The Tear-Jerkers (One Sixty-Two: Day 92)

Writer’s note: One Sixty-Two is a season-long series of blog posts connecting baseball’s major-league players to life’s universal themes. Just as there are 162 games in a season, so there will be 162 posts in this series. Let’s play some ball.

Day Ninety-Two: David Wright, New York Mets

For the past few years, Amy and I have shared a Friday-night ritual with the girls that we all have come to love. We call it Movie Night. After dinner, we sit down in the living room, pop a film into the DVD player, and watch it together. I fetch the ice cream, Amy turns off the lights, and the girls cuddle up with us.

It started one Friday night in August three years ago when I showed the girls the old 1966 Batman movie, featuring all the actors from the delightfully campy ‘60s TV show. The girls had watched plenty of Disney, Pixar and Sesame Street films with us before, but this might have been the first time I’d actually selected a movie for them. Somehow, the Adam West-Burt Ward madcap feature appealed to the girls, and they wanted Daddy to pick another movie for next week.

So the Friday-night ritual was born. By now, we’ve exhausted our own collection of age-appropriate films as well as our local library and the county library system. Some Fridays – tonight being one of them – we find ourselves watching a film we’ve seen already. (The girls get a second look at The Tale of Despereaux today.) Other weeks, we branch out further than we thought we would, even into the realm of foreign films (The Red Balloon and White Mane, to name a couple). Still other weeks, we move into the documentary realm and watch episodes of Planet Earth. Whatever the choice, we can’t go wrong because of the simple fact that we’re all spending time together.

Being that most of our films are G-rated, they typically end happily. We don’t lean toward many tragedies in our Friday-night club. However, if the girls wanted to stay up a little late tonight, they could watch a genuine tear-jerker right before their eyes.

Right now, the sad tale is playing out in Los Angeles, and it was in Phoenix earlier in the week preceded by San Francisco last weekend. It’s the tale of the 2010 New York Mets, and it’s getting ugly fast. The Metropolitans were in the thick of the National League East divisional race during last week’s All-Star Break. But after losing seven of eight games on the West Coast, New York now finds itself 7½ games out of first place. A few more losses, and the Mets will be sitting in fourth place.

If you read the news, you see all kinds of speculation about changes in the Mets’ front office and dugout. I certainly have no idea what the team’s owners will do. But I do know what it’s like to sit in the midst of a serious slump. It starts to feel, after awhile, like you’re on a long train to nowhere. Every pitch, every inning and every game seem designed to leave you on the bottom looking up.

David Wright is one of the more talented hitters in baseball, and he’s certainly been the Mets’ top player this year. But even Wright finds himself caught in the current that has carried his team backward this past week. Wright is 6 for 30 since the All-Star Break, with just two extra-base hits and two runs batted in. The amazing thing is that Wright’s .200 average during these past eight games is actually higher than the team average of .189.

The Mets need some hits, and they need some wins. That’s easy to say. What’s much more difficult is to actually do it – to turn the losing streak around, and bring a much happier ending to your season.

My girls are a little young for PG-13 movies. But when they’re old enough, I’m sure we’ll sit down one night and watch Titanic together. They’ll fall for the love story, they’ll cry over the senseless deaths, and they’ll marvel at the magnitude of the tragedy. In sports, the metaphor of a “sinking ship” is often used to describe a franchise whose fortunes are falling fast. The metaphor’s use intends no disrespect toward those ships that really have gone down. It’s just a way of visualizing the mounting strikeouts in the scorebook, zeroes on the scoreboard, and losses in the record books.

Right now, that metaphor fits the New York Mets better than any team in baseball. In order for that to change, someone has to steady the ship. The Mets need a W, and they need someone to set things right. W; right. David, it sounds like you’ve been called on deck. Grab a bat, my friend. The movie isn’t over yet.