A Daughter, A Baseball Team and an Impossible Conflict

A Story of Love, loyalty and betrayal

Oct 11, 2024

So both National League Division Series are over and the New York Mets are one step away from an improbable trip to the World Series. This makes me very happy. What also makes me happy is that the Mets are not playing the Philadelphia Phillies anymore.

You are no doubt familiar with the expression “between a rock and a hard place.” According to Grammarist.com, its American usage dates to the early 1900s and a “dispute between copper miners and the mining companies in Bisbee, Arizona. The miners demanded better working conditions, which the companies refused to supply. That left the miners with two unpleasant choices: continue to mine in the same terrible conditions (a rock), or face unemployment and poverty (a hard place).” (The phrase also has origins in Homer’s Odyssey, which chronicles how Odysseus faced two equally horrid choices as he navigated through a narrow channel, either passing close to Charybdis, a treacherous whirlpool, or Scylla, a six-headed, man-eating monster.) No, not very savory options.

What does this have to do with baseball?

Let me explain.

I, quite literally, grew up with the New York Mets, rooting for them on my grandfather’s knee from their first year of existence, 1962. The first ballgame I ever attended was at the Polo Grounds, where an outfielder named Jim Hickman hit a home run to earn the home team a rare victory. Two years later, after the Mets moved to their new ballpark in Queens, I watched every pitch of a doubleheader loss to the Giants that took almost 10 ½ hours – including a 23-inning second game that was the longest (7 hours, 23 minutes) in big-league history. I was thrilled in the 14^th inning when Roy McMillan and Ed Kranepool pulled off a triple play. With Jesus Alou on second and this guy Willie Mays on first, Orlando Cepeda drilled a line drive up the middle. McMillan speared it, touched second and fired to Kranepool at first.

I was less thrilled when the Giants had a two-out rally and scored twice in the top of the 23^rd. The Mets went down in order in the bottom half, second baseman Amado Samuel popping out to end the game at 11:25 p.m.

The Mets would finish in last place that year, per usual, but my love for them never wavered, and by the end of the 1960s, they had Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman, Cleon Jones, Tommie Agee and Bud Harrelson (I would like to name them all, but won’t), and a brilliant manager, Gil Hodges. It all reached an unthinkable pinnacle on Oct. 16, 1969, Game 5, when the Mets closed out the mighty Baltimore Orioles for the biggest upset in World Series history, and the happiest moment of my rooting life. I was at Shea Stadium that day. I ran on the field with the other hooligans, snatched a two-square inch piece of sod and headed back for the safety of the first-base seats. Fifty years later, I wrote a book about that season to commemorate its 50^th anniversary. I went all over the country and spoke to the guys about their recollections of that iconic season. I never had more fun researching a book, and never will.

Through good times and Bobby Bonilla, the Mets remained in my heart, and that was especially true this season, when they sunk to 11 games under .500 (24-35) in early June and looked somewhere between bad and pathetic, and then found a way to have the best record in baseball over the rest of the season, and win three epic games in the last 11 days. On the last day of the regular season, they had to beat the Braves in Atlanta to make the postseason, and they did it by scoring eight runs in the last two innings, capped by a game-winning two-run homer by Francisco Lindor. A few days later, in the wild-card series with the Brewers, the Mets were down 2-0 with two outs left in their 2024 in the decisive Game 3, when Pete Alonso lined a three-run homer into the right-field seats in Milwaukee against Devin Williams, one of the best closers on earth. The Mets tacked on another run and it was on to the NLDS, getting there by winning crazy games with crazy rallies, and becoming one of the most endearing groups in Mets annals in the process, beginning with Carlos Mendoza, a baseball lifer who was getting his first chance to manage and making the most of it.

Next up for the Mets was a best-of-five series with the Philadelphia Phillies, your NL East champions.

This is where things got tortuous. You see, the team I fell in love with over 60 years ago (before the Cuban Missile Crisis if you are scoring at home) was going against a team being covered by Alex Coffey of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Alex is the oldest of our three kids. In just her third year on the Phillies beat, she (parental boast alert) has already distinguished herself as one of the best young sportswriters in the country, her work getting showcased in The Year’s Best Sports Writing anthology in both 2023 and 2024. (Did her father ever do that? No, he did not.) Day after day, she finds fresh angles and stories, and writes them gracefully. An old-school journalist, Alex would never root openly for the team she is covering, but the truth is that if the Phillies were to win the World Series (or make a great run to get there, as they did two years ago) it would be great for the Inquirer and great for Alex’s career. Between a rock and a hard place typically refers to two equally distasteful options; in this case you could say I was looking at two very appealing options: If the Mets win, it’s great for my team. If the Phillies win, it’s great for my daughter. On the other hand, you could also say it was a lose-lose situation. If the Mets win, it's bad for my daughter. If the Phillies win, it’s bad for the team I’ve rooted for since the Choo Choo Coleman days.

How could I summon my usual passion for the Mets when a Mets’ triumph went against the best interests of my daughter?

I couldn’t.

As crappy and conflicted as I felt, I was good with Zach Wheeler dominating his former team for seven innings in Game 1, before the Phillies’ bullpen imploded. In Game 2, the Phillies on the brink of going down 0-2, I was very good with Bryce Harper mashing that homer to center and Nick Castellanos going back-to-back to tie the game at 3-3, and with Castellanos winning it in the ninth after Brandon Nimmo homered to get the Mets back in front, 4-3, and Mark Vientos hit his second of the game to tie it.

I understand this is completely heretical behavior for a lifelong Mets fan. It might be unforgiveable to some of my OMG brethren. What can I tell you? I’m not proud of it. In truth, I feel like a total turncoat, the Benedict Arnold of Flushing. I thought, going into the series, that I’d root for my daughter to write great stories and for the Mets to win. I wound up rooting for my daughter to write great stories (and she did) and, gulp, for the Phillies to win.

I am guilty as charged.

And so it went for the whole series. Sean Mannea was masterful and outdueled Aaron Nola in Game 3, and I was despondent. Lindor smoked a grand slam home run to lift the Mets to a 4-1 lead in the sixth inning of Game 4, and effectively end the series, and I felt much worse still. By the time Edwin Diaz struck out Kyle Schwarber to finish the Phillies off in the ninth, I was finally out of my misery.

Then something very odd happened. As I watched the Mets spray champagne on each other and revel in the latest chapter of this fun and heroic ride, I found myself thrilled for them. I watched Mendoza get emotional and the great Lindor describe his matter-of-fact home run trot after the grand slam, and I loved it. The Mets were better than the Phillies at hitting, pitching and fielding in this series. Trea Turner flailed at about 500 curveballs in the dirt and looked as lost as any elite player I’ve ever seen. Three-quarters of the Phillies lineup was only marginally better.

The Mets won, and deserved to win, and now they are into the National League Championship Series, against the Dodgers. I am a free man, unshackled by my love and loyalty to Alex Coffey. I can root for my team again. I hope they will have me back. I just have three words to say:

Let’s Go Mets.