On a sunny day in late March, Michael Matteo, Jr., lounged on a grassy berm beyond the right-field fence at Clover Park, a minor-league stadium set amid the sprawling strip malls of Port St. Lucie, Florida, about an hour up the interstate from the tony confines of Palm Beach. On the field, a New York Mets split squad was comfortably beating the St. Louis Cardinals in a spring-training matchup. The temperature was in the low seventies, cool for South Florida; that morning, the stadium’s elevator attendant took comfort in knowing that at least the cold weather wouldn’t frizz her hair. Back in Brooklyn, where Matteo lives, it was “thirty-five degrees and raining,” he said, sounding pleased. In the bright Florida sky, a few contrails fluffed into clouds. Matteo, who wore shorts and a commemorative ’86 Mets jersey, had taken off his shoes.
Matteo is a plumber by trade who also works as a garbage collector for the New York City Department of Sanitation. He was ten years old in 1986, when the Mets won the World Series for the second—and, to date, the last—time. It remains one of the great moments of his life. He goes to at least twenty games a year at Citi Field, in Queens, where the Mets play, and buys a season package when he can. He began bringing his son to Port St. Lucie three years ago. His son, who is now eight, was pressed up against the fence, baseball glove in hand. A few feet away, a young kid asked his mother whether a lazy fly ball was a home run.
Optimism is running high this year among those who cheer for the Mets. Usually, this is a bad sign: the Mets have a long history of disappointing their fans, not to mention their friends, their mothers, local authorities, themselves. The team lost a hundred and twenty games in its first season, in 1962, a record that held until last year, when it was bested, or worsted, by the Chicago White Sox. And yet the Mets have also maintained an almost continuous capacity to surprise. “It is safe to assume that the Mets are going to lose, but dangerous to assume that they won’t startle you in the process,” Roger Angell wrote, in this magazine, during that first season. By now, the losing is more of a spiritual condition than a description of the team’s over-all performance in its sixty-three years of existence. There have been just enough moments of wild, inexplicable joy to keep hope alive. “I simultaneously expect everything is going to go perfectly and I expect some unimaginable calamity to befall us,” the writer Devin Gordon, a diehard Mets fan, told me. Gordon is the author of a book about the team, “So Many Ways to Lose.”
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“I just learned the rules of baseball, like, a year ago,” another fan, Kyle Gorjanc, standing near Matteo on the berm, told me. She wore a Mets hat studded with palm trees over her pink-streaked hair. Last season, the Mets lost thirty-three of their first fifty-five games, and looked terrible. Then they went on a run that lasted through the summer and into the fall, ending only in the National League Championship Series, where they faced the juggernaut Los Angeles Dodgers. The turnaround began on a day that Grimace, the McDonald’s character, threw out the ceremonial first pitch. The shaggy purple blob became a mainstay at games. “The Mets were very meme-heavy last year,” Gorjanc said. “It’s what got me interested.” She’d become envious when her partner, Nick O’Brien, who was with her at spring training, attended a playoff game, and afterward texted her a picture of two Grimaces and a Hamburglar break-dancing in the parking lot.
The high expectations for the team this year seem more grounded in something like reality. During the off-season, the Mets signed one of baseball’s best hitters, Juan Soto, a Dominican player who turned pro at sixteen and won a World Series, with the Washington Nationals, at twenty-one. He’s now twenty-six and a terror to pitchers everywhere. A disciplined, versatile hitter, Soto drew more walks before turning twenty-six than any player in major-league history—while also ranking among the league leaders in slugging. He is slotted second in the Mets’ batting order, behind Francisco Lindor, the team’s shortstop and clubhouse leader, and ahead of Pete Alonso, a popular slugger with a barrel chest and a small head—fans call him the Polar Bear. It’s a top-of-the-lineup that rivals any squad this side of the Dodgers.