The sentence sent shivers up my spine.
“With a little luck, the Mets will be playing a lot more in October—maybe even another World Series appearance.”
This is something Hamilton Post columnist Peter Dabbene wrote in the piece he submitted last month. It is also something I promptly deleted.
You see, the New York Mets hadn’t even clinched a spot in the Major League Baseball postseason at the time, and here was Dabbene writing about the World Series. I’ve been around long enough to know this is not something you mention if you actually want your team to make it that far.
And since I very much wanted the Mets to play in the World Series, I didn’t even have time to think before my well-trained editing reflexes caused me to jab at the backspace key until I had vanquished the evil clause. Die! Die! Die!
Here we are, a month later, living in a world where the New York Mets have run off seven playoff wins to clinch a spot in the final. Yes, the New York Mets are in the World Series, and, as crazy as that sounds, that’s only the start. Because I believe I had something to do with it.
That’s right, I’m taking some credit for the Mets’ success.
Sure, the starting pitching was masterful. The defense was solid. The baserunning aggressive. And no one in Major League history has hit like second baseman Daniel Murphy did this October.
But do you really think the Mets would be 2015 National League champions if I hadn’t digitally erased six words set to appear in a hyperlocal monthly newspaper? Or if I hadn’t worn the same three orange polo shirts for two weeks straight? Or sat on the same couch in the same position for every game?
I think not.
Sports are full of superstitions, and none moreso than baseball. Batters spit into their hands for good luck. Fielders jump over the baselines to avoid bad luck. And players never, ever speak about a no-hitter while it’s going on.
If those work, why wouldn’t leaving my Mets cap on the front seat of my car—as I did the day of the Mets’ first 2015 postseason win and every day hence?
The orange shirts, the lucky seat, the cap in the car—they’re all part of my recipe for Superstition Soup. And no ingredient is more important than the other.
Now, the logical person would ask, “Anthes, how do you know you’re having an actual effect on the game? And do you really have to do all of those?”
I, too, doubted the value of the ritual. In fact, we weren’t even two days into the Mets’ postseason run when I started to wander from the path. The day of Game 2 of the National League Division Series between the Mets and Dodgers, I wore a green—green!—T-shirt. I kept the Mets cap on my head instead of in the car. And I watched the game over my fiancée’s parents’ house, not on my lucky couch.
All seemed well until, in the seventh inning of the game, that scourge Chase Utley stampeded into Mets shortstop Ruben Tejada, breaking Tejada’s leg. Shortly thereafter, the Dodgers took the lead, and held on to win Game 2.
Like the child who burns his hand on the stove, I was properly chastened. I learned my lesson.
So, for NLDS Game 3, I went back to doing what I did before the Mets’ Game 1 win—back in the orange polo, back on the lucky couch. Sure enough, the Mets won.
Keeping everything straight hasn’t been easy. I forgot the orange polo for NLDS Game 4—a loss by the Mets. I may have alienated a few family members before NLDS Game 5 when I firmly requested they remove themselves from my lucky couch. And, although I am distinctly equipped for an orange-centric wardrobe as a Syracuse University alum, I didn’t exactly have time to keep the shirts freshly laundered with games nearly every day.
Rank shirts aside, perhaps the most difficult part of this whole thing was replicating my exact positioning on the lucky couch. You want to change nothing. You want everything the same as it was during that first win. And during that first win, I lay on the couch with my knees crunched up and my head resting on the couch’s arm at a 45-degree angle. I awoke the next morning unable to move my neck much. Or, really, at all.
Eventually, the stiffness goes away, only to be aggravated the next Mets game by my awkward baseball-viewing position. It’s funny, really—for much of my life, being a Mets fan had been a pain in my neck. And now, literally, it was.
But I wouldn’t change a thing. After all, that’s the point, right?
Rob Anthes is senior community editor of the Hamilton Post, and not crazy at all. Connect with him on Twitter @RobAnthes.
