Whether you’ve been hibernating with high hopes or riding out the winter months knowing full well your team is destined for yet another middling campaign, there comes a point when you can actually feel a new baseball season’s impending arrival.
For me, that sneaking suspicion comes in the form of dreams. To be honest, I don’t remember a ton of dreams. But around this time every year, I’ll dream about baseball.
Visions of Shea Stadium, tapping into the terabytes of memories long lost in the caverns of my subconscious, seem to conjure recurringly.
The team’s new digs make appearances, as do random, rogue snapshots of sandlots familiar and unknown. But for some reason, my mind always brings me back to Shea; a welcome trip.
Subplots ranging from mundane to surrealistic to absolutely absurd try their best to camouflage the message, but I know what it all means; baseball’s just trying to tell me it’s getting close.
Soon enough, the unmistakable snaps of four-seamers into the webbing of catcher’s mitts and cracks of wooden bats on said offerings will fill the air. The natural optimism that time of year brings is enough to snap any of us out of the doldrums.
This time around feels a bit different.
In case you’ve been living under a rock all winter, or have been taking quarantine to the next level, a new era of New York Mets baseball took hold with Steve Cohen’s $2.4 billion purchase of the team from the Wilpon and Katz families in November.
The repercussions of actual, title-minded ownership have already begun to reveal themselves in the team’s actions this offseason.
Credit: Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports
Acquiring franchise shortstop Francisco Lindor and right-hander Carlos Carrasco from Cleveland and left-hander Joey Lucchesi from San Diego, signing Trevor May to solidify the back-end of the bullpen, and bringing in James McCann as the team’s new backstop signify a complete one-eighty from the previous regime’s bumbling operations.
And the presumably ongoing efforts to bring in more, high-profile reinforcements are evidence of the most exciting part of the equation: this is just the start.
Yes, we’ve all seen offseason champions crumble into regular-season flops (we see you, 2002 Mets), but, again, this feels different. There’s an energy around this organization — and especially around this fan base — that feels marginally magical.
As we can all attest to, whether our team is headed for a summer in the basement or will manage to keep us hanging on through the dog days, the sheer exhilaration of knowing the roller coaster you’ve been waiting in line all winter for is about to start moving is still very much there.
As it turns out, this is the ride we’ve been waiting to embark on for a decade or so. That just makes it all the more thrilling.
