I don’t care much for the Mets and it’s not altogether unpleasant, as a fan of another NL East team, to see them struggle. So it’s a pretty extreme set of circumstances to make me actually want to defend them. I feel inspired to that this morning, however.
The inspiration? Mike Vaccaro’s column about them in the Post today. In it he goes beyond merely detailing the Mets’ lousy road trip and decides to call the Mets’ front office “The Cabinet of Stupid” several times:
Here’s the thing, though: The Mets do have just enough starting pitching to keep themselves in a lot of games. They have just enough professionals who seem to relish the underdog challenge that this big-market overdog needlessly inflicts on them. And they were 15-11 at the start of May. Easy to root for, despite their flaws. Easier to feel good about.
Except the Cabinet of Stupid couldn’t leave that alone, so it famously dispatched the Loyalty Oath letter, and followed that up with another, and another, and still can’t believe why anybody thought it was a bad idea. Honestly, there’s no correlation between the Oath and the fact that the team has gone 1-6 since hitting the “send” button.
Unless you believe in karma.
Obviously anything the Mets front office has done or not done is open for criticism and, boy, there has been a lot to criticize over the past few years. But focusing on the 2014 team and that loyalty letter thing seems pretty odd. Yes, the current Mets brain trust got them where they were the past few years, but the team is clearly better now than it has been, the moves they have made in the past year or so have all been pretty defensible and as I’ve said, that stuff about the loyalty letter thing seems comically overblown. It’s an OK team that is struggling but it’s not some comedy of errors like it’s being portrayed here. This all seems like autopilot LOL METS stuff, detached from reality and designed to play into the lazy preconceptions of a certain swath of Mets fans.
But mostly I’m irked by this because a guy who is paid to write — and who, in the past, has shown no small amount of wit — can’t do any better than “Cabinet of Stupid.” That’s, like, fifth grade insult material. You work for the Post for cryin’ out loud. The paper that gave us the all-time best headline ever with “Headless body in topless bar.” You can lodge all the overheated insults you want at the Mets because you have a job to do, but you HAVE to bring better game than that, man.
