The NY Mets
unveiled a new fan celebration song -
"Our Team, Our Time" - at the beginning of last week but the rallying cries from Shea faithful have been filled with eye-spitting tears and ear-splitting nays. Par for most sports team songs, it's cheesy and cringeworthy, crustily dated. Under this forgettable (mainly regrettable) "rap" song that might find appeal among a couple of
Corona 10-year olds, the Mets have gone 5-5 and it's led
some (make that
many) to ponder how team management could set such an early embarrassing tone in a season that promises nothing but unwounded, salt-less pride.
Sure, there have been some pretty bad songs at Shea over the years:
"Get Metsmerized" followed by
"Let's Go Mets Go" (video) in 1986 and Z100's
"Who Let the Mets Out?" from the 2000 postseason, but baseball fans are nostalgic freaks and almost all would argue that there is no substitute for the original. Let's look at the evolution of a real "classic."
"Meet the Mets" (1963) was actually written in 1961 before there was even one Met to meet. It's a charming ditty, harking back to an imaginary feel-good time when someone might call this old 'burg "New York Town" with total sincerity.
"East Side, West Side..." these were much simpler times indeed.
"Meet the Mets" (1984) - OK, it's the bash-n-brash 80's, Joe Piscopo is crashing your dinner party. That means horns are big, hair is big, cocaine is big, marketing is BIG. Since it's not tactically desireable to delineate New York fans between just two sides of the compass, this jazzed-up version features base-extending shout outs to Long Island(!), New Jersey(!), Brooklyn, Queens, uptown
and downtown. Easily my favorite. Close your eyes, when they dry you can almost smell the studio musicians and singers.
"Meet the Mets" (1999) - Now here was a spirited attempt to marry the old and new, something Trump would admire. It uses the original lyrics with an updated urban beat backdrop. It failed, of course, but not nearly as bad or off the mark as the current pothole-thumper.
"Meet the Mets" (organ) - For those who have spent time walking the perimeference (see also: circumeter) of that big blue toilet bowl in Queens, this is the soundtrack. I include for the sake of completists who dream of watching their bride creep down the aisle to it. I am not among them.
Disclosure: I grew up an Orioles fan, will always hate the Yankees (and Red Sox for that matter), so adopting the Mets was an easy thing to do when I moved here. In truth, I only followed them closely through '01 before finally realizing that baseball ceased being an actual sport after the 1997 World Series.
