Opinion: This is Foxhole Time
It’s June, and it’s crunch time.
It’s crunch time in the sense that, with a long hot summer looming, it will be very easy for the sub-.500 Mets to just check out mentally and quit on the rest of the season.
I hope they stay in the fight.
In the next 31 games, the Mets play the Phillies, Rockies, Angels, Yankees, Cardinals and Marlins, at which point it will be the All Star break.
The team’s ownership will then need to decide how best to keep potentially-bored fans tuned in with a long second half still to come.
In other words, as early as it is, the pressure is on.
“The bottom line with [the 1986 Mets] was…we didn’t care what was said about us; good, bad or indifferent,” Darryl Strawberry recently told the New York Post.
“I think sometimes [this current team] has trouble dealing with the pressure that comes with playing in New York.”
This morning on MetsBlog, I wrote that key players on the Mets are growing ‘sick of the pressure,’ sick of the booing, sick of the media, and sick of New York.
In April, Strawberry told me that, when he played, the more the fans booed, the more he wanted to shut them up – and so their passion ultimately made him a better player.
“That’s the test of the players,” Tom Seaver recently told me, when I talked with him for an interview that will run on SNY’s website tomorrow.
“Do you have foxhole people? Do you have people who you would get into a foxhole with and say, ‘You’ve got my back and I guarantee you I’m gonna watch your back.’”
The thing is, I’m not so sure the Mets have these players on their roster any more. If they were ‘foxhole people,’ they may now have shell-shock from The Collapse.
According to teammates from his days on the field, Willie Randolph is a ‘foxhole guy.’
Therefore, it’s up to Omar Minaya and Randolph to identify who does not have the stomach for the coming fight, and then they need to adjust.
“This is foxhole time,” Seaver said, and time is running out.
