America at Large: New York Mets fighting Yankees trend

Daniel Murphy has been unconscious. A peculiarly American sports cliché that has come to define the New York Mets' improbable run to this year's World Series. Loosely translated, it means he has ascended to a higher plane of performance with no apparent idea of how he got there.

A journeyman pro once so prone to mishaps that fans actually started a website OhMurph.com cataloguing his woes, the 30-year-old has hit seven home runs in the first nine games of the play-offs. That’s more long balls than he managed in two of his seven seasons in the big leagues.

A run of form so rich and unexpected it prompted David Glass, owner of the Mets' Series opponents, the Kansas City Royals, to call Murphy "the reincarnation of Babe Ruth", it has also allowed the city's lesser-spotted franchise to command the media spotlight for once. Since their inception in 1962, the Mets have traditionally played the part of the pre-oil billions Manchester City to the New York Yankees' all-conquering United. Their every misstep has always suffered by comparison with the more illustrious cross-town rivals whose lengthier history and 27 titles dwarf the Mets' meagre two.

Seminal books

If the Yankees became famous for always finding ways to win, the Mets are notorious for happening upon bizarre paths to defeat, a self-destructive tendency that led detractors to rework their theme song

Meet the Mets

as

Beat the Mets

. To fully understand just how woebegone they have been for much of the past five decades, you only have to examine the titles of three seminal books written about the club.

Iconic New York journalist Jimmy Breslin's evocative account of their historically bad inaugural season was the self-explanatory Can't Anybody Here Play This Game? Supposedly a quote from their first manager Casey Stengel, it was a question that perfectly captured the frustration and fatalism that would come to hallmark their long-suffering fans.

When Jeff Pearlman revisited the Mets' team that won the 1986 World Series a couple of years back, he called his hugely entertaining romp, The Bad Guys Won: A Season of Brawling, Boozing, Bimbo Chasing, and Championship Baseball

The elongated title went some way to explaining why such a talented squad never turned into the sort of dynasty many thought it had the potential to be. They haven’t won a title since.

Then there's The Worst Team Money Can Buy: The Collapse of the New York Mets, in which Bob Klapisch and John Harper forensically documented how the 1992 edition, then the most expensive baseball team ever assembled, spectacularly imploded. One player from that era had a contract so bloated he still gets paid $1m a year by the club.

If the outline of the Mets’ story is contained in those three tomes then, pending their performances in this best of seven series with the Royals, the next great publication could be titled “the best team money couldn’t buy”. The great irony is that the players currently thrilling the blue and orange half of New York came together through a curious amalgam of accident and design.

Having made a real estate fortune large enough to buy the Mets outright in 2002 (paying nearly $400m for the half he didn’t already own), Fred Wilpon had a reported 500 separate investment accounts with Bernie Madoff when the latter’s Ponzi scheme was finally exposed in 2008. Nobody is quite sure how many tens or hundreds of millions he lost in the subsequent shake-out but Wilpon was sued by other victims of Madoff, the implication being that he must have/should have known the returns he was getting were too good to be true.

The murky fall-out from that debacle, at a time when the Mets were building a new stadium in Queens, severely compromised their financial situation and inhibited their ability to go after big-name free agents. To the long-suffering supporters, this was typical Mets. An owner embroiled in a scandal meant a club in the richest market in the country had serious money troubles that were reflected in the often parlous quality of the team put on the field. Indeed, one magical October like this won’t be enough for many fans to forgive Wilpon for the damage done to the franchise.

The restrictions on their spending – the Mets’ payroll of $120m is the 15th largest in the sport – turned into an unlikely boon. Forced to foster talent in-house, the Mets have used 26 players in this campaign, including all four pitchers likely to start against the Royals, who’ve come up through their minor league ranks. Reaching a first World Series since 2000 (that party was spoiled by the dastardly Yankees) is a little bit more special when so many of those involved are home-grown and have soldiered together for years off-Broadway.

Not that long ago, the Mets were so ill-starred some believed they were cursed. Just about every time a star player was commemorated with a bobblehead doll given away at the stadium, he either got injured, lost form, or, in some cases, both. These days, they appear so blessed that Jerry Seinfeld, a fan so devoted he periodically calls in to sports talk radio to air his views, believes his pair of customised blue and orange runners have brought the club good luck. We think that was a joke. The funny thing is the Mets no longer are.