Get Excite: The Metal Mets Begin the World Series TONIGHT!!!

The World Series starts tonight! The Mets, baseball’s most metal team, are playing the Royals, a team whose fanbase is perhaps equally as starved (albeit less comically tragic) in a best of seven series, three games of which will be hosted minutes from the Flushing Bay. WHAT PLANET ARE WE ON??

People are jumping on the Mets bandwagon left and right. And to hell with the haters… we open bandwagon jumpers with open arms! The New York Mets are the team of the people, after all, not the Ronnie James Dio-hating, upper crust 1% (and, inexplicably, lots of Puerto Ricans) like that other team across team. New York comes ALIVE when the Mets are good, and it’s exciting to see. Even traditionally sports-averse people like our own Kelsey Chapstick is going out of her way to find a bar with the game on tonight, no easy task while she’s home visiting her native West Virginia for the week. All aboard, this train ain’t stopping, hop on up and enjoy the ride!

Speaking of bandwagon-hoppers: don’t be that guy or gal with a shiny new Mets hat. I mean, in light of the preceding paragraph I guess it’s cool, but you better be prepared to talk shop about Mo Vaughn, Braden Looper, Andres Torres and Wally Whitehurst. Or at least be willing to listen.

Also don’t be that guy or gal with a really old-looking, decrepit, foam cap that’s obviously been sitting at the bottom of your hat bin for the past 25 years. This is slightly cooler than the above — vintage and all that — but please understand that some of us PAID GOOD MONEY to watch horrible baseball from 2009-2014, and many other years before.

Consider owning a middle-aged Mets cap. I think that’s the way to go, right? Nothing says “I’m a true fan” without being an asshole about it quite like a cap that’s in decent condition but has a few light sweat stains around the brim.

Anyway, what to make of the coming Series? I hope the long layoff doesn’t hurt the Mets — some studies have shown “long layoffs don’t hurt a team” (winning percentage ends up being around .500 for teams with 6 days off or more going into a World Series, in the wild card era) while doomsayers point out that “only one team of the last 8 to sweep the CS round has gone on to win the WS.” Who to believe? Who knows.

My buddy Ted Berg, who writes for USA Today’s For the Win sports site and with whom I play old-man baseball (real baseball) every Saturday, recently uncovered a study that says it’s basically all luck, and that for any statistical determination of which team is actually BETTER to have true meaning, two teams would have to play 269 games vs. one another. Despite — or because of — having sat through six years of meaningless late-summer baseball in Queens, I don’t have the patience for that. Seven will have to do.

So it all comes down to dumb luck, eh? Will Daniel Murphy continue his historic post-season? Will the Cespedes for the rest of us solve his power outage, assuming his ailing shoulder is indeed 110%? Will Juan Uribe’s addition to the World Series roster provide some meaningful pop off the bench? Will poor Sean Gilmartin get to face a batter? Will there be another unlikely hero, or some crazy baseball play no one’s ever seen before that ultimately decides the fate of these two teams?

Who the fuck knows. Let’s watch the games and enjoy them. To tell with god-forsaken WAR and stupid-ass national TV announcers (PRO TIP: Spend $2.99 to sign up for a monthly subscription on MLB’s At Bat app, stream the WOR broadcast from within, and then delay the TV broadcast 10 seconds or so with your DVR to sync it up. Howie and Josh calling the game! So much better than Joe Fucking Buck. Doesn’t work with live radio since that broadcast is several seconds ahead of TV — only works with the At Bat app). Us Mets fans (and, respectfully, you Royals fans too) don’t get opportunities like this often. LET’S GO METS!!!

So, uhh… anyone got any extra World Series tickets they’d like to pawn off to a poor ol’ metal blogger? Will pay decent money, but not those insane StubHub prices. Otherwise it’s couch duty for MetalGF and I, which ain’t so bad at all… especially not with the company of Howie and Josh.