great article from sunday's post by mike vaccaro....
ON the one hand, the plight of a Mets fan isn't so terribly unusual, or unique. Jets fans know what it's like to root for the "second team" in town. So do Nets fans, and Devils fans, and Islanders fans. So do White Sox fans, and Angels fans, and Clippers fans, and fans of the Tattaglia Family, and Jersey music fans who favor Bon Jovi over Springsteen, and fans of "heads" (which, according to mathematicians, wins only 49.2 percent of the time against its long and bitter rival, "tails").

Life as The Other Guy ain't easy. It's how you become The Other Guy in the first place, right?
Well, here's a Mets fan named Ken McConnell who would beg to differ with that. Listen to him:
"I've been a Mets fan since '63," McConnell, a Long Island native now living in Hollywood, Fla., writes. "I became a Mets fan because my father was a Dodgers fan, because my older brothers took me to Shea and the Polo Grounds when I was a kid. From the start, we knew we weren't the Yankees. That was fine. We didn't have the history with the Mets, but we had that link to the Dodgers and the Giants.

"We always knew it was a fair fight, because the Yankees won all those pennants in front of quiet, polite people from Jersey and Westchester. New York City was a National League town. It was always a National League town. And we figured it always would be. The Mets proved it for a lot of years. Only now, New York isn't a National League town. You're a fool if you believe that. And you're a bigger fool if you believe it'll ever be that way again."

It's what people always forget when they talk about this Yankee dominance that is alleged to extend all the way back to Babe Ruth. It just isn't so. It wasn't so when the Yankees had to share the town's affections with the Giants in the '20s and '30s, it wasn't so when they had to share the city's soul with the Dodgers in the '40s and '50s, and it wasn't so when they had to share New York's baseball buck with the Mets in the '60s, '70s and '80s.

In Shea Stadium's first 29 years of existence, 1964 to 1992, the Mets outdrew the Yankees 20 times. And if you remove from the equation the years 1976 through 1981, when the Yankees were winning pennants in a newly renovated Yankee Stadium while the Mets were barely fielding a semi-pro team in the dying days of the M. Donald Grant administration and beyond, that number is 20 out of 23.

"It burns me when we get treated like stepchildren," McConnell writes. "Like it's always been the way it is now. It hasn't. The Mets were equals. They were always equals."
McConnell is one voice, an angry one, and there are thousands of others. As another Mets season winds its way into complete nonsense, they feel increasingly disenfranchised. It takes a little bit of the joy out of the game when your single biggest rooting interest is that the team fires the witless manager sooner, rather than later, the better to begin thinking, again, about a new form of tomorrow.

Yankees fans increasingly believe that Mets fans are growing extinct. And while it's true that it sometimes seems an impossible task to identify a Mets fan under the age of 30, they're out there, too. And they are furious. No second team in this market stirs the smoldering embers of frustration the way the Mets do. Jets fans are conditioned to expect the worst. Same with Nets fans. Devils fans and Islanders fans have almost relished the championships they've won in obscurity while the Rangers toiled haplessly in the limelight.

Mets fans?

They get to sit, and seethe, and they get to watch Paris Wilpon and his daddy, Fifth Avenue Fred, go on vacation and let all their underlings absorb the heat while another season careens into the abyss. Mets fans are so much more honorable than the men who own the team, it isn't funny. For years, they've been dared to abandon the ship. And they never do. In their heart of hearts, they think this could still be a National League town again.

If the Mets ever rise above playing like they belong in the International League, that is.
"A long time ago, I made a choice," another Mets fan named John Bliss wrote me a few weeks ago. "I picked the Mets. For better or worse, I have to live with that choice. For better or worse, I'm glad I made the choice I did."

For better or worse, Mets fans find themselves rooting for The Other Guy now, wondering if that isn't a permanent designation. Another season up in flames. Another year deeper in the Wilpon Family Reign of Error. Another year removed from equal footing in America's most passionate baseball town.

Wondering if they'll ever be able to recover.

Worried that they already know the answer to that question.