My First Angry Sports Fan Moment

Do you remember your first angry episode as a sports fan? 

Not just anger, but rage. A moment you lost perspective and forgot your teams’ success shouldn’t turn your positive reality into a dark dystopia. 

We all have moments of deflation when our teams lose, but how many of us have let this passivity turn to aggression? Your team TKOs your own sense of self, which to this point you’ve healthily separated from your sports fan persona. But in these seconds, your Bruce Banner has Hulked into just the sports fan….which has flipped calmness into temper.

Sadness is for civilians. Madness is for monsters. 

This is the tale of my first time getting angry towards watching sports - the one and only time I’ve acted violently. 

June 14, 2002. Yankees @ Mets.

The woebegone 2002 Mets were still hovering around .500 when they hosted the rival Yankees in the first of a three game series. 

I was only 11, naively believing ESPN’s talking heads who pumped up the significance of this game, saying it was a “must win” for the Mets. Yes, an interleague June game should have such implications (eye roll) …..Alas this was merely Mets game number 66 which would conjure my inner el diablo.

Taking you to the 8th inning of this game, the Mets were leading 2-0 against the Yankees. The Bronx Bombers had the most runs scored in the majors, yet were stymied by the Mets pitcher and “Human Rain Day” Steve Trachsel. 

Perhaps this wasn’t the Yankees day and the Mets could take the series opener. 

But in the top of the eight, the Yankees cut the deficit in half. After the Mets failed to score in the bottom, the Yankees took their one run deficit into the 9th inning. The Yankees were down to their final out, but Mets hair-raising closer Armando Benitez gave up a game-tying single to who else but Derek Jeter. 

Jeter was well establishing himself as a Met killer. He had already won the World Series MVP against the Mets and would finish his career against them batting .364. This 9th inning 2 out game tying RBI was merely a footnote on his robust resume. 

Jeter was adopting the role that many villains face against other teams. Just as Mahomes against the Bills, Brady against the Jets, Jordan against the Knicks, one could label Jeter as the Mets “thief of joy”. 

When the tying run scored, my spirit squashed into the couch. It was getting late, 10:30 pm for an 11 year old. Later on, I’d hear a description in the lyrics of Pink Floyd’s Dogs “Gotta stay awake, gotta try and shake off this creeping malaise.”

Creeping malaise, indeed. 

Once the Yankees tied the game in that fashion, I had an ominous feeling the Mets would somehow crash and burn. Yet I was still rubbernecking as this catastrophe unfolded in real time.  

In the bottom of the 9th, the Mets had a base runner on second and nobody out. Surely, the Mets could knock both the winning run and smug smirk off Jeter’s face. But the Mets metsed. The next three batters failed to hit the ball out of the infield and the winning run was stranded at third. 

Now we’re in extra innings. 

I’m rueing the last two innings of the Mets inept bullpen and inability to hit with RISP. This feels like another game the Mets will hand a gift victory to their opponent - this time to the hated Yankees. 

And with former Met Robin Ventura -  returning to Shea for the first game since he signed with the Evil Empire -  at the dish, my vitriol was about to hit an all-time high. 

Facing Japanese export/rec specs model Satoru Komiyama, Ventura drove an 84 mph meatball over the right field fence to give the Yankees the lead. 

By the time Ventura rounded first base, I had gathered several coalescing dark emotions and reached into the depths of Mets-induced rage. 

If yelling at athletes through a television doesn’t alert them, pelting them with a plastic rectangle might. 

From about 20 feet away, I got up off the couch, grabbed the remote control off the adjacent ottoman, and threw it at the television. 

I’m glad it was more of a fling than a chuck, because once the remote bounced off the 65 inch chonk of a TV, the structure didn’t budge and no pixels were compromised. Everything was still functionally intact…..except my dad. 

My dad had been watching the game with me, sharing fatalistic, sky-is-falling comments as the Yankees squeaked closer to the Mets. He was well aligned with the fact that the Mets were about to blow this and was ready for the ensuing vitriol. 

What he wasn’t prepared for was a need for wrath. 

I can’t recall if it happened the exact moment I hit the television or milliseconds earlier when the remote left my fingertips, but I remember feeling the room’s tension. My dad’s previous menu of angry tirades at me mainly consisted of being a nuisance to mom and sister. From telling my mom her Chicken Marbella was gross or hitting tennis balls at my sister’s face, he was always the referee between myself and the women of the family.

But this was a different target. 

His fury directed towards me embodied more of a glaring scowl. He got off his couch, walked to the television to check for damage, picked the remote off the floor, walked it over to me now laying on the couch in paralyzing confusion. He held the remote in his right arm and got up close to my face - a proximity that would make Earl Weaver arguing with an ump proud. 

Don’t you ever fucking throw the remote at the television again!

He didn’t shake the remote or threaten to hit me. However…… If there was ever a time that would warrant him hitting me, that was it. 

You’re so fucking lucky you didn’t break the TV!!!

After saying his peace, he left the room remote in hand and stormed up the stairs. 

I will always remember the ensuing silence. His footsteps moving into the distance getting quieter and quieter, while Mets announcer Gary Thorne carries on in the background inaudibly. 

I lay on the couch in a dazed trance, like a heroin addict numbing into his surrounding, staring at the television with the monitor’s light refracting off my dimmed soul. 

In the next 15 minutes of real time, I had zoned out over my own stupor. The Mets completed their choke job losing by a final score of 4-2. My favorite team to love led over my favorite team to hate nearing the homestretch and they gave up runs in the 8th, 9th, and 10th to lose at the finish. 

When the game ended and the WB11 broadcast fed into the local news, I walked over to the television to shut it off. Instead of going to bed, I returned to the couch to process the series of events. 

Trying to analyze everything, it took me a bit to escape the Mets-laden haze before I compassionately understood my dad’s rancor. 

It was first about the television. He paid for the television and any damage would cost more money and effort. It was also the main room television, one used by everyone in our family. I had always gotten in trouble for my actions against one individual, but this almost resulted in me acting against the whole Sheinman clan. 

I realized how fortunate I was that I didn't break the television. Perhaps when he said how fucking lucky I was, he was referencing how I would have paid for the television through allowance. My estimation was that it was two years worth. 

But perhaps this was, most importantly, a wakeup call to my young relationship between me-Adam and me-Mets fan. 

I thought about this flashback after recently witnessing an interaction between my dad and his dog Waffles. 

While in Florida visiting my parents, my dad caught Waffles chewing the main television’s remote. He grabbed it from her mouth, held the remote in front of her eyes in a mildly threatening manner and yelled a quick “BAH” (sounds phonetically like POP!).

“What was that noise?”, I asked. 

He replied, “Whenever she chews on the remote, I yell “BAH”. I’m trying to condition her to associate the bad noise with the bad action so she’ll stop.” 

23 years earlier, I was the dog with the remote in my face. 

Waffles was in her own universe for her quagmire, the only agent to blame for her mistake. Upon reflection, I remembered the featured players who were part of my episode. 

Derek Jeter: The “big brother, golden child” who could do no wrong for bullying the Mets. 

Robin Ventura: Someone I once loved on the Mets but now hate because he wears different laundry. It was one of my first exposures to the illusion of a player maintaining loyalty. 

Satoru Komiyama: Arguably the most incompetent Met reliever I can remember (and that’s saying something). A Korean rookie bum whose fastball topped out at a batting practice-esque 87 mph. His sunglasses, like safety goggles for power tools, fit the appearance of someone who was hacking his way through the big leagues. In 25 appearances, he had a 5.61 ERA in what became his only season in the big leagues. 

And then there’s Dad.

I know why he was upset at that moment, but I wonder if he thought about the incident days later. I wonder if he empathized how frustrating it was to be a Mets fan. He had seen the franchise disappoint in the last decade, creating the “Worst Team Money Could Buy” in ‘93, falling short of the playoffs by a game in ‘98, Kenny Rogers choking in the 1999 NLCS, and succumbing to the Yankees in the World Series. 

But perhaps while he knew Mets fans should expect disappointment, he knew better than a young sixth grader would that one ballgame in June isn’t worth anger. No matter what the hyperbolic New York media told you about the importance of a Subway Series, revenge, bragging rights, ownership of New York, blah blah blah….that it was just a game with 100 games left in the regular season. 

Losing to the Yankees in June is not worth letting emotions get the worst of me: And the worst of my emotions should not be violent. 

When the Mets or my teams in other leagues lose, I now process my anger in a more passive way. I’m sad, despondent, but also reflective. I put any loss within perspective of a series, a season, franchise and then switch domains of how it affects my greater non-sports life. 

As someone who hasn’t witnessed a championship in 34 years, rooting for four New York based teams, I’m used to disappointment. My default of being a sports fan is meaningful pain, a sadistic decay, a Grateful Death if you will (RIP Phil Lesh). 

But I taught myself after this incident that manifesting rage into physical damage affects others.That behavior is the opposite of what sports fandom should channel. It shouldn’t deter, it should unite. It shouldn’t bring fear, but attraction.

We have mechanisms like gallows humor, listening to postgame shows, or debriefing with other fans as a way to cope. 

Punching walls, flipping traffic cones, knocking over trash cans seem unnecessary even if it doesn’t involve others getting hurt. But we’ve seen this anger take on second parties - fans throwing beer bottles onto fields, pelting players with icy snow, and of course fist fights in the stands. 

Evoking violence means you’re still working out personal baggage and projecting out onto the external world. How does that make being a sports fan fun? 

I’m glad I learned that while I was a child.