The Sounds of Summer

What’s up guys, A Friend of Mr. Glass’ here. Big day for us here at the site as today concludes the final work week without regular season baseball. It hasn’t been easy, but by god, we’ve made it.

Now I promise to make a formal prediction about the upcoming season of Mets baseball before the first pitch is thrown, but before we take a look forward, I wanted to take a quick look back.

See, here at Y2K we try and give you a little something something that you can’t get anywhere else. With that in mind, there’s a topic I’ve been meaning to write about all offseason, but never got around to doing.

That changes now.

Maybe I was just desperate for baseball, or anything Mets related, but I distinctly remember hearing the song "Hypnotize" by my man B.I. up above a few months back and being flooded with memories of one overweight individual.

Not Biggie. Nope. Butch Huskey.

For parts of 1 and a half seasons, Big Butch never stepped to the plate without the sounds of “Hypnotize” blaring through the speakers at Shea.

And that got me thinking that there are any number of songs that I instantly associate with certain players, or with the Mets in general. So without further ado, allow me to present 10 songs that always remind me of the Mets. These songs are presented in no particular order, for the most part.

10. Jay Payton – “Got Your Money” (ODB); Derek Bell – “Big Pimpin’” (Jay-Z); Huskey – “Hypnotize” (Notorious B.I.G.)

So I’ve already talked about Huskey but I didn’t feel like I could leave him off this list. This is about as thugged out as it’s gotten over the years at Shea, although Payton’s choice of ODB’s 1999 smash easily takes the cake in terms of the most explicit song ever broadcast over the Shea airwaves (of course, they only played the intro, but the point stands).

Honorable mention for the thugged out list would include Mike Cameron’s choice of “Welcome to New York City”, also by Jay-Z. This one couldn’t quite crack the list, however, largely because I associate the Obie Trice knockoff “Welcome to Detroit City” too heavily with my junior year of college, not Mets baseball.

In any event, anything that reminds me of Derek Bell makes me smile.

He lived on a yacht. He wore his uniform baggy. He spotted a friend of B.O.A.F.O.M.G.'s sitting in the stands and sent the batboy over to get her number. And for something like the first two months of the season he hit .400, before getting displaced by Timo Perez and then, years later, initiating Operation Shutdown.

9. Kaz Matsui – “Bruce Lee Theme”

No idea who this song is by or where it comes from, but this one takes the cake for being the biggest headscratcher on the team. I have no idea how it would be possible for this song, or at least the part of it they play, to psyche a person up. Maybe that’s cultural ignorance talking, but all I know is that Kaz has sucked in both of his major league seasons. This song, bizarre but nonetheless awesome as it is, does not appear to be helping.

8. “Don’t Stop Believin’” (Journey)

Journey defined 1980s power ballads the way the phrase “Ya gotta believe” defines Mets fans, so it only makes too much sense any time the people running the sound system decide to pump the shit out of this song during Mets games.

I can’t remember when it was (it may have happened during several seasons), but there was a time there when the Mets would play this song after every victory. It might have been 2002, given the team’s slogan that year, “Always Believe,” drew its resonance from Tug McGraw’s immortal pledge.

(As I said in a fantasy draft last night, has there ever been a more derivative slogan than that one? Can't you just picture the sloganeers sitting around a room, depressed, completely out of ideas, and asking themselves what the most generic slogan they could possibly get away with would be?)

Anyway, whatever season(s) it was, chances are it wasn’t the last time you’ll hear Journey’s 1981 classic at Shea.

7. “We Will Rock You” (Queen)

I know what you’re thinking. How on earth does he identify this ubiquitous song with the Mets?

Easy answer: The 1986 Mets Tape.

Truth is, I was raised on that tape. I can’t even conceive of how many times I’ve seen that video. As anyone who’s familiar with the tape knows, “We Will Rock You” is heard each time the calendar flips ahead to the next month, but that's nothing compared to the culminating cheer of "We willl... we will... ROCK YOU!" that the Game 7 crowd jubilantly cried in the run-up to the team’s first title in 17 years.

Meanwhile, that was 20 years ago. Yeesh.

6. Mike Piazza/Robin Ventura – “Ice, Ice Baby” (Vanilla Ice)

Easily the most obscure entry on this list, “Ice, Ice Baby” by Vanilla Ice greeted Mike Piazza to the plate exactly one night in his Mets career.

The year was 2001. Desperate to break out of a season-long funk, Piazza had dyed his hair platinum blond.

Back in those days, Mets players were permitted to wear facial hair, and few players took more creative advantage of that right than Piazza.

One day, the Monster showed up with a most unusual design shaved into his beard. Describing it is nearly impossible, the best I can explain is this: imagine entwined, interlocking vines with a little space between the vines. That’s kind of how Piazza’s beard looked that night. Needless to say, it looked ridiculous.

Seizing upon Piazza’s fashion don’t, Rockin’ Robin had the Shea tunesters swap Piazza’s customary heavy metal with Vanilla Ice’s breakthrough rap song. Piazza was not amused, and the song was never heard at Shea Stadium again (at least in the context of Piazza). But to this day, every time I hear that song, I think of Robin’s prank.

5. Lenny Dykstra/Wally Backman – “Wildboys” (Duran Duran)

Another track that needs no explanation for any viewer of the ’86 Mets tape, this song encapsulates one of the more exciting aspects of the '86 team. To quote Keith Hernandez, everybody likes the “hardnosed, Pete Rose type players” that Backman and Dykstra were. I still remember my friend, the street legend known as Sepa, sweating the shit out of these two guys. I was always more of a Strawberry guy, but Backman and Dykstra, as immortalized by Duran Duran, were strong picks for favorites on the '86 team.

4. “Who Let the Dogs Out” (Baha Men)

I really wish this one didn’t have to make the list. This song sucks, and it always bothered me that it was the victory song for the 2000 Mets. I think it was a Timo Perez product, but I could be wrong about that.

One way or another, the song sucks but that team was great. Lot of great memories. Each victory in late 2000 came packed with a little Baha Men; whether that's something we should be proud of, that's debateable, but hey, there's no accounting for taste.

Neither the team nor its victory song could hold a candle to the one that preceded it, however, and that brings us to No. 3 on this list.

3. "L.A. Woman" (The Doors)

A classic. I’m tempted to say that no other song is as closely identified with a single team in Mets history as this song is with the 1999 Mets. A Robin Ventura product, "L.A. Woman" blasted triumphantly after every win. While the whole song is great, the part that will always be most fondly remembered by Mets fans is the “mojo rising” segment that begins in between minutes 4 and 5 of this 7-minute song.

“Mojo rising” became a team motto on par with “Ya gotta believe” for the 1999 team, and even to this day you still occasionally see a sign about getting the mojo rising.

That song is identified with the entire 1999 team, but for me, I’ll always best remember it playing after the win in Game 5 of NLCS, the grand slam single game. Easily the greatest postseason game I’ve ever been to. Who better than Robin to get the game-winning hit, and what better words to hear than "mojo rising" over the loudspeakers. The way it starts slow before building to a near orgasmic crescendo -- what's not to love?

And as I stood there with the Hound, me freezing, finally able to put my jacket back on (I had taken it off immediately before John Olerud's game-tying home run, and consequently had to leave it off for the next 10 innings on a drizzly October night), with Robin Ventura getting mobbed by his teammates while Jim Morrison grew ever more energized in the background, I had a sense that it might never get any better than that. It was heaven.

2. “Get Metsmerized” (1986 Mets)

The infamous rap song produced by the 1986 Mets. Confession time: I’ve never actually heard it. Chances are you haven’t either, but I’ve definitely read about it, and am desperate to hear it someday. If anyone knows where I can get a copy, please tell me. If anyone has a copy and is coming to the tailgate, please bring it. I’d kill a youngling to hear this song, what do I care?

Years later, Dontrelle Willis and Juan Pierre would freestyle during the Florida Marlins’ victory parade following their championship win over the Yankees in 2003. Their raps were terrible, but possibly better than “Gets Metsmerized” from everything I’ve heard. One way or another, baseball met rap music with the 1986 Mets, and “Get Metsmerized” lives on in the imaginations of youthful fans who never had the pleasure of hearing Howard Johnson spit it.

1. “You Belong to the City” – Glenn Frey

The final song on this list is yet another entry from the 1986 Mets tape. The song appears on the tape in just the moment when the announcer is explaining how that Mets team captured the heart of the city. It was a time of Yankee embarrassment and Mets domination, it was a time when the pulse of the city hung on the Mets' every move.

That's the way I like to think of the Mets today. Sure, it's not the case. This is, at the moment, a Yankee-dominated town. But for me, whenever I hear this song, I realize that this hasn't always been a Yankee town, nor will it forever be one. For there was a time when it was all Mets all the time, and if we're lucky, and if the Curse prevails, we may just see that time come round again sooner than we think.

Anyway, that's all I got. If I left off any crucial songs, please feel free to suggest them on the comment board.

I'll be back with predictions for the upcoming season later today or during the weekend, and it was Sip's plan to write a piece about the breakup of Mr. and Mrs. Anna Benson, so keep checking in for those.

- A.F.O.M.G.