Pedro's Legacy: Spare Us, Will Leitch

It pains me to write this, it really does. For years, Will Leitch, the creator and former lead editor of Deadspin, has been a guy I've really respected.

And I'm indebted to him on some level; on his watch, Deadspin linked to various Y2K articles, including some written by yours truly, all of which broadened our audience.

But Mr. Leitch, now of New York Magazine, has posted a very ill-considered (and, frankly, poorly written) piece in which he attempts to tell Mets fans how to feel about one of their own.

The piece is called "Leitch: The Unfortunate Legacy of Pedro Martinez". The key word is the one in the middle, legacy.

Your legacy is the story of how you're remembered, and to my mind, Pedro's Mets legacy can only be defined by Mets fans, because only Mets fans have the proper perspective on the matter.

Let me explain because I don't want to seem unreasonable about this. I appreciate, for instance, that I can opine on Manny Ramirez's Red Sox legacy, and I can even be right about a lot of it.

I can know everything the statistics tell me, and I can know everything about the number of pennants they won and fights with the Yankees, and World Championships and the circumstances surrounding the trade that sent him to the Dodgers.

I can know all of that.

But I'll never know what he meant to the team or its fans because I wasn't there during the offseason before he signed his deal with the Red Sox, when members of a disappointed fan base couldn't wait to read their paper in the morning or flip on SportsCenter or NESN or look at their favorite sites on the internet.

I wasn't there during that tumultuous offseason before the 2004 season when the Red Sox came thisclose to sending Manny to Texas for A-Rod. And I didn't have to agonize over the reality of the deal falling through and my biggest rival getting the best player in the game. And when Manny was holding his World Series MVP trophy aloft and talking about how this moment was for all the Red Sox fans who wanted "Alex" he wasn't talking to me or people I knew.

The sum of these moments is what defines a player's legacy within a fanbase. And it's by doing all those things, by suffering through bad losses, by talking to that other guy at the bar wearing your favorite team's cap on some random night in January during a hopeless offseason, and listening to sports talk radio and reading all the newspapers you can devour and the blogs too when you're done, that you develop the perspective necessary to speak for a fanbase credibly.

* * * * *

At the bottom of his lede, Leitch asks whether Pedro "ever, really" had symbolic value.

Anyone who's been following this team as long as we all have knows the answer's yes. We know that because we remember what 2004 was like, and 2003, and 2002.

We remember what it was like hearing a somnambulant-seeming Art Howe droan on about how the team "battled" night after night.

We remember the disappointment of Mo Vaughn and Robbie Alomar and Roger Cedeno.

And we remember the horror of losing the one shining hope the franchise had, Scott Kazmir, whose picture on draft day in his Texas Longhorns t-shirt is scarred in our memories because we were so excited and it was the first glimpse we'd had of him, was jettisoned moronically at the trading deadline.

We remember what Shea had become, a wasteland of hopelessness and ill-will between fans and management.

We remember what a bad feeling that was.

* * * * *

And then we remember how Omar brought in Pedro, outbidding everyone else and announcing to the fanbase, "Yes! We care, too!"

And we remember there was that first season with Pedro when he would have won 20 games (maybe 18) if not for a shoddy bullpen (sound familiar?).

And for some of us there's the memory of racing across campus after class let out so we could catch the very beginning of the season opener; and there's the memory of that jacked up feeling that accompanied watching him pitch in his crisp No. 45 Mets jersey for the first time. And there was the crushing feeling of falling behind 3-0 in the 1st, and there was the amazement of watching him strike out seemingly every batter who faced him after that.

But it was only the beginning. There was the last game of the season-opening road trip that you listened to on the radio home from school, the one where Pedro dueled John Smoltz down in Atlanta and Beltran hit that home run to take an 8th inning lead to keep the Mets from falling to 0-6 heading into their home opener. And then the next day, at the home opener, there were the cheers that erupted for Pedro as rosters were read.

There was the simple joy of his blue glove (which you loved because you remember Doc had a blue glove), and the fans who wore the Pedro jheri curl hair and the way he ran through the sprinkler that time and the way he entertained an entire stadium when his image was stuck on the wall in centerfield (which was supposed to have rotated out and become black so that hitters could see), and even though play was disrupted for 10 minutes the fans gave him the loudest cheers every time his smiling face showed on the jumbotron and he'd give the guns.

* * * * *

This rambling stream-of-consciousness narrative is, to me, the nature of fandom. A fan's memories are vast collections of moments that other people know nothing about unless they're fans too. What I've compiled above is just the tip of the iceberg; I could have shared many more memories or recalled many more moments than this.

To Will Leitch, Pedro's Mets legacy is something about the pratfalls of signing aging superstars. Thanks Will, but we've heard that one before; the storyline wasn't waiting all these years for Pedro to become its archetype.

No, Pedro's Mets legacy is about something much more than that, it's about something more than what you can deduce from headlines or statistics. It's about the way things were for this team before and after he came, all the moments before he signed, and all the moments after (only some of which came when he was actually on the mound).

We know he never delivered a World Series, and we know he was expensive and that he broke down halfway through. Thanks for the research. We'll take it from here.

- A.F.O.M.G.