Débuting concurrently with the New York Mets in 1962, the song Meet the Mets struck the tone—no pun intended—required to capture excitement for New Yorkers still suffering from the exodus committed by the Giants and the Dodgers after the 1957 season. Music, indeed, is a powerful conduit for emotion, inspiration, and passion. A title from the soundtrack to the Elvis Presley movie Speedway conveys the power of music—There Ain’t Nothing Like a Song.
Imagine Rocky Balboa without the accompaniment of Bill Conti’s masterpiece Gonna Fly Now. Imagine the television show The Wonder Years without Joe Cocker’s rendition of I Get By With a Little Help from My Friends as the theme song reflecting the show’s late 1960s and early 1970s setting awash in nostalgia. Imagine a baseball game without the National Anthem.
When the Mets front office executives chose Meet the Mets in a contest involving 19 entries, it carved a foothold for worshippers in a culture colored blue and orange. Written by Ruth Roberts and Bill Katz, Meet the Mets immediately conveyed an invitation to become familiar with the th nascent National League team through its title.
This new squad created to fill the void, heal the wound, and revive the fervor in New York City’s baseball psyche needed an identity for a National League fan base knocked on the canvas by the twin blows of Horace Stoneham and Walter O’Malley moving the Giants to San Francisco and the Dodgers to Los Angeles, respectively. Meet the Mets fulfilled its obligation to render affection for an infant team with a highly significant number of players past their prime—and many who would never see a prime.
Meet the Mets uses lyrics harmless for a pre-feminist society soaked in the traditional dynamic of a father working and a mother staying home to take care of the kids, clean the house, and volunteer in the community, perhaps for the PTA. Undeniably, the lyrics indicate a message to the male baseball fan, ignoring the female populus. Or at least submitting it. Advocating for a man to have his kiddies and his wife join him in a day at the ballpark symbolized the male dominance structure reinforced in the Eisenhower decade of the 1950s through popular culture, for example, the television shows Leave It to Beaver, Father Knows Best, and I Love Lucy. Today, the lyrics seem antiquated. Condescending, even.
In a 1963 critique, New York Times scribe Leonard Koppett analyzed how classical music icons might have fared in creating a song for the team. “Think of the Mets as they really are,” wrote Koppett. Puccini would have oversentimalized them; Wagner could write for the Giants or perhaps the Yankees, but not the Mets; Beethoven would have become too furious; Brahms, poor soul, would have tried and tried; Verdi might have captured the essence of a Chris Cannizzaro and a Cookie Lavagetto, but a Charles Dillon Stengel would have been beyond him.
“Only Mozart could have done it, because, like so many others, would have loved the Mets—with genius added.”
A new version of Meet the Mets débuted in the mid-1980s with an updated arrangement plus lyrics indicating the appeal of the Mets throughout the New York City metropolitan area, with the exception of the Bronx, however, because of its status as the Yankees’ home. Certain tribal loyalties set by geographical boundaries cannot be crossed, not even by the power of a song.
A version of this article appeared on www.thesportspost.com on July 16, 2015.