NOT HOCKEY: As baseball season approaches, it's hard to be an optimistic Mets fan

PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla.  —

You’ll forgive me. I’m digressing from the usual hockey discussion here to turn to the start of the Major League Baseball season. I promise this will be one of the rare times I switch it up to baseball.

I can’t help myself.

And it’s for all the wrong reasons.

Earlier today, a Mets-related website I love posted a video of Opening Day 2008, the last one ever at Shea Stadium. While it was really nostalgic to watch, it was all the more painful to watch because next week, when the Mets open the season at home, it’ll be at the very-cold, and just-not-home-yet Citi Field.

There are so many reasons why I can’t stomach Citi just yet.

Perhaps it was the opening season, 2009, which was one to absolutely forget. 

Perhaps it’s 2010, 2011 and 2012, which were, as most Mets seasons are, dismal.

Perhaps it’s because there are so few great memories.

Not complaining about it, but
the Mets' biggest off-season
move was to introduce these
new blue jerseys — finally. 

And that almost changed June 1, 2012 — when Johan Santana threw the Mets’ first-ever no-hitter. And yet, after that moment, the Mets went from being in contention — just a few games out of first place — to oblivion.

So I suppose there are numerous factors. 

No memories.

Madoff.

The Wilpons.

And sadly, the notion there’s no hope.

I went to Spring Training this year for the first time. After all, I live in the city the Mets spend two months in each February and March. As I walked around, the most exciting part of it was seeing the Mets announcers — Eddie Coleman and Chris Carlin — and getting to chat with them both.

Yeah, David Wright was there. 

But for the most part, it was hard to tell whom anyone was.

And during the course of the few hours I was there, it hit me, as it often does in March, that this season, like so many others, is doomed. Already.

It’s quite the antithesis of being a fan of the New Jersey Devils where, for any given season, we go into thinking a Stanley Cup championship is possible.

With the Mets, it’s now (and often is) wondering about whether they’ll win 70 games. It’s wondering which uniform they’ll wear (there are, after all, about 300 combinations thereof). It’s about wondering if the attendance will breach 20,000 on weeknights. It’s about playing in a stadium that makes me feel like every home game is, in fact, a road game.

Perhaps once the Mets play a post-season game at Citi that will all change. But the problem right there is the notion of a post-season game seems so foreign.

Until there are some memories at the stadium atop, home will always and only be at the stadium below. 

Some say 2014 will the year.

But why not 2013?

It’s not like the Wilpons are in financial trouble, right? It’s not like we’re a team in the middle of nowhere where no one cares for baseball. It’s not like this isn’t New York? It's not like the biggest move of the off-season was the announcement that finally — finally — those of us who lobbied for it finally got alternate jerseys that are blue, and not hideous black.

They call the Nassau Coliseum, just a few miles east of Citi, the Mausoleum. 

Yet I can’t help but wonder how much Citi Field will seem like a mausoleum come April — shit, Opening Day won’t even likely be a sellout, unless the Mets buy and give the already-overpriced tickets away.

And if April games are barren — and they will be — imagine what it’ll be like in May, June, July, August and lord, September.

It’ll be just another one of those typical Mets seasons — one that is over, like it’s portrayed in “Family Guy,” after the first pitch is thrown.

And boy will that create a lot of memories.

Memories most Mets fans will want to forget before they even happen.

The year 2008 seems like so long ago. We said goodbye to Shea, and with it, decades of good memories, too. 

Oh, when will the misery just end?