For Temple journalism professor David Mindich, being a Mets fan in Philadelphia has become a source of secrecy. Representing his favorite team is not a source of pride in a place like Philadelphia, where intense sports fans instead make him fear for his safety.
“There’s cities where, if I went to a baseball game, I would wear a Mets hat,” Mindich said. “Philly is not one of those cities.”
The Mets saw their 2024 season come to an end at the hands of the Los Angeles Dodgers Sunday night, losing the National League Championship Series in six games. But to get even that far, they had to go through the Phillies, ejecting them from Major League Baseball’s playoffs in four games in the divisional round.
The Phillies and Mets are longtime division rivals, with emotions intensifying in the 2006 season when the Mets beat out the Phillies for the division win. The following year the Phillies won the championship, breaking the Mets’ seven-game win streak on the last day of the season.
The teams face off more than a dozen times each regular season, allowing ample time for bad blood between their fanbases to fester. Last week’s divisional series was the first time South Philly and Queens dueled in the playoffs. Never before had I-95’s NL East beef held such enormous stakes.
When Hayden Bandell walks Temple’s campus in Mets gear, passersby yell at him. They flip him off. Once, a passing Phillies fan gave Bandell a thumbs down and blew him a raspberry.
“Honestly I’m not fazed by fans anymore,” said Bandell, a senior media studies and production major.
Philadelphians are known for their intense passion for their sports teams – a passion not always expressed peacefully. City officials slather streetlights in Crisco whenever the NFL’s Eagles near a Super Bowl berth to stop postgame revelers from shimmying skyward in excitement. On the baseball front, Phillies fans rioted in West Chester after the 2008 World Series. And that was when they won.
Oftentimes, the excitement threatens the uninitiated.
“If people are a fan, that’s not a Phillies sports team fan, then you kind of hide it,” said Hannah Devanny, a senior journalism major.
Devanny last saw men in mourning when the Mets felled the Phillies in the NLDS. Not a funeral — a baseball game.
“It was funny, because this is a sport,” Devanny said. “It’s not that serious.”
It wasn’t the first time Devanny saw Phillies fandom get out of hand up close. She’d gone to a game with her father two years ago that put this phenomenon on full display.
“We were at the Phillies stadium, and we were in a section of all Phillies fans,” Devanny said about going to the game with her dad. “He thought he was gonna get beat up.”
He had chosen not to wear Mets gear out of fear of being attacked. Devanny still wore hers and spent the whole game being ridiculed by fans.
The Phillies — and their fans — had reason to be confident heading into the Mets matchup. Eight players from their roster appeared in July’s All-Star Game, and the team tallied the second-best win-loss record in baseball. Yet the Mets’ offensive firepower proved too much to overcome, stunning players and spectators alike.
“It was a surprise,” Mindich said. “But you know, being a Mets fan, by definition, you are rooting for an underdog.”
In contrast to this, Bandell’s passion burns orange and blue whether the Mets are favored to win or not. He even plans his schedule to maximize the games he’s able to see. He even took a train to New York last Wednesday to watch his team from Queens play against the Dodgers. Still, he hoped this year’s team would surprise him.
They delivered and then some.
“I think they can beat anyone,” Bandell said prior to the Mets’ elimination in the NLCS. “They’ve been the hottest team in baseball since the end of May, and that’s the beauty, really, of this postseason.”
For Mindich, the decisive Dodgers series was a little more complicated. He wasn’t just thinking about his own team’s stars — Francisco Lindor and r, Pete Alonso. His mind kept drifting back to LA’s two-way pitching ace, Shohei Ohtani.
“If the Dodgers wind up beating the Mets, I wouldn’t be too upset,” Mindich said before the series ended.
Even for Devanny, the question wasn’t whether one of the big leagues’ most tortured teams could beat any opponent. It was whether they would.
“I feel like the Mets are one of those teams that they’ll go far, and then they kind of choke at the end,” she said.
Be the first to comment