British Mets Fans Feel Your Pain

They're misunderstood, tired, and lonely, but they've kept at it. Sound like any Mets fans you know?

On October 3rd, 2010, the Mets played the most Mets game of all time. 

It was Closing Day of the 2010 season, and the Mets, 79-82, were playing the 90-loss Nationals. Mike Pelfrey allowed a run in the top of the fifth; the Mets struck back when Josh Thole grounded into an RBI double play in the bottom of the inning. The Nationals’ bullpen held the Mets scoreless through the next nine innings. Meanwhile, the Mets were running out of pitchers. In the top of the 14th, out of options, the Mets went to the last guy in their pen: Óliver Pérez.

Pérez hadn’t pitched in a month, but here was a golden opportunity to end the season on a high note; to turn a completely lost season into, at the very least, something with an ending that might signal better things ahead.

Pérez didn’t do that. Instead, he pitched the most Óliver Pérez inning you can possibly imagine: strikeout, hit-by-pitch, stolen base, walk, walk, walk. A double play mercifully ended the inning with only one run in, but that was enough. The Mets went down quietly in the bottom of the 14th, and ended their season with a loss.

Rob Davies was watching from the stands that day. He was surrounded by fans who were disgusted at the performance of their team, but he was having none of it. “I was gripped. I loved it,” he said. The atmosphere in the stadium, the whole ethos of the sport...he was hooked. “I decided from that moment on that I was going to be a Mets fan, and I was going to follow the Mets.”

Davies, from Cardiff in South Wales, is just one example of a phenomenon that, in conversations with British Mets fans, becomes clear. It takes a great deal of commitment to follow the Mets from the UK — night games start after midnight — and only the hardest-core of fans manage to stick around long-term. If you’re a British Mets fan, in other words, you’re already a pretty committed Mets fan, which means you have all the usual Mets fan moments. Being laughed at for your fandom. Rooting hard for a team that looked good, then somehow went on to lose 90 games. Moments of laughable mediocrity and failure that you inexplicably enjoy. They may be from across the pond, but British Mets fans have lived the Mets fan experience, and then some. 

For many British fans, rooting for the Mets began as an accident. Andrew Wilson, 21, from Edinburgh, played soccer until he was around 14, when a broken tibia put him on the sideline for six months. “I wasn’t doing anything,” he said. “I was always on my phone, and I discovered baseball.”

He found local teams — once he’d recovered, he joined the Edinburgh Devils of the Scottish National League; he still plays for the team today — but also started watching professional baseball. At first, like many British fans, he watched the Yankees. The Yankees hat, multiple British fans told me, is ubiquitous in the UK, not as a symbol of Yankees fandom but simply as a fashion statement. But then Wilson found out that New York had another baseball team too, and he had the thought that, at one point or another, all Mets fans have to have. 

“Why not just go for something a little bit different?” he thought to himself. With that, his Mets fandom was born. A year later, he was in New York as the Mets made a run to the 2015 World Series. He couldn’t get tickets, but the atmosphere was palpable nonetheless. “Being there in October and November, playing the Dodgers and the Cubs, that was just amazing,” he said. “Cespedes, he was probably a cult hero for me.”

The cover photo from the “Mets Fans in UK” Facebook group

Tony McGlynn has another story that will be instantly familiar to Mets fans. McGlynn, from Watford near North London, now works as a train engineer, although he spent nearly three decades as a mechanic for the Royal Mail. He became a baseball fan on a trip to the United States in 1994. He had family in Connecticut, and they took him to two baseball games: a Yankee game on a Saturday, and a Mets game during the week. 

“Yankees, the stadium was amazing, the fans were happy, it was a beautiful day, they won 4-3,” he said. “A few days later, I’m at Shea, it was a miserable team, the fans were fed up, and I thought, ‘this is the team for me.’”

McGlynn explained it simply. 

“A normal person would probably have become a Yankee fan,” he said. “There’s a gloss and a glamour to it that isn’t for me. I’m an underdog kind of guy.”

As McGlynn left the U.S. to return to England, his cousin gifted him a Mets t-shirt. He’s followed the Mets ever since.

Graham Caskie, meanwhile, first encountered the Mets in New York, but not in Queens. Caskie is from Newbury, about 50 miles west of London, but as a student, about 16 years ago, he spent two months traveling around the United States on Greyhound busses. In New York, having lunch near Ground Zero, he heard a construction worker talking about the Mets.

“Who are the Mets?” he thought to himself. He read up on them, and thought he liked what he was reading: “Maybe they’re the more gritty, working-class team in New York.” Over the next two months, he started following them.

A few years later, determined to see a game at Shea Stadium before the Mets moved to Citi Field, he made another trip to the U.S. He remembers describing the purpose of his visit to an incredulous border guard. “You’ve come all this way just to watch a Mets game?” the guard asked.

That first game was a doubleheader on a Saturday afternoon. It was 2008, and things weren’t going so well. Luis Castillo, in particular, was getting booed mercilessly. Eventually, people started leaving, and one fan sitting near Caskie started yelling at them. 

“What are you leaving for?” he yelled. “The Mets need your support! Where’s your commitment?”

Caskie, seated nearby, wouldn’t help but agree. “Where’s your commitment?” he thought to himself. “I’ve come all the way from London to watch this game!”

It’s not just origin stories that British Mets fans have in common. There’s also something else: people who know them, for the most part, think they’re crazy. For hardcore American Mets fans, that’s probably also a familiar feeling. 

For Caskie, that came during the 2015 NLDS. He was staying in a hotel with his wife and his son, with his parents in a room next door. While his wife is just uninterested in baseball, Caskie said, “my parents think I’m crazy.” He set an alarm to wake himself up so that he could listen to live to the NLDS radio broadcast. Sure enough, it was one of the greatest baseball experiences of his life.

His father didn’t see it that way. “How daft are you?” he asked. 

Wilson, a consistent fan since 2014, said his parents’ mindset is similar: “you’re basically crazy.” 

“I know,” he added. “That’s what it is, I guess.”

Some fans, on the other hand, have been indoctrinated into the fandom by supportive — or, depending on how you look at it, destructive — family members or close friends. McGlynn’s sister-in-law married a man who spent lots of time in the United States — and was a Mets fan. Davies, of course, went to his first Mets game with his family. Graeme Wear, from Milton-Keynes, got into the Mets in a similarly accidental way. 

It was 1986, and Wear was serving in the Armed Forces. Stationed in Germany, his father-in-law sent him two videocassettes. One was highlights from the 1986 World Series. The other featured Super Bowl XX. He immediately took to the Mets.

Wear started playing baseball the next year, and always kept up with the Mets. There was almost never baseball on TV, but you could call a phone number that would read you the results. In the last few years, the MLB.tv app and a TV channel called BT Sport, which sometimes shows baseball, have made it easier to follow the Mets, but with the time difference, it’s still difficult. It still takes uncommon devotion and optimism. 

These British Mets fans don’t wear rose-tinted glasses; they’ve watched the same team that all the Mets’ American fans have. “Over the last ten years, it’s been mainly downs,” Davies said. “We haven’t really had much to cheer about as Mets fans, but going forward, I think there’s a lot to look forward to you.”

“The Mets, as a whole, they’ve not been very successful since they were founded,” Wilson said. “With the Wilpons and Saul Katz, there didn’t seem to be an awful lot of ambition. We’re New York. It’s a big market. We can’t just be playing second fiddle to the Yankees.”

“If I’m going for a plain point of view,” he added, “it’s not been very successful. But for me, being a guy who loves baseball and loves a team, I’ve loved every single minute of it.”

That, really, is what it takes to be a successful, long-term Mets fan. You can’t just love the Mets, although that’s essential; you have to love the experience of loving the Mets. You can’t just root for the team to do well: you have to embrace games where Kevin Plawecki pitches and the Mets lose 24-3 as part of a wonderful tapestry of life, while also being perpetually irrationally optimistic. 

“It’s part of being a Mets fan, always accepting the worst,” Wilson said. “But we’re looking good for the future.”

Mets fandom is something you can’t quite explain — it just happens.

“What’s kept any Mets fan close to the team the past fifteen years? I don’t know,” Caskie said. “I just love watching Mets baseball.” Of all the failure and embarrassment and losing, he said: “I’ve found it made the good stuff very good.”

One thing that does differ among British Mets fans is the way they follow the team. Some watch games live, as tiring and time-consuming as that can become. Some follow the team via YouTube highlights. Some simply check scores whenever they can. The various methods of following the team don’t seem to have anything to do with devotion level or commitment; rather, it’s just based on how tired a person can stand to be. 

That’s the essential truth about British Mets fandom: it’s a difficult, lonely endeavor. There aren’t many fellow Mets fans with whom to discuss the team; games can last until all hours of the early morning; if you don’t subscribe to the MLB streaming app, TV coverage is minimal. 

“Other than that,” Davies said, “it’s pretty good being a Mets fan.”

It’s lighthearted, but it’s also completely true: maintaining baseball fandom under those conditions is difficult even for the most devoted supporter of the game. Maintaining Mets fandom is a different thing entirely. The Mets may be good this year, but just this week, they’ve fired two hitting coaches, had two star players get in a fight and deflect the blame onto a rodent debate, and lost their star pitcher to injury — twice. Start to think about Pérez and Castillo and Mickey Callaway and Bernie Madoff and Bobby Bonilla, and it becomes difficult to imagine how a person could possibly devote so much time and energy to following a team like this, faced with so many restrictions.

The answer, of course, is simple: they’re Mets fans. Wilson routinely stays up until the early morning to watch routine games, even losses; he has only met a few other Mets fans in person in his life. Graham Caskie works with about 300 people; he can think of exactly one who even knows of baseball, and that person is a Red Sox fan. Rob Davies was introduced to the Mets by Mike Pelfrey, Luis Castillo, and Óliver Pérez. Tony McGlynn works full-time and has three children. And yet, they keep at it. They keep following the Mets. 

It’s not like they’re expecting an immediate payoff: like American Mets fans, they’ve watched the last 30 years of franchise history, and they’re ready for whatever the next 30 may bring. And they’ve managed to keep up the trademark Mets fan optimism. Without it, after all, no one could possibly make it as a Mets fan. 

“Success will happen at some point,” Wilson said. “Whether it happens in one year or in 80 years, there’s some success that’s coming.” Implied, of course, is that Wilson is a Mets fan, and whether the Mets succeed this year or in 80 years, he will still be a Mets fan, and whatever may happen this year or next year or in 80 years, he’ll still be a Mets fan, because that is what it means to be a Mets fan. 

But why do they do it? “You just got to do it,” Wilson said. “It’s part of being a fan. It’s a sacrifice you’ve got to make.” British Mets fans, it’s clear, understand the sacrifices that being a Mets fan requires — maybe not better than ordinary American hardcore Mets fans, but at the very least, just as well.

“I’ve been falling asleep to Howie Rose’s voice for years,” Caskie said. I mean, come on — does Mets fandom get any more authentic than that?