The New York Mets and not the New York Yankees won a World Series when I was 7. Therefore, as a New Yorker and an emerging baseball fan, I got the Mets. Forever.
It’s how it goes sometimes. Wrong place, wrong time, it all sounds so cool on a transistor radio and, then, oh, what looks like confetti on a black-and-white TV. Your team picks you and then you grow old.
So I was the skinny, rag-armed kid at shortstop wearing Bud Harrelson’s No. 3.
If you were a Met I loved you no matter what, and if you were Shea Stadium I loved you anyway and if you were a Yankees fan I felt quite superior for a solid three or four years, leaving only the next half-century.