Late in August, the New York Mets were coming to the end of yet another losing season. Even with the highest payroll in Major League Baseball, they were stuck in last place.
That was more or less all right with A.M. Gittlitz, the author of the recently published “Metropolitans: New York Baseball, Class Struggle and the People’s Team,” an idiosyncratic history of the team and its relationship to leftist and populist movements.
He understands all too well that the Mets are the Mets — a ball club known as much for its tragicomic ineptitude as its occasional moments of glory.
If the Mets were more like, say, the New York Yankees, a team that has rattled off victories with businesslike efficiency for more than a century, he might be less interested.
Late on Tuesday afternoon, while riding the subway from his apartment in Manhattan’s Chinatown to Citi Field in Queens, he suggested that some Mets fans had come to expect too much since 2020, when the hedge fund manager Steven Cohen bought the team for $2.4 billion.
“There were a couple years when Mets fans kind of became like Yankees fans,” he said. “But it just seems wrong for the Mets to have that sense of entitlement.”
Gittlitz, who goes by Andy, is a Mets fan for reasons having little to do with the team’s flashes of prowess. He likes the goofy mascots Mr. and Mrs. Met. He appreciates that the Mets pitcher Sean Manaea takes the subway to work. And when he considers Tom Seaver, he sees not just a historically great pitcher but also someone who took a brave stand when he publicly decried the Vietnam War shortly before he led the Mets to victory in the 1969 World Series.
Gittlitz was born in 1987, 25 years after the Mets’ first season and one year after they won the World Series for the second and last time. His interest in baseball and political activism have run side by side since he was growing up in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., a hamlet about 45 miles north of Manhattan. His father, a fellow Mets fan, often took him to games. His mother died when he was a teenager.
When Gittlitz wore his Mets gear to school, in his telling, he was taunted by the considerably more numerous Yankees fans, who ruled over the halls with jocklike arrogance and took pleasure in bullying the nonconformists.
“I became fully convinced the Mets were the team of a downtrodden underworld of artists and radicals, with the Yankees representing the contemptible dominant ideology,” he writes in “Metropolitans.” That youthful notion would grow into the book’s thesis.
He spent his college years at SUNY New Paltz and the New School for Social Research. After graduation, he started writing about the Occupy movement and related subjects for The New Inquiry, an online journal. He paid the rent by delivering food before switching to marijuana.
“It was a very good job when weed was illegal,” he said.
His first book, “I Want to Believe: Posadism, U.F.O.s and Apocalypse Communism,” came out in 2020. Since then, he has earned a living as a writer and as a host of “This Wreckage,” which he called “a dirtbag-left podcast.”
Despite his tolerance for losing, he wouldn’t mind if his team came out on top a little more often. As the 7 train hurtled above Queens, he mused that the Mets’ recent four-game winning streak could be the start of a turnaround, taking them from the basement to the playoffs.
“They might be on one of those runs,” he said. “I mean, they’re going to have to win another 25, 30 games. Not impossible.”
There were long lines outside Citi Field. Although there was a promotion on — Reversible Bucket Hat Night — Gittlitz thought the turnout might have had more to do with the winning streak. “They’re playing really well right now,” he said as he walked past a hulking statue of Seaver.
Inside the stadium, he picked up a veggie burger and a can of Dos Equis at the Vegan City food stand. After settling into his field-level seat along the right-field line, he took a moment to describe what he sees when he watches baseball.
“You have this defensive team, whose singular goal is the production of outs,” he said, gazing out at the grass. “Then somebody from the other team comes up holding a big stick. He tries to hit the ball in play, causing all this chaos that allows him to run around the bases and safely make it home.”
Contrary to popular belief, he continued, baseball was invented not by farmers or urban laborers but by Manhattan’s middle-class office employees. The game, he said, became an expression of their uneasy position in the social hierarchy, caught between the workers, whom they envied and resented, and the elite.
The hitter, in this view, is acting on the office employee’s pent-up desire to wreak havoc on the system. By smashing the ball, he is giving himself a chance to triumph over the mechanistic forces of modern life.
“They standardized the game in such a way that it was neatly balanced between defense and offense,” Gittlitz said. “As the rulebook proliferated, it was always seeking that balance, that tension. And this is the tension that drives capitalism.”
The game on Tuesday began when Fernando Tatis Jr., the slugging right fielder of the San Diego Padres, stepped into the batter’s box. The Mets pitcher, Zac Thornton, threw a fastball. Tatis smacked it over the wall. Citi Field groaned. After just one pitch, the Padres were leading, 1-0.
In the bottom of the second inning, things were looking up. The Mets had the bases loaded, and Francisco Lindor, the team’s star shortstop, was at bat. Gittlitz noted with pride that Lindor’s wife, Katia Reguero Lindor, served Zohran Mamdani as a member of his inaugural committee when he was New York City’s mayor-elect.
Lindor slugged the second pitch over the wall in right field. There was a problem, though: Tatis, leaping. He caught the ball before it could reach the stands, robbing Lindor and the Mets of a grand slam.
Midway through the game, Gittlitz checked his phone and saw that several members of his group chat, Mets Sickos, as well as a few other people he knew, were seated in the upper deck.
He found his friends filling most of a row high above home plate. One wore a Mets jersey with “Lenin” on the back. Another was the indie film director Caroline Golum.
“Did you see that catch?” Gittlitz asked, referring to Tatis’s over-the-wall grab.
“Horrifying,” Golum said. “But also amazing.”
As the innings plodded by, Gittlitz paid a visit to another group of friends seated a few sections away. During the seventh-inning stretch, they stood and swayed, arms across one another’s shoulders, while singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”
We returned to the field level for the bottom of the ninth. With the Mets losing 5-2, the sound system blasted a thunderous drumbeat. It failed to rouse the faithful.
“Has this team already given up hope?” Gittlitz asked. “Is the game over for them? Is it over for the fans? Kind of seems like it.”
Flyout. Strikeout. Strikeout. Another Mets loss. Gittlitz seemed deflated. For the moment, the game had killed his hope for a miracle run that would result in a playoff berth.
But as we joined the crowd making its way toward the 7 train, he did some math in his head. If the Mets got hot in the season’s final weeks, they might just pull it off.
“They’d have to lose once a week,” Gittlitz said. “At most.”
