Karma is Cause of Mets Collapse

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The New York Mets have just experienced what many are calling the worst collapse in baseball history. The Mets were in first place most of the season, but in the last two weeks it all fell apart. Yesterday, the last day of the season, the Mets packed and went home for the winter.

As a deaf Mets fan for some 40 years, I am pretty sure I know why the team collapsed. It’s a simple matter of karma.

Karma says if you do something bad to someone else, something bad will happen to you. The “something bad” the Mets did was refuse to closed-caption their TV broadcasts.

And what they did wasn’t done to just anyone, but to deaf people, who already have to deal with too much crap and don’t need to be reminded every time they watch a baseball game that society doesn’t really care about them at all.

I was thrilled last summer when I learned that my basic cable included SportsNet New York, a new station partially owned by the Mets that shows almost every game each season. I was less thrilled to see that the games were not captioned. Following FCC protocol, I wrote to my local cable provider to complain. In response, they told me SportsNet New York is a new station and is allowed three years before it is required to provide captioning.

Apparently they plan to wait until the last possible minute. I have now gone through two seasons of uncaptioned baseball. It is weird because I can watch other teams play with captions but when it comes to my own favorite team, I only get half the story. You can follow a baseball game without the audio portion, but it’s not as much fun.

SportsNet New York obviously doesn’t even own the equipment needed to show captions, as nothing is EVER captioned, including commercials that are routinely captioned on other stations.

Here’s what it says on their website:

Q: Is closed captioning available on SportsNet New York?
A: We are always looking to add features to help make our telecasts more enjoyable for all of our viewers. However, when starting a new network – adding all of these different elements take time. Closed captioning is important to SNY, and we currently are looking into adding this feature to our channel. In the interim, we ask that you remain patient as we work toward adding closed captioning to our network.

It’s all about money. I don’t know how much the equipment costs or what they’d have to pay people to caption the games, but I imagine it is a drop in the bucket in the big-money world of Major League Baseball. I can’t help but feel that if one player forfeited his salary for just one game, it would probably pay to caption the broadcasts all summer long.

But the team was stingy and selfish and couldn’t be bothered to pay a few bucks to ensure that their many fans with hearing loss could fully enjoy the games.

The Mets did a bad thing to all of us, and what happened? It came back and bit them in the ass.

I am not so much disgusted with the Mets’ poor play over the last two weeks, I am more disgusted with Sportsnet New York and its ignorance and apathy, which allows the company to think it is perfectly fine to insult and neglect deaf people on a regular basis.

By the way, the team added insult to injury by hosting a Deaf Awareness Day at Shea Stadium this past Saturday. What a bunch of hypocrites!

As a lifetime fan, it hurts to say this, but the Mets got what they deserved.

Shea Stadium, Flushing, NY, August 11, 2007
Photo by Tom Willard

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