Einstürzende Mets-Batting

A pre-9/11 take on the Mets’ ineptitude:

As mortified fans watch the Mets fritter away their once-commanding grip on first place in the National League East, dread infects the city that it might be witnessing a collapse of unprecedented proportions. Even those who far prefer the Yankees can’t escape the fact that such a nose dive would be downright humiliating to New York.

How could they? How dare they?

John Glendinning, 53, a retired laborer from Brooklyn who goes by Whitey, is so agitated he can’t watch the games without losing his sense of civility. “I get too nervous,” he said. “I start throwing things at the wall.”

But, hey, calm down. Collapses happen.

Indeed, where would the city be without its grandiose collapses? The all-out falls from grace or riches or first place, or even a simple upright position, are a familiar and infuriating and perhaps even necessary part of the New York experience. And while collapses smart, they can also be spellbinding.

These breakdowns, of course, aren’t confined to baseball teams that suddenly forget how to hit or pitch, not to mention catch fly balls. They materialize in every aspect of life.

Roads collapse, stores collapse, financial markets collapse, egos collapse. They’ve all happened throughout New York’s history, again and again. During the 1975 fiscal crisis, in fact, the entire city just about collapsed.

Collapses can be aberrant or telling. They can reveal something about larger societal verities. Or they can be vacant of meaning — simply perversely breathtaking to watch.

Part of what makes these sour episodes so intriguing is the velocity at which they can happen. Part of what makes them so frightening is that they can upend our world, even cause us to root for a different team. People and institutions that we thought we knew and trusted to always be there are — poof — gone just like that.

Then again, one of the worthwhile things about collapses is that they allow the often pleasing challenge of recovery, which isn’t always that hard.

. . .

Infrastructure Collapses are pretty common: Walls go, roads go, especially when no one takes care of them. Thus in May 2005, a 75-foot-high retaining wall collapsed onto the Henry Hudson Parkway in Upper Manhattan, burying parked cars in mounds of debris and dirt. The road, at least, held. Not so in 1973, when an 80-foot section of the West Side Highway fell onto West Street near Canal Street.

No one was seriously injured in these collapses, but many New Yorkers worry a lot about pieces of the city falling apart.