Why does Hollywood love putting the Mets in post-apocalyptic situations?
It's been a bumpy few decades for Mets fans here in the real world. Sure, there have been moments of delight since their last World Series title in 1986, but the general vibe has been visions of Adam Wainwright's curveball dancing through your mind every night before you fall asleep.
If you thought the 2015 Fall Classic was rough, though, just remember that things could be way worse: You could be a Mets fan in a movie or a TV show. For whatever reason, the folks over in Hollywood seem hellbent on shoehorning the Mets and their stadiums into a post-apocalyptic situation at any opportunity. The inclusion of Citi Field in the Avengers: Endgame trailer is only the most recent example of the Mets being involved in plotlines revolving around the end of the world.
This concerning trend got started back in 1997, when the original Men in Black movie featured an alien spacecraft flying over Shea Stadium -- distracting Mets outfielder Bernard Gilkey enough for him to get hit directly on the head by a fly ball.
Gilkey, my dude, I understand that a UFO zipping over the yard might be a bit out of the ordinary, but if you're playing in Queens, right next to LaGuardia Airport, you've got to be used to playing through aircraft. Absolutely no excuses for dropping that ball.
But while Shea Stadium survived that brush with destruction, it wasn't so lucky in the second season of the TV show Futurama. In "Terror at 500 feet," lovable talking robot Bender blows up to enormous size and fights a 500-foot tall entity throughout the streets of New York City. At one point in this fight, Bender fills Shea Stadium with boiling water and pushes his enemy into it. I'm not totally sure how you'd fill an entire baseball stadium with boiling water, but the important thing is that in this universe, Shea Stadium almost definitely gets crushed.
But the most vivid cinematic edition of "Mets play host to end of the world" has to be the scene in Sharknado 2 in which a tornado of sharks crashes down upon Citi Field in the middle of a game.
I get that a movie about shark tornadoes made the choice to leave "realism" at the door, but if this middle-aged guy is able to hit a full-grown shark over 500 feet off the scoreboard, he probably should have been on the Mets to begin with. Again, it's unclear why Mets fans are the fanbase forced to stave off annihilation, but kudos to this uppercut-swinging hero for sending that shark way gone to center -- and to whomever operates the home run apple for hunkering down during the sharknado to get the job done.
While Citi Field survives its appearance in Sharknado, Avengers: Endgame appears to be a different story. During the stadium's brief teaser cameo, there's not a single person visible inside the park, but the parking lot outside is full. That implies that a game was going on when Thanos did his thing, which probably doesn't mean good things for
👀 #avengersendgame #CitiField (via @Avengers trailer) #SuperBowl pic.twitter.com/L9V21B6c9Y
— Citi Field (@CitiField) February 4, 2019
Do the Mets still have to pay Bobby Bonilla in a post-apocalyptic world? Who knows. I just hope that the next time someone decides to make a movie about the end of the world, they pick a different baseball team to heap their woe onto.
