Mets Beat Reporters Resort to Henny Penny Journalism

I read Henny Penny to my kids last night and was struck by how much that story relates to the sportswriters who cover the 2007 New York Mets.

Henny Penny is a dim-witted farm animal who gets hit in the head by an acorn. She decides that the sky is falling and that she must go tell the king. On her way, she tells the story of the sky falling to a bunch of her friends, who end up accompanying her on the journey. But on the way to see the king, they run into a wolf who leads them to a "shortcut" to the king's castle.

Of course, the "shortcut" is into the wolf's den, where all of the animals lose their life, except for Henny Penny who runs home instead.

Several times this season, the Mets have been on the verge of clinching a playoff spot, only to start playing a type of baseball that would make most high school teams think, "Hey, we could beat those guys!"

And when the team starts a stretch of lousy play, the media trots out its "the sky is falling!" articles. And the public buys it hook, line and sinker and follows that absurd line of thinking to completely irrational levels.

The Mets built a 6.5-game lead on September 13th by winning 10 out of 12 games from the last time the media told us the sky was falling. There were 17 games to play in the season and it would take a collapse of epic proportions for the Mets to fail to make the post-season.

The second-place Phillies came to Shea and swept the Mets in three games, starting the latest batch of Henny Penny stories.

Now, it's never good to be on the wrong end of a series sweep. It's especially dangerous to lose three straight to your closest rival in the standings. But if there was ever time for some perspective, especially considering how these doom and gloom stories were written just two weeks ago and were proven false, now seemed like an apt time.

Instead, a new round of Henny Penny tales bombarded us.

Now, I know full well how hard it is to come up with angles for a story, especially when you consistently work on deadline pressure. I am aware that controversy helps sell papers. And I recognize that it is better to be out in front of a story than be the last one to record it.

But at some point, is it not your obligation as a reporter to investigate the big picture then apply some common sense and historical judgment?

The Phillies have been just as streaky as the Mets lately. Philadelphia won six straight, went 1-5 and followed that up by winning nine of 11 games though September 18th.

Now, the Mets and Phillies streaks have been inveresely proportional, largely because Philadelphia has taken New York behind the wood shed the last two series. But the two clubs don't face each other the rest of the season, which seems to be an important consideration when projecting their final records.

Additionally, the Mets close up with the Nationals, Marlins and Cardinals - three teams under .500 for the season. By contrast, the Phillies have to go head-to-head with the Braves, who still cling to playoff hopes themselves.

It's unlikely that both the Phillies can maintain their hot play and the Mets continue to find new ways to lose. But that's what would need to happen for this collapse that the Henny Penny crowd is predicting to occur.

Wednesday night things finally broke for the Mets. They ended their five-game losing streak while the Phillies had their six-game win streak snapped, which makes the Mets' lead in the division 2.5 games.

Each day, the people at Baseball Prospectus run a Monte Carlo simulation of the rest of the season one million times to predict the odds of each team making the playoffs. After Wednesday night's action, the simulations have the Mets winning the division 90.6 percent of the time and making the playoffs as the Wild Card entrant an additional 3.9 percent of time.

So, the Henny Penny crowd has a 5.5 percent chance of being right. Is that a big enough chance that it's worth the humiliation of being wrong for the glory to be ahead of the story?

It is when nobody is willing to take you to task for being wrong. We know full well that writers would crow how they've predicted this collapse for over a month and how they saw it when no one else did, if it were to come to pass.

Well, I'm not going to give them a free pass. Here are the headlines in just one newspaper - The New York Post - the last few days:

COLLAPSE SHIFTS INTO 'OVER' DRIVE
AMAZIN' MESS - MEANDERIN' METS CAVING IN TO PLAYOFF PRESSURE
ANOTHER NAT-ASTROPHE - * SKID HITS 5
HIGH ANXIETY - STRESSED METS STUMBLE DOWN THE STRETCH
DON'T SAY IT! - 'COLLAPSE' BEING WHISPERED AROUND METS
WASH. & FOLD - METS' COLLARS FEELING TIGHTER AFTER BELTWAY BLUNDER- FEST
TRIPPING TO THE FINISH LINE
DEEP SIXED - METS LOSE AGAIN TO PHILS
SAME OL' STORY - AMAZIN'S DROP ANOTHER TO PHILLIES

You can't get the entire feel from the headline, which most often is not even written by the sportswriter, but surely you can sense a theme. Mess, catastrophe, anxiety, collapse, tripping, deep-sixed - these paint the Henny Penny picture captured in even more detail in the articles by writers like Mike Vaccaro, Mark Hale, Larry Brooks and Mike Puma.

I don't mean to pick on the Post. I could just as easily have used The Daily News, Newsday or The New York Times.

Now, when a team is losing key games in September, it's bound to be ugly. But this goes beyond ugly and into paranoia for no good reason.

Yes, the Mets enjoyed a cake walk in winning the title in 2006. But you know what - most years are not like that. Most years go down to the final week or 10 days. This is where a little perspective would have been helpful.

In the children's tale, Henny Penny survives while her friends meet their end. In our case, the sportswriters drive their readers off the cliff with tales of doom and then go on to piss on the next story.

It's open for debate if Henny Penny learned anything from her silly actions that resulted in her friends' deaths. Let's make sure these sportswriters learn something when it turns out that they were wrong and the sky did not fall. Remind them of how ridiculous those columns were when the Mets clinch.

Because you know they'll remind us if it happens the other way around.