was eight years old when the New York Mets made the 2015 World Series. My brother and I had never witnessed a successful team and were just old enough to understand fandom. We took our dad’s enthusiasm as a model, and as summer turned to fall, we threw ourselves behind the team. We hunched around the TV when the Mets clinched a playoff spot. We bit our nails when the Mets prevailed in a close first-round series. We cheered wildly when they swept their second-round opponents and advanced to the World Series.

Or so I’m told.

My best memory of the Mets’ greatest season of my lifetime does not take place during this magical postseason run. It happened several months earlier during an uncompetitive home loss to the San Diego Padres. At that point, the Mets had barely won more games than they’d lost, and the playoffs were a long way off. My dad, brother, and I watched out of habit rather than expectation.

Down 7-2 in the bottom of the seventh inning, Mets’ shortstop Wilmer Flores comes up to bat. The crowd rises to applaud him. Watching from the couch, I’m not surprised. Two innings earlier, Mets TV announcer Gary Cohen announced reports circulating on social media: Flores had been traded.

At the plate, Flores raises his eyes from the ground. He turns his head toward the outfield, then stares into the stands on the third-base side. I can tell from his face, round and expressive like a baby’s, that he has no idea why he’s being cheered. “Man, you gotta feel for him. They usually take the guy out,” my dad says. Cohen concurs: “It’s a little odd that Wilmer is still in the game.”

Flores takes a long at-bat, but grounds out for the second out of the inning. As he walks back to the dugout, the crowd gives him another ovation, louder than the first. Minutes later, the camera cuts into the dugout, where Flores talks briefly with another player before disappearing into the clubhouse. He’s clearly been informed of the trade. “Man, wouldn’t you hate to be a baseball player?” my dad asks. I nod.

But after the commercial break, Flores is, inexplicably, back on the field for the top of the eighth. The camera zooms in on his baby face, flushed red. There are circles around his eyes; he wipes them with his right hand. At one moment, he chews his glove leather. Flores is crying, and by now, I am too.

idway through the classic baseball comedy “A League of Their Own,” Rockford Peaches manager Tom Hanks chastises his shortstop Bitty Schram for an error that cost the team the lead. As Hanks finishes his profane diatribe and turns back to the dugout, she begins to sniffle and cry. Hanks whirls to deliver the now-famous line: “There’s no crying in baseball!”

In the last few years, this scene has been re-interpreted as a self-aware, humorous, lovably traditional comment about athletes’ mental health. Hanks and Schram are parodies of the bad old days, the stifling and traditional game only my grandfather remembers fondly. This imagination has come to prominence as mental health itself has entered modern fans’ lexicon. Depression, anxiety, sadness, ‘the yips’ — these are valid reasons for time away from the game, whatever the game. Ask gymnast Simone Biles, soccer standout Ronald Araújo, tennis stars Naomi Osaka and Aryna Sabalenka. Philadelphia Eagles’ tackle Lane Johnson was praised for his bravery when he cited mental health for his retirement a few weeks ago. Today, most fans smile knowingly when we hear “there’s no crying in baseball,” because of course there is crying in baseball. There’s also crying in soccer and crying in hockey and crying in water polo and yoga and hobby horsing. Crying is okay!

That we now allow athletes to express their emotions has been one of the better things to happen to sports this millenia. We have come a long way from a cockeyed Hanks bellowing at poor Bitty Schram. Tears do not prove an athlete’s weakness.

Yet athletes’ emotions are still treated by fans as proof of something, no more free of scrutiny than in-game performance. After a win, look at any major professional sports team’s social media, and you will find as many celebration videos as in-game highlights. After a loss, you’ll find voyeuristic videos of players in tears — Brazilian star Neymar Jr. after his country’s surprise World Cup exit this summer, or quarterback Josh Allen after an overtime loss in the 2026 NFL playoffs.

Crying is no longer an embarrassing admission of weakness, but evidence of athletes’ commitment — to their love of the game. I knew Wilmer Flores was all-in because he was all out there on the field. He held nothing back, and so he cried. It never entered my mind to judge him because it was genuine, raw, unfiltered, vulnerable. I saw in him a visceral connection to the sport and his teammates that I identified with from my couch. His crying validated my support.

evotion is the medium of fandom. We have no other power except to care. There is a large body of research on why this happens; depending on what you read, it is tribal structures, geographic identity, underdog stories, leisure time, accessibility, and more. I’m sure they’re all right, but on some level that devotion is illogical. We stake our emotions on events we cannot impact, hoping, generally against probability, a group of people who do not know our names will emerge victorious. Anyone who has spent any time on sports social media has seen some version of the sentence “I can’t wait for 11 people chasing a ball around a field to determine my mood for the next week.”

I’m more interested in how we care. Devotion releases fans from normal codes of behavior. What is embarrassing, taboo, or silly is permitted, encouraged, within the social logic sports fandom. On your average Saturday night, walking into oncoming traffic, climbing stoplights, and piling 30 people into strangers’ pickup trucks to dance are liable to get someone in social, not to mention legal, trouble. Watch Times Square after the New York Knicks won the NBA Championship; everyone did it.

Devotion, though, has always been trickier for athletes. Fans do not believe in a vacuum — they must believe athletes care as much as they do, especially when they’re successful. If the players don’t believe in themselves, what is there for fans to believe in? An athlete’s passion gives fans permission for their passion.

But when an athlete, inevitably, is unsuccessful, they must placate the fans whose devotion has gone unrewarded, lest they be labeled a callous scourge. In moments of professional struggle, they are responsible for enabling fans’ devotion and maintaining the suspension of normality.

Players are eviscerated for not taking this into account. Anthony Rendon, a World Series-winning third baseman in the midst of a $245 million contract, remarked in 2024 that baseball “has never been a top priority for me” and that his faith and family “come first.” A former teammate said Rendon coasted on talent and “don’t give a shit” about the game, and a Fox Sports commentator called the comments “tone deaf.” Kyle Tucker, baseball’s highest paid player by average annual salary, was similarly critiqued this season. Videos showing his perceived lack of effort went viral; fans commented that he looked like he’d rather be playing video games than baseball. Some speculated he was struggling with mental health, that explanation being preferable to him not performing devotion. “Kyle Tucker Must Cry,” one blog headline read.

When fans’ consider themselves more devoted than players, the relationship becomes poisonous, as much as, if not more than, in “A League of Their Own.” Spectators realize their devotion is not being reciprocated, and they feel cheated. The athlete loses their idol status and fans feel the sanctity of devotion, the suspension of self-awareness, ebb. Mental health becomes prescriptive rather than accepted. Crying is no longer taboo, it’s required.

For some players, though, devotion comes naturally, and liberates them from performance. This is why I, along with Mets fans, love Wilmer Flores. He was in the midst of a mediocre season, contributing as an average bottom-of-the-order bat but a poor defender, a weakness that sometimes relegated him to the bench. Neither he nor the team had excelled. Yet, having learned of his impending trade, his tears showed how much the Mets mattered to him. I was not embarrassed to cry with him. I was proud.

The pride extended from the screen. I never played baseball, but I was a dedicated soccer player, and Wilmer Flores became my model for devotion. To borrow an old coach’s phrase, I did not “manage my emotional relationship to the game.” I practiced hard and played hard and, more often than not, we won. On these occasions I was elated, jabbering my teammates’ ears off on the drive home. When we lost, I cried right there on the sidelines. It mattered so much to me, to have left myself out there and lost anyway. It was worst when I’d played poorly, or made a critical mistake. My mom tried to usher me to our car before the tears came, but I rarely made it.

That every play carried significance was a burden. I felt nauseous before games, even ones I was confident we’d win. But in wins and losses, it felt good to care, and for my teammates and friends to know I’d dedicated myself completely, that no one could reproach me for my lack of effort.

I can’t say this made me happier or better; it did not. My teammates who could laugh away our losses tended to be more consistent on the field, not to mention more stable emotionally.

Wilmer Flores showed me I’d rather devote myself unsuccessfully, as a player and a fan, than hold anything back — for better or worse.

he Mets never traded Flores. Reports after the July 29 loss revealed another player in the deal had failed their medical examination. The deal was off, and Flores remained a Met.

He was given standing ovations for a week. Two nights later, he hit a walk-off home run against the division-leading Washington Nationals. Rounding third base, he tugged his jersey at the “M-E-T-S” lettering across the chest. It looks like his wild heartbeat thumping through his jersey. He responded to the support, outperforming his season stats over the last two months as the Mets surged to the playoffs and into the World Series.

Flores came up to bat in Game 5, needing a hit to keep the Mets season alive. He’d been slumping all series, recording only one hit in 16 at-bats. I could see the writing on the wall and had, reluctantly, accepted we would lose. But I did not want Flores to make the final out. He cared, and did not deserve to lose the game for us. But he was passive, watching a fastball on the inside corner for strike three, and the Mets lost the World Series.

I wonder what would have happened if it had been another, less beloved player. To this day, you will not hear a word against Wilmer Flores from Mets’ fans, including myself. The tears he’d cried in July shielded him in November. His devotion superseded his performance.

As a fan, I don’t want to force the players I love to embody this devotion. The weight of fandom is heavy and no athlete’s responsibility. But when players have it, when a tear slides down Wilmer Flores’s baby cheek and I glimpse his own devotion, I’m honored to be so moved.

—Associate Magazine Editor Wyatt J. Meyer can be reached at [email protected]. His column “The Under-Explored Emotion” contemplates experiences of embarrassment in modern life.