Flushing Out the Blues: How Mets Baseball Boosts Your Brain

If you’ve ever shouted, “C’mon, Carlos—leave him in!” at your television, and then immediately ducked as if Carlos Mendoza could actually throw a shoe through it in response, congratulations: you’re not just a Mets fan. You may be enhancing your brain.

That’s right. According to new research out of Japan — a country that’s given us sushi, Godzilla, Tsuyoshi Shinjo, Kaz Matsui, and Kodai Senga watching sports doesn’t just make your heart race, your voice hoarse, and your neighbors question your sanity. It also rewires your brain in ways that can make you feel better, think sharper, and possibly even forget that we once signed Jed Lowrie for $20 million to do absolutely nothing.

In a trio of studies led by Professor Shintaro Sato (who, as far as I know, has never sat in the Upper Deck at Shea during Bat Day), researchers scanned brains, crunched data, and probably watched more sports clips than Keith Hernandez on a rainy night in the SNY studio. Their conclusion?

Watching sports and especially watching baseball doesn’t just light up your brain’s reward circuits like Pete Alonso hitting a walk-off. It actually builds up your grey matter. That’s the part of the brain responsible for learning, memory, emotion, and, in my case, remembering every detail of Game 6 in ’86 but not where I left my car keys.

And it gets better.

The study found that the more often you watch sports, the more your brain changes, for the better. Regular viewing of baseball (sorry, golf) can slowly reshape the structure of your brain to make you happier. Think of it as neuroplasticity by way of Citi Field. Or as your Aunt Sylvia might say, “Who needs therapy when you’ve got Gary, Keith, and Ron?”

Let’s be clear here: this isn’t just Mets propaganda (though, if it were, we’d put it right next to Meet the Mets and a signed 8x10 of Ron Hodges). The scientists actually put fans into MRI machines and showed them sports footage. Their brains lit up like a Fourth of July doubleheader. Watching baseball our beautiful, maddening, 162-game-rollercoaster baseball sparked activity in the same pleasure centers that light up when you eat chocolate, hug your kid, or beat the Braves.

And yes, they found that watching popular sports boosted happiness more than less popular ones. So if you’ve ever sat through nine innings of Rockies–White Sox and felt like your soul was slowly exiting your body, there’s now clinical justification for that.

But if you tuned in to a classic Mets comeback you know, the kind where we load the bases with nobody out and still only score one then your brain was probably getting a workout that would make a Peloton instructor jealous.

Now, I’m not saying watching the Mets every night is the same as hitting the gym. But I am saying it might be better for your brain than that elliptical you’ve turned into a coat rack.

And for those worried that the highs and lows of a Mets season might be too much stress, take comfort: even when your team blows a 4-run lead in the 9th, your brain is still firing off good stuff. Joy. Community. Dopamine. And if nothing else, gallows humor, which we’ve all got a Ph.D. in by now.

So the next time someone tells you that spending three hours a night watching the Mets is a waste of time, just tell them you're building grey matter. Tell them it’s medicine. Tell them it’s science.

And if they still don’t get it?

Tell them to go watch golf.