Overconfident Mets Fan Stuck With 'World Champs 2015' Tattoo

Photo courtesy of Josh Davis

By JASON KOESTENBLATT

There’s sports fandom, and then there’s Josh Davis.

The 22-year-old Hackettstown, New Jersey, man loves tattoos just as much as he adores his favorite baseball team, the New York Mets.

“Growing up I watched the Mets with my dad and it just kind of grew from there,” Davis said. “And then the ’98, ’99, 2000 teams and the World Series … I was a little kid and that was just everything to me.”

But his latest marriage of body art and fandom didn’t have the outcome he expected, and his prediction became permanent.

Davis had so much faith in his team heading into the World Series, he got a tattoo of the New York Mets logo on his torso with the words “World Champs 2015.”

Less than a week after the ink dried, the Mets lost the series four games to one, relinquishing the title of World Champs to the Kansas City Royals.

When the Mets made an amazing run in 2015, winning the National League East Division for the first time in nine years, followed by a divisional round playoff series win against the Los Angeles Dodgers and subsequent four-game sweep of the Chicago Cubs in the National League Championship Series, Davis was brimming with confidence about his beloved squad.

Clearly, he was a little too confident.

“I knew at some point I was going to get a [Mets] tattoo,” Davis said, speaking by phone from First Place Tattoos on Main Street in Hackettstown. “So I was going in to see my artist on the day of game one of the World Series and I said ‘I’ve got the faith, let’s do this.’”

Davis told his tattoo artist, Don Kincaid — the man responsible for the colorful images on the super-fan’s arms — he wanted the New York Mets logo tattooed on the side of his torso, but with one twist: It needed to say “World Champs 2015.”

“Don was like, ‘Are you sure about this?’” Davis said. “I told him what the team meant to me and Don could see how much faith I had, so we went with it.”

Kincaid finished his work as the first inning of game one got underway.

Before he went under the needle, Davis tweeted, “Bout to make a bit of a risky move with my New York Mets,” and two hours later posted, “Watching the first pitch while getting a met tattoo.” Those tweets didn’t convey the specifics of the artwork, though, until Davis posted a photo of the completed tattoo.

While there’s no 2015 World Series trophy at Citi Field in Queens, the artwork on Davis’s body will remain — forever.

“I’m going to make it into a tribute piece,” Davis said, acknowledging the gaffe but passing it off as no big deal. “I think I’ll add the years of when they actually did win the World Series and maybe put an asterisk next to [2015].”