Mets Fan Blog

As I wrote on the blog a couple of days ago, we all love Gary, Keith and Ron.  In these trying times, when you’re not hearing as much love as you’d like on the radio or in the forums, it is good to remember that there is something that every Mets fan always loves:  our absolutely stellar broadcasting team. 

The problem with a broadcasting team is that there aren’t many ways for us to show them our affection.  We can cheer or boo players and they’ll hear you, apparently.  I’ve cheered great calls and analysis by Gary, Keith, and Ron in my own living room, but they haven’t heard me. 

Well, now there is a way for us to show them how much we love them.  Gary, Keith, and Ron have established a charitable website on which they sell clever t-shirts, with all proceeds going to their favorite charities:  The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (Ron’s son has JD); The Cobble Hill Health Center, which specializes in  care for people suffering from dementia (Keith’s mom died of Alzheimer’s); and The Women’s Shelter of Greater Danbury (as Gary points out on the site, domestic violence touches everyone).  If you buy a t-shirt, you help a worthy cause, and you also get an invitation to a fundraiser Gary, Keith, and Ron will be hosting at the end of the year.  This is a great idea and these are great causes.  Gary, Keith, and Ron aren’t just wonderful broadcasters, they’re decent and caring human beings.

The garykeithandron.com site is great.  In addition to getting a t-shirt, you can post your favorite memories of Gary, Keith, and Ron, you can ask them questions, and you can learn about their likes and dislikes.  As a literature professor, I was very, very impressed by their literary tastes.  I was also interested to learn such tidbits as that Gary Cohen’s heroes growing up were Marv Albert and George McGovern, Keith likes to build plastic models and his favorite food is country French, and if Ron Darling couldn’t be a baseball player or an announcer what he’d have liked to have been is an American expatriate living in Italy or the South of France.  This is one of the things I love about these guys.  How many other baseball broadcasters can you imagine sharing a meal under an umbrella at a café terrace in Provence?  I’m sure they also like a beer and a hot dog at a ballgame, which, in my experience, is a little more expensive than most meals in Provence. 

Anyway, please check out their site and their t-shirts.  Here’s what one of them looks like.  I got an advance copy because I gave advice about Internet contacts to Lynn Cohen, Gary’s wife and a reader of my book and blog, who was centrally involved in getting this whole project together.

 I know I’m not exactly model material, but neither, perhaps, are you. 

I went to a baseball game today (5/15/08) at Shea stadium.  I had a wonderful time with friends and I almost saw the Mets first no-hitter (seriously Pelfrey made me very happy and hopeful).  I’m not going to spoil my serenity right now by talking about the game.  I had unusually excellent seats and so I saw all the baserunning and a catch on the left field line from very close up.  I am not any better for this.  Readers of my blog have probably noticed that although I have been writing on my Mets blog, I am not saying very much about the 2008 Mets yet.  The truth is that there’s very little I have wanted to say.  I have not been happy, but I haven’t wanted to join everyone else jumping on the team.  So I have written about stuff like loyalty and life and what we love about being Mets fans.  I am beginning to run out of the nice stuff.  I am afraid I am going to have to vent soon about what I don’t like about being a New York Mets fan right now.  The season is almost one-quarter over.  But before I say anything, I want to wait to see what happens with the annual May madness of the first Yankees series.  Who knows? A gutty performance in that series might turn things around, as a no-hitter might have today, or a Wright clutch hit, or a Delgado home run. 

In the meantime, here are some pictures you can’t get anywhere else:

Gary, Keith, and Ron broadcasting from the “upper tank”

Mets literati:  From left to right, Greg Spira, Greg Prince, Me, and Matt Silverman.  More words about the Mets have been written by the people in this photograph than have been written by the people in any other photograph I’ve ever seen.

Mets Glitterati. 

I was in perfect position, and I was all set up to photograph the Mets dugout if the game had ended with something dramatic.  I have nothing to show you.  Let the pictures above amuse you. 

You know that sinking feeling you get when you realize that the game is on Fox or ESPN?   Today, you feel, the Mets will happen in a kind of flatland, where nothing is particularly interesting, funny, or surprising.  You have the feeling that you’re not in New York anymore.  Maybe you’re in Kansas. 

If you’re a Mets fan and you want to watch a game on television, you have to have Gary, Keith, and Ron.  You want them because they are so good.  Have you ever spoken to anyone who thought they weren’t?  Do you know how rare it is for a broadcasting team to be this popular, this admired by a fan base?  And not just any fan base.  I’m talking about us.  We’re critical.  We’re desperately loyal but impossibly whiny.  Mets fans expect something more than a couple of bland guys trading stories about whatever.  We expect something more than bias and cheerleading.  

And we get it.  Almost every day.  Gary, Keith, and Ron are part of a great tradition of Mets broadcasters (Nelson, Murphy, Kiner, Rose) who are deeply knowledgeable, who are not shills, who are funny, relaxed, ironic, and generous, and who stay with us for a very long time, becoming part of our lives.  The high quality of Mets broadcasting is as much a part of the personality of the team as the over-the-top silliness of life at Shea.  We’re kids because we respond to Mr. Met, the Apple, Cow Bell Man, and the Curly Shuffle.  But we’re grown-ups because we expect a “word picture” with life, character, and dimension.   

For example.  I was listening to Gary and Ron the other day, broadcasting a game from Los Angeles.  They started to talk about Sandy Koufax and instead of talking, as generic broadcasters would, in obvious ways about the pitching accomplishments everyone knows about, and about what a nice guy he is and how nice his wife is and how nice his kids are, Ron wanted to talk about the kind of aura Koufax has for pitchers, and how meeting him is like what it would be like for a deeply spiritual person to meet the Dalai Lama.  He then went on to pointedly praise Koufax for his important role standing up for all players, and not just for himself, by insisting on labor justice for ballplayers more than a decade before that became a movement.  Gary, in the meantime, explained what would strike modern fans as the peculiar fact that Koufax was on the World Championship 1955 Dodgers but didn’t really come into his own as a pitcher until the early sixties.  You learned about the rules that governed bonus signings, how Koufax, by signing for a bonus, had to be on the major league roster for a designated period of time. 

This is what I’m talking about.  Have you listened to other announcers?  Do you think you would have learned any of this?  Do you think these other announcers would know how to use the Dalai Lama in a sentence?  We Mets fans are a privileged group.  We know and understand more about baseball because we get to listen to this kind of commentary. 
 
One thing I love about Gary, Keith, and Ron is that they’re all knowledgeable, but they know different things because of the different perspectives from which they’ve experienced the game.  Ron, of course, can give you a seminar on pitching, just as Keith can on hitting.  But I get a great vicarious pleasure out of how Gary can answer Ron and Keith’s questions about things like when Jon Matlack joined the team, or which minor player broke up which almost Mets no-hitter.  Only a lifelong Mets fan like Gary would know these things.  You see how these former Mets need us, to teach them about the Mets.  It is in the memories of the fans that the Mets exist. 

This, fundamentally, is why Gary, Keith, and Ron are so important.  They shape the experience we are now having of the New York Mets.  What they are showing us is what will become our memories.  Can you imagine what your memories would be like if they had not been shaped by the likes of Ralph, Murph, Gary, and Howie? 

Just as the announcing is great, the dynamic of this team is very entertaining.   Representing the Mets fan, Gary is charmingly nerdy.  He has arched eyebrows and a crooked mouth and he makes little jerks of his head, at the very top of which is just a little tuft of hair.  He doesn’t actually look like George Clooney, as you might have expected from listening to his magnificent voice.  He’s the responsible one, who keeps things moving, who keeps things solid, even though he can also be moved to lyricism.  If Nelson Figueroa starts an April game, Gary will tell us that “as a fog descends, a spectre from the past takes the mound at Shea.”  Gary has a relaxed, respectful rapport with Ron Darling, who is, as he’s always been, impossibly cool, but in a refreshingly accessible way.  Darling shows you that jocks can be as wonky as fans, but even more sophisticated than newscasters.  I’ve never seen a player in the booth as good as Darling.  No one ever has.  It’s as if Christy Mathewson had gone into broadcasting.  He probably doesn’t like the awe he inspires in people, with his looks, his name, and his talents.  And this is probably why he’s so self-effacing.  It’s as if he’s saying, hey, this is just what I am.  I’m relaxed, so you relax. 

In this trio, Keith’s role is to be a little bit of the class clown, who can shrug and make fun of himself, who throws Tootsie Rolls out of the booth, who will complain about a long promo being like a novella, who will let the Mets have a day to honor his moustache, who is willing to serve as the spokesman of a company that sells the hair dye he uses.  He’s a middle-aged version of the guy you see on the Seinfeld episode.  He has this way of asking funny questions.  He doesn’t seem to pick up on everything right away.  Whoever made those wonderful cartoon ads for Gary, Keith, and Ron got this dynamic perfectly.  Keith would ask Ron Darling if pitching was all in the arm.  And Ron would play around with him in answering, with a little bit of mockery, but with a lot of respect and affection.  

The spirit of these three is perfectly evident in the way they look when you suddenly see them all together on Post-Game Live.  Are they looking great in their suits or is it goofy matching t-shirt day?   They look as if they’re going to be serious but they also look as if they think there’s something very funny about it being Post-Game Live again.  And there is, especially if they have to squeeze together for the camera in the t-shirts, with Gary between the sky blue or black or white matching guts of the athletes.  As Gary offers his overview of the game, Ron nods as if he agrees and as if he’s waiting to say something really important.  Keith nods too, but with a little smile, as if he’s trying to keep it under control.  Gary turns it over to Ron, who offers his sage perspective.  Ron gives it back to Gary, who moves things forward to the next game detail so that Keith can talk about it.  Keith offers his insight, usually talking to the little screen on which the replay prompt is playing instead of talking to the camera as he’s probably supposed to.  Keith often says really insightful things, but he rarely if ever says them with the authority Darling musters so easily.  Although he’s older, Keith almost seems like a little brother in relation to Ron.  This impression is reinforced by the fact that Darling looks and sounds a little like Wally Cleaver.  Keith, you realize, is the Beaver.  He means well, but he has a tendency to get into trouble.  And with his paternal voice and his bemused curiosity about what’s going on up there in the boys’ room, Gary Cohen is like Ward Cleaver.

That’s what they feel like to me.  They’re like a family you’ve known a long time.  Gary, Keith, and Ron feel like brothers who are a lot of fun and from whom you’ve learned so much.  You want to be with them, as much as you can, as long as you can.  What you hear most often, when Mets fans talk about this TV team, is the hope that they’ll be with us for many years, as Murph and Kiner were.  You yearn for this kind of stability, through decade after decade, just as you’d like to have it in your life and family.  These guys give us something that we don’t want to live without.  They give us a sense of being at home with the Mets.  They give us comfort, knowledge, and enthusiasm.  They give us a sense that rooting for the Mets is something that an intelligent adult would want to do.   

Gary, Keith, and Ron keep alive the smart, funky flame of Mets fandom, something that came into being in the crazy sixties and promises to continue into the next century.  I am at home in the place they’ve made for me.  I would really rather not have to watch a Mets game anywhere else.  Ever.
 

[Gary, Keith, and Ron have a great new project.  Watch for an announcement about it soon.]
 

I’m still not getting a read on this season.  No one is.  I’ve seen uneven Mets seasons before, I’ve seen bad games follow good games and vice versa, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a season in which absolutely superb and absolutely lousy games follow each other day after day after day for such a long stretch. 

By the way, if you’ve never seen me read from my own work, please check out this video of a reading I gave of pieces from Mets Fan at the Chappaqua Library in Westchester:

Mets Fan Reading 

A couple of weeks after my first birthday, my parents’ baseball team, the Brooklyn Dodgers, did something they would only do once.  They beat the Yankees to win the World Series.  My father, an intern, was at work.  My mother was alone with me in an apartment at 163^rd street and Riverside Drive.  When the game ended, she couldn’t stand the silence, there in the middle of Giants and Yankee country.  She called her brother in Flatbush and asked him to hold the telephone receiver out the window so that she could listen to Brooklyn. 

Obviously I don’t remember this, but I sure wish I did.  And I wish that I had been in a position to help my mother celebrate what was a once in a lifetime event.  My mother turns 80 next week.  I would really be grateful if she could see her team beat the Yankees in the Series one more time.

My mother is the most dedicated baseball fan I know.  She remembers going to her first baseball game over 70 years ago, with her older cousin Naty.  Ebbets Field, she remembers, “was just a place in our neighborhood.”  My mother grew up at 823 President Street, at the corner of Seventh Avenue.  In what is now, I think, an optometrist’s shop, my grandparents had a “candy store,” called Thomashow Brothers from 1913 to 1960.  You could get a soda in the shop, or ice cream, your newspaper, a comic, a pack of cigarettes, a roll of lifesavers, etc. and you could, during the summer, always hear the Dodgers game on a radio.  In the late fifties, I used to sit in the phone booth to the right as you came into the store and I’d watch all the people.  My most vivid memory is of the time when the phone rang and I had to jump out of the booth in terror.  I can still bring up images of what I watched from that phone booth.  I remember men in hats and women with bright red lips.  I remember my grandmother in a grey jacket, solemnly making ice cream sodas for pimply teenagers with too much Brylcream in their hair.  I’m glad I have these memories.  It makes me feel a part of old-time Brooklyn, which I always think of as the soil from which the New York Mets have sprung.

You could take the trolley from Grand Army Plaza to Ebbets Field.  Brooklyn used to have trolleys.  In fact, that’s how the Dodgers got their name.  “Trolley-dodgers” were what they called Brooklyn street-urchins around 1900.  But since you had to walk a few blocks to get to Grand Army Plaza from Seventh Avenue, and Ebbets Field was not that much further, it was not considered to be worth the nickel it cost to take the trolley to the stadium.  So my mother used to walk to see a baseball game.  She remembers how cozy, she says, the stadium felt.  She says that Ebbets field was like a circus.  She loved the band that walked around the stands playing commentary (like “Three Blind Mice” when the umpires made a bad call).  Her favorite player as a kid was Cookie Lavagetto and she remembers the lady who sat in the stands and screamed and held up signs about being crazily in love with him.  Later her favorite player was Dixie Walker, “the People’s Cherce,” as he was called in the papers, though she was saddened when he was one of those who wrote the letter asking Branch Rickey not to let Jackie Robinson play.  Before Robinson came in the late ‘40s, the Dodgers were generally a pretty dismal team.  I asked my mother if she minded this and she said “Of course not.  We didn’t care if they were good.  They were the Dodgers.”  I asked her what it felt like when the Dodgers went from very bad to very good.  She said, “You know what it was like.  It was just like the Mets.”  During the great years, her favorite player was Roy Campanella, and she remembers how devastated she was when he was in the accident that crippled him.  She also remembers how devastated she was when the team left her to move to Los Angeles.  She said that only the coming of the Mets made it possible for her to get over it. 

She loves the Mets.  She watches every game.  Talk to any old Dodger fan.  It’s one team in their mind.  One team that represents the scrappiness of old New York life, one team that represents the highs and lows of life as it is actually lived.  She asks me who my favorite Mets have been and I tell her Seaver, Koosman, Hernandez, Strawberry, and Piazza.  She says, you see, “those are the good ones.  I like the good ones too, but I also like the other ones.”  I say I like the other ones too and I ask her who her favorite Mets are.  She tells me Mookie and Hubie.  To her, I guess, these are the heirs to Cookie and Dixie.  I don’t think it’s just the funny nicknames.  I think what she likes is the guys who are “The People’s Cherce,”  guys who come through in really special moments and who are not necessarily great or even good all the time.  I’m not exactly sure why she feels this way, but she does. 

I’ve been to a lot of ballgames with my mother.  She gets very emotional at them.  We used to go to Shea as a family on Mother’s Day when my mother and sisters would get these little make-up kits from Maybelline.  My mother never went to any games with her parents.  They were immigrants who could not understand why everyone in my mothers’ generation were so entranced by this American game that was so obviously a waste of precious time.  They thought that watching baseball was like playing cards.  But they were missing the point.  All of my relatives in my mothers’ generation became die-hard baseball fans.  The ones who lived in the Bronx even became die-hard Yankee fans.   I realize that baseball must have been one of the first things that let us in.  Here was this American thing that everybody could love without qualification, that everybody could love alongside everyone else.  Sure lots of different people could live side by side in New York, eating their own foods in their own houses, going to their own different churches and synagogues and mosques, living their own different senses of the world.  But baseball gave us a sense of what it was like for all of us to feel exactly the same about something.  No matter where you came from, you felt the same thing as everybody else when Carl Furillo did something, or Gil Hodges, or Jackie Robinson.  The importance baseball had in making Americans all feel like Americans probably can’t be overstated.  When my mother asked her brother to hold the phone out the window in 1955, what she wanted to hear was the voice of all of Brooklyn. 

My mom doesn’t walk very well.  But I really want to convince her to go to one last game at Shea.  And I’d really like to go to a game with her at Citifield because I want to get her impression of how it is like and unlike Ebbets Field.  The Dodgers and the Mets have been an important part of her life and I guess one good thing I’ll say about Citifield (which I still think should have 8000 more seats) is that for me, it brings my mother’s baseball life around in a kind of circle.  I imagine this little girl walking down that big broad avenue between Prospect Park and the Botanic Gardens in the 1930s.  I remember my family seeing the big new stadium right by the cool World’s Fair  in 1964.  Baseball gives us a certain relation to time, and to place.  We’re all Americans now in my family.  We’re here in this one place.  And we’re still moving through time, watching and caring about the Mets. 

Nobody has a read on this season yet.  Do you want to try to see if you can get a read on a week of the season?  Consider this past week.  Last Tuesday, David Wright wins an exciting game for us in the eleventh with this wonderful, old-fashioned increasingly rare baseball thing called a clutch hit.  Then we get clobbered to the point of absurdity by one of the worst teams in baseball.  Our next game is a gem, a perfect-in-every-respect victory against what may be the best team in baseball.  The next day our relievers get jumped on and we suffer another double-digit loss.  The day after that, we pull out a close beautifully-pitched game with three runs in the ninth.  The next game is blown as Ollie Perez gives up a home run to everyone who wants one.

Remember how last year was so maddening because there would be a good stretch and then a bad stretch and then a good stretch and then a bad stretch, etc?  This year is like that too, except this year the stretches are nine innings long. 

Choose whatever tired metaphor you want:  see saw, roller coaster, Jekyll and Hyde, Abbott and Costello.  Personally I run out of metaphors when I look at the Mets.

I just look and I watch and I sit there and I don’t know.  I say that I’m just going to have fun.  And maybe I will.  I’m just not entirely sure at this point what I am supposed to be having fun about. 

I went to one of the worst baseball games of my life yesterday.  I’m not going to get too excited.  I don’t think that game was typical of anything.  If I thought it was, I’d stop writing this blog right now and tell you all to find something else to do with your time.

It was a lot of fun when I got there.  The field level seats were filled with kids who all seemed genuinely happy to be in the stadium.   It was something called Cyberchase Day and there was a person and a purple character who looked suspiciously like the Phillie Phanatic.  They were on the field and the kids were shouting answers to questions they were asking.  When this little performance was over, the kids went way the hell upstairs without any apparent resentment.  They were what used to be called “Midget Mets.”  I was once a Midget Met, as I’m sure many of you were.  The name always made me think of the Munchkins.  I don’t think they call them Midget Mets anymore, but that’s still what they are, kids who can’t believe their luck to be at Shea stadium for an afternoon game for free.

The game was delayed by a water main break, of all things.  When it finally began, the Midget Mets greeted the Pirate batters in the top of the first with the most sustained unprompted chants of “Lets Go Mets!” I’ve heard in a long time.   I remembered my first baseball games and how hoarse I was by the end of them.  These kids gave Wright and Reyes the same unclouded love I gave to Jim Hickman and Tim Harkness.  I thought of how far this festival of children and cotton candy and foam fingers was from what I had been hearing about all week:  the crazed unhappy state of Mets fans, the frustrations of young men who, just beginning to feel stuck in stuff they hadn’t really bargained for, were booing men who made millions a year for not doing their job, not playing a game well enough to win it.

It was a perfect April afternoon:  bright, sunny, windy, and cool.  As I waited for the game to start, I had this April sense of nothing mattering much.  No mistakes could be fatal in this light.  No wrong turns were permanent.  No ruts were inescapable.  The Mets were in pretty good shape.  If they won today, they’d be 15-11 for April.  Not bad, even though they hadn’t really looked that good.  The kids contributed to the youthful feeling of the day.  They cheered and stayed hopeful, and they didn’t seem to be thinking at all about what they were demanding or about how disappointed they were going to be if they didn’t get it.  I found myself hoping that the Mets would give these kids over the next few decades something like what they had given me over the past few decades:  a sense of community, a sense of pride and hope, a sense that I was a little bit crazy for caring so much and hoping so much, a sense that I had to keep doing it because for all of the disappointments I had endured, the pleasure of the rarest sweetest reward would someday make it all worth it. 

You know all the rest.  The first boos I heard were when Castillo made his error.  The booing wasn’t as bad as I had feared, nor, to be honest were they as bad as the Mets might conceivably at a few points have deserved.  Very few people actually booed.  Very few ever do.  And for the most part it was like the guy a couple of seats over who booed because it was fun to be stupid and it made his girlfriend laugh.  When you finally saw the Pirates’ proud 13 balancing on our hapless, shameful 0, you heard more people booing, but it was exasperation, it wasn’t bitter or particularly cruel.

After a while, the only people left in the stadium were a few bemused thousands, friends talking to each other, enjoying the lazy absurdity you get at the tail end of a lost blowout.  It’s a weird state I’d seen before, festive in a backwards way.  The game is beside the point, the pain of loss is over, and the pleasure of being in the stadium is still there.  It was like some games I remember in the late ‘70s.  It was what the heck.  It was a rest from the pressure.

I don’t know what to tell you about the Mets after the first month.  I know they don’t look so hot, but they’re 14-12.  That projects to the familiar number of 88.  But surely some of our good players are going to wake up.  And really, anything can happen. 
 

Call me a loser.  Call me complacent.  Call me whatever you want.  I’m just going to watch and see what happens.  I’m cool.  I’m puzzled.  I’m okay.  You do what you want to do.  I’m going to have fun.

So Delgado was cheered when he came to the plate yesterday.  Take that, Mike and the Mad Dog.  (They shrug and move on to the next molehill they can try to turn into a mountain so that people bored on highways will sit through interminable commercials.)

Let’s keep it up.  Let’s rise to the occasion.  What wearies me most about all this talk of the fans’ right to boo, etc. is the often unchallenged assertion that this is a “what have you done for me lately” town, that New Yorkers demand a lot all the time and are not happy unless they get the best results all the time. 

This is a lie and a slander.   New Yorkers are not like this.  Mets Fans are not like this.  I know a lot of people think that this crap is true, and if the booing keeps up, a lot more will come to believe it.  But this isn’t us.  That aspect of New York, which admittedly does exist in certain places in the financial district or in corporate Midtown, has been symbolically represented by the Steinbrenner years over at the other stadium in town.

The Mets represent the other spirit of New York and they always have.  We are still the people who cheered the team all through the sixties, when the product on the field was often laughable.  We stuck with our team through the great years of 1969-76, when there were some horrendous slumps, by Jones, Agee, Gentry, Clendenon, McGraw, even Seaver in ‘74.  Many of us remained loyal and cheered the team from 1977-83 when there was nothing much to cheer about.  The booers discovered their power when they started hounding Doug Sisk in 1985.  And if it hadn’t been for them, Sisk might have found his way back and we might have won the pennant in 1985.  The Mets tradition is loyalty and hope against all odds.  It’s the other New York.  It’s the spirit of my grandparents when they stepped off the boat, were checked for lice and eye disease, and were sent penniless into the sweatshops of the Lower East Side.  It’s the spirit of your ancestors.  It’s cheering people when they’re down.  It’s helping your friend back up.  The booers belong in the boardrooms, cutting peoples’ jobs to make a stock more profitable. 

I mean this and I feel it.  But I feel sympathy for the booers too.  I know where they’re coming from.  I know what they’ve been through.  People aren’t booing now because they’re New Yorkers.  They’re booing because we’ve all just been through hell and we’re not over it yet.  It’s a temporary thing.  But we have to make it a very temporary thing.  Because if we don’t stop it now, it could ruin this season.

I’m going to the game today.  Field Box section 228G, seat 1, wearing a t-shirt saying “It’s Outta Here.”  Stop by and say hi.  And if the crowd starts to boo, join me and stand and clap and cheer.  We outnumber them.  Let’s show the world that we’re with the Mets and not against them.

You know, sometimes I feel as if I’m living in a lunatic asylum.

Was that a condescending remark?  Did I INSULT all Mets fans and even all Americans?  Don’t read the blog!

No, I mean it.  A presidential candidate makes a thoughtful observation in private about the fact that people, in hard economic times, tend to cling to their religion and the customs of their culture, and rather than trying to understand his perfectly plausible point, the media and his political opponents insist that what he actually did was INSULT religion itself and the whole working class and everything they do and believe.

Lest anyone think I am being politically partisan let me also make clear that I don’t think it is a big deal if a former First Lady, visiting what has recently been a war zone, exaggerates the degree to which she was in danger.  I’ll go further.  I don’t really think it is fair to suggest that the Republican nominee, in pointing out that an American military presence might be necessary for many decades in Iraq was actually suggesting that we should expect to be fighting a war in Iraq for 100 years.

The lunacy is everywhere now.  Any moderately complex or debatable statement or gesture made by a presidential candidate is immediately turned into an INSULT, a LIE, or an embarrassing GAFFE. 

Maybe this state of affairs makes sense in politics because political rivals are supposed to distort each other in order to get ahead of each other.  Networks and newspapers need to distort in order to keep everyone interested in the horse race that determines ad prices.

But couldn’t we possibly keep this crap out of baseball?  Isn’t baseball interesting enough?  I guess not.

Carlos Delgado finally breaks out of his slump and hits two home runs in one game.  This is a cause for celebration.  And so this complex and intelligent man gets back to the dugout, and even though the crowd wants a curtain call, he determines that the situation does not call for it.  He’s never been a big curtain call guy.  He points out that he’s only done it twice, one time when he hit 4 home runs in a game.  He carefully and respectfully explains his high standards for the gesture.  He points out that it was only a solo home run in the seventh inning, not a game winner, not a grand slam.  And he knows and we know that he’s still only hitting .205.  I agree with Steve Somers and Eddie Coleman that he should still have taken the curtain call.  By not taking it, he made not taking it the story of the day, rather than the two home runs.  Obama, Clinton, and McCain should have also avoided making the statements they made because look at all the trouble they have created for themselves.

But doesn’t Carlos Delgado have the right to make his decision, and to have his explanation taken seriously?  Do we really need to spend an entire day debating about whether Carlos Delgado INSULTED us, when there is nothing in the man’s character or past performance that would suggest that he would have wanted to INSULT us?

Will somebody please wake me up when this election and this baseball season is over?  I don’t know how much more of this I can take.

The latest big Mets news is that Carlos Delgado has been dropped from fifth to sixth in the lineup.  It is hard to argue with this decision, and no one is making much of a fuss.  All of us are concerned.  None of us is surprised.  Some of us want the Mets to replace Delgado now.  Some of us want the Mets to be patient.  But even those of us who want the Mets to be patient know that we feel this way mainly out of loyalty.  In baseball, as in many things in life, patience is not always the right move.

This is a drama we’ve all been through many times before, as baseball fans.  Here you have a marvelously gifted individual, big, strong, smart, and handsome, owning the world and owning the fans at 33, as he leads the team into the glorious 2006 season.  Do you remember how important Carlos Delgado was to us then:  his 38 home runs and 114 rbis fitting so cosily into the clean-up position, between the two equally powerful hitters at 3 and 5?  Do you remember those blasts high up into the night sky to right, or slapped almost awkwardly with great strength over the center field wall?  Do you remember Carlos cool and smiling and totally at ease in that fine, fun 2006 dugout? 

And then there’s the maybe dropoff season, maybe not.  And the questions.  Hey if Moises Alou can be so good after 40, why can’t you be really good at 35?  How come? 

Mike Piazza was this age in 2004.  Keith Hernandez was this age in 1989.  Do you remember what that was like?  They looked the same.  They were still young men.  They could come back.  Couldn’t they?  And if they did come back, wouldn’t that prove something?  What?

Do you remember the first time you saw an unambiguous sign that you were getting older?  Not growing up.  I mean older.  I mean beginning to go in a new direction.   I do.  I was in my late twenties and one night, after a party, I had a hangover.  My first ever.  It was by no means the first time I’d ever been drunk.  But it was the first time my body ever said to me:  hey, now things are different.  You are not capable of what you were last month.  Remember the first time you felt that you were more tired out by something than you thought you would be? 

Of course, it is no big deal.  Or not much of one.  I still drink, but not like I used to.  I still do a lot of things, but differently now.  I am a healthy 53 year old, the same age as Keith Hernandez.  I can still do my job and I still feel as if I’m pretty far away from death.

Carlos Delgado is young enough to be my son.  He was born on the day I graduated from high school.  But look at what he has to deal with right now.  And what we have to deal with if we watch him with sympathy.  It’s not the same for him as it is for us.  Oh, sure he makes millions so I’m not feeling that sorry for him.  But you know those small drop-offs in your thirties that don’t mean that much to you?  For him, it means being knocked down out of the realm of the immortals.  For him it means still being big and strong and fit and young and struggling to get something back that is small, and is going away, and that made all the difference in the world.  A millisecond of a reflex, an ability to heal just this quickly, the tiny advantages that made him so much more than an ordinary human being.

Big-league ballplayers, as they begin to go into their tailspin, are terrifying to watch.  They are fighting with death at the first moment it appears on a distant horizon.  We don’t have to fight it this early, but we watch them do it for us.  Because they look the same as they did when they were so great at 33, they look as if are fully equipped for the battle.  They look as if they can win it.  We have to watch them fight.  Do you remember Mike Piazza’s face when he would throw to second base and not even come close to throwing the runner out?  Do you remember Keith Hernandez in 1988 and 1989?  They fought for us and for themselves.  They had such dignity, and nobility, and every once in a while they looked as if they were actually winning.  But they weren’t.  They couldn’t.  Our heroes looked the same.  But slowly they came to mean something different.  And you felt something different when they came to the plate.  You felt the triumph of time and the need to move on.  You saw strong young men losing the struggle that everyone loses. 

I am rooting for Carlos Delgado.  When I have a sense that things are over, I am desperate to be proven wrong.  This is what baseball is about:  hope and faith.  It is about believing in something that you know isn’t going to happen. 

I’m away on vacation this week, which is why I haven’t followed up on my opening day post.  I’ll be back on Monday, April 21 and I don’t think anything about this season will be determined by then.  I want to thank all of the wonderful people who read my blog, and who’ve come up to me at events, or e-mailed me to tell me how much they enjoy it.  The book also continues to sell very well.  I would like to mention that, if anyone is comfortable doing this sort of thing, I can always use reviews on the Amazon site.  It does help sales of a book if people hear about how other like-minded readers have enjoyed it.  So, if you have the time or interest, you are welcome to go to my Amazon booksite and leave a comment under “Customer Reviews.”  Thank you.  And see you again soon.  Keep the Mets on track while I’m gone and don’t boo.  Not yet.  No matter what they do.

It’s 8:30 am on April 8, 2008 and I begin my drive down to the last home opener at Shea Stadium.  It’s also the home opener of the 2008 season.  These are two separate events, even though they are the same baseball game.  I am grim and nostalgic about the first, fearful and desperately hopeful about the second.  I know that I will see Citifield today for the first time close up.  I am bracing for that.  It’s a bright morning.  It’s cold and I am not feeling the enthusiasm that all of these new beginnings call for. 

I turn on WCBS-AM 880 to get the news, weather, and traffic.  They are having a little sequence about the last home opener at Shea.  The reporter asks one of the construction workers, a Mets fan, about his best memory of Shea.  “Some girl,” the construction worker says.  “Did it work out?” the reporter asks.  “Yeah,” the construction worker says with a kind of chuckle.  That’s it.  I think of how I should be mad that that’s all they have about this very big event in the lives of so many people.  But then I think of how this interview kind of sums it up.  Who knows what happened to that guy?  Maybe he married the girl, maybe they had dinner, maybe they spent a wild night in bed with each other.  What means the most to us about Shea Stadium is what has happened to us there:  what has happened over 44 years to tens of millions of people who’ve come to spend a few hours looking for something more than what life usually gives them.  Is it any wonder that people have such a particular love for stadiums, and for amusement parks, and for bars and restaurants and all these other places where things have happened that aren’t the things that just happen at work?

I turn off my ignition in parking lot C around 10 am.  So many people are here, eating hamburgers and sausages and drinking beer at ten in the morning.  People are playing catch just for the symbolism of it.  There is, as always, wind off the bay, and party tents shake and banners flutter.  Here is Citifield.  And there is Shea.  Both of them are together now, side by side, for one year.  Shea is so tall, all sharp blue angles and curves, all silly and funny and tacky.  Citifield is short, broad, and graceful, classical columns and arches.  It is a lovely thing, I admit sadly to myself.  It is even prettier than I thought it was going to be. 

I walk all the way around the two stadiums.  Shea looks as it always does.  It looks as if it has no idea that it is not going to be there forever.  Citifield looks exactly like pictures I’ve seen of Ebbetts Field.  It looks as if it should be on a street corner in Brooklyn in the ‘40s or ‘50’s.  It doesn’t really belong on this windy plain off Flushing Bay.  But it is here because Ebbetts Field meant a lot to someone.   This is what stadiums are.  They are things that, by containing our lives, become part of what we are.  And when they die, they live only in our memories, like dead people.  Unless we own a baseball team.  Then we can bring the dead back to life.  If I owned the Mets twenty years from now, would I rebuild Shea in the parking lot of Citifield?  No, I wouldn’t.  But I guess I’d want to.

So there is the new thing, with slender arches like waves.  It looks like the Baths of Caracalla.  Look at the keystones on top of the waves.  Look at how where the waves end, a stately colonnade continues the march and the movement.  Here is beauty.  Here is architecture.  And there behind it is my big old friend Shea.  In his stupid clown costume.  What taste in clothes my big moron friend has!  Who let him in the building?  Oh how embarrassing it is to be related to someone like him.  How do I explain him?  Did he even have an architect?

I’m sorry.  I am loyal to Shea unto death.  And when I finally get into the stadium and see that Citifield is only as tall as Shea up to the top of the mezzanine, I am angry as I have been angry for two years.  Citifield is too small.  It is.  I don’t want to hear what the accountants have figured out about profitability.  So they hired good accountants.  They also hired good architects.  The goddamn thing is beautiful.  I haven’t changed my mind about it.  But it is beautiful.  And my new ambivalence does not make me feel any better.

I go inside and do my Shea things.  I stand on the field level and look around.  The arches overlook the apple.  I get my hot dogs and knish and find my seat and sit and have lunch with my sister Stefanie.  We talk and watch the goings on.  There’s the New Milford High School Marching Band.  There’s a ceremony to honor the Shea family who will now no longer have a stadium named after them and there is a very good little documentary narrated by Gary Cohen on the Diamond Vision about how William Shea forced Major League Baseball into expanding by threatening to found a new league and had a stadium named after him for his efforts.   The teams are introduced and as always, the Phillies clubhouse staff takes the brunt of the booing by being announced before the players.  Jimmy Rollins gets it because Mets fans still can’t get over him saying that the Phillies (the Phillies!) would be the team to beat in the NL East in 2007.  I think we should just shut up about that already.  “Friend of the Mets Michael Amante” gets to sing the Opening Day National Anthem AGAIN.   And then some super duper Hornets or something wow us by flying over the stadium (Stefanie says to me “Yeah, like what Shea stadium needs is a flyover.”)   The game begins.  The crowd is into it.  Fists pump into the air when Oliver Perez ends the first half inning with a strikeout.

Delgado hits a long home run and is now a fan favorite.  The season will be different.  We will be redeemed.  You feel the hunger of the crowd for a great season.  How glorious it is to be at the ballgame.  How perfectly Perez is pitching.  From my seat in the Mezzanine, far back in the cold dark shade under the Upper Deck, I watch as flatbeds of blue cotton candy float over the field and the boxes so bright in the early spring sunlight.  I’m at the game.  The last home opener at Shea.  The beginning of a bright new season of memories, hope, and redemption.

The game is good and the crowd is happy.  And then it all turns bad, just as the home opener suddenly did last year.  And then you feel once again that feeling from last year.  That sense that a three run lead by the opposing team is simply insurmountable.  Oh you cheer and clap when the Mets come up.  But although you don’t join the stream of people leaving between the eighth and ninth innings, you know that it is just not going to happen.  The crowd is not filled with the despair you saw at the end of last season.  But as we fall behind, it feels sullen, glum, hopeful, and fearful.  It is a hard year already.  We don’t lose hope over three ugly losses.  But we’ve got something around our neck,  something as big and as awkward as the blue and orange horseshoe of flowers presented to Willie Randolph by the Shea family at the start of the game.

What will get the yoke off?  Jose Reyes flies out deep to end the game.  The last home opener is over.  The season is just beginning.

Please come meet me and see me talk about and read from my book Mets Fan on Thursday, April 10 at 7 pm at the Hillside Library in New Hyde Park, Long Island.  I know there’s a game on, but I believe I can offer a more reliable guarantee of entertainment.

This piece is simultaneously posted on the great blog, Mike’s Mets.