Dana Brand’s Mets Fan Blog

So I was at that ballgame last night (Thursday, 9/27).  From the very beginning, you could tell that people were ill-at-ease.  They were hopeful, but afraid.  You could tell this when you heard the relief in the sound from the crowd’s throat, when the first pitch Pedro threw was a strike.  You heard the nervous fear when the second Cardinal at-bat was a single.  And then you knew what you were up against when you heard the fatalistic groan after Castillo’s error.  Pedro looked good to me.  I thought things would be all right when I saw that 72 mph curveball, that slow, sneaky strikeout pitch.  I felt as if the Cards would not score many runs.  We would be okay, wouldn’t we? 

Nobody thought we would be.  We were like the Mets, I think.  Deer in the headlights.  I saw the Mets come up and I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to get a few hits in a row.  I felt as if I had looked into the future and nothing was in it.  At least not in the short term.  I would stay for the whole ballgame of course, and I would cheer and chant “Lets Go Mets!” and glower at the loud less-than-10% who booed.  Those guys are loud, let me tell you.  There aren’t many of them but they make a lot of noise.  I think the part of their brain that has been removed has been replaced with extra lung tissue. 

What really gave me the sense of deep sadness was the fact that, perhaps for the first time ever, I took no pleasure in the festive goofiness of the stadium.  I found it distracting.  At one point, for the first time ever, Mr. Met popped into the crowd right next to where my daughter Sonia and I were sitting.  Sonia whooped and ran after him shouting, “Dad, take a picture!  Take a picture!”  I took this beautiful picture of my beautiful daughter and my favorite Hall-of-Famer.  But for the very first time in my life, Mr. Met could do nothing to cheer me up. 

I didn’t want to have fun.  Yet all around me people continued to have fun.  The young couple in front of us made me feel as if I was sitting behind the Kiss Cam.  Boy did they have a lot of beer, and pretzels, and hot dogs, and ice cream, as if being able to eat all this food and kiss in the bright lights was a kind of foreplay.  They made me wonder, in my sourness, if they should think of setting up little booths in the concourse of the new stadium.  I think the Romans had things like that.  Oh, was I miserable.  I saw people leaving before the end of the game, with no emotions on their faces, not numb, just indifferent. 

The ironies of the season flashed before me as I sat there waiting for the runs that never came.  We were good and the Yankees were bad.  And then that all changed.  We were a .500 team since what now seemed like an impossibly distant Memorial Day.  There was a moment of pride and spunk as Pedro obviously insisted that he wanted to pitch to Albert Pujols.  We cheered Pedro.  He had come through for us.  But it wasn’t enough.  He left and we were alone with our thoughts.  Oh why, pray tell, would we want to stand up and sing “Take me Out to the Ballgame?”   Why did I have to hear Lou Monte singing “Lazy Mary?”  When would I hear it again? 

After we made a lot of noise through a feeble ninth inning, it ended.  The 0-3-1 that had been on the board for so long stayed there and froze.  It stuck.  It was humiliating.  We were tied for first.  The lead was gone.  And here we were in this mocking semblance of a familiar reality, in our beloved stadium where the lights were still bright and kids were still cute.  But nothing was the same.

Most of the crowd on the ramps were anguished.  I was with them.  Some were indignant.  Screw them.  The season was down to three games. 

It’s funny to think that in four days, we will know what happened.  I remember reading about Washington at Valley Forge in a book I had when I was a kid.  I remember wanting to go back in time to tell the Continental Army that even though things looked as bad as they could possibly be, they would actually win and they would create our wonderful country.  I want to tell the Mets something like that right now.  But it will be four days before I can imagine doing that.  Right now, I just see them in the snow, with their crutches and bandages and grey, blank faces, just like the pictures in my book about Valley Forge. 

This entry was posted on Friday, September 28th, 2007 at 7:42 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.