Okay, so just as I get all ready to focus on the final month of Shea stadium, just as I get ready to chronicle my emotions, recount my memories, describe everything about the arena from the bathrooms to the edges of the parking lot, just as I get ready to share all of my hopes and fears for baseball fandom in the future … what happens?
A pennant race breaks out.
I mean, you could see it coming, I guess. Here you have two teams a game apart at the end of last season. Going into this season, they seemed fairly evenly matched. And then they’ve had similar streaky, stumbling seasons. And so now there are thirty games left and they’re one half game apart. We have a right to expect a tremendously exciting and perhaps historic September.
Why am I surprised? How exactly has this crept up on me? Why does this feel so weird?
I’m talking about something real here, something I’ve experienced, that you may have experienced too. I realize, as we enter the last month of the season, that however much I’ve been paying attention, I’ve been experiencing this season from a kind of distance. It’s even a kind of blur. When the Mets have gone up, I’ve been expecting the downturn, when they’ve gone down, I’ve expected the upswing. As a result I haven’t actually felt a hell of a lot. Last year, I sweated every pitch, I felt the vertigo you feel when you bounce too violently and too frequently between horror and happiness. And then I got conked on the head at the very end. The neurons that hadn’t already blown out got switched around. And so I stumbled into this season and now that it’s almost over I realize that I’ve experienced it through a fog of numbness. I couldn’t lament or celebrate anything because last season gave me a sense that nothing meant anything. All season long, I have had the sense that whatever happened, the opposite was waiting right around the corner.
When you get to the last month, though, everything does mean something. The little flukes that will decide this season one way or another are just about to happen. And they will echo through your memories like all of the concluding flukes that decided other close seasons. I have to be ready to experience this. I can’t just think about the death of the stadium, and perhaps the end of a warm, inclusive century-old era of New York National League fandom. The pennant is now at stake. Meaningful games are about to be played in September. And they don’t just have meaning for this season.
This is the last season at Shea. This is the end of a particular story. It is very important that the story end with dignity. And it would be un-fucking-believable if it were to end with glory.
