Dana Brand’s Mets Fan Blog

Tom Glavine’s career appears to be over.  The Braves have released him before giving him a chance to show what he could do after his rehab starts.  This does not look like a classy move and I commend Chipper Jones and John Smoltz for expressing their criticisms of it.  Somebody may sign him, I suppose.  I would rather the Mets didn’t, although Atlanta’s treatment of Glavine makes me consider the option in ways that I wouldn’t have before.

 I just want to take a moment to do something that most Mets fans haven’t felt inclined to do in recent years.  I want to tip my hat to Tom Glavine.  It is true that this man gave us the single most disappointing meltdown pitching performance in Mets history and followed it up by saying the dumbest thing any Met has ever said about his play (I was devastated by Glavine’s remarks about the final game of the 2007 season, I wasn’t merely disappointed.)   I don’t have to tell Mets fans that he has competition in both of these categories and the fact that he wins both of them is really something.

I also don’t think that he should ever have been on our team.  I think it is a bad idea to sign a former nemesis because he’s had contract troubles with our main division rivals.  Tom Glavine wanted to be a Brave and by all rights, he should have spent those five years with them and not with us.

But he spent those years with us.  And although people have a hard time remembering it because of his last game, he pitched pretty well for the Mets, and he gave us some great games and some solid, inspiring, paternal leadership.  I will never forget the last game of the 2007 season, but I will also always remember the shutout he pitched against the Dodgers in the 2006 NLDS and the exhilarating opening game of the 2006 NLCS against the Cardinals.  His 300th win was a thrill too.  And whenever I watch my tape of the 2006 clubhouse after the clinching (perhaps the best Mets moment of the century so far) I see how important Tom Glavine was to that team that lifted us up so high. 

Thanks, Tom.  It was real.

The Mets have the flu.  Have you heard?  It’s probably the swine flu.  They were 19-9 in May.  But May is over.  It’s June and they’re gonna die. They just lost two really bad games to the Pittsburgh Pirates.  Nothing like this has ever happened before in all the annals of recorded history.

Beltran is probably out for the season.  And so is Reyes.  And Omir Santos is not really Johnny Bench and Gary Sheffield is not really Gary Sheffield.  Putz is no good.  I hear Bobby Valentine may be available soon.  That’s a relief because Jerry Manuel’s no good.  Look at what just happened.

It’s just like last year.  The bullpen gives games away.  And even Santana now has an ERA around 2 or something.  Wright is 2 for 22?  The bum.  Nobody has hit a home run since the days of Dave Kingman.

The Phillies are pulling ahead.  They’re two games up on us now.  Omar has to do something.  He needs to trade some of our minor leaguers and backup guys for a first-base or outfield-playing slugger.  That’s the ticket. 

We have no time to lose.  If we wait too much longer we’ll be so far behind the Phillies we’ll never catch up.  You have to remember that we’re going to play the Phillies and the Yankees in succession.  How can we beat them if we have NO OFFENSE AT ALL!  

There’s a flu going around all right.  But it’s not in the stomach.  It’s in the head. 

There’s always something about guys who get up off the scrap heap, guys who get themselves right into the thick of things when they weren’t even on the periphery when the season began. 

Coming off of the scrap heap gives players an appealing humility.  Look at how it has softened Sheffield, how it has given him a maturity he probably could have used earlier.  Look at how much fun it is to watch Santos emerge.  When they interview him, he gives the impression of someone who never gave up on himself, even though he had every reason to.  He believed and now things are happening as he had hoped and now we get to watch him pump his fist in the air when he wins the game in the eleventh.

Guys like this give flavor to a season.  When a team is weakened by injuries, as the Mets have been, fans can lose hope and interest.  They can feel that they’re not watching their team.  But players like Santos and Sheffield make a team new.  They renew the fan’s interest, and the team’s dynamic.  You always need novelty in baseball.  All of the games greatest pleasures (and pains) come from the unexpected.

We’re enjoying this season, aren’t we?  The nuttiness and the disappointments are going to continue.  But our starting pitching, except for Perez, is falling into the groove of “even better than expected.”  Our relief pitching brings relief.  The lack of home runs is almost funny at this point.  We are winning ballgames.  We are 18-8 in May.  And although we’ve been hit hard by injuries, nothing is collapsing.  Instead we have new guys to root for and new things to enjoy.  As Mets fans in this century, we spend so much time worrying and complaining.  I’m just going to take this moment to kvell.  We’re not out of the woods yet.  These are the Mets, they never get out of the woods.  I’m not even going to be unduly optimistic.  But I am enjoying these games.

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I’ve finally finished putting up my website with samples for my forthcoming book, The Last Days of Shea:  Delight and Despair in the Life of a Mets Fan.  Please check out the site.  It has links if you’d like to pre-order the book from the publisher or from Amazon.  The book is scheduled to be published in September, but it is likely that it will be available in August.  I’ll let you know as soon as I know something definite.  Ignore what it says about January on the Amazon site.  That has to do with the date on the catalog it will appear in.  The book will be out this summer.

Road trips are a very important part of American culture.  For some reason, our writers and filmmakers are particularly attracted to the idea of an unpredictable journey without a clear destination, in which people who aren’t sure of their identity bang around looking for it.

Every year, in the middle of May, the Mets go on a road trip to the West Coast.  More than any other road trip, West Coast road trips feel like road trips because the games are on so late that you really feel as if the team is “away.”  And if you stay up for the games, you are sleep-deprived for a whole week and that makes you feel as if you’re away too. 

For some reason I have never been able to understand, the West Coast road trip is often weird.  And it often seems weird in a significant way because by the time you’re in the middle of May you feel as if the games should tell you something about what is going to happen with the season. 

So what is significant?  The astonishing play of the San Francisco series or the peculiar combination of surprisingly effective pitching and absolute Throneberry-esque chaos on the field and the basepaths in the Dodgers series?

What is significant?  The fact that the New York Mets right now lead the National League in batting average (have they ever done that before, even for a few days?) or the fact that they are last in home runs (could anyone have ever guessed that of this team)?  The fact that for two weeks they make a habit of coming back from behind?  Or the fact that they can suddenly stop doing it for a while?

What is significant?  The fact that we are only a game out of first place, behind a team that has no discernible pitching staff?  The fact that Beltran and Wright are vying for an MVP?  Or the fact that the team seems so easy to screw up in the head (if there were such a thing as a team balk, the Mets could have one called on them)? 

The Mets are banging around looking for their identity all right.  And like all good American heroes on road trips, they are not really going to find it.  We’re along on this trip and we’ve got to get used to the fact that there’s going to be something we couldn’t have anticipated on every stretch of this highway.  We’re going to have some fun, we’re going to have some adventures.  And at several points we’re going to get sick to our stomachs.  Is there any possibility that we could stop worrying about our team’s identity and just take things as they come?  I don’t think teams have identities in any consistent way.  After years of teaching books about people in search of their identity on road trips, I don’t think the idea of consistent identity is particularly helpful.  The Mets will be what the Mets will be.  I don’t mean to go all Buddhist on your ass, but that’s the whole story. 

I’m looking forward to the Boston series because I have a gut feeling that the road to the World Championship this season will have to lead through Boston.  So I want the Mets to get comfortable there.  There’s no reason why they couldn’t be.  There’s no reason why the team that played that totally five-error, missed-third-base insane game the other night couldn’t win the World Championship this year.  That’s what’s so strange. 

I really need it this year.  I can live with the Mets not being great.  No team in the National League is great.  I just want the Mets to be the flawed National League team that really gets somewhere this year.  I don’t want, you know what I don’t want.  I don’t want another bloody Sunday.  I been there before. 
 

I went to Citi Field yesterday, bearing a ticket that said $180 on the front.  Needless to say, I didn’t pay this.  My sister Stefanie has a friend named Jeff who has a friend who works for a law firm that has these tickets.  So Jeff got these tickets for the night and I went to the game with Jeff, his son William, and Stefanie.  This is how I got to sip Myer’s rum straight from a snifter in the Acela Lounge at, shall we say, the ballpark. 

So what is the Acela Lounge like?  Simply exquisite.  The designers have made bold and interesting decisions, creating a space that is of the ballpark yet transcends it in a striking and inventive way.  This is a contemporary version of the clubby spaces in which New York’s sports aficianados have congregated for over a century (e.g. The Twenty One Club, Toots Shor’s).  As soon as you enter it, you think, this is how to go to a ballgame!  This is how to elevate the experience!

No, seriously.  It looks like an airport lounge. 

We sure as hell weren’t going to eat there for $48, so we took the escalators down to the areas of the stadium where they let everybody go.   Farewell, I thought, oh favored realms to get into which you have to show a ticket with a three-digit number.  Will I ever see you again?  Not often, not so long as I still continue to have a five-digit income. 

Before checking out the lively, festive (not) bar scene at the famed Acela, we did check out an equally exclusive experience down at our seats (which were six rows behind the Mets dugout).  It’s called batting practice and I must tell you that it is so much fun.  You get to stand behind the dugout and see the players up close.  You get to see how they interact.  You see Omar Minaya and Jay Horowitz.  You feel a sense of intimacy and excitement.  You are right in the heart of things, two hours before the game.  Over in right field, we saw a whole mass of people shading their eyes and looking towards us and the players.  I wonder who those people were. 

For dinner, we went down to the food area out beyond right center field.  Here is one of the great paradoxes of Citi Field.  The food court in center is an absolute triumph of democratic values.  Everyone in the stadium is entitled to buy superb food, not just good, not just good for a ballpark, but superb food, for very reasonable prices, not just good prices for a ballpark, but reasonable prices by any standard.  If they had the centerfield food court set up in Manhattan, I would go there when I felt like having a reasonably priced delicious casual lunch.  The food court is itself a destination.  This time I had a soft taco sampler with wonderful sauces for $9.25, and a corn on the cob with a cheese crust flavored with Mexican spices that was so good it brought tears to my eyes.  I couldn’t help but also grab myself some clam and corn chowder later and if this was ancient Rome and if there had been a vomitorium over by the waffle ball court, I would have gone back for a some ribs and pulled pork from Blue Smoke, and tried what I’ve heard are some excellent Italian heros and pizza, and anyway, I can’t figure it out.  I’ve heard from Jeff and from several other sources that the food in the Caesar’s club is very unimpressive.  My biggest problem with Citi Field remains the fact that I find it still a somewhat unpleasant sociological experience.  If this is the problem, how the hell did it happen that all the best food is available to everyone for prices that barely seem to cover costs?

So the game began and the seats were terrific and they offered a perspective on the stadium I had never had before.  In the field level, you can really feel how much smaller Citi Field is than Shea.  You don’t feel, as you did in the field level of Shea, as if you are at the bottom of something immense open at the far end to the sky.  You feel as if you’re down in a not very deep well or walled enclosure.  There is a pleasant intimacy, but there is a loss of the sense of height and the sublime.  This is obviously an intentional trade-off that you can appreciate best in the $180 seats.  The thing is that these seats really are not any better than the equivalent seats at Shea, which I didn’t sit in often, but when I did, I only paid $65.  If I was someone who used to have field level seats at Shea and now had field level seats at Citi Field, I would have an enormous problem with this.  What does it do to your experience of a baseball game to pay 50% more for your ticket than full-price for the best seats at a Broadway play or slightly more than front row center at the Metropolitan Opera?  I was eager to find out.

I don’t think I did.  I think I discovered, as the Mets and the Yankees are discovering, that there are few people either rich enough or profligate enough to spend this much money to see a baseball game.  Right near us was a vast and virtually empty area where the seats were padded and looked like seats in an airplane.  Above it was a balcony of two-thirds empty seats accessible only to one of the clubs. 

Our own section was pretty full, but it seemed as if, like us, our neighbors hadn’t paid a high price for their tickets.  They just ended up with them somehow.  It was more than abundantly clear that a few of them did not have a lot of interest in baseball.  A row of teenage girls behind us paid absolutely no attention to the game.  And I’m not saying that a few loudmouths in our particular area are typical of the ones who sit there every night, but there were several independently existing prosperous young men who were outraged (that’s the only word to describe it) when Jose Reyes made an error.  They shouted profane abuse at him when he came back to the dugout, abuse that he and all the little kids in the row behind the dugout could hear.   One of them said, after David Wright struck out, “This is unbelievable!  He can’t get around on an 88 mph fastball!”  I hadn’t thought about hitting and pitching in this way before, but apparently some fans believe that good hitters are hitters who can hit all balls thrown under certain specific speeds. 

I know that there are idiots and uninvolved fans at every level.  But am I wrong to think that people sitting in the most coveted seats in a stadium might be people who are particularly knowledgeable about baseball, who enjoy it deeply, and are more involved in it than an average person?  This is what was weirdest, I think, about sitting in the expensive seats.  You were really close to the players.  You were where everyone would want to be.  And with all the empty seats and with a few clueless fans in the seats that weren’t empty, you didn’t really feel that you were right in the thick of New York Mets baseball.  It’ll be fine with me to have to go back upstairs.  In the meantime, I think they should do something about the empty seats.  I know that they don’t want to lower the prices because the people who bought them first will feel ripped off (they’re not ripped off now?).  So why don’t they give the empty seats to veterans, or to families of New York area police and firefighters killed or injured in the line of duty, or to families of people who died on 9/11?  Then no one would have the right to complain, it would make the Mets look good, and the center of the stadium will have some life.  Next year, they can sell all the seats in the stadium at prices that are more appropriate to the new economy.  One of the continuing problems with Citi Field and the new Yankee Stadium is that they are already dated, in terms of their price structure and their socioeconomic architecture.  They were planned when there still were hundreds of thousands of people in New York for whom money had no value. 

I enjoyed watching Johan Santana pitching beautifully in spite of not having his velocity or his magical change-up.  He is sublime.  Lowe was fun to watch too.  The baseball game was fascinating through seven innings.  Then it went to hell.  But still, the Mets had won seven in a row going into the game.  There was no reason to despair, just as there is no reason to believe that they are invincible.

I like Citi Field more every time I go to it.  But I still have to get used to it.  And I continue to hope that the economy, and the Mets, will change it so that it will be easier for me to feel at home in it, as I always felt at home in Shea. 

“Dana, you are the most optimistically optimistic optimist I’ve ever known with regard to this team.”  Deb McIver of “The Good, Bad, and the Ugly … The Mets” in a comment on my blog, May 1.

On May 1, I posted a blog piece entitled “Calm Down,” in which I argued that Mets fans were losing faith in their team earlier than the team deserved.  In saying this, I was not being optimistic about the team.  I was saying that the degree of pessimism fans were feeling was premature, even if it was psychologically understandable. 

Since May 1, the Mets have won 5 games out of 6, moving above .500 and into second place, one-half game out of first. Would it be right for me to say that I told you so?  No.  It would be wrong, for the same reason it would be wrong, I think, to give up on the Mets because they had a weird April. 

Six games do not provide you with a big enough sample to tell you what is likely to happen over the next 135.  One of the glories of baseball is that, as we know, 145 games is not a big enough sample to give you an idea of what is likely to happen over the next 17.  But even if six games don’t have much predictive value, I think that these particular six games may have a kind of representative value. 

What I mean by this is that although I don’t have any clear sense of whether the Mets are going to win 100 games this season or 80, I do feel that I know that, as in the previous two seasons, there is going to be very little space between success and failure.  The Mets are a talented yet flawed team in a division of talented yet flawed teams.  If they win, they will have come very close to having lost.  If they lose, they will come close to having won. 

All of this is represented in these six games.  With the exception of the first game in Philadelphia, each of these games could easily have gone the other way.  The Mets really should have won the game they lost.  And each of the four games in their current winning streak looked at some point as if it was seriously considering turning into a demoralizing disaster. 

But none of them did.  And they didn’t because Beltran continues to rule, Wright is beginning to bust out, and Delgado is beginning to stir.  Pelfrey, Hernandez, and Maine are settling down, Johan Santana looks as if he may genuinely be as good as any pitcher who has ever worn a Mets uniform, Putz is showing himself to be generally very reliable, and Frankie Rodriguez is terrific.  When you add to this the fact that Atlanta and Florida aren’t scaring anybody and the Phillies, for all of their offense and grit, have a starting staff with an ERA of 6.58, you might reasonably conclude that the season isn’t exactly over for the Mets. 

So did they find the fire in their belly?  I still don’t think that fire is necessarily the secret to baseball success, any more than it is necessarily the secret to any kind of success.  Fire may be the secret to the success of certain teams, but if you remember, people rarely praised the 2006 Mets for their fire and their grit.  They were praised for their sense of fun, their talent, and their balance.  Like many Mets fans, I’m not sure how much fire there is in the Mets.  But unlike a lot of Mets fans, I’m not sure how much fire there needs to be.  I don’t doubt that this team could be successful.  And I am very pleased that they have begun to find their rhythm and they are on their way to finding their fun. 

If you listened to the crowd last night at Citi Field, you could hear that Mets fans are really ready to enjoy the Mets again.  All that angst in April was our fear that it was all going to happen again.  But it doesn’t have to.  And I’m not convinced that it will. 

The book is still a few months away from its release, but I got the cover today!  I love it.

And hey!  That was some game, wasn’t it?  2 Homers by Beltran and a go-ahead homer by Wright.  A win for Maine, effective relief.  The troubles aren’t going to go away.  But no one can tell me that they know that this isn’t going to happen.

I wish the game hadn’t been rained out today.  I’m glad, of course, because of the benefits for the pitching rotation, but the rainout prevented the Phillies series from meaning anything.  Something like this makes you realize why there’s often a lot of emphasis on the rubber game of a series.  Why do they call it a rubber game?

I want Oliver Perez to go to the minors for a while.  I think he needs some time out of the spotlight.  I think a gracious acceptance of this would demonstrate to a lot of people that he’s more mature than he seems.  I’m sure he can get it back.  His talent always comes back.  I have no idea if he’ll ever develop into a consistent pitcher.  It’s certainly possible.  It’s okay if he goes on the DL, though I think it would be better for him to go to the minors.  I don’t want him to go to the pen.  Who wants Oliver Perez coming out of the pen?

All of the teams in the NL East have serious flaws.  Anything could happen, except Washington winning it.  Not only can we tell very little from April, we may not be able to tell anything much from the first three or four or even five months of the season.  But are Mets fans going to relax and just take it as it comes?  Nah. 

I am worried about Carlos Delgado’s hip. 

I think that the bumpy, awkward emergence of Daniel Murphy as an important player on the Mets is going to be one of the most interesting stories of the season.

I think that the other most interesting story of the season is going to be the emergence of the relatively complicated and only apparently uncomplicated David Wright as the team’s leader and guiding force.  I think everybody had better watch out for what happens when Wright emerges.  He’s going to be like Achilles. 

I think Jerry Manuel is doing strange things out of a part-conscious, part-unconscious desire to shake things up a little.

Although I didn’t actually enjoy the first month of the season, nothing has happened yet to make me feel as if I should revise my original prediction that the Mets would win the division, but that significant games would be played in the final week of the season.  When I look at the other teams in the division, I don’t see a team with more talent and I don’t share the belief of most Mets fans that there is something permanently deficient about this particular team’s spirit. 

I think the Mets will get it going.  And I think that the spirit of the team will be good, as it was in the summer of last year (remember?).  I think we would have ended up with a very successful season if Wagner and Maine hadn’t been lost at the end.  There is no spiritual deficiency going back to Adam Wainwright’s curve ball or Duaner Sanchez’s taxi ride.  That’s in our heads.  And to some degree in theirs.  The real challenge of this season will be to drive the phantoms out of their heads.  We’ll also have to build a ring of fire around the team so that the phantoms don’t come back in at the end of the season.  If we do this, their talent will do the job.  It’s mainly up to the Mets, of course, to get those phantoms out.  But we can help them.  Do I think we will help them?  No.  I wish we could.  But I don’t think we will. 

I don’t agree with anything anybody is saying. 

Well, I agree that the Mets have gotten off to a disappointing start and that we’ve just had two exceptionally unhappy end-of-the-year experiences.  I think that Jerry Manuel has made a number of bizarre managerial decisions this year and I don’t know why he has been making them, since he didn’t seem to make many bizarre decisions last year.

Certain players, most notably Perez and Wright of course, have been having difficulty finding their groove.  Hasn’t anyone ever seen an April before?  The year’s been bad so far, but if you look at every year, twenty-one games is not enough to tell you what is happening.  I’ll tell you this, though.  I am certain that the Mets are not going to finish 9th in the league in ERA, 8th in the league in runs scored, and 15th in the league in home runs.  It’s just not possible.

Glass jaws?  No grit?  Maybe, as Joe Benigno invariably opines, what they need is a good brawl?  I don’t believe in any of that shit.  This team has considerable strengths and some peculiar weaknesses.  They are good, but not that good.  They are better than last year with this bullpen, as long as we don’t freak the new guys out.  A couple of games switched in each of the past two seasons and the Mets could have been on their way to the World Series.  Despair is premature.  We are just spooked.  Big time. 

It should be a very interesting weekend.

In the New York Times on April 27, George Vecsey, praising a sculpture garden of great Cardinals outside Busch Stadium, wrote the following:

“Things are just more conservative in this river town, where the Cardinals have won 10 World Series, second only to the Yankees’ 26. The Mets have won two Series in their first 47 seasons, and management is hearing it from fans who say Mets history has been minimized at the new place.

What do Mets fans want — statues of Marvelous Marv Throneberry missing first and second base on a triple in 1962? Timo Perez shifting into a lower gear on a drive he imagined would be a home run in 2000? Nolan Ryan and Lenny Dykstra packing their bags?

The Mets have produced exactly one homegrown Hall of Famer, Tom Seaver, and a few spectacular underachievers, relying mostly on superb imports like Keith Hernandez, Gary Carter and Mike Piazza. Even factoring in Casey Stengel and Gil Hodges, that does not add up to a statue garden just yet.”

How could someone who wrote Joy in Mudville (Being a Complete Account of the Unparalleled History Of the New York Mets from Their Most Perturbed Beginnings to Their Amazing Rise to Glory and Renown), 1970 have written this?  I have the greatest respect for George Vecsey, but does he no longer believe in what he wrote so long ago?  Are the only baseball experiences worth cherishing those which are provided by Hall-of-Famers?  Are the many and continuing disappointments of Mets history to be taken as proof that we have wasted as many years as we have spent rooting for them?  Is this why the Mets didn’t do enough to mark their history in Citi Field?  Are they ashamed of themselves?  Why is Joy in Mudville out of print?  Doesn’t anybody care?  Should we be ashamed of ourselves?  Are we all a bunch of losers?  Should we have been rooting for the Yankees or the Cardinals?  Sometimes I just get tired.

I went to Citi Field to see a game on April 27.  I had, essentially, two experiences.  One was awful and one was wonderful.

Approaching Citi Field by car from the Whitestone Expressway, getting off at the Northern Boulevard exit, I saw once again that one of the minor disappointments I will probably just have to get used to is that Citi Field doesn’t look so great when it is approached from the way in which I will always approach it.  It just looks like a big billboard.  It has no charm and none of Shea’s grandeur.  Citi Field does look great approached from the subway or LIRR.  I parked and will probably plan to park in the future in the lot across Roosevelt Avenue.  The stadium is very impressive approached from that direction and, as I was to discover later, all lit up after a game it looks like dynamite. 

So I crossed Roosevelt Avenue, said hello to my family’s brick and then entered the rotunda.  One thing I noticed is that there wasn’t any hospitality agent preventing people from using one of the two central escalators.  This remained true throughout the evening.  The Mets may have wisely determined that there was no need to segregate fans in the Robinson rotunda.  With both escalators being used by all fans, long lines did not form.  Everything was smooth, efficient, and democratic.  Yes, there still was a special smaller escalator to the Sterling Level but this is perfectly all right because the Sterling Level doesn’t connect to anything else. 

The awful experience I had was trying to go to batting practice.  I’d been going to batting practice as a kid, and later, with my kid, at Shea stadium since 1964.  It was always a spectacularly wonderful experience.  I write about it a lot in my upcoming book, The Last Days of Shea.  At Shea, if you got there two and a half hours before the game, you could go right down to the area behind the Mets dugout and watch the Mets close up as they stood around and talked and joked and did their stuff.  You could see that there really was a person named David Wright who looked exactly like his pictures and who liked to horse around with a person named Jose Reyes who looked exactly like his pictures too.  They weren’t just the indistinct guys people saw from the Upper Deck whom you could tell apart by their uniforms.  They weren’t the stars you saw on your television.  They were a couple of always surprisingly young men hanging out while Carlos Delgado was taking his swings.  The atmosphere at batting practice was always wonderful at Shea  People would be taking pictures with all sorts of phones and cameras.  People would call out for a wave from players or from “Mr. Minaya” or even “Mr. Horowitz.”  You got to see photo ops, reporters, special guests.  You felt that you were behind the scenes.  If you looked up and around, you could see Howie Rose, Gary Cohen, or Ron Darling bent over papers, getting ready for the game in their little boxes above a frieze that said “Believe Magic Amazin’ Miracle Believe Magic.”   People talked to each other and then there would occasionally be a flurry of excitement when a player, usually a bench player or a pitcher would come on over and sign a few autographs.  For the most part, though, the ballplayers concentrated on their own tasks.  They were doing enough by letting us get so near to them.  We stood back respectfully and enjoyed our privileged proximity.  When we were told that batting practice was over, we trooped out and went up to our real seats.

Batting practice at Citi Field is nothing like this.  It is crap.  No one who doesn’t have an actual ticket to a seat between sections 110 and 125 can get any closer to the action than section 110 on the first base side and section 125 on the third base side.  Guys in green jackets stand watch over all of the aisles leading to the field from the concourse.  A few of them are stationed along the flanks of the protected seat area.  They look, with tireless vigilance, over at the straggly little crowd standing around in section 110.  If anybody tries to advance into the protected area to get a better camera angle, they are quickly and sharply informed of their transgression.  On Monday night (4/27), two hours before the game, there was almost no one in the vast and tightly guarded area of the field level behind home plate between first and third base.  There were just long banks of empty seats, except for about five people, including two kids with gloves, standing right behind the Mets dugout.  In section 110, I stood with the rest of the people who had come early for batting practice.  I recognized a lot of these people from Shea.  We could see nothing.  The players were at a considerable distance from us and the sun was shining directly into our eyes.  We just stood around, shading our eyes, bored, disgruntled, and looking wistfully over at the rows of empty areas behind both dugouts.  I saw a kid with a mitt looking over at the kids with the mitts behind the dugout with the same look on his face as you see on the face of the hungry kid watching the rich kid eating his spaghetti in Vittorio De Sica’s great film The Bicycle Thief.  It made me sick to my stomach.  I felt as if we were in something like a holding pen.  I didn’t feel as I had always felt at Shea, as if I was welcome in the bosom of my stadium, welcome to be so close to my heroes. 

After standing around for awhile, I noticed that Matt Hoey was leaving his spot in the front row of the holding pen and was walking back up to the concourse.  Matt is one of the diehard Mets fans featured in Mathematically Alive, the guy who was always first on line to buy single tickets when they went on sale at the ballpark.  He’s always easy to recognize at a ballgame because he’s very tall and always wears a well-autographed blue and orange “Cat in the Hat” type hat.  I stopped Matt and asked him how he felt about all of this.  He looked back at the field and said, “I feel bad for the little kids.  You can hardly see who the players are.”  When I said that I didn’t understand why the Mets didn’t just let people go into the areas behind the dugouts the way they always used to, Matt said, “Yeah, it makes no sense.  I’m not going to stop loving them or anything, but it doesn’t make any sense.”  He’s not going to stop loving them or anything.  This is the kind of fan this is being done to.  I really cannot believe the Mets intended to do this.  But somebody didn’t think something out very carefully.  When I complained to a supervisor of the guys in green jackets, he gave me an e-mail address to write and complain to.  I’m going to write to this guy and see if anything can be done.  If this is what Mets batting practice is going to be for the rest of my life, then trust me, it will not be worth going to.  It will become one more reason to miss Shea desperately.  There should be no good reasons to miss Shea desperately except obvious and sentimental ones.  If there are going to be objective ways in which Shea offered a much better experience of baseball, then something is wrong.  I’m hoping that they just have to realize the effect this rule has on people.  I’m hoping they will make it right.

So I went over and ate my dinner by the old Home Run Apple.  If you ever feel disillusioned, if you ever wonder why the hell you are still a Mets fan, just go to that area and watch the people taking pictures in front of the Apple.  It will restore your faith in the human race, and it will show you why you still love the Mets.

The wonderful experience I had at the ballpark was the game and boy is it great to say that.  I had a $15 ticket in Promenade 515 and that was just fine.  The crowd up there was filled with all kinds of people and everybody was loud, rowdy, fun, and generous.  I felt like I was in Shea and that is the highest compliment I can give to Citi Field at the moment.  The game was a gem and filled with all sorts of wonderful pleasures.  An unhittable John Maine.  A catcher hitting his first home run that turns out to be the first grand slam hit at Citi Field.  Sheffield redeems his error.  Daniel Murphy hits a triple.  David Wright hits a triple.  Everybody hits a triple! The bullpen shuts it down and Frankie Rodriguez strikes out batters on change-ups that nobody nowhere no-how can hit.   There is still the new annoyance of the never-ending wave.  There is still the offensiveness of “Sweet Caroline,” which is a dud in the crowd, but they make it look good by putting the one or two people dancing to it up on the screen.  I’m still getting used to the light, to a lot of the stadium being in shadow, to a kind of spooky glare that is very different from the green-yellow brilliance of Shea.  But I realized, as I watched a wonderful Mets game with a crowd that was into it, that what we will ultimately feel about Citi Field will depend on what the Mets do here.  This place could win us over real quick if the Mets 1) tweaked some things that need to be tweaked (more of our history, access to batting practice, opening up access to the clubs and restaurants to everybody after the fancy people have gotten their first shot, bringing back rituals, colors, and totems that reminds us of Shea and the 45 years we spent there) and if the Mets 2) relax, get used to the space, and start winning as many games as they have the talent to win.  After the game ended, I walked out of my section to the common area of the Promenade and over the top of the food stands I saw Queens and the Unisphere beautifully illuminated.  I missed my ramps but the feeling on the stairs was fun.  As I left the stadium, I visited the brick once again and walking towards Roosevelt Avenue, I looked back on an illuminated building with genuine style and glamour.  The Mets are still here.  We’re still here.  We’re still in Queens.  It can happen. 

I’ll be going to the game tonight (4/27), showing up to get into the stadium to see batting practice.  I want to see if I can reconstruct exactly the kind of experience I always used to have at Shea, from batting practice to getting onto the Whitestone Expressway at the end.  I want to see what is similar and what is different, what rituals and impressions can be restored and what can’t.  My seats, a very reasonable $15 face value, with an addition $10 added on for unnecessary bullshit charges, are in section 515, row 6, seat 4.  If you see me walking around with my notebook or if you come by my seat, I’d love to get your impressions.  So don’t hesitate to say hi. 

P.S.  One more thing.  I say this every year and I’ll say it again.  Please don’t vote for somebody on the All-Star ballot just because they’re a Met.  Vote for the guy who deserves it.  And please wait until enough of the season has passed so that you can tell who deserves it.  The All-Star game is such a joke when it’s elected by the fans goaded on by team campaigns.  And whenever anyone complains and suggests that we go back to the system where the players elected the teams, MLB says, “Oh No, the fan is king and we want the fans to be represented,” as if all they care about is our happiness.