ON SEPTEMBER 10 I went to the game on September 10 with a $5 ticket, which actually cost me $16 once you added various surcharges necessary to cover the administrative, labor, and material costs of sending the e-mail back to me with a .pdf document attached. Still, it was a $5 ticket. That’s what it said on the front. As I got to the stadium, I saw from signs, and from some people in uniforms at the entrance to the press area, that the theme of the night was going to be 9/11. It was September 10, but we were off tomorrow. I had a weird thought. It’s a kind of inappropriate thought but I wondered if anyone else had it. 9/11, besides being the murder of thousands of innocent people, was also the destruction of an emblematic New York landmark consisting of two buildings that every weekday held 50,000 people. The destruction of the WTC permanently changed the face of New York. It changed what the great city looked like from an airplane and from many angles on the ground. Suddenly a gigantic thing that held a lot of human life was gone. I know that the destruction of Shea is in no significant way analogous to the destruction of the WTC. But I couldn’t help having this dream-like thought. I couldn’t help being struck by the apocalyptic similarities. It is as weird as hell to be sitting in a gigantic building filled with tens of thousands of people and to realize that in a couple of months it is not going to be there anymore. It’s weirder than sitting in a smaller building with fewer people. Giant things force on you an idea that they will last a long time because they take up so much space. How can something so big disappear? How can something so sublimely real stop being real? The thing is that, in New York, giant things are often destroyed. Few cities in the world have a more spectacular list of gigantic things destroyed or demolished. Shea stadium was about to go the way of the old Penn Station, the 6th Avenue El, the Singer Building, Coney Island’s Steeplechase, The Crystal Palace, the Croton Reservoir, the old Madison Square Garden, the ocean liners lined up at the West Side piers, the World Trade Center. All these big things that once contained living crowds as large as the one I was in had been dispatched to the great New York of memory. Only Ebbetts Field had been allowed to come back from the dead. My $5 seats were in the Upper Deck in that shadow area behind home plate. On both sides of the shadow, the right and left field stands were illuminated by the banks of lights that look like teeth at the top of the stadium. Where I was, in row N, there were a lot of birds, eerily tame pigeons that flew very low over your head the way the planes do approaching LaGuardia as they come in over the Grand Central Parkway. It was actually a nice place to sit, on one of these last days of Shea. You could see the whole stadium and the whole crowd. This is where I used to sit when I was a kid, so I had a sense that I was looking out over the stadium and looking back into the life I had spent in this place. I looked towards the just fair point of the Upper Deck and remembered when I saw Tommy Agee hit the ball there. There was a lot of 9/11 stuff, which people applauded more than they usually applaud the people who throw out first balls and take down numbers and stand around with Mr. Met. The Quantico Marine Corps Band played the National Anthem with the brassy drama that only a good military band can give it. Somebody near me sang along with a loud screechy emotional voice, far off-key. And the 7-train rattled loudly through our moment of silence. But this was all right. New York is no more about perfection than it’s about permanence. I liked the feel of the crowd in the first couple of innings. I liked the spontaneous storms of affection for this team as they got hits and threw strikes and made plays. I hadn’t felt so much Mets love in a Shea crowd since the first couple of months of 2007. I particularly loved the joy with which Carlos Delgado’s mere existence was celebrated. I remembered my anger at how he had been booed all those months. But I was in a forgiving mood. And then the third inning, when they scored six runs, was a perfect feast. Jose Reyes (at 25!) broke Mookie Wilson’s all-time Mets stolen base record. Wright and Beltran hit their RBI singles. I had forgotten how beautiful singles look from the Upper Deck, how they pop out over the near portion of the outfield, hang for a second, and then drop and roll onto the green to the delighted cheers of the crowd. I loved how we all booed the Nationals for walking Delgado and then how we all got to see more and more runs coming home to us off the bats of Tatis and Easley. As I watched, I enjoyed the cozy, fragrant warmth of my pretzel and the smooth earthy coolness of my bright yellow beer. What a feast for the senses and spirit a good ballgame is! Oh, how much I love the Mets! But of course, it was a Mets game, so there had to be some strangeness and trouble. I couldn’t figure out why Elijah Dukes thought that Mike Pelfrey would have wanted to take the trouble to hit him in a 7-1 game between a first and last place team. But I understood that the drill was that we would all boo him real loud when he came up, which of course would eventually distract Pelfrey and Dukes would have a terrific day at the plate. This is baseball crowd logic. It’s not logical. Then I couldn’t believe it when we lost a big lead for the second night in a row. And then there was Hey-ay-ay baybee! I want to know-wo-wo, if you’ll be my girl! And the t-shirts. And then I changed my seat, moving down to where the Mezannine extends out into left field. I wanted to get a different perspective on the stadium. So I walked down the forbidding slope of the Upper Deck, holding the railing where so much red paint had been worn away by so many hands, stepping on people’s peanut shells, reading their backs, Wright, Reyes, Santana, Coney Island Polar Bear Club. As I walked down the aisle of the Mezannine towards my new seats, I looked up and saw how the lights of Shea illuminate each individual face. When you look at a well-lit crowd, you see how crowds don’t really overwhelm the individuality of the people in them. You see how absolutely distinctive everyone’s face is, especially in a New York crowd, where there is so much variety of color and feature. You also see, in such bright light, how everyone’s style is also distinctive. The only thing that brought all of these sharp human impressions together was what was happening in the middle of all the greenish-yellow light. Everyone cheered, smiled, and grimaced at the same time. As I was walking, I saw all these faces grimace and that was how I learned that Heilman had given up a home run to Guzman to tie the game. When I found my new seat, overlooking the visiting bullpen and the picnic area, I saw how the big crowd looked different and sounded different from the other side. It was funny to see the illuminated booth with Gary, Keith, and Ron, like a little set jewel in the vast bank of seats and faces. It was funny to face the batter instead of standing behind him. It felt like a different game. And it became a different game as the Mets regained the lead, and then almost lost it. Wright hit his home run into the picnic area and right up close I got to see the Home Run Apple rise to the occasion and take its proud curtain call. We won, 13-10. Everything felt good as we bounced down the ramps. Our hitting was good, our fielding was good, our spirit was good, our pitching had been bad, but in the end we didn’t think of it. The Phillies had lost. We were 3 and a half games in first with 17 to play. Of course, having lost last year when we were 7 games ahead with 17 to play, we couldn’t say we were confident. But the odds were on our side. The odds had been spectacularly on our side last year too. But there was a reason we could actually feel good. In 2007, we were 5-12 for those last 17 games and the Phillies were 13-4. In 2008, if we went 9-8, the Phillies would have to go 13-4 to beat us. How likely was it that we couldn’t manage 9-8, and if we did, how likely was it that the Phillies would go 13-4? We felt good, because we didn’t smell defeat in this year’s team. We smelled hot dogs and happiness. We smelled glory. ©Dana Brand 2009 |