Dana Brand’s Mets Fan Blog

Anthony De Rosa, over at Hotfoot blog, has published a Mets press release about the “Great Eats in Store at Citifield.”  . 

I don’t know where to begin.  So the Mets have signed a 30-year deal with ARAMARK to run all the concessions at Shea and ARAMARK has signed up with Danny Meyer’s restaurant group to create an “unprecedented partnership” to create an “all-star dining experience” for us at Citifield.  Good.  I like food.

What do they have in mind?  Well, for “all ticket holders,” who can schlep to the outfield concourse, there is barbecue and hamburgers and hot dogs.  And, we’re told, a “new concept” called a taqueria that serves some Mexican dish called tacos which Wikipedia says is this shell they put stuff in.  They also have a “new concept” place called “Pop Fries,” which is a “frites” stand, a place where they serve Belgian-style French fries.  “Frites” is apparently Belgian for French fries.   Don’t tell anybody, but they also have frites in France, but people going to the ballpark don’t want to think that they’re eating French food.  A lot of people think that there’s something un-guy like about eating something French.  Belgian they can handle. 

Well, that’s all we learn about the outfield concourse.  Then the press release goes on to tell us what they’ll be eating in the Sterling Club, a “premium seating area for 1600 guests directly behind home plate.”  What means premium?  I’m assuming, from the fact that the outfield concourse is described as “accessible to all ticket holders,” that the Sterling Club is not accessible to all ticket holders.  If my assumption is correct, I won’t be happy.   I like the idea of the Sterling Market in the Sterling Club, which, we’re told, will be a casual café serving “classic, artisanal comfort foods.”  They put the word “artisanal” in there to let you know that you won’t be eating the same kind of slobby comfort food they have out in the outfield concourse.  I’m not sure what they have in mind, but I worry that some people are going to find it hard to be comfortable while they’re eating something they’ve been told is “artisanal.”

Inside Sterling Market there will also be the Sterling Beer and Wine Bar, which is described as a “venue” that will have “specialty brews” and an extensive collection of “wines from around the world.”  Wine at the ballpark?  I love wine, but at the ballpark?  What would wine taste like at a ballpark?  What would it cost?  Well at least you’ll have a “venue” at Citifield to drink the wine in.  You don’t have to drink it in the stands.
 
So congratulations to ARAMARK for being designated Citifield’s “exclusive concessionaire.”  In the interest of full disclosure I have to reveal that I am a little bit mad at them for making it clear to me, when I asked, that they wouldn’t sell my book in the Mets stadium store because they didn’t sell anything that didn’t have some kind of stamp of approval from Major League Baseball.  That’s why they don’t sell any of the excellent books about the Mets at the stadium.  Wouldn’t it be nice if you could pick up a book in that store where they sell jerseys for more than any book ever costs?  What do you call a racket inside a racket inside a racket? 

Don’t get me wrong.  I love baseball.  I love the Mets.  I will probably break down and love Citifield.  But I just want to know that if the Mets do to me what they’ve done the last two years, I will at least have the opportunity of coming down from the Promenade Level to grab a seat in that casual cafe behind home plate, where I can drown my sorrows in a glass of Bordeaux and a plate of artisanal comfort food.

I visited Shea a few weeks ago, on October 22.  The World Series was still on. Shea was exactly where it had always been.  I took the 9E exit going West off the Grand Central Parkway and I pulled up onto the side of the road that we all know that runs along the south side of the parking lot. 

It looked as if there was no one around.  I got out of the car and I was alone with it.  I saw Shea across the parking lot, which was empty except for painted lines and stop signs. It looked like a big blue whale waiting to be cut into pieces.  There were cranes and little sheds and cables along the top layer.  The big letters across the top said “TADIUM,” and you could see where “SHEA S” had always been. You could still see the white sticky ghosts of the letters. 

The sky was ominous and oppressive and it was very windy off the bay and leaves were blowing around.  But it could just as easily have been a clear, still, sunny day.  It made no difference.  What I was seeing didn’t require any special effects.  This was an unsentimental work site.  They had to cut up the blubber and prepare the try-works.

I took some pictures and got back into my car and drove around the stadium as if I was heading to one of the parking lots.  I’ve driven this route a million times but this time there was only me, as in a dream, and I couldn’t get into the parking lots.  I drove along the road with the chop shops.  Here’s where the people were. I saw that the parking lot over by the grand entrance to Citifield had a lot of cars in it.  But people were busy. If I parked my car on the road near the entrance to that lot, no one was going to bother me.  

When I got out of my car and walked into the lot, I saw that Citifield was cheerfully getting ready.  Shea was behind it, hulking and silent.  During the season, Shea was still full of life and Citifield was silent and pretty and looming.  Things were reversed now.  The scoreboard was gone and the seats were ripped out.  This made the passages to the inner concourse look like empty eye sockets.  Shea looked stripped, the concrete was rough and ancient-looking where the seats had been.  And the passages through which we had brought our food back to our seats were now empty eyes staring at Citifield.  Or empty mouths dark and open.  Without the scoreboard, you could stare directly at them.  There was something frightening about the way the stadium looked.  The only remaining signs of life were the giant mural in shades of blue, with Seaver pitching, Koosman leaping, and Hodges looking over at something in the distance.

There were plenty of cars in the lot and there was a long line of black corporate-looking SUVs.  A few of them had license plates that suggested some kind of connection to the Mets.  I walked as close as I could to Shea and took some pictures.  No one stopped me.  No one even acted as if they saw me.  There were a few random helmeted, jacketed people doing stuff to Citifield.  There were ominous rattling sounds somewhere over on the field at Shea.  I couldn’t actually see what was happening because there was this “Almost Home” Citifield bunting draped over the metal fence that kept you from walking too close.    

One thing that was funny is that the chop shops were all open and busy.  Usually they’re closed when you go to a ballgame.  So you heard a lot of random hammering and cutting sounds that went with the rattle somewhere over the fence.  You heard the low-pitched familiar rumble of the subway cars.  You heard the high, sharp caw-caw sounds you always hear from the seagulls.  And there were still the planes. 

It’s Election Day.  It’s the seventh game of the World Series and your team is still alive.

Anyone who follows baseball knows that there are many similarities between following baseball and following a political election.  There is the same immersion in the day-to-day fluctuations of fortune, the same shifting balance of hope and fear, the same sudden resolution on one final day.  There is the same invitation to the infinite pleasures of geekhood:  the romance of numbers, the memories of earlier epic battles, the friendly community of like-minded geeks.  The major difference between a political election and a baseball season is that a baseball season is much, much shorter. 

Well, there’s also the fact that politics is about something real and baseball isn’t.  Just kidding.  Just kidding.

But, well, you know, this is part of it.  I mean really.  The best thing about baseball is that it feels so real, you make it so real, but it isn’t real.  If the Phillies win the World Championships, you can ignore them.  It can even add interest to what will happen next year.  If the Mets have lost again, you can comfort yourself with the thought that rooting for a baseball team is all about hope, love, and loyalty.  The pain of the loss is very real.    But you know that pain is part of the package.  You chose the pain, in order to have the hope of the pleasure.  This makes baseball pain subtly, but significantly different from unhappiness.  As a baseball fan, I’ve lost a lot more than I’ve won.  But I am still happy to be a baseball fan.

As a voter in presidential elections, I’ve also lost more than I’ve won.  But there’s no way I have enjoyed it.  There’s no way I can see it as part of the fun of following political elections.  The pain comes and it stays.  It can’t be sentimentalized.  It is unhappiness.  If you’re a grown-up human being, you can’t be comforted.  Except by triumph. 

[This is a continuation of a sample essay from a draft of my new book, The Last Days of Shea, which I hope to have out by mid-spring.  The first part of the piece can be found in the blog entry of October 21.  If you haven’t read my first book, Mets Fan, please check it out by clicking on the link.  There are links to Amazon and BN.com on my site, but please  remember that I have a holiday special for my blog readers.  If you send me your address, inscription instructions, and a check for $25 per copy ordered (this includes the cost of shipping), I will send you an inscribed copy or copies of Mets Fan.  My address is Dana Brand, 5 Bradley Lane, Sandy Hook, CT 06482]

Baseball is a ride I get on.  It’s like a lot of other things in my life.  No sense of triumph justifies it and no sense of loss discredits it.  It lifts me up.  It drops me down.  It is something I do, one of the things I live for.

Baseball is also something I share with millions of other people.  Friends of mine who were at Shea for the seventh game of the 2006 NLCS tell me that they had never seen anything like the love, kindness, and sympathy that Mets fans shared at the end of that game.    Even though I wasn’t at Shea, I did feel that all of us were together at that moment.  I had that feeling I always have at the great moments of Mets history.  I have this sense that I am flying over New York with its roofs off, past big apartment blocks and brownstones and long rows of small houses and suburbs spreading to the horizon.  I feel as if I can look down into the living rooms and see all the Mets fans in their clusters of family and friends, everyone with snacks and drinks and Mets regalia, everyone feeling the same things at the same moment.   Although the season ended with me in my living room, with just my daughter, my pretzels, and my beer, I felt as if I was with millions of people.  

What sense does this make?  This wasn’t 9/11.  This wasn’t the loss of something truly important, like a war or an election.  It wasn’t even really a loss.  So much had been won.  This was only the end of a winning season that ended one out short of the World Series.  Why value an experience like this.  If something doesn’t really matter, does the fact that millions of people care about it make it matter?

I don’t know.  I love to be with people who have the same memories I have of the New York Mets, who respond as I do to some names and numbers and events in the past, who share new things with me, as they happen.  People who share these things with me are not entirely strangers, even if I have never seen them before, even if I will never meet them.  I sit in the crowd at a Mets game and look around me and think, “I don’t know any of these people!”   Yet they are my paysans, my landsmen, my homies.  This big colorful bowl is our village.  And so are all of these screens on our laps and in our living rooms with their pictures and words.  I love this. 

This is a good village.  It’s better, in lots of ways, than a real village.  There’s just a connection, not a lifelong interdependence.  A village this big and this abstract can never be a prison.  While it’s part of your life, it doesn’t consume or determine it.  You don’t really hate your rivals from other villages.  You know it’s all just a game.  Your triumphs don’t actually cost anyone anything.  Your losses don’t deprive you of happiness, food, freedom, or life.  It’s not a problem that baseball isn’t real.  One of the best things about baseball is that it isn’t real, but it still lets you feel real love and real hope.

Real love and real hope about something that isn’t real?  Yeah.  Why not?  Haven’t you ever enjoyed a movie, a book, a TV show, or an opera?  Baseball is part of this web of unreal things that are so important to all of us.   It’s a story that engages our emotions and our imaginations.  It touches deep things in us.  But no one tells it, no one controls it, no one makes it up ahead of time.  Like life, it just happens, but like a story, it is only as real as we allow it to be.  It has all the indeterminacy of reality and all of the splendour of the imagined. 

And because we share it with so many other people, it can seem more real than real things we enjoy or suffer in private.  No one knows what I have with my wife and my kid and my friends and my family and myself.  All Mets fans know what we have with the Mets.  I know that doesn’t make it real, but to say that baseball isn’t real is like saying that Harry Potter isn’t real, or American Idol.  It may be literally true.  But it’s not true. 
 
 

I drove by Shea to see what was going on.  It was actually quite easy to get close enough to get a sense of what is happening.  I’ll eventually post fuller impressions.  But here are some pictures.

[Below you’ll find the first half of an essay of mine called “The Curveball,” which is one of the opening pieces of my forthcoming book The Last Days of Shea, which I hope will be out this spring.  If you haven’t read my first book, Mets Fan, I urge you to do so.  It’s about my first 45 years as a fan of the New York Mets, and I’ll bet that you’ll find a lot in it with which you can identify.  It makes a great holiday present for Mets fans and baseball fans and you can find Amazon and BN links on my site:  Mets Fan if you want to order it.  If you want to order a signed, inscribed and discounted copy or copies of the book for the holidays, you can order it or these directly from me.  Just write me a personal check or money order made out to “Dana Brand” and send it to me, with your address and any inscription instructions, at Dana Brand, 5 Bradley Lane, Sandy Hook, CT 06482.  The cost is $25 per copy, which includes shipping and handling.  Anyway, here is a sample from my new book.  Samples from Mets Fan can be read on the site.] 

For all that we enjoyed our home opener in 2007, every Mets fan was haunted by the final pitch of the 2006 season.  Adam Wainwright, of the St. Louis Cardinals, had thrown a two-strike curveball to Carlos Beltran.  Beltran did not swing.  He saw that the pitch was high and he waited for it to pass.  He was waiting for the next pitch, the historic pitch, the pennant-bearing pitch.  The high curve, already taken, already in the past, approached the plate at the level of Beltran’s eyes.  Then it fell.  It dropped, like a bomb from a plane.  It fell from the sky.  The 2006 season was over.

In 2006, the Mets won 97 games and their first division title in 19 years.  They swept the Dodgers in the first round of the playoffs.  They came into the NLCS as clear favorites.  But then there were a couple of inexplicable bullpen collapses and a horrific five-run first third of an inning from a veteran pitcher fighting to save his marriage.  The inferior Cardinal team had the superior Mets on the ropes, with two games to play in New York. 

Still, I believed.  And having seen the sixth game at Shea with my own eyes, having felt the Upper Deck of the stadium bounce as I stood on it with tens of thousands of other screaming people, I thought that the Mets would pull it out.  By the time we reached the ninth inning, Endy Chavez’s catch had already saved the game.  Ollie Perez also saved us, giving up only one run.  I trusted Aaron Heilman because I had every reason to.  I felt it in my throat when Yadier Molina of all people hit a two-run home run off Heilman in the top of the ninth.  But I still believed that we were in 1986 and not in 1988.  The Mets loaded the bases in the ninth with one out, and two fine hitters were ready to come to the plate to give us one of those Mets moments you will remember all your life.  Hope was alive until the last fraction of a second, when the curveball dropped and everything suddenly and finally took the form it would always have. 

If the 2006 Mets had played a hundred games against the 2006 Cardinals, they would have won sixty or seventy.  But they only played seven.  And they had lost four.  The 2006 NLCS, so close to having been won, would always be lost, just like the 1988 NLCS or the 1973 and 2000 World Series.

Twenty years minus one week before Wainwright’s pitch, the Mets had won their last World Championship.  I felt those twenty years, as a presence in the room, as soon as I choked off my remote control on October 19, 2006.  I wondered what I would have felt if I had known, at thirty-two, that the Mets would not win a World Championship in the next two decades.  Would I waste twenty years hoping for something that would not happen?  Let’s say I could talk to the thirty-two year old guy who had seen the ball bounce between Bill Buckner’s legs only two nights before.  What would I say to him?  What I’d want to tell him, from my current perspective is that hoping and dreaming justify themselves.  To hope and dream, you need the idea of success.  But you don’t actually need success itself.    

But the kid already knew this.  I remember that he knew this.   He was a Mets fan. And he had already been one for twenty-five years.

As I sat in my living room, at the end of the 2006 season, I asked myself something I ask myself all the time.  How could baseball be worth the attention I have given to it for forty-five years?  How could it be worth the emotions I have felt for it?  Many things in life are worthy of my attention and my emotions.  If I felt nothing for my family, if I paid no attention to my career, my health, and my good fortune, my life would be much worse.  But what difference would it possibly make if I suddenly decided to ignore baseball?   

Look, your life is filled with things you don’t have to pay attention to or care about.  Nobody has to listen to music, or look at art, or read a book, or walk in the woods, or care about someone else’s problem, or taste food.  You don’t even have to love the people you love.  You don’t have to work where you work or live where you live or do what you do.  Some things are more important than other things, but everything is optional.  Everything is a ride you don’t have to go on.  If you wanted to, you could sit and watch everything from a bench.  You could listen to the screams from the roller coaster.  You could watch the kids get sick from spinning around.  Or you can say “to hell with it,” and get on the ride yourself. 

Baseball is a ride I get on.  It’s like a lot of other things in my life.  No sense of triumph justifies it and no sense of loss discredits it.  It lifts me up.  It drops me down.  It is something I do, one of the things I live for. . .

On the eve of the historic Presidential Debate at my home institution, Hofstra University, I would like to announce officially that on November 3, 4, and 5, 2011, Hofstra University will host a conference commemorating the 50th anniversary of the New York Mets.  The conference will be organized and co-chaired by me (Professor Dana Brand of the English Department) and by my colleague Professor Richard Puerzer of the Engineering Department. 

2011, in our judgement, can be considered the 50th anniversary year of the Mets because it was on March 6, 1961 that the New York Metropolitan Baseball Club Inc. received its certificate of membership in the National League.  On October 10, 1961, the first Mets team was drafted, and on October 28, 1961, ground was broken for the construction of Flushing Meadows Park, later Shea stadium.  The team played its first official game on Aprill 11, 1962.  Hofstra is the perfect place to have such a conference because it is a university in the heart of the Mets homeland and because William Shea, the man who brought National League baseball back to New York, was on our Board of Trustees.

The Hofstra Conference on “Fifty Years of the New York Mets” will be organized under the auspices of the Hofstra Cultural Center, which has sponsored over one hundred international conferences on a wide range of topics.   Most of the conference topics have been scholarly, cultural, scientific, social, and political (including the well-known series on each presidential administration since that of Franklin Roosevelt) but the Cultural Center is also known for innovative conferences on topics that are not always represented in academia, even though they are definitely worthy of serious study.  Hofstra’s conference on “Baseball and the Sultan of Swat:  Commemorating the 100th Birthday of Babe Ruth” in April, 1995 was a model of this, and Professor Puerzer and I hope to emulate the success of that conference by bringing together players, journalists, executives, fans, bloggers, cultural figures, and scholars to commemorate and discuss the extraordinary history and phenomenon of the Mets. 

Conference registration will be open to the public.  A call for papers and presentations will be issued in the spring of 2009.  There will also be associated art and memorabilia exhibits, as well as a film festival and perhaps even musical performances. 

We hope that the conference will be a lot of fun for everyone, and we hope that it will contribute to an understanding of why so many people find baseball important.  We will be particularly concerned with understanding why so many people find the Mets important in their lives.  The Mets are an extremely popular franchise.  Yet for a variety of reasons, they have never received the attention they deserve, in the press or in publishing.   Because of their relative youth, and their secondary status with respect to the Yankees, they have also never paid as much attention to their own fascinating history and traditions as they might have.  Now that the Mets are about to become fifty years old and are about to move into a new stadium, it’s time for that to change.  The Mets deserve some attention:  loving, intelligent, appreciative, and critical.  Let’s give them some.  If you have any ideas for what you would like to see at the conference, or if you would like to be involved in some way, please visit my blog at metsfanbook.com and leave a comment on the post announcing the conference, or e-mail me at danaabrand@yahoo.com.  

[A note to my regular (and new) readers:  I will be blogging during the offseason, but I will not blog as often as I did during the regular season.  From now until the end of the year, expect to see a new post at least every Tuesday.  I will also blog if something important happens.  For the next few months I will be busy revising the manuscript of my new book, provisionally entitled The Last Days of Shea.  The book should be out sometime next spring.  I want to thank everyone who reads this blog and I want to thank the people who have left such wonderful, heart-felt, and often brilliant comments.]
 

Check out this wonderful article by Mark Herrmann in Newsday:  Mets’ Farewell to Shea was Perfect

He quotes me in it, but that’s not the only reason I’m recommending it.  It does justice to the Mets’ tribute to their own history, without any of the narrow-minded “Yeah, but they didn’t win” bile coming from a lot of other columnists and talk show hosts.  It’s worth a read.  It was supposed to be in the print edition of Newsday today, but it got bumped because of some follow-up stuff about Jerry Manuel’s contract.  As Mets fans know all too well, things don’t always go as you would hope they would. 

On another note, Hotfoot, a terrific Mets blog, is sponsoring a contest in which they are giving away a copy of my book to someone who gives them the best comment explaining why you are the ultimate Mets fan.  Just click on their link, scroll down to October 3 and enter your comment.  Just below the contest is a write-up of an interview with me.

I know it was only yesterday, but it seems like years ago.  I was walking towards Shea in the rain from my parking spot out by Flushing Bay.  The other lots were full at 11 o’clock in the morning.  As I walked under the Whitestone Expressway, I saw the outer ramps of the stadium filled with a crowd of people looking down on big stage lit up like a studio, where Gary, Keith, and Ron were talking to each other as if they were in the booth.    There were policemen everywhere.  A big SUV pulled up and the police surrounded it as Yogi Berra shuffled out and everyone started shouting “Yog –i! Yog -!”   Yogi waved at the flashes of bright light coming from hands held high above the press of people.  He walked into the stadium on a soggy scarlet carpet. 

I never thought, when I got my ticket to the last game at Shea, that it would be the most significant regular season game to be played there in 45 years.  It was more significant than the last game of last year, because last year had already happened and needed to be redeemed.  It was more significant than any of the regular season games played in the seasons we had made the playoffs, because when we have made the playoffs, we’ve almost always won by a large margin.  We lost the close pennant races of 1984, 1985, and 1987.   We did win in 1973 but that was not as significant because we were winning against all expectations.  The only game that might have been as significant was the game in which Melvin Mora came home on a wild pitch in 1999.  But that wasn’t quite as significant because we hadn’t won two years before and collapsed the year before.  This was really big.  And I was kind of overwhelmed by it.  I didn’t want this day to be about a do-or-die baseball game.  I wanted a day to be alone with Shea and the crowd and my memories. 

But I didn’t have a choice.  And I was feeling pretty good.  Johan Santana had made me so happy on Saturday.  And there was a 75% chance that there would at least be a game on Monday.   And if there was a game on Monday, or if we won it today, the promised ceremony would not feel like a wake.  It would feel like the mining of a rich vein of collective memory.  It could propel the Mets, and Shea, into one more glorious month of life.

The stadium filled, completely.  And everything feels different when every seat is not merely purchased but filled.  Everything feels different.  And everything about the 2008 season, and everything about the 45 years the Mets have spent at Shea was going to feel different depending on the outcome of this one single ballgame.  I hate this, even though this is the reason I love baseball.  I love and hate to be dangled over the pit of possibility.  I love and hate knowing how much of a difference one game, one inning, one at-bat, one pitch can make.
 
I was so glad to be there.  But I hated every moment of the game.  Except for the moment when Carlos Beltran hit his home run.  And I liked Endy’s great catch, and the way he bounded up against the wall as if to remind us of what he had done two years ago.  I liked how the crowd was in every pitch for most of the game and I guess I was pleased with the way Perez pitched.  I think I would have enjoyed the game in real time if the Mets had gone ahead early and I know I would have enjoyed it in retrospect if they had pulled it out from behind.  But when the Marlins hit their home runs in the eighth, and you heard the hiss of air, and you realized that the deep vein had been found and that nothing was going to stop the air and the blood, well, what could you do and what could you say?  It was ruined.  It could not be retrieved.   I was still hopeful in the ninth.  But I was hopeful because of a reflex I had developed over 47 years.  I had looked at my hand and had seen that the life line was short and I really didn’t expect anything.

The Marlins celebrated when it was over.  I had always felt bad for them because they were a good team and no one came to watch them play.  Now I was glad that their stadium was always empty.  I hoped that they would languish unloved and unnoticed for a very long time to come.

When it was all over and the Marlins had finally heeded our request to “Get Off the Field!”  there was an entirely unreal twenty-five minutes as the devastated crowd stood and faced legions of policemen and security guards in orange shirts as someone (not Jane Jarvis) played a dirge-like version of “I Fought the Law and the Law Won.”  Behind the unnecessary army, black-suited functionaries with tape measures positioned blue and white standing posters of great Mets moments.  Nobody was rushing onto that field.  And no one was comforting us. 

They showed us a movie about Shea, and they played “New York State of Mind.”  Then there was an old-timey version of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” and then with clueless fanfare, Mr. Met took down the number 1 to reveal some kind of Citifield logo and for the very first time in history the crowd lustily booed something Mr. Met had done.  Oh Noooo!  Mr. Met, of course, doesn’t talk but I crazily thought of him as Mr. Bill.  My brain was completely free-associating by this point.  I’m lucky I wasn’t hallucinating.

Then Howie Rose came out to start the real ceremony.  He read a list of names of people who had been invited but didn’t come.  And then there were people who had survived and were representing people who were dead.  And then he read a list of names of people who then walked down the right and left field lines out of the bullpens and took their place in an arch on the field. 

Jack Fisher.  Ron Hunt.  Al Jackson.  Frank Thomas.  Jim McAndrew.  Jon Matlack.  Craig Swan.  George Theodore.  Doug Flynn.  Ed Charles. Art Shamsky.  Wayne Garrett.  Dave Kingman.  Felix Millan. John Stearns.  George Foster.  Tim Teufel.  Todd Zeile.  Ron Swoboda.  Lee Mazzilli.  Wally Backman.  Ron Darling.  Sid Fernandez.  Howard Johnson.  Bobby Ojeda.  Robin Ventura.  Al Leiter.  Ed Kranepool. Cleon Jones.  Bud Harrelson.  Jesse Orosco.  Edgardo Alfonzo.  John Franco.  Rusty Staub.  Lenny Dykstra.  Gary Carter.  Jerry Koosman.  Yogi Berra.  Keith Hernandez.  Darry Strawberry. Dwight Gooden.  Willie Mays.  Mike Piazza.  Tom Seaver. 

There they were on the field.  These deep and close friends I’ve never met.  These larger than life figures who live in a special dream world in tens of millions of minds.  Here is a man who made me so happy when he hit a home run as I was listening to the family car radio during an intermission between features in the Paramus Drive-In Theatre.  There is someone who made me cry when he came back after six years of unforgiveable banishment.  There is someone who played on the Mets from when I was in the second grade until the year I got married.  There is someone who made me smile because he didn’t look or act like any other ballplayer.  There is a shy man no one has seen in years, who was the single most exciting player I have ever seen play. 

There was a chunk of my life down on that field.  There were the artists who made something that would always be more than a game to me.  They were all lined up and I watched them through my binoculars.  I saw the old teams come together again, particularly the great team of the Eighties, the team that is about my age.  I saw the old team of grown men from the impossibly distant days when I first entered Bob Murphy’s voice.  And I saw the newer Mets, who were young enough for my daughter to have fallen in love with.  Each of them stood on the field in a big jersey with his number.  And then, as the music changed to the kind of music they play at the victory celebration at the end of Star Wars, I saw each of them touch home plate and wave to us all.  The vast crowd of the wounded cheered as if nothing had happened that afternoon, as if all that mattered was a half century of warm and briny love, as if all that mattered was them and us. 

There was then a ceremony where Tom Seaver threw one last pitch to Mike Piazza.  The last pitch thrown from that mound, the last pitch caught.  Seaver and Piazza put their arms around each other and waved and then walked out to deep center and through the blue wall.   It was all over, and our tears of love had to mix with our tears of bitterness.  The afternoon was remembered again.  People stuck around looking, sitting, standing, taking pictures.  I couldn’t believe that I would never see this broad, warm familiar sight again.  It was not really there anymore.  It was already collapsing within itself.  As I walked down the ramps for the very last time, the stadium felt eerily alive, and dying.  It was dying as people actually die, with love, generosity, and an uncanny alertness.  When I was finally outside of it, I looked up at the neon ghosts on the side of the building, hitting and fielding and pitching.  

I walked towards the parking lot by the bay, turning around every few seconds.  Finally I passed under the Whitestone Expressway and I couldn’t see the stadium anymore when I turned back towards it.  I walked through the darkness of the nearly empty parking lot to my car.  Not wanting to get into it right away, I walked to the promenade along the bay and sat down on a bench.  I could see the lights of LaGuardia Airport, and their reflections, shimmering columns in the black water.  To the left I saw the top of the Empire State Building.  And off to the right in the distance was the Triboro Bridge, with its lights like the strands of a necklace.  I thought of how I used to show the bridge to my infant daughter.  We could see it from her very first bedroom, in Astoria.  Standing, with my help, on my lap, she would look at the bridge as if she could see that something was there, but she didn’t know what it was or what it meant.  I looked at the lights in the water and against the night sky.  I knew that Shea was empty, but all of its lights were still on.  I couldn’t see it, but I could feel it behind me. 

I should have a piece up by tomorrow on the Last Game.  I have to collect my thoughts and emotions.  If you want to hear my first reactions, you can listen to the two interviews I did on radio/podcasts last night, right after they kicked me out of Shea.  So live from the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot just north of the Whitestone Bridge on the Hutchinson River Parkway: 

Shea Goodbye at New York Baseball Digest  I come on around minute 33.

Anniversary Show and Shea Goodbye at Seven Train to Shea  I come on around minute 56. 

Both shows have great guests, but I haven’t had a chance yet to listen to the whole things.

“This seemed like a good idea six weeks ago,”  Lynn Cohen observed as she snapped a picture of me and my mother and my wife at a picnic table in the picnic area.  Lynn wasn’t seriously complaining.  Her fundraiser for her garykeithandron.com charity was an enormous success.  The whole picnic tent, and soon the whole warning track, and the whole picnic area were filling up with people wearing Gary, Keith, and Ron t-shirts.  I was in the tent, with my mom, my wife, my daughter, and my sister.  We also had my father’s old Mets cap.  So he was with us at our last game together as a family at Shea.  At his actual last game, Melvin Mora came home from third on a wild pitch and the Mets tied for the 1999 Wild Card. 

It was thanks to Lynn that we were all there.  Lynn had read my Mother’s Day blog piece about how much of a Mets fan my mother was.  She knew that my mother had gone to National League games in New York since the thirties but that she wasn’t planning to go to any more games because she couldn’t walk well enough.  Lynn convinced me to try and bring her to her fundraiser.  I did and I will never regret it.

I had a meltdown as we were waiting with all the other GKR t-shirt wearers to go onto the warning track for the Star Spangled Banner.  There I was under a grey sky at Shea, right by the home run apple, standing behind my 80-year old mother in her wheelchair.  Here I was, for one of the last times, at a place I had been coming to since I was 9 and she was 35 and my dad was 39 and what the hell was all this and what the hell had happened?   And where was big Shea going to go now and what were they going to do with it and how many things that were once real can become memories before you just want to jump off a bridge?  I asked my mother how she was doing and she said she was so happy. 

They opened the outfield fence and I wheeled her onto the warning track and we looked and there was the wet and noisy stadium and there was the smooth, soft, bright green wonder of the field.  We just looked, seeing it all from this side for the first time.  Here is where it all had happened.  Over there is where we watched it from.  Here is the spot where Cleon caught the last ball of the series.  There’s the wall that Endy climbed.  There’s the right field line, made so famous by a single unforgettable moment.  Here it all is and now we turn around and go back through the wall.  Shea will live a little longer if we win today.  But soon it is finished.  And none of what is right here right now will ever be here again.

We rode up to our seats in a strange little elevator.  We got settled and there it was again, all before us.  My mother asked, looking to the left, “That’s the bullpen?”  “Yeah.”  “They should put a lock on it,” she muttered with disgust.

First we cheered for Jerry Koosman, as he took down the second-to-last number.  Then we cheered for Cleon Jones who threw out the first pitch.   My mother puts her hand on my arm and says, “I’m so glad to be here.  I love it here.”  Then after the first inning, when that voice tells you that the New York Mets appreciate your support, my mother said “If they appreciate our support, they shouldn’t aggravate us so much.” 

This is true.  But this is the way it is.  The Mets got two runs up onto the board really quick, but how could I avoid the sense that aggravation was on its way?  Johan Santana, as good as he was, had thrown 125 pitches only 3 days ago.  There was no way to avoid aggravation.  What if we could only score two runs?

As the game went on, and as the lights came on, there was a general brightening of our souls.  Blessed with a particularly magical change-up, Santana held the Marlins speechless.  They were lost.  For all that they hated us, they could do us no harm.  I began to feel, and the crowd began to feel, that we were watching the gutsiest most brilliant and most important Mets pitching performance since Leiter’s two-hit shut-out in Cincinnati that won us the Wild Card in 1999.  We were cheering every strike and booing every umpire mistake.  We were swiveling our many hips to the Carlos Santana song that is Johan’s trademark.  We were chanting “Johan, Johan, Johan, Johan.”  The rest of the Mets were out there, but we were riveted by this one single superhuman effort.  I watched him through the dim soda fuzz of the rain on my glasses.  I couldn’t believe what was happening but I heard it and felt it in the stamping of the picnic bleachers.  “We’re gonna have to clone him,” my mother pointed out.

We roared with approval when he came to bat in the seventh.  In the eighth, we sang “I’m a Believer,” with proud, loud belief.  “Are they singing about Tom Seaver?”  my mother wondered.  They might as well have been.  That’s who it looked like on the mound.  It’s true that we never scored a run beyond the two we got early.  But as the ninth began, we really believed that it didn’t matter.  Endy came out to stand in front of us and we welcomed him.  You could tell from the way Johan stood on the mound that he would not be denied.  He was stepping up, and in our great communal gratitude, we pounded and cheered and chanted.  There was an uninterrupted wall of sound in the ninth.   Everyone was standing, except my mother, who couldn’t.  I stayed sitting down with her and it was as if we were hiding in a meadow during a storm of locusts.  All around us, people were so happy they were screaming.  And then there was a double.  And at the last minute, a ball was hit terrifyingly deep into left field.  But Endy caught it against the wall.  Once again he saved us.  We slapped each others’ hands.  We slapped strangers hands.  But it seemed, in the picnic area, as if there were no strangers.  Every one in those t-shirts were as much my family as the four women around me.  I was so happy, so grateful, and so surprised.  The Mets had lived.  The Mets would continue.  Shea wasn’t over.

My mother and I went down in that sound-proof, slow-moving elevator.  She nodded happily to me.  “That was a wonderful game,” she said.  “Thank you so much for taking me.  But I didn’t see the end.  They were all standing up.  But I don’t blame them.  I would too if I was them.  They should have stood up.  It was wonderful.  At least they weren’t doing that stupid wave.” 

I’ll be there tomorrow.  And if there has to be a Monday, I will do what I can to be there as well.  I will stand.  I will go to the window.  I will do what I can to help Shea live as long as it can.