Tuesday, August 21, 2007

TREVOR TIME. [8-21-07]

Meet Vincent and Francois, die-hard Montreal Expo fans who spotted me on the 7 train and determined that I would be their font of all necessary information to get them to the game. They were in town on their annual ballpark visit, where they pick a couple of stadiums and attend games. As they reminded me, the Expos last game was at Shea, and no other than Endy Chavez was the final out. It was their first time at Shea, and I’m proud to say that they exhibited the appropriate excitement and respect as we pulled in on the 7. I hope they took my advice and self-upgraded from the upper deck down to the mezz, because it was a frickin nasty night in Flushing. It reminded me of April in, say, SEATTLE, when it’s not rain so much as a really aggressive mist.

[Riddle me this: why can you already buy Luis Castillo t-shirts BUT THERE IS NOT ONE THING IN THE BALLPARK WITH #33 ON IT?]

[more after the jump]

Sunday, August 19, 2007

WHAT ARE WE WAITING FOR?

Last year, our post-season invoices were waiting in our mailbox when we arrived home after trouncing the Cardinals on August 22nd, 2006. We paid them immediately, and our seating locations were outstanding. Our friends with seats on the loge, who have been plan holders for three times longer than I have been, were on vacation, and didn’t pay their invoice until a week later. Their seats were in the upper deck. Lessons learned.

Accordingly, TBF has been logging in to mets.com every single day to see if the invoice link was online yet. He also emailed the Mets at the beginning of the month, who told him: “Thank you for your email. Once the league gives us permission to invoice our ticket holders we will do so. At this time we do not have any prices and would not know when they would be available.”
“Fine,” said TBF. “Now I just need to make the time to harass MLB for this information.”

While I was working today, TBF did a little research, and found out that the following teams have already invoiced their fans:

Arizona Diamondbacks
Detroit Tigers
Los Angeles Angels
Philadelphia Phillies
San Diego Padres
Seattle Mariners

So where the hell are ours?

Smart money says we’ll see them this week. Be prepared!!

Saturday, August 18, 2007

Q&A: WE’VE GOT HEART.

Kristen & Stephanie are the proprietors of We’ve Got Heart, a great blog about the Washington Nationals. In honor of this weekend’s series, we exchanged questions about being fans of our respective teams. You can read their questions and my answers here.

Did you grow up as baseball fans?
Kristen:  Sort of – The closest MLB team to me was the Pirates.  My dad loved the Pirates and Roberto Clemente, so that sort of stuck with me.  I loved Pirates Short Stop Jay Bell as a kid.  We also have the AAABA tournament in our hometown every year.  My dad was involved with that organization, so I usually went to 3 games a day for that whole week.  There’s tons of scouts and one year, I was an Ambassador to it – selling tickets and advertisements, promoting it in the community and doing in-game entertainment things.  We had a Frontier League team for awhile too (The Johnstown Steal) and we went to those games all the time until they left.  I was so happy to move to DC and finally get my own team.
Steph:  I have always been a sports fan.  I grew up a Military brat so we moved a lot and I never had a true hometown team until the Nats came to DC.  But I used to go to Reds games in Ohio and lots of minor league games in some of the smaller towns I lived in…Seawolves, Wranglers.

What team did you follow before the Nationals came to town?
Stephanie The Nats have stolen my heart – I can’t imagine ever rooting for another team.

Do you have season tickets or do you just buy individual game tickets?
This year, we got a 20 game package but next year we’re getting 40 games.  We’re moving to a new park so it’s a very exciting time for a season-ticket holder.  We’re hoping to sit in right field.  We’ve already been to over 60 games this season, so we’ll just splurge on the extra 20.

[More after the jump.]

Friday, August 17, 2007

C’MON, SHARE THE DRUGS.

If by “heats up” you mean “Backsliding Dodgers come to town to play a team that can’t sweep their back porch,” then, sure.

Otherwise, SHARE ‘EM! 

NO COMMENT.

UM, HELLO??! IT’S THE *PIRATES*!!!!!!!!!

$#@!

No baseball tonight. TBF is going to see the Tigers with his dad at the House of Evil, and I am going to go somewhere there is no baseball and get something done.

Thursday, August 16, 2007

HE WHO SHALL NOT BE NAMED.

Roger Angell in the New Yorker on the Barry Bonds saga: I guarantee you he’s the only one who would compare Bonds to Voldemort. Brief but delightful, as always.

ENDY SAYS…

“Make skim milk part of your team,” or something like that.

I hope he’s drinking LOTS of milk to heal those bones so he can come back soon. 

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

BIKINI BEACH PARTY.

Or, why MetsGrrl is not at the SNY viewing party at the Hawaiian Tropic Zone tonight

The first time TBF and I went to the “Glory Days” exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York, the thing that struck me the strongest was all the *women* in the photographs of Ebbets Field (and Yankee Stadium, truth be told). Women in the stands. Women with pennants and scorecards and programs. Women yelling, women cheering, women heckling. Wearing hats and heels and hose, even, they were there, at the games.

And this is odd to me, still, because my perception growing up was that baseball was not a place for girls. I mentioned this to TBF, and he suggested, gently, that I wasn’t exactly around to know, and he’s right. And not growing up in a household that had any focus on sports (although had a strong focus on the three sisters [and one brother] in it being able to do whatever they set their minds on), my perception of professional sports, and baseball, probably came from the media, and more specifically, beer commercials. Everything surrounding baseball seemed to have a NO GIRLS ALLOWED sign on it.

This is why, when I started this blog, I went out there looking for other girls like me. And, like MG reader April (who wrote some very kind words about this blog a few months ago), I don’t know why I was surprised. To be fair, I don’t know if it was surprised so much as delighted. But it’s why I have the girls-only blogroll, and is one of the reasons I go out of my way to read other female baseball bloggers. (The second reason is that they are funny, or incredibly interesting, or amazingly good writers.)

[more after the jump]

Saturday, August 11, 2007

ROLLERCOASTER OF LOVE. [08-10-07]

I wasn’t going to write about this game. To be honest, I was praying fervently for a rainout all day. I should have taken two days off work after being sick, but I only took one, and then paid for it the rest of the week. Work was relentless, the subways crashed on us on Wednesday, and I’ve felt like the greyest, most washed-out rat in the proverbial race all week. All I wanted to do tonight was come home, put on my sweats, and get in bed with the cat and a good book, even as I made my usual goodbyes to my teams at work about heading out for my baseball therapy. The fucked-up 7 train tonight (not running express, and almost not running, period) meant that although I left work after 6pm, TBF was on the same train that I was. Leaving work at 5 and coming home to get the car still should have put him at Shea well before first pitch, much less both of us standing in the tunnel watching the last out of the Marlins’ at-bat in the first inning.

Yeah. It was That Kind of ending to That Kind of week.

HOT DOG HEAVEN.

The Shake Shack will have an outpost at Citi Field!!

TBF: “If they sell Chicago dogs at Citi Field, it will be baseball heaven.”
MG: “Honey, they don’t sell Chicago dogs at *Wrigley Field*.”
TBF: “One can only hope.”

No, seriously; this is *exactly* what I hope to see at Citi Field - local restaurants getting their spots. Yes, they’ll still be overpriced, yes, the lines will be long, yes, Aramark will likely still have a stranglehold on everything else.

But Shake Shack! At Citi Field!

No, seriously, this is damn exciting.

(Can we get a banh mi place too?)