Tuesday, July 27, 2010

I’LL GO CRAZY IF I DON’T GO CRAZY TONIGHT. [7-27-10]

Let’s get this out of the way first. Obviously, the win was awesome and fantastic and Jeff Francoeur earned genuine applause from me tonight, instead of the usual derisive commentary that escapes the side of my mouth when he is at bat.

But I sat there thinking: Why the hell couldn’t you idiots do this on the road? And I was more than a little disgruntled. Sure, Wainright didn’t have his best stuff tonight, and Niese did have good stuff. It’s not that I wanted them to lose tonight in order to prove some idiotic theory, just seriously - really? 8-2? Where the hell was this offensive power on the west coast?

These are professional athletes. You can’t just chalk it up to something as simple as “they don’t like the road,” and I’m not going to jump on the bandwagon that is surely rolling somewhere acclaiming the genius of Dave Jauss or hanging up a neon arrow pointing at HoJo. It’s one win. Get me a winning homestand record and then we’ll talk about this team having a chance (although TBF started to calculate the standings in his head again via the out of town scoreboard as the night went on. He had finally stopped doing it by the first game in LA.)

Citi Field was full tonight, fuller than this team and this organization deserves, frankly. But here’s what’s weird: this was not a crowd of diehard Mets fans determined to support their Mets. These were random people who bought tickets to this game for a variety of reasons: the date, the team, the weather. There were multiple groups, there were tons of Cardinals fans who came in for the series, taking advantage of the weekend to also pay a visit to the House of Evil (or so the Cards fans on TBF’s 7 train told him).  The hipster beacon must have been on, which is surprising given that the National was playing in Prospect Park tonight, but there were so many ironic trucker hats and funny hair cuts getting up and down and up and down and up and down for beer tonight that I wanted to tell them that it would be so much cheaper to just go watch the game at the Turkey’s Nest already. I don’t know if the Mets got booed, because I was in the stupid will call line for close to half an hour (more on this below), but I am curious. The problem is that this turnout will send a vote of confidence to the organization that everything is okay and they can put a crappy product on the field and people will come anyway.

PERSONAL TO: Stupid girls who arrived at the top of the 6th and couldn’t find their seats, blocked the aisle (all four of them) and told everyone to shut up and calm down while they stood there with runners in scoring position and debated their seating location, and then left at the top of the 9th. I don’t care that you all had cute little Mets and Cardinals hats, you give us girls a bad name.

Now, that that’s out of the way, onto the important things:

There was offense! Real, actual OFFENSE! There were hits! There were walks! There were RBIs! There were HOME RUNS!

We saw Mike Hessman’s Mets debut. It was not inspiring. Everyone around us exclaimed “Who is this guy?” and we were just too worn out to start explaining. There was zero recognition for him; there was zero recognition that this was Carlos Beltran’s first game at Citi Field. The AV team tried to spark some reaction by putting one of the new noise meter cartoon graphics on the board, and people responded to that like they always do, but there was no - “Hey! That’s ‘El Esta Aqui’! Beltran is back!” type of murmuring through the crowd.

Mostly, I took that photo because WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME I SAW THE METS SCORE RUNS AND HAVE A LEAD??? I needed photographic proof.

Frankie came in at the top of the 9th. 8-2 or not, I still had confidence that he could just get this done and send us home. It was delightful that the last out was Albert himself.

This activity on the field was something much missed over the past two weeks, and something I am still perturbed I never got to photograph on the road. (San Francisco doesn’t count, because there I was mostly photographing Rod Barajas holding Jose Reyes back from going after Phil Cuzzi.)

Am I evil that when I saw hordes of Cardinals fans heading for the local train tonight, that I didn’t put on my Girl Scout hat and tell them they could also take the express to Times Square? There, I said it. There were too many red shirts, bedazzled Yadier Molina jerseys and bumpits and sprayed hair for my liking. I know, not all Cards fans are like that; we had a lovely family sitting in front of us. But still. They are the enemy.

I had planned on presenting you with a laundry list of the idiocy at the ballpark tonight. The Mets seem to think that putting a bunch of cheery 20-somethings out on the curb in front of the rotunda to say “Welcome to Citi Field!” will automatically make people feel welcome. The problem with this is that it is window dressing, an illusion, because it is business as usual in terms of contempt for the average fan not spending the $$$ to go to the Delta Club. There was the 30 minute line to pick up tickets, there were the ushers at the turnstiles not paying attention, there was the nasty elevator operator. But really, the worst offense to me was the fact that they made the fans take down the PUT KEITH IN THE HOF banner, so quickly I couldn’t even get a photograph of it. Although there I will be slightly reasonable because while it was hung on the railing out in the left field landing, I see how it could have caused a problem later if there had been a ball hit in that direction that struck the top of the fence near the sign. I wish there was a place for people to hang their banners, though; I am heartily tired of the sanitization of ballparks these days.

I suppose all of the above just said “welcome home”.

Tomorrow I am back at Citi, and promise I will have fabulous photos for you. It was very hard to be shooting from row 13 of the Promenade again, so the slideshow tonight is limited.