Saturday, September 05, 2009
LEFT OF CENTER. [9-5-09]
Today was my first regular season day game, my first regular season weekend game, and my first regular season game where I was not in Section 514. I was out in Section 531, where I exclaimed with delight upon encountering a section with the famed “blind spot”:
I exclaimed with delight because I have wanted to experience this for myself, so I could be knowledgeable about the situation, and not just adopting the tiresome THE BALLPARK IS AWESOME STOP BITCHING ABOUT IT IT’S NOT THAT BAD attitude that is all the rage this season, from people who had been to the ballpark once or twice at best.
At least there were only Cubs fans in that row. I would be irked in the extreme if these were my plan seats. (Of course, the fact that one could regularly buy seats better than our plan seats for single games is yet another thing I could get upset about, but no longer have much energy for.)
It is astonishing to me that I haven’t been to a baseball game since August 20th. I felt like I was out of practice. It felt odd, and wrong. It was also odd that we were playing the Cubs this weekend at home for the first time - given that last weekend, we were out in Chicago, playing the Cubs. The new scheduling system sucks. The Mets ticket plans suck. Despite having the closest thing to a Friday plan, Friday night was the first night in four years where the Mets were in town, and we weren’t at the stadium - because these game plans suck. (Yes, I could have bought tickets, but we already bought 30 games, and we bought Sunday as the hedge against missing this series.)
I went as an invited guest with Delightful Commenter Meg, who I have been trying to meet up with all year. She has the opposite games of mine, so if I am there Monday, she is there Tuesday, et cetera. Finally there was a game where she needed a date and I was in town. I still bemoan the fact that this year was the year where I couldn’t just pick up a random game on a Thursday when I’d had a bad day and wanted to go sit in the upper deck by myself with Howie and Wayne in one ear until I felt human again. I hate that when we got that itch to DO something, it wasn’t go out to the ballpark, because it was expensive, and because what was left to buy wasn’t worth sitting in. You will notice I didn’t add “and because the Mets suck,” because that would not ever really stop us from going to see baseball (well, there are degrees; TBF tells of the night after a particular Armando Benitez infraction where he stormed out of Shea vowing not to return until the team actually gave a damn again), but rather, it was just financial. Too much money for what they had to offer.
There were Cubs fans out and about, of course, and you couldn’t really tell how many until Derrek Lee hit that ball underneath us into the freaking Left Field Landing or wherever it went (I don’t know, all I know is that it went underneath us), and then you could hear them. Earlier in the day, the fans in front of us, sitting in the obstructed view seats (and clearly unacquainted with the concept of leaving one’s seat between at-bats) tried booing the Mets when they announced the starting lineups. “You know, at least our team sucks because all of the players are on the DL, and not just because it sucks,” was yelled in his direction.
[We were doing some trash talking on Twitter last night:
Speaking of Aaron Heilman, he was one of the things immediately on our minds when we arrived at the ballpark. Meg noticed the minute NOW WARMING UP FOR THE CUBS: AARON HEIMAN was on the video board, and the two of us were raring to boo as soon as Lou came out to take the ball away from Gorzelanny.
“BOOOOOO!” we yelled, with great vigor.
The people around us gave us looks of varying degrees. I wonder if Aaron Heilman is going to get some other kind of reception than the one we just gave him. (For the record, I was conflicted. I liked Heilman. But he also just gave it up way too often when we needed him the most.)
Literally two minutes later, Alex announces, “Now pitching for the Cubs, #47, Aaron Heilman,” and the people formerly glaring at us are suddenly booing.
“Now you boo? You look at us like we’re crazy, and now you boo?” I sit back in my chair, indignant, and just a little sunburned.
A thing you will notice when you go out to Citi Field these days: the Mets are actually starting to treat the fans like, well, fans. They gave away jerseys or balls or gift cards or t-shirts or SOMETHING between every single inning. There were no video board treatises that SINGLE GAME TICKETS ARE STILL AVAILABLE. Before the game started, they brought a handful of rugrats who belonged to the Mets Fan Club For Kids onto the field and had them run out to stand next to the position players, much like they do in Philly (except that in Philly you don’t have to pay $20 to join a club to do it, just be wearing Phillies gear, and the kids get to stand on the field during the anthem - trust me that it pains me in the extreme to point out something Philly does better than we do). My sources indicate that none of this is coincidence, and it’s nice and all, but it’s too little, far too late. They need to step it up; they need to do more; and they need to do it now. Sending Bobby Parnell and Tim Redding to sign autographs and pose for photos in the Acela Club will not encourage the people with the pricey tickets to renew their plans next year. Plus, we’ve all been so burned by the Wilpons that even the dumbest WFAN caller (like the guy today bemoaning that we didn’t sign Halliday as though it was just a matter of us saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’) knows that this sudden attempt at largesse is probably more like noblesse oblige and most definitely more like bullshit.
Figgy was not bad today, and Cory Sullivan is suddenly raking, but they just couldn’t get any runners in or seize the right opportunities, and there were a couple of lucky catches by the Cubs, all just more of the same we’ve seen all season. We could have gotten those runs back, and we could have stopped giving Derrek Lee something to hit. But we didn’t, and we didn’t, and given the fact that the Mets won’t let anyone sweep them, this means that we will lose tomorrow’s game since we won Friday’s game. We will be there, still in Section 514 believe it or not, just a different row (lower down, of course), with Francisco Rodriguez bobbleheads happily in hand.
