Tuesday, April 08, 2008

NEVER GONNA GIVE YOU UP. [4-8-08]

We are late, the bus is late, and of course the train is running local, which gets us out to Flushing later than we had wanted. There are more Mets fans than I remember on the street, on the bus, on the train, more fans wearing colors than I remember. When we get off at Willets Point and head down the stairs, I can’t understand what the bottleneck at the bottom is and am about to get cranky when I see a large round white head: Mr. Met, and all is forgiven. I might benignly suggest that congregating at the bottom of the exit stairs might not be the best idea in the world, but it’s Mr. Met! He can get away with anything. Everyone loves him. Grown men clamor for a hug, a high-five, a handshake. TBF is angling for a photograph, and I remind him that we have about another 40 games this season at which this can happen.

The rotunda is gone. I knew it was going to go, but seeing it gone, replaced by those utilitarian stairs with a sturdy corrugated metal roof, bothered me. Also, we’ve lost that incredible vista, coming out of the subway station and seeing the expanse of Shea right there before you, the best backdrop ever. Instead, you now come down stairs and BOOM, Citi Field in front of you, and you stop and take out your camera and promptly careen into hordes of people who have just come down the stairs and are now taking photos of Citi Field.

Somehow with the rotunda gone it is more crowded, and there is a new team store quonset hut set up just to your right. The ticket windows are closed, Topps starting lineup across the roof as usual, except somehow we couldn’t get Angel Pagan a card in time. It is so crowded that I give up on my idea of doing a 3/4 circuit to gate A to absorb color, and take some photos of the people and the day, so we head in at Gate D, since the bag line is remarkably short.

Food prices have gone up. Beer prices have gone up. To be expected, and not the end of the price increase, and we gotta pay for that $137.5m somehow, I know. Then it’s through the tunnel and there it is, Citi Field, a solid presence now. You can believe you will be watching baseball inside the edifice this time next year. We turn the corner and up the stairs and find many familiar faces awaiting our arrival.

The Section 12 regulars are back. Row G, Andrew and William and Older Brother and Father, and Row F, the sisters to one side and the father/son combo to the other. Row E is missing our retired LIRR friends, but they usually unload in-demand games, so we’ll keep our fingers crossed. However, the gentleman we refer to as ‘the walrus’ because he owns the seats in front of us, never shows up, and scowls at us from behind his mustache the entire game when he is there, arrives with friends in tow.

Three years now I have been seeing these people, and it is more than a touch heartbreaking that this is the last year we sit together.

The organ music ends, and the PA kicks into gear: “Born To Run,” which I take as momentary omen and blessing and bump fists with TBF in quiet triumph, simply because of what that song means to us. We’ll ignore Springsteen’s poor showing as a baseball fan in general, much less a baseball fan of a particular team, today.

I don’t walk around a lot today, but when I do, all I hear is shades of the same conversation, how most people don’t believe they’ll have seats in Citi Field or that there will be seats made available, the rumor being that the Mets won’t have weekend plans or partial plans, that it’ll be full season only, end of story. And I think about how the Washington Nationals had this long questionnaire for plan ticket holders in order to migrate them to the new stadium, questions about what you preferred, one of which was, “I want to try to continue to sit near these people in these seats.”  I realize the Mets don’t have to do anything like that, but they could do something, or at least tell us now what they are going to do next year, if we stand a ghost of a chance, because there’s a whole lot of people who believe that none exists.

I love the pomp and the circumstance of Opening Day, and this year, the ceremony to add one William A. Shea to the retired numbers wall. I love that I know that the floral horseshoe is a tradition, and that Mr. Shea’s family continued it after he passed, and that they plan on continuing to do so when the team moves next door. The Phillies are roundly booed, starting with the clubhouse staff and trainers, and continuing on up. There’s a guy in the front row, you know the type, the one who has to underscore every announcement over the PA with his own commentary. There’s a guy on the Phillies staff, named Duby or Dubie or maybe even Doobie, and of course, as soon as his name was announced, we got 5 minutes of predictable delight from our commentator: “Dooooobieeeeeeeeeeeee,” echoed through the section.

Adam Rubin had an interesting piece in his blog yesterday about his predictions about how the various members of the Mets would be cheered. I would say for the most part he got it right. It is nice to see John Maine and Oliver Perez and Endy and Marlon Anderson get their just desserts. It was nice to see Mr. Santana in person, standing on the field in Flushing for the first time, and to hear the cheers, the hope and the optimism. It was not nice, however, to hear Aaron Heilman get booed. Can we please not boo during introductions on Opening Day? Just like I’d like the “Jose” chants to wait until he actually *does* something, could we hold off on the boos until someone does something wrong, at least? If you mean it as remedial this behavior can only be confusing. Please, attach it to specific performance.

And then, the game began. Were we going to get Oliver the Good or Oliver the Bad? The scoreboard informs us that the Mets have faced the Phillies in 8 home openers and have won 7 of those games. We want retribution. We want blood. We will take no prisoners.

Unfortunately, we weren’t the ones on the field.

There have been enough reports on the game that I can refrain from repeating myself here. I can, instead, report to you on the following things, none of which matter very much in the end:

Profesor Reyes is gone. Instead, we have “Maine Street USA” with #33, which is a lame geography quiz. We also have ‘The Wright Way’ which was, essentially, a MLB PSA reminding kids to wear a batting helmet.  We also had the Verizon Dance-off, in which a cute girl had to dance off against Vinnie from Staten Island, and we were supposed to text who we wanted to win. I imagine someone sent a text message, because winners were announced later in the game, but we seem to be scraping the scant leftovers of lame from the giant-sized barrel of lame when it comes to in-game entertainment.

(Please realize I am not a fan of this tripe; I adored every minute of my Wrigley Field experience because of its complete and total absence. I am simply reporting on it because we are subjected to it.)

Of course, while I am talking about lame, I am omitting the 8th Inning Sing-along, during which the Mets felt the need to kow-tow to a bunch of internet trolls (really, the kinds of people with nothing better to do who sit in a basement of their parents’ house and play online all day) and play that goddamn Rick Astley song, which is still in my head as I write this, almost 6 hours later. “In the spirit of fun,” the PA announcer feebly attempted to engage the crowd. “Everybody sing along!” Why the Mets had to acknowledge this, at all, in any way shape or form, when the people who did it didn’t care about the Mets, New York City, baseball, or anything except getting what actually ended up happening, which is getting a puerile piece of crap played over the PA at Shea. Thankfully, everyone ignored it, except for two people over in the next section, who clearly must have been drinking.

If I sound cranky, I refer you to the box score at that moment in the game.

There were good things in the game: Delgado’s home run, Church being a reliable corner outfielder, Beltran being Beltran. And even Oliver getting frustrated when he struck out with two runners on base was positive, because it was a visible sign that he gave a damn. Of course, I would have wished that it hadn’t thrown his mojo off for the rest of the game (conjecture, but possible, no?).

We dragged ourselves onto a Manhattan-bound 7 train and slowly crawled back to Greenpoint, not talking very much. As I stood waiting for the bus at Court Square, several people approached me with hopeful smiles: “Did they win?” I shook my head, look of woe on my face. It is not that bad, is it? Or is it? I worry about Jose. I worry about Luis Castillo. I worry about Delgado, despite recent production.

At least baseball is back; at least the season has started; at least the winter has ended and spring is here. All of those things, at least,  are sufficient to be thankful for.  Whether the Mets will bring us any more remains to be seen.

But three days a week, when the Mets are in town, I will be back at Shea, waiting and watching and hoping and cheering. There is comfort and solace and consistency and joy in the ritual of doing this, no matter where it is. One more time at Shea.  We are back on Friday (probably) and Saturday (definitely), and next week, and the next week, and the next week. Stop by and say hello.

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