Friday, September 07, 2007

THE HOT DOGS ON THE FIELD LEVEL ARE BETTER. [09-07-07]

If I even began to tell you what kind of two weeks I have had - okay, wait, how about I just tell you. Let me start with walking into work two Mondays ago and being laid off (from a job I barely started and hoped to stay at for years) along with half of my team. I’ve been pounding the virtual and literal pavement and I am lucky that I have a resume that makes me in demand, but it’s more exhausting than actually working. (This will also, I hope, explain the lightness of recent entries.) Today, I had a 10am interview and then a 2pm interview and then a 3:30 “meet and greet” and I am walking the streets of Midtown in my best suit (which is wool and silk) and heels (not my kind of footwear) and it has been like this all week (and last week too) and I am just WORN OUT.

So when my 2pm finished at 2:45 and my 3:30 cancelled, my first thought was: how quickly can I get home, get changed, and get out to Shea? By the time I got back to Brooklyn, I just wanted a nap, but I knew that I would feel better just being at Shea, even if I only caught 15 minutes of BP. So I changed clothes and reversed course and made it to Shea a little after 5pm. Although I was bitching about the MTA (the reason it took me an hour to get back to Greenpoint from Midtown, and then half an hour from Greenpoint to the 7 again) and wondering if it wouldn’t have been better just to wait for TBF to get home, when I got off the 7 train and walked down the stairs, I realized that just being able to walk around Shea without 60 gazillion people there and have it be somewhat calm and empty already brought my blood pressure down several notches. I walked over to Gate C, around the morons who do not understand the concept of the bag line and the no bag line (e.g., people with no bags go into the bag line and then stand there waiting for their non-existent bags to be searched), up to the field level and down to the row behind the photographer’s pit like I owned the fucking place.

(Which, to some extent, I feel like I do. On some level.)

I don’t know how often you get to BP but BP during the week is much different than BP on Friday, and forget BP on the weekend. BP before school is out is much different than after school is out. Et cetera. And, today for some reason was more crowded than my usual barometers would have led me to believe. I feel sorry for the kids who come to BP with their balls and sharpies and expect that yelling “HEY, WRIGHT” at #5 will mean that he will just drop everything and come running over. But they’re kids; who I really end up blaming is their parents. I try, sometimes, to quietly tell a parent who I can tell is new to this that they should take the kids down to the outfield, where they can get to the front row and the pitchers more often come over to sign than I’ve ever, ever seen in the infield during BP. Some of the position players are also known to sign out there, when they come out to say howdy to their buddies or whatever reason they end up out there.

Today was like summer, in that there were dozens of people screaming “DAVID! JOSE!” repeatedly, occasional calls for Lo Duca or Delgado - and before you remind me that Carlos is on the DL, I will point out that I am well aware of this and also knew that the player they were yelling DELGADO at was none other than Mr. Marlon Anderson, who bears no resemblance to Carlos except perhaps in the color of his suntan.

I, however, [heart] Marlon Anderson. So after the 12th person yelled DELGADO at him, I realized he had noticed that I was taking photos of him, and yelled, “Marlon! Thanks for the hits! How about a nice smile!”

Of course, then the dozens of people yelling DELGADO started yelling MARLON or ANDERSON which ended my nice photographic moment. And that was fine, because that was about the time I noticed this gentleman standing on the field being interviewed, and almost totally lost my shit:

I realize this is old hat for most of you, but for me, this is the closest I have ever been to Tom Terrific and I just could not stop taking photos, and thinking - YOU IDIOTS! TOM FUCKING SEAVER IS RIGHT THERE!!! He’s kind of busy right now and I don’t know that he’s the warmest and fuzziest but WHY AREN’T YOU ALL YELLING TOM SEAVER? No, seriously people. Even before I knew one small thing about baseball I knew perfectly well who Tom Seaver was and knew he was a Met and that he was important. So there is no way, no way at all, that anyone enough of a fan to buy some kind of clothing that says METS and buy a ticket to a game and know enough about going to baseball games to get there early enough for batting practice THAT THEY WOULDN’T KNOW WHO THE HELL TOM SEAVER WAS.

Did I mention I got to take some photos of Tom Seaver? Holy crap.

Once the Astros took the field for BP, I was kind of at overload, and I like my quiet time sitting in my seat while they draw the lines and water the infield, just Jose Reyes likes coming out into the dugout by himself for a few minutes before the game starts. (At least that’s the way I imagine it in my mind, because, really, who knows? He might be banished to the dugout by his teammates because his energy level is driving them insane.) But before I went upstairs, I went to the Nathan’s on the field level, all the way out in right field. And I shouldn’t have, but I ordered a hot dog with sauerkraut and french fries, figuring it would all at least be reasonably hot, since it was only, oh, 6:05 or something like that.

I have to tell you I don’t think I can eat another hot dog at Shea ever again. It was moist, delicious, perfectly hot, the fries were salted and the exact combination of crisp crust and inside mush that Nathan’s fries should be. Let me just say, it is not like that upstairs, not even at the Grand Central Food Court behind home plate on the mezzanine, not even when I have arrived early and partaken of food from there.

Crap.

So I went upstairs and settled in. I would have called TBF but I wanted to surprise him with the photos. I tried calling my friend Alan, he of Mariners charter seats and his own corner of his own baseball room with a photograph of Mr. Seaver, he who grew up rooting for the Big Red Machine, but Alan is the father of twins and does not answer his phone often. Alan, I wanted to say, I was standing at BP with a couple of hundred people and I am the one standing there going, TOM SEAVER IS RIGHT THERE. Since he and his wife had a hand in the creation of MetsGrrl (and in the shidduch of MG + TBF), I thought he would be a little proud and happy to hear about that. But instead, I played with my new camera and got ready for the tribute to Gil Hodges.

And then, the game. Once the Mets decided to get some hits, and Pelf calmed down a little, things were fine and dandy. Once we widened that spread from 2-6 and went upward, TBF put his feet up and relaxed, and as the runs increased, he kept saying, “It’s been a long time since we enjoyed an old-fashioned beatdown.” But even as he kept saying it, I kept eyeing the scoreboard waiting for the Mets to blow a 9-run lead, or, you know, do what they have been doing, which is let teams like Pittsburgh and Cincinnati gain 7 or 8 runs back on a perfectly healthy lead, the kind of lead that you would expect from a team in first place. So I could tell you about that, and Endy being back, and Carlos Gomez being back, and about Lastings’ incredible dive and Endy’s flight of the bumblebee in the outfield to catch a ball that Alou would still be thinking about catching, and Sosa getting that out with the bases loaded.  And I can tell you all about the sheer and utter joy about joy of photographing this game WITH MY NEW CAMERA, the Nikon D4 and accompanying lenses that a recent windfall helped finance. The ability to not just have three frames in rapid succession, but to be able to follow Lastings Milledge from bat on ball to every step around the bases was heaven. Heaven!

And, heaven, of course, is that last out for Houston and the sounds of “Taking Care of Business” as we scurry out of Shea and head for the 7. The Phillies lost, the magic number is 17, and the days towards October are ticking away on the calendar.

I hope you will take the time to go through the many, many lovely photos of today’s BP and the game, because there were far too many, and trust me when I say this is but a small representative sample.