Tuesday, March 27, 2007

the official metsgrrl spring training report

[Administrative note: I know this post is incredibly long. But this will likely be one of the last posts before the blog moves out of Blogger and onto a proper web site, one that will allow me to have excerpts on the front page and each post on its own page. So I beg your indulgence, but if I don’t post this now, once the season gets started it will never get posted.]

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Spring training wasn’t about the tickets or the hotel or any of the other innumerable details it took to get TBF and I down to Florida last weekend. Spring training was about that first moment that the gates to the practice fields opened at 9:30am, and we walked down a dirt path in the morning sunshine. The grass was that impossible, improbable green, and instead of watching it from above you were surrounded by it. The sky was blue and gold and ringed with fluffy white clouds. The air was warm and soft and clean, the breeze that blew through the pine trees was calm and soothing. There were birds twittering in the background, and a layer of quiet underpinned it all.

Then the players walked onto the field, the royal blue uniforms the perfect contrast to the green and the sky. They are feet away, relaxed stance, smiling and laughing and decidedly normal. Your shoulders relax another few inches, climbing down from their mundane sentry posts up around your ears. The grass is still slightly wet and sparkling. You lean against a fence, breathe the air, and decide what to watch next. No pressure, though, you’ll be back again tomorrow. Sure, they may clear the spectators after 15 minutes, or after 30, but you’ll be get something you didn’t know you came here for, and you’ll be back the next day. Wait, there’s Carlos Delgado on a different field, practicing short hops with Sandy Alomar, over and over and over, and you can just stand there quietly and watch him. No one else is really paying attention, they’re all over at the other field, waiting with their Sharpies and their clean white baseballs.

Yeah, the hordes with no manners, clamoring for autographs in the middle of the workout, with their dozen balls in mesh sacks or their game-used base in a plastic grocery bag, toted by a child who is just barely bigger than said base, could piss you off and ruin the whole thing. The beauty of it is that they don’t have to.

Go stand somewhere else, and if you’re lucky, you’ll befriend one of the security guards who got married the year the Mets were born and he and his wife became Mets fans by default. He can tell you stories from 1966 or 1972 or a few weeks ago. Talk to the couple standing next to you with the disposable camera, and you’ll find out that they’re at workouts to get signatures for the wife’s father, who suffers from Lou Gehrig’s disease but loves Jose Reyes and David Wright.

Stroll over to the side field and watch the minor leaguers, who you may see on the adjoining field in a few years. Say good morning to Al Jackson as he strides by, heading for another field, where he’ll shortly be joined by the starting rotation. You can’t stand next to that fence but you can get close enough to watch them take a lesson in fielding.

Baseball happens so fast; Spring Training is where it all slows down. I can watch Aaron Heilman throw tosses or take a dozen photos of Mike Pelfrey pitching because it doesn’t count, because you’re so much closer, because you can be selective about your details. It’s zen meditation in the real world, watching the baseball arc in that familiar movement from home plate into the outfield, as you watch it trace an invisible line through the air and down into the waiting glove of the outfielder. *smack* You can hear the ball hit leather, because it is spring training and you are closer than you will ever be at Shea. You use binoculars to lip read or to see who is doing what in the bullpen or figure out what Lastings Milledge’s batting gloves look like.

That would be a good start to attempt to explain what the whole Spring Training trip was like.

Day one was figuring things out. How early did we really need to get up, how early did we really need to be there. Where do we stand, what do we do. Taking a nap in the car in the parking lot of Tradition Field after open workouts but before the game, dozing off with the sound of bats smacking balls right nearby.

We entered Tradition Field around noon. I wasn’t sure how I was going to handle seeing the Cardinals for my first baseball experience of the year, and more importantly, how I was going to handle Cardinals fans. (Okay, maybe it was more about how TBF was going to handle Cardinals fans.)  Especially since our seats were right near the visiting team’s dugout, and we arrived just towards the end of batting practice.  Of course, it’s the Cardinals, so it’s a sea of red.

I didn’t know how we were going to sit in our seats and not start a riot, no matter how well-behaved we tried to be, until we realized there were Mets fans right in front of us. I am about to be cordial when one of them turns around.
“Don’t spill beer under my chair, my purse is there.”
Um, ohhhhkkaaaaay, I think, and probably said through my expression.
“Well, you know how it is at Shea,” she continued.
Right, I thought. Which is why I don’t bring a good purse to any ballpark, ever.
A few minutes later, we overheard the same woman say, “We should just become Braves fans, their park is so much nicer.”
I quickly glance at TBF, and can tell that he has heard this.
“I’m not going to say anything,” he mutters under his breath, “Because there’s just nothing to say. I don’t care that they’re wearing Mets shirts.”

Back watching baseball, except it’s 80 degrees and I’m not wearing wool socks and six layers of polar fleece and wool. It felt surreal in that setting, like it was a movie or a tv show.  If I hadn’t spent the morning watching the players running around orange traffic cones, it would have been even weirder. We were so close, the park is so small, and after a four month break, the people we got used to seeing week after week after week are back in front of us. It was like the first day of a summer camp you went to every year, seeing the same people looking slightly different, and you are slightly different, but here you all are again.

And then there are the new guys. TBF had printed out a roster but forgot to give me mine, and my hands are full with the camera and taking notes anyway. It takes a little while to remember who is 17 and who is 3 and HoJo is 52 and Manny Acta is not at third base any more, doing his best Pete Townshend windmill to wave the runner home. I get a little dazed by it all by about the third or fourth inning, dizzy from being so close and getting up so early and trying to keep track of everything in my head, and every once in a while, picking up the camera again.

The heavens opened not long after the game ended, the traffic snarled, and instead of 15 minutes back to the hotel, it was more like 90. It doesn’t matter, there’s nothing we have to do or anywhere we have to be - except back here tomorrow morning. It feels like we’ve gone through three days in 24 hours.

On Saturday, we headed back for Tradition Field to catch morning workouts before driving down to the joint Marlins/Cardinals complex in Jupiter. But the crowd at the gate was larger and hungrier, while we are even more laid back than the day before, and protective of that vibe. We watch the bus roll out with the b squad, heading for Jupiter, and I consider the crowd and our chances of enjoyment, and suggest we head there ourselves. In the end, we walk into the fields, only to turn around about three minutes later, get in the car, and head south. (In one of the few fan-friendly moves we think the Mets have ever made, they refunded our parking fee as we left the lot.)

As lovely and warm as Florida is, it is still a state of planned communities and gated communities and despite copping out and heading for Outback for dinner Friday night, we like character and diversity. The area around Roger Dean Stadium could be a Disney complex, bland and homogeneous. We arrive so early we can park on the street for free and catch batting practice.

This is about the time we decide that we just aren’t autograph people. We aren’t like this with musicians, so it probably wasn’t very likely that we’d suddenly change course with baseball players. I had brought some 5x7 prints of photos I’d taken over last year, because I thought that would be different and personal and something I’d like to get signed (and that the players might actually like signing; I’d even brought extra prints to give them if they liked them), but in the end, the whole exchange just becomes transactional and not personal; there’s no moment, it’s all about taking something from someone.

(I don’t mean to offend you if you’re an autograph collector, but if you see what we witnessed behind the Mets dugout on Sunday morning, where two fathers—who were clearly professional autograph hounds—had three young boys sent off with commands to get a signature from a particular player, when all these kids wanted to do was go sit down.)

The idea of going to see the b squad seemed like a good one at the time. TBF was sure that courtesy mandated that the Mets would send at least one or two of the stars, but that didn’t happen. Even then, we were still liking the idea of watching Lastings Milledge take four at-bats while we are sitting behind the mesh; watching John Maine pitch a game from that proximity; seeing the other young players in action.  I’m glad we did it, but I’m not sure we’d do it again. On the other hand, TBF did get his photo taken with Billy Marlin, so he found the entire day to be a rousing success.

The fellowship of baseball fans continues to be something I study from an almost sociological angle. There are people who mistakenly believe that just because you’re a fan of a certain band, that you’ll automatically be best friends with anyone else who likes that band. Of course, that’s completely impossible, and impractical, and in a lot of cases, you actively dislike a lot of people in the audience or who call themselves fans. You aren’t going to even try to have a conversation with them.

Contrast that with baseball fans. Maybe it’s TBF, and the fact that he is a hardcore baseball curmudgeon of the first order. Maybe it’s the scorecard, maybe it’s the way he acts, but he always attracts fellow curmudgeons, and he always ends up engaged in respectful conversation with fans of the home team no matter where we go (with the exception of Yankee Stadium). Sure, at first there will be the requisite sparring, and some pointed heckling, but once that formality is out of the way, the ushers are coming over to chat with him and he ends up engaged in conversation I can only characterize as highly civilized discourse, always well-mannered, and 99.9% of the time so far above my head I get dizzy trying to follow along. This happened with Cardinal fans on Friday and happens again on Saturday with Marlins fans.

Sunday at Tradition Field was like Sunday in the upper deck at Shea. There is heckling of the highest order from the section just above us. There are three guys on vacation bemoaning their wives and mother in laws; you think they’re going to be assholes but instead, they just turn out to be wise asses (and funny, to a certain extent). But my god, do the Mets suck, and we are almost glad that we have to leave at 3:45 to get back to Orlando for the flight home - tired, sunburned, drunk on baseball and ready for the season to begin.

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