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My first encounter with a rain delay. I headed for Shea a little late and when I transferred to the 7 at Court Square, my phone went off with a text from TBF, informing me that first pitch was delayed. At that point, unless I wanted to go back home and get the car, or ditch the game (fat chance), I pretty much had to head to Shea and wait it out. This time I was in our seats since my loge-friends were on vacation - but at least our seats are under the overhang, by quite a comfortable margin. Unless there’s serious wind blowing rain won’t impact us all season.
I [heart] our seats. In fact, I like them more than LA & M’s loge seats, because we are straight up from third base, even if we are one more level up. There was an elderly couple in the seats next to me, keeping score, and they had binoculars. I know I have a pair somewhere, which would seem to be welcome equipment on a weekly basis.
The highlight of the rain delay was watching Mets Weekly reruns on Diamondvision, so I could see Wright and Floyd on MTV’s Total Request Live (something which, had I known about in advance, would have had *somebody* TiVO). Highest of high comedy.
Tonight I finally got to meet my compatriots for the rest of the year. The row behind us is a lot of very smart, very fanatic, very funny people, who know a fucking LOT about baseball. There was the token Yankees fan in full regalia in the front row of the section, and a random single guy in between us who felt the need to yell, “YANKEES SUCK!” about every 7 minutes - which would of course cause the MFY fan to get up and posture, various insults be yelled back and forth, and then the whole cycle would begin again in another 10 minutes: “IN CASE YOU FORGOT: YANKEES SUCK!” Again, highest of high comedy.
Yeah, we took the Marlins, 9-3.
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The first game of the season! Finally. This year, I am all about taking the 7 train and not driving, saving gas, conserving, plus it really is an easy commute from home… there is very little excuse (okay, at least there isn’t on the way out to Shea; coming home, waiting for the G train, I manage to come up with a long list).
You would think that after everything I went through to get my seats, that I would have been running upstairs to sit in them… but for some reason I chickened out and snuck into the Loge to sit with my friends who also have the Tuesday-Friday plan - let’s call them LA and M for short. I didn’t even go upstairs to watch some of the game from the seats. I think I was afraid to compare them to LA & M’s seats or that maybe I made the wrong decision (I had to do this on my own, since TBF was working out of town at the time).
But a chance to check out the new guys, and see the old favorites. It was big and overwhelming and reminding me how much I still have to learn about baseball.
Oh, and we won.
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I was just going to roll up some time around noon, until a friend who also has the Tuesday-Friday plan mentioned he was going to get there at 10:30, and by the time we finish talking and I mention that I’d like to take some photos… we are now meeting at 10.
I wake up excited. Unreasonably so. It’s not even a game. But still, to wake up and pull out my Mets jersey and drive out to Shea for the first time this year is undeniably exciting.
I park under the Grand Central scurry across the parking lot towards gate A. While it is bright and sunny and unseasonably warm (and I am dressed accordingly), on the far side of the stadium it is windy and FREEZING and we have an hour and a half to wait… before the gates open up and I scurry down onto field level to the first section where I can get front row.
After all of that, and the anticipation of waiting, it was a little bit anti-climactic; just like watching batting practice with the Pepsi Party Patrol thrown in, nothing organized, no introductions, and without a yearbook most of us can’t tell the brand new players by face (and most of them are wearing jackets over their batting practice jerseys so we don’t have numbers to help us out).
We were there until 3, and it was warm enough to get sunburned, and I got a ton of great photos. Most of all, it was just great to be in the park again, the vivid blue and green reminding me of last summer, watching baseball.
And taking photos of David Wright’s ass.
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I freely admit that I know very little about baseball. I freely admit that I am learning (if you read anything above, you will note that there is zero attempt at posturing). There are many other excellent and smart individuals on the internet who can provide you with meaningful statistics and analysis; if you come here looking for that, it’s your own fault.
legal disclaimer:
Metsgrrl.com is in no way affiliated with, condoned or given any notice by the New York Metropolitans baseball club, who have their own website. Similarly, we have no association with the ownership group or any businesses related to the Mets. All article text is written by the authors, all pictures are taken by the authors, who retain copyright to their works. No copying or reproduction of any content here, photographic or otherwise, is authorized. Please email us if you wish to reproduce our work or put these photos on your blog (the answer will, most probably be no. Sorry.)
In other words: If you think this is the an official Mets web site, you need help. Don’t take the stuff that’s on here, especially without asking. Play nicely with the other children.
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When I started dating The Boyfriend (hereinafter TBF), for me to have objected to him being a baseball (and Mets) fanatic would have been like saying, “I don’t like the color of your eyes, can you do something about that?” I knew full well what I was getting into, and truthfully, thought it was something to be admired. It wasn’t that I didn’t like baseball, but that my father wasn’t a huge sports fan (only recently - as a result of All Of This—have I learned that he actually grew up an enormous baseball fan, cutting Hebrew School to sneak into Ebbets Field, and was one of those people who stopped following baseball once the Dodgers left Brooklyn) and I never dated anyone who had enough patience to explain any game to me. I had friends who were big baseball fans and so I have been to more than my share of games, especially when I was living out West, so it wasn’t like I hated baseball—I just didn’t know a damn thing about it.
In 2004, when I moved back to NYC, we went to one game together - I don’t know why we didn’t go to more, probably because I was dealing with moving and unpacking and settling in. But in 2005, that all changed.
I can’t tell you what it was, exactly; we were living together (for all intents and purposes) at that point so I had a better idea of how many games he was going to. And we didn’t have a lot of other plans for the summer. I do know that at some point I said, “I think we should plan on going to a lot more games this summer,” and, well, we did. I went to 10 games last year, at least two of which I went to on my own (after TBF had gone back to the Midwest to work for the year).
Having the friends-as-baseball-fanatics, as well as other friends who had the Tuesday-Friday plan, gave me a lot of ideas. From the friends-out-West I understood the importance of getting in on any kind of seasonal plan before the new stadium was reality.
And I liked it.
And I kept trying to talk to TBF about it, but he is, shall we say, a little more fiscally conservative than I am.
I had a really good month at work last November, about the time the Mets were emailing me to put down my deposit now for the 2006 season, and so I just did it, thinking that we would just talk about it later.
And then I got my phone call from Vito at Guest Services. I guess it’s time to talk to TBF.
He was a little speechless when I told him we were going to get the Tuesday-Friday plan for 2006. Good speechless, but it was a little scary for those first few seconds when he didn’t say anything.
I went out to Shea in December to pick out our seats, and give them the rest of our money, and started my first official season as a baseball fan on April 2, 2006.
This blog is an attempt to chronicle this first year. I wish I had had this brilliant idea back in December, and I could have started writing then. I am a writer, so generally, the way I remember things and work them out and commemorate important events is to write. But in this case, I was loving baseball even more because it was something I *didn’t* have to write about.
But, I’m a writer; I write. So I am starting this for real in June, and having to go back and reconstruct everything that happened before then. It is likely (okay, probable) that the early posts on here will suck as a result.
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Q. Who are you?
A. I’m a girl in Brooklyn who has, fairly recently, fallen in love with baseball and the Mets. A good place to start is the link titled Introduction, or HOW IT STARTED.
Q. Why Mets Grrl? What’s up with the GRRL thing?
A. Like Riot Grrl. All kidding aside, it was a deliberate choice. Yes, the era of Riot Grrl is over - heck, even Sleater-Kinney broke up - but the ethos and what it represented is still important to me.
Q. You don’t know shit about baseball. Blah blah WHIP blah blah ERA blah blah 1973 Mets blah blah blah.
A. Please to read my disclaimer. Thanks for writing.
Q. Your profile says you’re a writer. What else do you write?
A. Lots of things. But I like that everyone reading me here is reading me without any preconceptions, so I’m going to keep the pseudonym for now. However, if you’re an editor who wants to offer me a book deal, drop me a line and I’ll gladly send you the name of my literary agent. :)
Q. [Insert inappropriate overly personal question here that you’d never send to a guy writing a Mets blog.]
A. Next question?
Q. Do you like any other sports?
A. No.
Q. Will you link to my blog? Do you want to trade links?
A. I don’t trade links. I link to blogs I read and think are cool, and I’d hope that people link to me because they read me and think I’m cool. But I love hearing about new blogs and check everything out to hope that, well, I read them and think they are cool… which ends up with me putting them on my links list. :)
MetsGrrl.com is the home for the baseball musings and photography of your charming hostess, Caryn Rose.
I’m a writer and a photographer who documents rock and roll, New York City, and baseball. I am also a radical ne’er-do-well who worships at the churches of Bruce Springsteen and Joe Strummer. I am not as young as you wish I was or as old as you think. I have never hidden the fact that I am new to all of this (see “the long story” below).
In addition to metsgrrl.com, I also run a baseball travel site called All Down The Line, have a baseball tumblr where I talk about every other team besides the Mets at Talking About Baseball, and co-host a podcast with Julie DiCaro (from Cubs blog A League of Her Own called Throwing Like A Girl (Sundays at 6:30pm EST on Blog Talk Radio).
By day, I’m a technical project/program manager who’s been working on the web since 1995. I am an expert in social media and online community. I also write about rock and roll (with a focus on Bruce Springsteen), and New York City. I’m also a photographer. 99% of what you see on MetsGrrl.com is my work. I am also an aspiring novelist, with two-and-a-half completed manuscripts (third one nearing completion). (And If you’re an editor who’d like to help with that, drop me a line and I’ll give you the name of my agent.)
the long story:
This site started as a private Blogger blog back in the Spring of 2006, when I had just laid money down for a Tuesday-Friday plan at Shea, and wanted to keep a diary about my first real year as a baseball fan. At the time I knew very little about baseball, and had taken the step of purchasing a plan (as opposed to just going to games whenever) because I wanted to make sure that my Mets-fan-from-birth boyfriend (referred to on this site as TBF) had some kind of priority in the new Mets stadium. I had started going to games regularly during the 2005 season, and liked it pretty good, so I figured, hey, why not?
This is what Shea looked like the day I drove out to Flushing to pick out my seats for the 2006 season:
At some point during the spring of 06, some of the sites on my blogroll noticed hits coming to their site from mine, and they came over to take a look around. To my complete and utter surprise, they liked what I was doing, and started telling their friends. By the end of the year, I had been interviewed for Mets Weekly, had gone to my first road game, started photographing baseball, and had to figure out how to move the blog off Blogger because it wasn’t my little private project any more.
This is the last thing I ever thought I would be doing.
My family are not baseball fans. My father, who was born in Flatbush, is one of those guys who stopped following baseball when the Dodgers left Brooklyn. He used to cut Hebrew School to go to Ebbets Field. (I never knew any of these things until very recently.) Like everyone in Seattle (where I lived for 9 years), I sort of jumped on the Mariners bandwagon in 1995 and went to a handful of games a year. I had plenty of baseball-loving friends, but no team of my own until 2005. (You can read more about all of this here.)
This site is called “MetsGrrl” because I’m a cranky punk rock feminist. (The ‘grrl’ part comes from the Riot Grrl movement.) I wanted people to know right away that this site was written by a woman, but I also wanted to make sure I wasn’t mistaken for one of those girls in the pink hats that screams every time David Wright brushes dirt off of his uniform. I write from a feminist viewpoint, and yes, I favor baseball blogs written by women in my blogrolls and will do so until we have more of a majority. Deal with it.
I’m not a historian or a statistician, and although I have learned a tremendous amount since I started this site, I am completely transparent about what I do and don’t know. If you came here looking for a statistical argument, however, you’re in the wrong place, and there are plenty of fantastic sites that do that.
What I write about is what I know, and what I know is what it feels like to be at a baseball game, what it’s like to live in New York City and watch a New York City team and be a baseball fan in the greatest city in the world. There’s also a lot of attitude and a little rock and roll and from time to time, you get a picture of my cat. (It is a chick blog, after all.)
The beautiful thing about the internet is that if you don’t like it, you can start your own, or read one of the dozens of other fantastic Mets blogs that are out there.
Email me at MG at metsgrrl dot com. [Remove words, add symbols.]
Thanks for reading.
Caryn
LEGAL DISCLAIMER:
Metsgrrl.com is in no way affiliated with, condoned or given any notice by the New York Metropolitan Baseball Club, Inc., or Major League Baseball, who have their own websites. Similarly, we have no association with the ownership group or any businesses related to the Mets. All article text is written by the authors, all pictures are taken by the authors, who retain copyright to their works. No copying or reproduction of any content here, photographic or otherwise, is authorized. Please email us if you wish to reproduce our work or put these photos on your blog (the answer will, most probably be no. Sorry.)
In other words: If you think this is the an official Mets web site, you need help. Don’t take the stuff that’s on here, especially without asking. Play nicely with the other children.
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