All Gone

via Marty Noble's blog:

"The final upright moment of any part of Shea Stadium passed at 11:25 a.m. today. That piece was from Section 5, between the plate and first base. Jeff Wilpon says the plan remains to have all the debris replaced by a parking lot by Opening Day."

Somehow, I feel this deserves more commemoration than it's getting. Of course, as was pointed out to me last night, I get very sentimental over baseball. And I'm a sentimental Mets fan, so I think pretty much everything about its coming down deserves some sort of commemoration.

UPDDATE:

This is from William Valderrama, and is almost hard to watch. The sound of the fall is intense.

Spring Training, etc.

I've been to three pre-season Mets games in Florida since I last posted, and so I obviously have a lot to share. Regretfully, I haven't had a lot of time to write. I'm going to post about our amazing trip ASAP, but in the interim, I present my favorite commercial of the year:

drumroll, please

on the bridge from the subway to the stadium on Sunday, there was a drummer from the MTA's bring-music-to-the-masses program. I'm sure he did some other tunes during the gig, but I heard only this while making my way to the gate.

love for Ramon Castro

at the ballpark last Thursday, I was finally able to capture a short video as evidence for why my family and I so love Ramon Castro.




anyone who uses Darth Vader's theme (The Imperial March, for those uninitiated) as his batting music jumps straight to the top of the cool list with me, LHJ, and SJG.

Take Me Out to the Ballgame

Mr. Met style.

Jose Reyes Spanish Academy

I know the quality is terrible, but this is probably my favorite part of every home game (that doesn't happen on the field, of course).




turn it up-- it's all about the sound on this.

putting the band back together

Game 40: Cubs 5, Mets 4
26-14 for the season


the day started out poorly for me, with my stomach being messy, which meant I wasn't able to get to Shea until a little after noon, at which time it was too late to get onto field level with my nose-bleed ticket. though I walked the length of the park on the next level up looking for my dad down in the orange seats, I was unsuccessful. I guess we'll have to try again later in the season.





this must have been a give-away at some point in the last 15 years. it was pretty cute to see a grown man carrying it.

though I wasn't able to get onto field level, I did spy Willie having a conversation with some folks out the side of the dugout 45 minutes or so before game time.

the field was messed up by the rain yesterday and then the playing on soggy ground, so the choir that sang the National Anthem was forced to do it on the dirt.

our seats were where I usually sit, in the upper deck as close to home as possible. SRL and I were there when the game started, but when KJB showed up he was really freaked out by the height. rather than force KJB to look away from the game the whole time, we set out to find seats closer to the field.

after being kicked out of the Lodge boxes all the way in right field, we settled in the back of the section, a little closer to 1st base. I remembered why so many people think of Shea as a crappy ballpark-- in most of the Mezzanine and all of the Lodge sections, the overhang means you lose sight of the ball when it goes up in the air. since I normally sit in the upper deck, I don't face that problem, and so have great sight lines and not many complaints about the stadium.

we missed a little more than a half-inning before getting settled again, which caused me to stop scoring the game entirely-- missing so much made it seem futile. I'm now a bit sorry I stopped-- it would have been fun to get the bottom of the 9th down-- but it doesn't really matter. it was the first time I'd been to a game in a loooooong time with folks who aren't really invested in baseball, and so it seemed better to hang out with them than to cling to my desire to score the game.

Carlos Gomez, just a bit older than 21, is having the time of his life in the show. He'd picked up his first two RBIs the night before.

BFFs for more than half our lives: we've been having so much fun putting the band back together since they both moved back to NY last summer.

at the end of the 8th, it was looking like the Mets were going to lose 5-1, and SRL had to head back to the city for a work function. KJB and I moved down to the boxes at that point, and so were in a great position to see David Wright get a hit and an RBI in his first major league appearance as a pinch-hitter ever, and to watch Carlos Delgado hit the ball that drove in the winning run of the game. it did look as the ball was moving off of Delgado's bat and toward right field that it was going to be an out, but the Cubbies second baseman dove for it and missed...



...and the crowd went wild!

the team was too excited by the awesome win to do any kind of formal lineup-- the jumped all over each other and then off the field. it was the perfect way to end the last game before the Yanks come to Queens this weekend.

later on that night, after a yummy dinner and lots of fun hanging out with my cousins and their awesome partners, JRG and I rested up for the excitement of the weekend series against the Yankees. her papa is pretty excited about this series... his mom kept teasing him last night that you could say "M, how's the baby?" and he would say, "the Mets are going to bury the Yanks this weekend!" which may be true, but in fairness, he'd be saying it right after having given his daughter the perfect swaddle and while cooking dinner for all of us.

rain out

here's my ticket to tonight's game.




look right under the "SHEA STADIUM," the part where it says "NO REFUND IF RAINED OUT."



and now look at why I'm not at Shea tonight.

on the upside, this will give me time to catch up on some posts, and maybe finish off the Africa trip in our travel blog, finally. on the even more upside, I've got two more games to go to this week-- the first tomorrow afternoon with SRL and KJB, the second on Sunday night (yes, against the Yankees) with CBN. I'm so excited for both games-- and to get out to Shea around 11 tomorrow morning to watch batting practice with my dad from the field level. he'll be sitting field level for the game with a friend of his with S, K and I are up in the nosebleeds, but I'm really excited to see BP with my dad-- I think it's been more than 20 years since we did that.

in the stands

one of the particularities of attending most games at Shea is the sound of a cow-bell at important moments in the game. the cow-bell is weilded by a guy we all know as Cow Bell Man. he happened to be in our section for one of Pelfrey's few strikeouts on Saturday, and the sound is unmistakable.



the "yeah" at the end of this video is LHJ, excited by the strikeout.




the inning over, Cow Bell Man left to bring his sounds to other sections.




ha! I'd never seen this shirt before, but I love it. click on the picture for the hilarious detail.




for the All-Star Game? for President? I'm confused.





I do love my new sweatshirt.

High Quality Stupid

SJ and I sat in the top row of my family's favorite place in the park (if you can't be on field level, of course, which most of us can't most of the time) on Thursday night; the Upper Deck Boxes, right behind home. in the last row of the Upper Reserved section behind us sat an extremely loud, enthusiastic, and as it turned out, drunk couple. the Boyfriend was a Phillies fan, the Girlfriend a Mets fan.

for the first four innings, in between each pitch, they called out their slogans; "Sit him down, Moyer" from him, "Let's go Tommy, sit him down!" from her. they weren't the only reliable screamers in this section-- there was also a guy behind us who, at least three times each inning that Jamie Moyer pitched, yelled "Suck it, Moy-ah!" in his deep Long Island accent. perhaps the most annoying/amusing (and really, it would be hard to distinguish between the two at most points in the evening, though we laughed about it a lot) was the constant repetition of the same harangues over and over, with almost no reduction in enthusiasm as the game wore on. As SJ commented when the woman in front of as mentioned that they might at least say something new, "these are not likely to be the most creative individuals we've ever encountered."

Of course, there was some evolution in their cries as the game progressed; full last names got shortened or nicknamed (Glavine went from Tommy to T to Glav in three innings out of the Girlfriend's mouth) at some point in the top of the 3rd, the Girlfriend started screaming "Tommy, where'se your youth at?" at Glavine. It took all the willpower in my body not to turn around and explain to the Girlfriend that his youth had gone at some point in the 41 years since his birth, and that was perfectly appropriate.

SJ was sure they'd be done with the active screaming by the 4th-- turned out she was half right.




this video is not in any way interesting for its visual content; it's all for the audio of the "Suck it" guy and the Girlfriend.



in the top of the 4th, the Girlfriend suddenly stopped cheering. when the Boyfriend went to the bathroom, SJ turned to see why she'd shut up and found that the Girlfriend had passed out.



this didn't stop the Boyfriend from continuing his constant cheering and jeering. at some point late in the game he started the begging-- "can we just score some runs?! is that too much to ask?!" and the "where's the pitch? where. is. that. pitch?!" you can hear him pleading in the video above, again not visually interesting but taken for the audio. so sad. so drunk.

the Boyfriend left the Girlfriend passed out a couple of times, but when he was in the stands he was engaging in an ever-escalating verbal pissing match with one of the guys in a group of five who happened to be sitting just across the stairs from SJ and me.




eventually, the Girlfriend woke up and got into it with the antagonist in our row. "You're not even a real fan," she screamed. "You're not even wearing a jersey!" The antagonist pulled off his jacket to reveal that he was indeed wearing a jersey, at which point the Girlfriend came down to the boxes and pulled off her sweatshirt, screaming "you don't even know who I'm rocking! I'm rocking the Reyes, I'm a real fan!"

(you may be able to tell from the picture above of the final confrontation that she's actually wearing a Doc Gooden t-shirt, conferring on her a longer-standing fandom than Reyes would, but also a questionable attitude toward substance abuse. this picture was taken right before she fell on her ass.)

the Boyfriend got involved, and then Security got involved, and the Boyfriend wasn't sober enough to know that protesting wasn't going to help, and the last time we saw him he was face first against the wall behind the stands, being handcuffed.