Friday night's promotional handout was smart, compact and may even work the next time wet rain falls for real, but I prefer we let Jae Seo be our umbrella. He protects us against all kind of bad elements: Wilkerson, Vidro, Schneider…such unappealing sorts you should never encounter in a dark alley or a well-lit ballpark.
He also keeps Kaz Ishii far, far away.
It's a one-game winning streak for the Mets as well as for me — 1-0 in the Stars & Stripes cap that I nearly left on the train home but, like the Mets and their need for a run, remembered to grab at almost the last minute.
How marvy it was to land on the right side of a shutout at Shea. Laurie and I continued our trail of tiers, this time landing in the upper deck, a fine place to take in a game of baseball and a view of Queens, even though I can never quite shake the feeling that I've volunteered for stadium steerage. Shea only has an upper deck, I believe, because it can't economically shove enough people in the lower levels. Reminds me of a bit Bruce McCulloch did on The Kids in the Hall in which he was a minimum-wage employee. I paraphrase: “Minimum wage? You mean you're paying me the very least allowable by law?”
If the Mets could stick their budget/tardy/non-alcoholic customers on the moon, I think they would.
But I'm not complaining, not really. We had a successful duel and I had an adequate knish (conceding to the first concession that didn't require an extended wait along the limited-assortment concourse) plus a middle-innings summit with one of our esteemed blolleagues. I don't want to drop any names, but let's just say that as soon as the Mets scored, he had to walk off to his assigned seat.
Quite a horse race, this Wild Card chase. Being in the upper deck means being at eye-level with the scoreboard, and being as much of a contender as we apparently are, I couldn't take my eyes off of it. I wished for significance from every score. I wanted CIN's demolition of ARI to mean something other than a few sad ARIzonans. Maybe they'll still be despondent when we go out there. Though I was into it in principle, I couldn't get that much pleasure from SDP taking it to ATL since ATL is largely irrelevant to the standing of NYM. PIT, on the other hand, is to be congratulated on slamming PHI in the battle of PEN (yeah, I know it's PA but I'll bet the Shea scoreboard operator doesn't).
It was Irish Night. No great significance to it except one guy brought his bagpipes to the upper deck. Just him — no band or corps or whatever more than one bagpipist constitutes. Laurie called bagpipes the worst instrument ever invented. I have yet to rank them, but there's an Awesomely Bad VH-1 countdown just waiting to be produced.
I said bagpipes are the most annoying instrument ever invented, Greg. And there was some sort of drum (third most annoying instrument ever invented) corps up there too, about 4 sections over. Even though the upper deck has recently become my new home due to the banishment of us non-alcoholic (and therefore doubly low-spending…) types to its skyward regions, I must agree that it is the ghetto of Shea. We are obviously the crappest of the crap to them, and are thusly treated.
Oh, and the second most annoying instrument ever invented (annoying drumroll, please)… our survey says… THE VIOLIN!
We're Bagpipes — We're Annoying, But We're Not So Bad.