There are worse things than realizing your baseball team is bad.
For instance, there's realizing you long ago stopped noticing your baseball team is bad.
The Mets played the Marlins, and the Mets lost, with just a few bright flickers amid the gloom. There was Josh Thole, getting his first big-league RBI and continuing to show a good eye and a compact stroke. There was a nifty play at the plate, with Jeff Francoeur's throw from right bouncing up and over Thole's glove, past Elmer Dessens, off the back wall, into the hand Dessens shot desperately skyward, and from there being relayed hastily back to Thole to tag out a rather startled Dan Uggla. Just your routine 9-2-Wall-1-2 putout.
And there was Carlos Beltran, back from exile at long last. With the season thoroughly lost, I was startled by how emotional I was to see Beltran back on the field. Emily and Joshua and I had seen him on Sunday, wearing Cyclones red and white, and he looked awful, striking out three times and popping to second to end the game. (For video-board purposes the Mets somehow upgraded this to the climactic hit in a walk-off win. If only.) But he looked sufficiently like himself tonight to make you wonder what could have been: He made a sliding catch in left-center, and almost put the Mets in the lead with a drive to the right-field fence.
But almost wasn't enough, and almost was about as good as it got at Citi Field, which was empty as I've seen it this year. The silver lining to that, if I peer hard enough, was that my friend Lyle (a Mets fan relocated to L.A., with a Faith and Fear cameo involving a luckless Staten Island trip) was making his first-ever visit to Citi Field and so got to tour the park and get Blue Smoke in relative leisure. Lyle's mini-review: Great park, but feels like a replica. I can see that.
Happily, it was a beautiful night, and baseball is a pleasure even when there's nothing much to cheer about. Lyle and I camped out in the fancy Caesars Club seats (half-price on StubHub) surrounded by family and friends of the girl who sang the National Anthem, most of whom departed about halfway through the game. Lyle caught a shirt; as the game ground on the already-sparse crowd dwindled sufficiently that we seemed like a near-lock to get a birthday flower cake or be summoned for the latest round of combat between those age-old rivals the forklift and the light tower. (I snagged two abandoned t-shirts made to celebrate the anthem singer's big night. No, I'm not sure why.) In the eighth inning Lyle and I realized that we were the only motivated parties left in a two-section stretch of prime foul-ball territory; we spent the ninth standing on either side of a railing, on our toes like the world's oldest ballhawks.
Which was when two interlopers arrived, obviously to steal our about-to-arrive foul balls.
But wait! It was my co-blogger, accompanied by longtime Faith and Fear reader Sharon. They'd wandered into our section randomly.
One of the things I've liked best about Citi Field is that the funneling of traffic from the rotunda along the field-level concourse to the bridge and the eating area and from there to the escalators virtually guarantees that I'll run into someone I know. I'd said as much to Lyle, which of course meant this time I encountered nobody … until Greg and Sharon arrived. I started to note triumphantly that my point had been proven in rather dramatic fashion, then looked around the somnolent, nearly vacant ballpark and reconsidered the odds. The Mets finished losing, with nary a foul ball heading our way, and bloggers and guests said farewell and headed out of the park into an ever-longer night of an ever-shorter season.
As the season gets shorter, curl up with Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets, available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or a bookstore near you. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.
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