Peeking Around Corners

There was a midweek day game peeking out at me from behind a corner. That’s usually how I peek in at midweek day games. The TV in my office isn’t something I can watch full-on directly from my desk; thanks to the modern-enough set’s placement inside an ancient, undersized “entertainment center,” I can only be so entertained while I’m working. It’s probably better that way. When 1:10 PM rolls around, even if the Mets are playing, I’m usually supposed to be engaged by what’s on this screen, not distracted by what’s on that screen.

Yet once in a great while, you have to leave behind both screens and see what’s going on from whence the images are emanating. That is to say that for the first time in a couple of seasons, I allowed myself a midweek afternoon game in person.

In September, no less. This September, which isn’t just any September, because no September is just any September when something is riding on the outcome of every game, whatever day it’s scheduled, whatever time it starts. In other Septembers, it’s almost a badge of honor, however perverse, to engage in your team’s evaporation from sight. “You’re gonna go see the Mets today? Why? They’re out of it!” In those Septembers, the horizon is barren. You’ll miss baseball when it’s gone, you’re pretty sure, but you won’t miss this team that’s playing out the string.

In this September, the 2025 Mets of right now are still figuring out what tableau will fill their immediate horizon — emptiness or October. Every game all year counts the same. These games in late September suddenly count more than anything else. Hence, what could have been one last fun detour from the everyday mundane became what we within our obsession call important.

I don’t know if the kid on the platform at Jamaica understood the Wild Card implications of the Mets and Padres at 1:10 on a Thursday afternoon. He just knew his dad was taking him to a game when other kids’ dads weren’t doing the same for them. The kid, 5 or 6 years old at most, wore a jersey that said deGROM 48 on the back. The dad wore HERNANDEZ 17. As we awaited the connection at Woodside, the dad asked my advice regarding the next transfer. Would I be on the LIRR that takes you to Mets-Willets Point, or the 7 that takes you to essentially the same place? I recommended the 7 in this case, given the wait time for the Port Washington train whose stop near Citi Field is convenient only if it gets you there for first pitch. The next one of those wouldn’t.

When this game loomed on the calendar, and my friend Jeff told me he was coming up from the DC area and suggested we get together for it, the LIRR’s availability took center stage. There was talk of an engineers strike starting on September 18. How the hell do I get to a game without the LIRR? I studied bus routes and road maps, and wondered if I was capable of driving to a ballgame for the first time in twenty years. But then the LIRR issues were submitted to some sort of panel in Washington, and if there’s going to be a strike, it won’t be this season. The trains, as they say, are being made to run on time, or as close as the LIRR ever gets to it. Either way, I told the dad that he and his kid were better off taking the 7. The dad asked if they could follow me. I said sure. It’s just a flight of stairs here and a flight of stairs there, but I don’t mind being my fellow Mets fans’ pregame commuting security blanket.

The kid, I noticed, was making like the midweek day game itself, peeking out from behind a corner, specifically one of the pillars on the platform on Jamaica, while his dad and I spoke. He seemed more excited than wary of his day at the ballpark, but a stranger is a stranger and a kid is a kid.

“Is this his first game?” I asked the dad.

“No, not his first, but it’s our first ‘just the boys’ game,” meaning him and his son. The dad delighted in telling me of his scheme. He snuck out to the car and left the deGrom jersey inside. Then, when the kid got in the vehicle and saw the jersey, Dad informed him, “You’re not going to school today.” The kid had been asking all season to go to a game. His wish was coming true. The dad’s dad did this for him once, surprising him with sanctioned truancy at Shea Stadium, and now it was his turn. The dad loved the story so much, he repeated it to a pair of young women who wandered by a moment later.

Me, I got chills just thinking about it. My dad never pulled me out of school to take me to a game — we weren’t “boys,” exactly — but he got me home from a serendipitously arranged eye doctor appointment the morning of October 16, 1969, so I could see clearly the conclusion to Game Five of the World Series. Oh yeah, I’d lead these boys up that first flight of stairs at Woodside, wait for them to get their OMNY cards, wait for them to tap themselves through the turnstiles, and then lead them up that second flight of stairs until they were on the same 7 train as me. That kid was going to go a Mets game on Thursday if I had any small thing to do with it.

Getting to and inside the ballpark for a day game is a string of small things, from clearing one’s own decks, to divining and achieving transit connections, to negotiating the entrance labyrinth (security plucking and confiscating my sealed 20-ounce bottle of diet carbonated beverage product in May appears to have been a one-time affront to my soft drink sensibilities, as it and I were left alone this time) to deciding whether, in a day when everything’s a little rushed, if I have a minute to stop off at a lineless concession en route to the seats. It was past one o’clock. I wanted to make first pitch, but I didn’t want to greet Jeff emptyhanded. Plus, you know, it’s a ballgame. “Two hot dogs, two pretzels, please.” I can miss a batter. I prefer not to miss lunch.

When I met up with Jeff, I quickly sat down so nobody behind us would have to strain to clearly see Jonah Tong working to Padres batters. Sounds unremarkable, right? You’d think. In the next half-inning or the half-inning after that, somebody in the row in front of us decided that rather than swiftly finding his seat, he’d greet his friend who rose to meet him with a good, lengthy standing conversation. Jeff first, then I, requested a lowering of their bodies into their chairs so we could witness the hitting and the pitching down below. The late arriver among the two of them gave us two backwards flicks of his right wrist, the not necessarily universal symbol for “just give us a sec, OK?” It was rather rude, but it did gift us a handy gesture to activate every time he walked by us the rest of the day.

Pete Alonso’s own gesture involves swinging a bat mightily and sending a ball far. One-nothing in the bottom of the first. Tong’s right hand in the top of third was busy putting Fernando Tatis in scoring position via a single, an errant pickoff, and a wild pitch. Tatis came home on a Luis Arraez sac fly, facilitated by a ragged throw from Brandon Nimmo. The next sound you heard was Manny Machado whiffing on strike three for the third out and Jeff and me applauding heartily.

In the bottom of the third, something approximating a Met attack gets underway versus Randy Vasquez. The lately useful Cedric Mullins singles. Francisco Lindor singles to right. Mullins races to third. Lindor trails to second. Tatis believes he’s going to nab Lindor at second. He does not. Juan Soto makes the most of a groundout. He makes it into his 100th RBI of the season, scoring Mullins and pushing Lindor to third. Pete’s gesture is limited to a silent thank you toward Vasquez for a full-count walk. Nimmo is about to come up with runners on first and third and a chance to make us forget about that throw.

“How many runs do they get out of this?” Jeff asked me. “Zero, one, two, or three?”

I was thinking zero, but I said two to be optimistic.

We got three. Nimmo homered. We were up, 5-1, and to the extent Mets fans can relax in September of 2025, we almost did. Jonah apparently did. That one silver-platter run he served up to the Padres in the third stayed lonely. Whatever loss of confidence in his fastball that overcame him the previous Friday was restored in the interim. Tong went five and positioned his team and himself for a win. He positioned us to leave our seats with enough faith that the lead would still be there when returned.

A couple of the boys, peeking around one of the corners at Citi Field and seeing a Mets win.

Why get up from a game going well? Because somebody asked me to. About ten minutes after Jeff told me he’d be getting us tickets to this game, I heard from another good friend, Matt, that he had come into a pair for September 18, and would I like to join him? Couldn’t be in two seats at once, but we could say hi. Matt suggested the Shea Bridge for a stop ‘n’ chat. It was a real throwback. In the early days of Citi Field, when nobody knew anywhere else to go, it was “let’s meet on the bridge” in some appointed inning. I’ve mostly stopped doing that in recent years partly because now Citi Field is as familiar as the back of my dismissive wrist-flicking hand, partly because my fascination with getting up midgame and walking around has faded. That was the one thing I immediately embraced about Citi when I wasn’t resenting it for not being Shea, that you could meet somebody and stand somewhere and follow the game and not have people unleash their own trademark gestures at you.

One thing I’d forgotten about Shea Bridge during a midweek day game is, if it’s not bitter cold, it’s unbearably hot. Ah yes, the many climates of Citi Field. Where Jeff and I sat, in Greg-endorsed 326, we reveled in shade and comfort, wrist-flicking jerk notwithstanding. On the bridge, the sun beat down on us like that Twilight Zone episode where there are two suns. The meeting with Matt was delightful and, by unanimous consent, brief.

It was the kind of day when five splendid innings from the starter — this starter in particular — would bring about no regrets that it wasn’t six or more. Tong recovered so nicely from his prior meltdown, it was like it never happened. He struck out eight Padres before Carlos Mendoza opted to trust his bullpen. What choice did we have but to trust those relievers, too? Tyler Rogers in the sixth, Brooks Raley in the seventh, Gregory Soto (who got dinged but not dented by balls hit at him) in the eighth, and, with the lead up to 6-1, Edwin Diaz in the ninth to close it. The “Narco” entrance doesn’t really hit as hard in daytime as it does at night, but Alonso and Nimmo had hit hard, and Diaz didn’t take anything off his pitches, no matter what time it was. It was a one-two-three save in everything but name, a win for the boys in orange and blue, whether they wore their own names down on the field or were the father and son cosplaying hooky as Hernandez and deGrom on the train.

Jeff and I flicked our wrists and high-fived before finding our own respective trains, his the LIRR back to Penn Station en route to Amtrak, mine the 7 to Woodside for the 4:24 eastbound. I encountered a later-in-life version of my friend from the Jamaica platform on my brief ride west. There was a guy, probably a little older than me, wearing a contemporary road jersey stitched with AGEE 20 on the back. I complimented him on his choice of player. “My favorite,” he said. He was part of a group of other men of a certain age. Midweek day games seem to bring out such crews en masse. This one was in a good mood after the Mets’ 6-1 victory and all its playoff chase implications, even the one Padres fan in their tribe. His role was to absorb good-natured ribbing over his choice of team, which he did with a smile. Boys being boys, regardless of age, their self-imposed mission was to decide whether they wanted to make the same train I was aiming for at Woodside, or if they wanted to extend their good times at a bar in Woodside. Something about me on Thursday emitted “he looks like he knows where he’s going” vibes, because like the dad asking about the 7 train, they looked to me for advice.

“How far to Woodside?”

“Two stops.”

“Are there bars in Woodside?”

“There’s nothing BUT bars in Woodside.”

“We’ll just follow you.”

I wasn’t going to take them to Donovan’s, but staircases were my specialty, so I shrugged, “sure,” and didn’t flick my wrist at any of them. When we landed at Woodside, the Agee guy found his way down the stairs and into the station on his own. The others were behind me last I looked. I reached the concourse level and nodded at the Agee guy. The other fellas had not yet emerged from the crowd. Or maybe they spied a bar through a window and bolted down the back staircase to 61st St.

“Hey,” the Agee guy asked me. “Where did they go?”

I shrugged again. The game was over and I had the 4:24 to catch.