Depending on where you’re sitting and who’s surrounding you, the least conducive place for intently focusing on a ballgame can be at the ballpark. I sat most of very warm and very sunny Sunday afternoon in Citi Field’s Big Apple Reserved section, those uncovered seats in center far from home plate. Never was I happier to have tossed a tube of sunscreen into my game bag before heading out for the train. Stray passing clouds and their accompanying if evanescent breezes clinched co-Player of the Game honors by the second inning. (Can David Stearns be blamed for not hanging onto them, too?) I was surrounded by perfectly nice folks and their perfectly nice families who came as parts of larger perfectly nice groups. My attachment to one such larger group is how I wound up at Citi Field on Sunday, actually. My wife works in community services in the same borough where the Mets operate. Tickets, layered with a generous concession credit, were graciously donated in her agency’s direction late last week. People there were notified to respond in the affirmative ASAP if they were interested in going to the game. All available ducats were snapped up pronto. Stephanie and I were among the legion of snappers.
Nothing wrong with larger groups coming to a ballgame, though it tends to mean your neighborhood for the duration is populated by many people who have entered the premises with limited emotional investment in the unfolding of what will play out on that field off in the distance. To be fair, some of the perfectly nice folks and their perfectly nice families are conscious of the nominal attraction, in this case the New York Mets hosting the Philadelphia Phillies, and are into it. For example, one of the presumably perfectly nice folks, from one of the larger groups to which I was not attached, seemed proud that he knew the name of the Mets’ center fielder, for he filled between-pitch pauses with it repeatedly. “TY-RONE TAY-LOR! TY-RONE TAY-LOR!” I suspect this fellow’s day would have been made if Tyrone Taylor, technically at work, as much as shrugged a shoulder in our sections’ direction, for the gesture could have been interpreted as “I hear you and I appreciate you,” rather than “it sure is hot out here and I’m a little uncomfortable standing in my alternate blue jersey as I stay ready for a Phillie to hit a ball toward me.”
Either way, Tyrone Taylor didn’t so much as shrug.
In this setting, everybody’s kind of wandering around, chatting each other up. Why shouldn’t they? One weekend shy of the nation’s semiquincentennial, what could be more classically American than accepting an invitation to a group outing at the ballpark? Enthusiasm abounds for enthusiasm’s sake, if not the Mets’. At a gut level, this kind of outing appeals to the diehard Mets fan and it appeals to those who don’t know Tyrone Taylor from A.J. Ewing. It looms as a day to hang with people from work, yet nobody has to work right now. Tyrone Taylor is the only soul remotely in our midst who’s on the clock.
When you are in Big Apple Reserved, the scoreboard is at your back, so if you haven’t committed to following the action, the action dissolves into distant scenery. If there are kids on hand (and there were definitely kids on hand), their interest in baseball seems limited to standing in the first row, having migrated there as if by homing instinct, and hoping to be recognized or acknowledged in some way, perhaps with a baseball itself. You also get a steady stream of literal posers who recognize a major league outfield as a charming backdrop for photos, despite possessing no more than a slight inkling of the activity the outfield and the infield beyond it are used for. They trundle down the steps in clusters and turn around to smile for the camera phone for minutes at a time in different combinations (“OK, now I’ll take one of you and you”) while a regulation baseball game continues behind them. I imagine these people scroll through their pictures later and try to remember where this was and what they were doing there even as they admire the way the camera on their phone really captures the greenness of the grass at “this place where we went that time, I guess”.
To escape the sun and deplete our can’t-take-it-with-you concession credit, we set up for an inning or so in the shade at one of those green tables behind what used to be known as the Mo’s Zone in right. I’ve given up on keeping current with who sponsors which swath of seats at Citi Field. Evincing no sentimentality for an extinct brick & mortar retail sporting goods chain, it’s just easier to refer to it as the Mo’s Zone. Choosing to stand as shadowy fans on a shadowy planet, we gained an adequate view of the diamond and a monitor to replay whatever we didn’t grasp live. Another couple shared the table. Stephanie and I shared a hearty fruit cup, a product bearing the logo of Melissa’s Produce. Did you know Citi Field has fruit cup? It’s nestled within the beer cooler inside the World’s Fare market steps away from the erstwhile Mo’s Zone. Fruit cup makes for surprisingly effective ballpark quencher after the sun’s been beating down on you for a couple of hours. I couldn’t tell you how much it cost, because we used our nontransferable concession credit to procure it. I’m guessing Citi Field sells at least three of them per game.
Our consumption of the fruit cup coincided with A.J. Ewing’s pinch-hit home run that tied the game at three in the sixth. Andy Green may have been one of the people at Citi Field on Sunday who didn’t know Tyrone Taylor from A.J. Ewing, because daunting lefty starter Jesus Luzardo or no daunting lefty starter Jesus Luzardo (most Phillie starters are daunting), I’m not sure why an interim manager would sit one of the two promising youngsters he has at his disposal three games into his limited tenure. Prior to Ewing pinch-hitting for Taylor after Luzardo had exited in favor of righty Chase Shugart, the only Met run was generated via Carson Benge’s RBI single off Luzardo…lefty versus lefty, youth getting a chance to succeed, and succeeding. Andy Green isn’t interim-managing to play the percentages. Andy Green is interim-managing to make a little something out of a nothing season. At least he knew enough to eventually give Ewing a chance.
Give me shade and some fruit cup, and my focus on the ballgame emerges intently. Yes, a home run from Ewing! Yes, a high-five with the guy from the other couple at the green table! Yes, we’ll stay here at the spot that apparently has some runs in it long enough to watch Benge drive in the go-ahead run! Yes, the Mets lead, 4-3!
Then, with just a few grapes and one square of cantaloupe remaining, we take our fruit cup back to the Big Apple Reserved seats, where the various groups have thinned out a bit in deference to the sun’s ongoing beatdown. Still, we are refreshed, excited to watch as best we can bulk reliever Kodai Senga pitch as best as he can with a lead. Senga’s been in since the fifth, having followed opener Cionel Perez who was fine for one inning, and Tobias Myers, who gave up three runs in the third. When the third ended, someone to whom I’d just been introduced, having learned I regularly write about the Mets, told me, “You must have the patience of Job.”
I might not, really, because after Senga gave up an inevitable two-run bomb to Kyle Schwarber that crash-landed in the abyss between the outfield fence and the Big Apple seats to return the lead to the Phillies (a security guard stationed in our vicinity spent a chunk of the seventh-inning stretch trying to retrieve the ball for authentication purposes, not quite finding it despite a multitude of helpful Big Apple fingers pointing to where it loitered), I realized fruit cup contained only so much efficacy versus Ol’ Sol, never mind Ol’ Schwarbs. By the eighth, I suggested to Stephanie we vacate our seats, drift back into the Field Level shade, and take in the remainder of the game from a spot where we could make a quicker getaway once all was over. She didn’t argue. We stood and watched the Mets load the bases via a trio of Orion Kerkering-issued walks in the bottom of the eighth alongside others who had roughly the same idea vis-à-vis sun and shade. Poised to tie or go in front — one man out, three men on — the Mets see their rally die before it can birth even a single run. Ronny Mauricio popped up. Francisco Alvarez struck out. Senga would hang in there for the top of the ninth but we wouldn’t. I knew Jhoan Duran lurked for the bottom of the ninth. The quick getaway to the LIRR seemed in order.
Once again, Stephanie didn’t argue.
Slipping out a side staircase rather than departing through the Rotunda as is my usual custom, I tuned in MLB’s audio, which stubbornly rebuffered a few times and briefly sent me to the Athletics-Angels broadcast, but I was getting the gist of how the game was ending. By the time we planted ourselves on the Mets-Willets Point platform, the 4:57 to Woodside about to rumble toward us, I could hear Luis Torrens lining out to right, with Brett Baty’s preceding walk coming to naught. I hadn’t focused intently enough to notice the Mets had left fourteen runners on base Sunday nor that they had gone 2-for-16 with runners in scoring position. But they did both, and despite Senga’s mini-revival (5 IP, 2 ER) and Ewing’s and Benge’s fleeting moments in the omnipresent sun, they lost to the Phillies, 5-4. Two nights earlier, they lost to the Phillies, 2-1. The night before that, they lost to the Cubs, 4-3, but that was under a different manager, and the sunscreen could be left at home. So it’s not like every game the Mets lose is the same damn thing over and over.
