It's a crack, I'm back yeah
I'm standing on the rooftops shouting out
Baby I'm ready to go
Tonight two long-awaited things will finally happen:
1. It will be light for a respectable amount of time into the evening.
2. There will be a baseball game that means something.
The fact that these two marvels fall on the same day this year is so obviously right and fitting that it seems a bit dimwitted to have ever done it any other way. Granted, it's always nice to have Daylight Savings Time arrive — in fact, my longstanding position has been that the government should manipulate the clock in whatever fashion necessary so it's light until at least 7:30 year-round. (Who cares if in December the sun doesn't come up until 2? I'm in an office, kids are in school, and there's no baseball. Yeah yeah, farmers. Whatever.) On the other hand, getting Daylight Savings Time before baseball just means the extra sunlight illuminates a little more winter. And there's no amount of sunlight, warmth or other atmospheric phenomenon that can make a day without baseball, at its root, something to be enjoyed rather than endured.
Well, farewell endurance. Our long national nightmare is once more at an end. Summer is here. Youth is returning. Hope is escaping from its icy cage. Things are being put right.
I'm back and ready to go
From the rooftops shout it out
My blog brother's normal spring baseball rhythms are to fret from mid-March until mid-April that this is the year the boys in orange and blue don't seem to resonate with him, that this is the year he's somehow missed his berth on the S.S. Grand Old Game and it's gone sailing off without him. (Happily, by April 16 this is all just cobwebs of bad-dream stuff.) My normal spring baseball rhythms are wild excitement, followed by a lot of grousing about the endless pointlessness of spring training, followed by a Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation as camp breaks, one that sees me fling myself into mad activities like, well, watching two AL Central teams do battle.
This year's transformation was even more pronounced, because today found Emily and Joshua and me flying back from North Carolina. In the airport I caught sight of the Sports Illustrated Baseball Preview, with Albert Pujols looking gigantic and frightening on the cover. I devoured it quickly enough to leave finger smudges on each page, pausing only to carefully tear out all Yankee faces and logos, roll them into balls the approximate density of titanium, and discard them in the seatback pocket. David Wright dominates our preview, and we're picked to finish second but take the wild card. Vulnerable as the Braves look, I think I'd take SI's prediction. (Though they can keep the part about us losing in the NLDS to their cover boy and the rest of the Cardinals.)
It's a crack, I'm back yeah
I'm standing on the rooftops having it
Baby I'm ready to go
I was just finishing dutiful pondering of the dregs of the AL West (Ian Kinsler and Michael Young should switch positions? Sounds good to me!) when we came winging over the Gowanus and then Newtown Creek, and I did what any sensible Met fan on approach to La Guardia does: I peered out the window and hoped I was on the correct side to see Shea.
And I was.
And there were cars in the parking lot.
And people in the stands.
Wha? No! Shit! SHIT! Hey, wait a minute, the mound's covered….
No, I hadn't lost my mind, though that was a pretty bad moment. It was just a workout, albeit one with thousands in attendance. When the panic subsided, I realized it was the perfect thing for a crazed fan who'd just whipped through the baseball preview and was mildly worried he'd weep at the sight of Grady Sizemore in seven hours or so. Those little dots down there on the green part of the field? They were Mets, Mets where they were supposed to be, getting ready to do what they're supposed to do. Getting ready to make the world perfect again. Just in time, too.
I'm back and ready to go
From the rooftops shout it out
Shout it out
It's upon us, and in my mind at least, I still imagine I'll be tuning in to Gary and Howie on the FAN (and if I really didn't get sleep I expect Murph crackle over the airwaves once more)…oy, I still don't get SNY in my standard Time Warner package…What will I do?
So, you think if Anderson Hernandez hits a homerun tomorrow, in his first at-bat, that his career is doomed for mediocrity?
Daylight Savings Time? I just thought that was God smiling because Opening Day is so close.
#1) Republika–Awesome.
#2) The workout was pretty cool. I swear I was gonna have to rock myself to sleep at night, I'm do excited about the season. Delgado and Reyes were hitting like beasts. The whole experience was kind of neat, but mostly another way to milk money out of the concessions business. Parking was free, beer was still nearly $8. One out of two ain't bad.
I actually played that song today. They played it a lot before games in 1999. Need I say more…?
I have DirecTV. It's still kind of murky whether they're going to even have SNY tomorrow, though all signs are clearly pointing to who-the-fuck-knows. Someone very cruel took Gary Cohen off the radio; someone even crueler deposited him onto TV broadcasts and watered him down; and someone downright fucking menacing and shitty put him on a channel I might not even get.
I'm not sure what's happening, but three things are for certain:
1. The sun came out today
2. We're born again
3. There's new grass on the field
Beat the drum, and hold the phone, kids…because things are so god damn right with the world, that no one will even question it if you try to rhyme the word “field”, with “feel”…
“Ready to Go” was Orel Hershiser's warmup song, though I suspected that was just the A/V guy's doing.