Well, on the plus side Aaron Heilman kept us in it several batters longer than I thought he would.
After we got an HDTV, Emily and I had to deal with a problem: The picture had such hallucinatory clarity that we'd frequently get distracted by fans in the stands. What's that lady keep doing? Did you see that guy's hat? What's that guy reading? Would those kids watch the game already? (As a side effect of this, we went from thinking people on their cellphones waving at the person who can see them on TV should die to thinking they should die slowly.)
We're used to it by now, but during road games Met fans still catch my eye. For us New York folk, road games — even ones in the mountains far away — are primarily an oddity of the clock, to be watched from the couch. But for New York expats in those road cities, they're different: They're big nights planned out and awaited for some time — an evening when you'll get to see your team up close, and when you'll wear your faraway colors defiantly before the home crowd, whether in triumph or in defeat.
I thought of that after Matt Holliday's homer, when SNY's camera caught a guy in a blue Mets t-shirt somewhere on the third-base side behind a fuming Billy Wagner. Holliday had rounded the bases and headed back to the dugout, but that fan was still standing there in mute dismay, apparently too numb to do anything but stare at the field.
I wonder how he managed during everything left to come — Reyes' half-witting snare of Ryan Spilborghs' hard smash to avoid a loss in regulation; Reyes' round of high-velocity Twister with Clint Barmes; Reyes' erasure at the hands of conspirators Yorvit Torrealba, Brian Fuentes, Omar Quintanilla and, well, Jose Reyes; Heilman's apparent determination to walk Jon Herrera; Heilman's giving up a hit instead; and Holliday, again, sending the Mets to the hotel [1] and us to mutter our way through preparations for bed.
If that poor Met fan was still standing there through all that, I hope he remembered the bars are still open in Denver.