Two Silver Linings

Yesterday may have been the dreariest baseball game I've ever attended.

Emily and I were coming back from Philadelphia in a rental car, and with insufficient time to go home and get on the subway, we were stuck driving. We'd been warned about this, but it's true — it's hard parking at Shea when there's a new stadium in the lot. We wound up beyond something called the Aquatic Center, a piece of Queens real estate I'd never heard of. I have now, and I can tell you it's very far from Shea Stadium.

So we finally arrived to find our friends Chris and Peggy, and endured the business end of an ass-kicking, one of those horrid games that leaves you in the duck-and-cover position for half a game. When Carlos Delgado's bid for a cosmetic home run was foiled at the wall, I turned to Joshua and reminded him of the day he and I watched Willie Harris deep-six a Met comeback by snaring a Delgado drive in much the same spot. This is father-son bonding over shared torment — the part of baseball fandom that doesn't come with soft focus and acoustic guitar, but with Limp Bizkit and the two of us turning into the Ligues.

By the time Cody Ross was denying us, it was raining. While I was taking Joshua to the bathroom they announced that the Mets Dash wouldn't be held. By now Joshua's seen more than his share of Dashes lost to rain and ESPN being grabby. He gave me a shocked look, saw it was true, threw back his head and began to wail. Then the Mets finished losing and we trudged back to the now aptly-named Aquatic Center in the rain to sit in traffic on College Point Boulevard. “I am never thinking about this game again,” I said in the car, and with the exception of this blog post I mean it.

It was a day that desperately needed a silver lining, and fortunately there was one — a gathering of bloggers in SNY''s suite, set up through the kind auspices of MetsBlog's Matt Cerrone. (Thanks, Matt!) I couldn't stay for long — had to get back to Emily, our friends and our overtired kid — so wasn't able to meet everyone I wanted to meet or gawk at what life in a luxury suite is like, beyond noting that up there the beer is not only free but served in — ooh la la — glass bottles. But seeing Matt and the MetsBlog folks and Coop and Anthony and Brooklyn Met Fan up there gave me a feeling of honest-to-goodness Blog Brotherhood. In 2005, when Greg and I started Faith and Fear on a spring-training lark, blogs were an afterthought for the Mets and a way of thinking about the team that was reserved for Netheads. Two and a half seasons later, thanks to all those folks' hard work and thoughtful writing, MetsBlog is an integral part of the SNY/Mets ecosystem, and blogs of all stripes are becoming a crucial way for fans get their news, stage their debates and cherish the histories of franchises and fans alike. No, we weren't in the press box — but if I'd wanted to be in the press box, I would have gone that route a long time ago. We were on the same level as those guys, just down the hall, and that struck me as just right.

The other silver lining? As a couple of posts and comments here have noted, I've now entered what is sometimes delicately called a career transition — my 12 1/2 years with the Wall Street Journal Online ended on Friday. Fortunately, the very next business day turns out to have a Met game added to it. Mets-Pirates, 1 p.m., and you'd better believe I'm going. Because of all the summer days I wanted to but couldn't. Because I'm sure as heck not interested in sitting around the house wondering what to do with myself. Because I can.

Yeah, the weather report is iffy. It's OK. That's the difference between silver linings and plain old silver.