The Department of Sudden Realization is reporting the New York Mets will play the Atlanta Braves in two days. Well, it’ll essentially be random fellows wearing Mets uniforms versus unknown guys wearing Braves uniforms after the third or so inning, and it won’t count in any serious standings, and the outcome will be forgotten minutes after it is registered.
But the New York Mets will play the Atlanta Braves in two days.
Professional baseball players under contract to our favorite team will pitch against and hit against and maybe even field against professional baseball players under contract to another recognizably branded organization. People will pay money to sit inside a stadium and witness it. A score will be kept and displayed. Shouts of encouragement and bites of frankfurters and purchases of programs…all those pleasing signs of spring will, for the first time in an eternity, be sprung.
Baseball! It’s February 28, it’s freezing, half the world remains snow-encrusted, yet in two days, there will be baseball. New York Mets baseball is coming to a life near you.
We can start living ours again any hour now.
Billy Heller of the New York Post says Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets — available soon in paperback, with a brand new epilogue exploring the first season of Citi Field — is Required Reading. Read all about it here.
I live in Orlando and will be taking the day off from work to attend the game. It’s been really cold and rainy in Florida the past few weeks. I sure hope it’s nice weather for a few hours on Wednesday. Let’s go Mets!
Nothing in particular in Hey! Ball! brought about the following:
I am new to your blog. I love your understanding (if not always acceptance) of history, and I like how you guys write about fan devotion but without fanatic blind-loyalty devotion.
I recall reading a few posts, maybe more, than bring us back in time, deep (baseball) time. I wonder, however, if either of you has ever written about the moment — year, summer, game, event, moment — in which you, at 6 or 9 or 13 married the Mets for life.
You both write well, and I am wondering if you could post a 3,000 or 5,000 word post that takes us back in time (pre-, um, bitter or angry at the Mets’ various villains) and into those histories.
Thanks!
John
Fantastic blog, gentlemen! I’ve waited patiently reading scraps of baseball news anywhere I could for the duration of the winter, which in Iowa, is incredibly long. Yes, there are Mets fans here. There might even be five or six of us!
… and the snow is beginning to melt too, a definate sign that spring is near and baseball is back, even if only exhibition.