You didn’t need to stare out the window this morning to know this was the kind of day to make like Zooey Deschanel and ask your iPhone to conjure you some tomato soup (although maybe you could do it less preciously than Zooey Deschanel [1]). All you had to do was tap the weather app on your device of choice and observe nothing but “100%” chances of precipitation for ZIP Code 11368 forecast across the Flushing afternoon. Then you could look out the window. Then, if you were the New York Mets, you could put one and one together and come up with the decision to tell your customers well in advance of their leaving their homes, “Stay in today, have whatever kind of soup you like.”
It was a day meant for bisque, not bobbleheads. But the bobbleheads were on the schedule — the Tom Seaver bobbleheads, for Gil’s sake — and the tickets were sold, so…
Better get going, lest the Mets give away all 25,000 of what you’d purchased a ticket to secure one of months earlier. Better go against your soundest judgment and bundle up because even though the Nationals called their game way early in Washington and the appropriately named Thunder called their game way early in Trenton, the Mets of New York pretended blue skies were shining on them long enough to lure you onto the 10:56 to Woodside.
You disembarked by 11:26, you swiped your Metrocard through the turnstiles to the 7, you waited for the local and, after 11:30 AM — or almost 90 minutes to scheduled first pitch — you were informed via Twitter that the game was finally called.
So, you asked yourself, what am I doing up here waiting for the train to Shea/Citi Field? Why did I pay $2.25 plus the $7.00 in prorated 10-trip LIRR fare to get here, plus the $7.00 in prorated LIRR fare to now get home? Buyer beware, “ticketholder assumes all risks” and you love the game of baseball let alone Tom Seaver so much that we want to believe the clouds will part in deference to the conferring of his Terrificness’s porcelain likeness, but WTF, y’know?
No kid and few adults want to give up on a Sunday afternoon game. We’re all Charlie Brown at heart [2]. We’re all willing to convince ourselves “it’s going to clear up.” But what separates us from our cartoon selves is we have weather apps and we have the sense of sight if we’re lucky and the sense of touch probably. We can tell it’s raining and that it’s not going to stop raining. And the only thing that can get us into that rain when we have no other reason to be soaking in it [3] is because the Mets won’t immediately advise us to remain indoors where we belong and assure us our bobbleheads will be waiting for us on another date to be announced shortly.
Because they sold us the tickets. And they really wanted to scan them and have us inside their building for a while and sell us some more stuff while they waited for the weather window that was never, ever going to come. I can’t imagine that wasn’t the plan. Surely it wasn’t because rescheduling both the Mets-Giants game and the bobblehead promotion wasn’t easily solved. It was very easily solved [4]. The Giants were sticking around through Monday anyway. Voila, doubleheader. The bobbleheads were moved to the next available weekend date that didn’t have a promotion, Saturday, May 5.
All that would have been lost in announcing those solutions early enough to keep people from schlepping in their cars and on trains and paying whatever their unnecessary trip cost them was Sunday’s gate…which was lost anyway and was going to be lost no matter how much magical/financial thinking the Mets applied to the gray skies grimacing on us.
Nobody likes to leave the gate closed. But sometimes courtesy and convenience is the better part of valor where the surprisingly predictable nature of nature is concerned.
Happy remainder of Earth Day. This part of the planet needed a little rain anyway.