Things that still suck, in case you thought there’d been a change:
• The Mets
• The MTA
• Cody Ross
• Fireworks Night
The Mets and their 5-3 loss [1] in which Matt Harvey couldn’t rescue them and they couldn’t rescue Matt Harvey speaks for itself (and I believe the word it spoke was “feh”). Wednesday was yet another night of waiting [2], though unlike Monday and Tuesday, there was nothing worth waiting for.
Cody Ross…no further elaboration needed; I felt terrible watching Gerardo Parra bounce his head off the warning track [3] Monday night but am not sure I wouldn’t treat Cody Ross in the same situation like a sizable plurality treated Jason Bay [4] under similar circumstances, which is to say deplorably. So there goes my shot at the B’Nai Brith Humanitarian of the Year Award.
The MTA is on my The Out-of-Towners [5]-style list of those people Jack Lemmon as George Kellerman planned to bring to justice. Their transgressions were…
a) not having a Super Express available after the game for those of us who preferred leaving Mets-Willets Point at 12:30 AM instead of sticking around for displays of colored lights;
b) having what appeared to be a local that would get me to Woodside in ample time for the 12:50 AM whoosh through the station without stopping;
c) the Long Island Rail Road not noticing a 7 pulling in upstairs at Woodside and holding the 12:50 to, oh, 12:52 when the next train where I, among many others, was going wasn’t coming until 2:04 AM. Nice coordination, fellas.
Oh, and Fireworks Night can blow itself. Or blow itself up. I have nothing against fireworks per se and if the Mets want to treat loyal Mets fans to fireworks after a Mets game — ideally after one that wasn’t delayed for nearly two hours at its start by omnipresent rain — that’s fine. My problem with Fireworks Night, in brief, is that it apparently attracts tens of thousands of people who wouldn’t ordinarily attend Mets games, people whose interest in the outcome of the Mets game is minimal, people who do a very aggressive wave in the third inning of Harvey Night, people who sit behind me who don’t shut up for a second and start vociferously rooting out of the blue for Cody Ross to hit one out “so we can have some action” and then Cody Ross hits one out. It was swell to have Citi Field full. It was lousy to have Citi Field full of what a dear friend aptly refers to as bananaheads.
How much did Fireworks Night 2013 suck? So much that I even briefly found myself regretting having attended Fireworks Night thirteen years earlier, for if the memory of Piazza capping off the ten-run inning didn’t burn so brightly [6], I might not have fallen for, “Well, they came back once before…” and made the 12:50.
And with that Metstivus litany of all the ways what should have been a splendid evening disappointed me, we reach the halfway point of this mostly miserable season on a pace for 70 wins, which sadly sounds much better than I would have expected. Besides the revelation of Matt Harvey and the plethora of weird-ass games, the big story of the first half to me is how replaceable almost everybody on this roster has been. I used to love Ruben Tejada. Now I all but forget about Ruben Tejada. My “WE LIKE IKE” t-shirt just makes me sad. If I could trade it in on a “WE DON’T NECESSARILY DISLIKE IKE, BUT, UH…” model, I would. And for all my fleeting fondness for the recent crop of retreads, I can already feel their magic wearing off. Sure, I’ll take Josh Satin (the Bronx and Staten Island) as well as EY and Brownie and whatever Omar Quintanilla’s cute nickname might be, but I can see throwing them overboard at the first sign of stagnation. If not for Harvey’s majesty and our sturdy standard-bearer Wright, I might not qualify for the fan loyalty program that would entitle me to those hypothetical earned fireworks nights.
Who am I kidding? They’ll stop blowing stuff up and Citi Field will revert back to being the province of me, Joe (who invited me Wednesday night when he lucked into primo seats and had no inkling of how much everything would suck), the dozen or so like-minded individuals I keep running into, some camp group in matching shirts, a cadre of overserved underage LIRR commuters who’ve been pounding Bud Lights since Massapequa and the occasional condescending Cardinals fan. Yeah, I’ll be back in the second half — the second half of this season and the second half of my first century. That is if my train’s on time and they start to play by nine.