The 50th Anniversary Game

Last week, Major League Baseball released its schedule for next year and I shrugged. It was the epitome of too soon. But last year, when this year’s came out, I figuratively unfolded it and zeroed in on one particular box in quest of pertinent information:

Would the Mets be home on July 11, 2023?

They would not. Nobody would be, except for the American League All-Stars playing the National League All-Stars in Seattle, both squads in uniforms best described as unfortunate and worse (with worse topping unfortunate, 3-2). The Mets wouldn’t be home again in July of 2023 until after the break, contesting a weekend series with the Dodgers. No, that’s no good. The Dodgers are too much of a draw and the weekend wasn’t what I was looking for. Next in, the White Sox. Maybe. A lower-profile visitor suited me, even if they were interlopers enabled by interleague inanity. I just can’t accept that we play every AL team every year. I should probably get over that some, because it’s not going away. Fine, the White Sox. The White Sox would do fine. Especially on Thursday afternoon, July 20, 2023.

Bingo. That was it. That was going to be my 50th Anniversary Game.

As some of you may have read in this space, I just passed the 50th anniversary of my first game at Shea Stadium, a milestone event in the life of a ten-year-old fan. I knew it was a milestone on July 11, 1973. I knew it would be a milestone before July 11, 1973. All I needed was the date in advance to mark it down as the start of something I’d continue to do for as long as it was possible. My first Mets game. Having been taken with the Mets on TV and in the newspapers in 1969, I waited long enough for it to happen. Needing to be taken to the Mets, I had to wait. Nobody was volunteering to take me in 1970 or 1971, and in 1972, when it was supposed to happen for the first time, I caught an overblown cold that kept me at home.

When I was signed up for day camp in the succeeding summer and saw the list of activities, my eye was drawn to July 11, Mets vs. Astros at Shea Stadium. It was finally going to happen. And, as detailed in this remarkably well-preserved report, it had happened. I had gone to a Mets game.

I’ve been to quite a few since. I made it to 402 regular-season home games at Shea Stadium and, through the first day of July of this year, 305 regular-season home games at Citi Field, adding up to 707 and counting. There’ve been postseason games and exhibition games and games on the road, too, and they’re all filed and accounted for, but 402 and 305+ were my primary numbers entering Thursday. My tentative plan, assuming the owner of the New York Mets doesn’t decide to implode the current Wilpon-conceived facility and create a vastly superior CohenDome in its stead ASAP, is to live long enough and go regularly enough to match my Shea Stadium total of 402 at Citi Field, then seriously consider leaving it a tie for all eternity. But that somewhat morbid calculation is for another day. Yesterday, Thursday 7/20/2023, was for the numbers that started it all: 7/11/1973. My 708th Mets home game, which had no particular magic to it numerically. My 50th Anniversary Game, the concept of which had captivated my imagination for nearly a year.

Mets vs. White Sox at Citi Field. How could I resist?

I hadn’t said any of this out loud to anybody, because when you live so much in your head, you tend to think the things you think about need an Alan Suriel or Hiro Fujiwara to interpret them. The night before the day game, my wife happened to ask me, “When’s your next game?”

“Maybe tomorrow,” I said. “It would be my anniversary game: 50 years since my first game, more or less.”

“Your anniversary game!” she cooed. Stephanie thought it was adorable and appropriate, more evidence I married the right woman.

I checked StubHub for a cheap ticket. I wanted a cheap ticket, and not just for budgetary reasons. I wanted to sit in Promenade. It would be self-flattering to invoke Bill Veeck here…

I have discovered in 20 years of moving around a ballpark, that the knowledge of the game is usually in inverse proportion to the price of the seats.

…but mostly the baseball experience tends to feel more authentic to me upstairs. There are real fans and knowledgeable fans everywhere in a ballpark, but Promenade says, at least to me, I simply wanna be here for baseball. Plus I’d be going alone, given that I was the only person I knew who would totally get what I would be seeking in this outing. Promenade is the official level of loners in a mood. That was gonna be me.

Not a bad mood, by any means. To the contrary. I found my cheap ticket, Row 8 of Section 518, and I had myself as company, I made a turkey and mozzarella sandwich and I was off to the LIRR. I looked up and down the platform at others in orange and blue clearly headed for changes at Jamaica and Woodside like I was. We were tacit co-conspirators in the late morning in the middle of the week. We were all going to the Mets game. We were all getting away with something. I ate my sandwich on the train. My mood was great.

Off the steps from the 7 usually recalibrates my mood because I’m thinking about lines and security and the sense that we’re all suspect at Citi Field, no matter what price our ticket, but I pre-empted all that when I arrived. I walked around the exterior in a manner I haven’t in ages. I ambled over to Shea Stadium home plate in the Citi Field parking lot. I’m surprised I still know where to find it, not at all surprised that I don’t believe I’ll find it, given that previous Mets management seemed intent on erasing 45 years of ballpark history when it opened its shiny edifice in 2009. Yet there it was, fourteen years since installation. People were walking by it as if it wasn’t sacred. Sometimes you’re just thinking about lines and security. I took off my cap and tapped the plate once. I used to do that on Opening Day. I haven’t been to Opening Day in a while.

You gotta believe I saw the sign.

I wanted to check out the banners affixed to the third base side of Citi Field, having been delighted to find so many evocative ones on the first base side a few weeks earlier. There I saw a literal sign: 1973 NATIONAL LEAGUE CHAMPIONS, replicating the marker above the highest right field stands. 1973! Fifty years! Citi Field was welcoming me as it rarely welcomes me! I saw more neato banners, like one with Tom Seaver and David Wright embracing at the 2013 All-Star Game and another with Robin Ventura and Todd Pratt embracing in the aftermath of Game Five of the 1999 NLCS, though maybe Tank should have just kept running, though then there wouldn’t be a banner, would there? I shifted to the first base edge of the rotunda and saw, as I always do, the brick that celebrates my first date with the right woman, May 15, 1987, four days after we met. We celebrate May 11 every year like I unfailingly commemorate July 11 in my mind. It was as if 41 Seaver Way had been trimmed specially for me, a sensation I rarely if ever have. All this looking around, yet I saw I had ample time before first pitch in the middle of the day in the middle of the week in front of the ballpark. My mood was off the charts.

Then lines and security and being told I beeped, please walk through the metal detector again. Which I did, and didn’t beep. Somebody else searched my bag and told me, “you beeped, so you have to walk through the metal detector again.” Which I didn’t, because, as I explained, I just did all that. Oh, OK.

Impenetrable barrier breached, I was soon inside and upstairs. Promenade for the first time this season. I did a little more walking around I usually wouldn’t bother with. It really is nice up there, especially on a warm day if you know where to sit for a 1:10 game. I knew where to sit without realizing how much. My row, Row 8, in my section, Section 518, fronted a Long Island day camp group. That was another sign. I was at my first game, on July 11, 1973, because I was in a Long Island day camp group. This was a different Long Island day camp, but my proximity made me an honorary camper for the day, I decided. A happy camper.

Hundreds of kids in blue and white t-shirts. I’ve never related particularly well to individual kids, but they were at a Mets game and I was at a Mets game and I hoped at least one among the hundreds would look back fifty or so years from this date, July 20, 2023, and think, “it’s the 50th anniversary of my first Mets game.” Or maybe they were all veterans of Citi Field by now. The organization of the counselors and the campers was something to behold. Kids, naturally, want to get up and get things. The counselors were prepared for “merch” or food runs, taking turns taking whoever wasn’t glued to the Mets and the White Sox to buy stuff, but in groups. There’s so much more to buy at Citi Field than there was at Shea Stadium in 1973. I bought a yearbook then. I didn’t see one kid come back from the “gift shop,” as one girl called it, with a yearbook. That’s all right. I’m sure they all have Baseball-Reference bookmarked on their phones.

Kids by the hundreds can be loud at a ballgame. They’re supposed to be, even the future loners in a mood among them. The first fly ball they saw they greeted as kids in day camp groups a half-century earlier greeted the first fly ball they saw, like it was gonna be a home run. Of course it wasn’t, because it almost never is. Judgment of fly balls would grow keener as the day went on. Shrieking would be intermittent but not intolerable to adult ears, despite the sadists in the control booth posting a NOISE METER on the enormous video screen. Like these kids need to be told to GET LOUD. No, they’ve got that covered, thanks. They were in great voice, singing along with the day’s Ballpark Karaoke winner, “Stacy’s Mom,” and you haven’t lived until you’ve been enveloped in hundreds of prepubescent voices celebrating the fact that “Stacy’s mom has got it goin’ on.” With the Mets down five runs in the middle innings and the White Sox batting, they also brought and sustained an impressive LET’S GO METS! chant. Loner in a Mood’s rules of order specifies LET’S GO METS! is best deployed tactically, ideally with a Met at the plate, but I’m going to tell hundreds of kids not to be excited about the Mets? You don’t last 50 years going to games quashing succeeding generations’ enthusiasm. The only thing I told any kid, a girl sitting directly behind me, was “Alvarez is DH’ing” when she absorbed the home team defense and asked, with Mets fan awareness that made my heart soar, “Where’s Alvarez?” (Don’t think it didn’t pain me to casually use “DH” in a sentence in a National League ballpark.)

The girl didn’t respond and I decided to let her figure the rest out for herself. Thus, when Omar Narvaez stepped into the box, and she greeted his appearance with, “Who’s that?” and Omar the Infrequent announced his presence with authority via his first Met home run, it made for a delightful surprise. As did (for me anyway) Jose Quintana’s solid five-inning Met debut, despite a few balls falling in early, and David Peterson picking a guy off first in relief. The delightful surprises were few and far between down on the field, as the Mets fell behind, 6-1, by which time I was quietly hoping that if the Mets weren’t going to storm ahead (as I once saw them do, at Shea after looking hopelessly flat most of a midweek afternoon game against Chicago’s National League entry), they’d give up one more run and lose, 7-1, because it was the score they lost by at my first game. That would be a pair of How It Started/How It’s Going bookends for the ages. But the White Sox were held to six, and Pete Alonso shocked all of civilization with an RBI single, and it would be 6-2 before it was over.

Ah, I didn’t need those bookends, anyway.

Jeff McNeil did not beat out any of his myriad grounders for base hits, despite repeatedly making the SAFE! gesture with his arms as he crossed first; it might not be the winning move he believes it to be. Drew Smith was not the effective reliever he strove to be, though I’m happy to report that in a ballpark full of kids out for a good time, he didn’t have to convince himself they were yelling “DROOOO!!!!” after he surrendered four runs, because none of the kids bought a scorecard, either, and none of them booed. Trevor Gott’s 1-2-3 top of the ninth was one I had to take mostly on faith because I got up to beat the day camp traffic as the eighth ended, an homage to my camp group fifty years ago leaving early to beat the Grand Central traffic. But I wasn’t bolting the ballpark. I decided a day dedicated to throwing it back to Shea wouldn’t be complete without a stroll down the right field ramps, Ramp, singular, I guess. On our last trip to Citi Field together, Jason and I were still mourning the passing of the Shea Stadium ramps, especially after a rousing win. No rousing win would be forthcoming on Thursday, but the ramp seemed just the way to roll. I would take my time and take it into field level and position myself to stand and watch the Mets storm ahead or, probably, be extinguished before turning back into a commuter determined to make the 4:24 at Woodside. That bit of watching the final outs from downstairs with the train on my mind was something I think I last did in 2011. I’m now officially capable of nostalgia for Citi Field’s early days.

A little ramp bonus if you ever want to try and time it correctly: If you’re somewhere between the suite level and the field level, you can see the mound if you peek in at the proper angle, and maybe you’ll catch a strike or two on your way down. I watched Trevor Gott retire his last batter that way, as if I was stealing glances while standing on the 7 extension they tore down after the 2007 season, and it was likely my favorite pitch of the day. I’m always officially capable of nostalgia for anything that evokes Shea Stadium, as long as it isn’t a moldy hot dog bun. Unfortunately, the Mets were not capable of a rally in the bottom of the ninth, and they fell to the White Sox by the non-bookend score of 6-2. No scores of a losing nature are terribly delightful, even when the rest of the day is. And though they’re not my concern, good for the White Sox fans who trekked to Flushing and got one win in three for their troubles. Bill Veeck once more, on the team he owned twice:

If there is any justice in this world, to be a White Sox fan frees a man from any other form of penance.

I don’t suspect any pennants are coming to the South Side of Chicago or the Queens side of New York this season. Tommy Pham left the game with more groin aggravation. Starling Marte went on the IL with migraine miseries. We’re however many games out with however many left, behind however many teams who are in our way. But enough with the undelightful aspects of fandom in general, Mets fandom in particular and my fandom most of all. This was my once every 50 years day. Sharing it with the campers, some of whom may still be talking about it today even if it won’t necessarily be on their minds on July 20, 2073, made it a win despite the loss.

Mildly funny thing to me is I actually remember what I was doing on July 20, 1973, nine days after that first game at Shea. It sticks with me because there was something sticking in my mouth. I had the first wires attached to certain of my teeth en route to a full set of braces, a joy I’d carry orally for the next six years (if they had metal detectors at Shea in the ’70s, I imagine the beeping would have been incessant). That date sticks with me because it was the fourth anniversary of the first moon landing, July 20, 1969. I’ve always had a thing for dates, historical and personal. It’s apparently unnatural, based on a lifetime of continually being asked, “How do you remember THAT?” and not in any kind of admiring way. The sense that you’re different from everybody else will turn a person into a loner in a mood, whatever the mood. But that, I figured out more than 50 years ago, is what baseball is for. Baseball we do together, even if we sit alone. Camp groups drift apart. As long as there are Mets, Mets fans will always gather at a ballpark, whatever it’s called. I now have 708 instances — 402 at Shea + 306 at Citi — to back up my assertion.

I won’t be visiting an orthodontist to commemorate the 50th anniversary of my getting braces. Being over 60, I will probably be aware of many 50th anniversaries of things I’ve experienced in the years ahead, but I doubt I’ll make a day of many of them. Knock wood/brick, May 11/15, 2037, would make for a nice ballpark trip, whatever ballpark the Mets are playing in by then. But I don’t like to get ahead of myself. Ruminating about a 50th Anniversary Game about a year in advance is the uppermost extent of my speed. Less preferable result notwithstanding, the Mets and White Sox indeed did fine.

Thus, I judge the mood landing on July 20, 2023 an emotional success. Plus, I made the 4:24 at Woodside with minutes to spare.

If you like a good anniversary of a bad team, listen to National League Town’s salute to the 1993 Mets, who gave at least one fan a season worth remembering 30 years later. You’ll also learn why “section captains” have emerged as the fans-in-the-stands equivalent of Jeff McNeil constantly calling himself safe at first.