Everybody had a hard year
Everybody had a good time
Everybody had a (M)et dream
Everybody saw the sunshine
—Lennon and McCartney, more or less [1]
When I left for Citi Field early Sunday afternoon, Buck Showalter was the manager of the New York Mets. Before I arrived at Citi Field a little later Sunday afternoon, Buck Showalter let it be known that he would soon no longer be manager of the New York Mets [2]. As I was leaving Citi Field as Sunday afternoon was morphing into Sunday evening and the National League baseball season in New York was officially over, there seemed to be a tad of confusion as to who exactly decided Buck Showalter wouldn’t any longer be the manager of the New York Mets — did Buck proactively decide to step aside, or was it sternly suggested to the reigning National League Manager of the Year that he should move along to create space for the club’s incoming grand operational poobah [3]’s selection machinations?
Me, I was just trying to go to a ballgame, Closing Day, my twenty-eighth seasonal au revoir in a row (not including 2020), my thirtieth overall. The suddenness and the murkiness of the Buck Showalter exit kind of overshadowed the farewell to the season, as did that lingering ND from Thursday night. It was three days since the Mets and Marlins had their rainy game suspended [4], the one the Mets led, 1-0, at the end of eight, only to have the Marlins pull in front, 2-1, before the top of the ninth, let alone the bottom of the ninth, could be completed. When I wasn’t joining in the standing ovation for Buck during a sweetly choreographed lineup card exchange while THANK YOU, BUCK beamed from the EnormoVision screen — “there goes Vince Lombardi, having coached his last game for Washington” was the thought that popped into my head as the imminently erstwhile skipper saluted his players who were saluting him — I was continually checking my phone for definitive word of any ruling from MLB as to whether I had witnessed a win, lose or draw versus Miami the other night. With us finishing out the end of our string, and the Marlins being all but set for the postseason, I concluded I’d be comfortable having it called however it would be called. What I really wanted was for it to be called. The string should not be put into the books with a frayed end [5].
[6]Sunday in New York like it oughta be, managerial dismissal, unresolved record and blowout loss notwithstanding.
So Buck’s drama had some of my attention, as did some combination of the Diamondbacks, the Marlins and Rob Manfred’s minions (the out-of-town scoreboard made clear there was zero reason the proposed delicious four-out scenario would unfold on Monday), the combination of which served to distract me somewhat from the annual communing with finality [7] I relish on Closing Day. That’s too bad, in that we had a perfect shirtsleeve Bobby Darin “Sunday in New York [8]” First of October to sit in the ol’ ballpark one more time in 2023, a reminder that baseball played under sunny skies on a dry field is preferable to all alternatives.
Little was special about the season that was coming to its merciful end on Sunday, and little turned out special about Buck Showalter’s final game as Mets manager, Jose Butto [9]’s six solid innings and Tim Locastro [10]’s no-doubter home run notwithstanding. Yet I looked forward to this Closing Day in particular because of what it represented personally vis-à-vis how the baseball year began, and that element of Game 162/Decision 161 delivered.
Three days before Opening Day, my wife went into the hospital for what I chose to identify in conversation and correspondence as “a medical procedure,” because I didn’t choose to use the word for what the procedure was intended to address. Let’s just say she was diagnosed with that thing Major League Baseball urges everybody to Stand Up To [11] during the World Series. Stephanie stood up to it courageously, and modern medicine (along with health insurance) did the rest. What she had to be operated on for was a version of that thing, a friend who is a researcher in the field told me, that is among the most treatable. You never want to get any form of it, he added, but if you have to get some form of it, this is the one to get.
Sure enough, the procedure played out as doctors described in advance, and the recovery proceeded without incident, which is easy for me to say, as I wasn’t the one recovering. The biggest post-op moment — and, as far as I’m concerned, the biggest victory of 2023 — came the morning of what was supposed to be the Home Opener, the one that got rained out because they thought it was going to rain, but it didn’t. The phrase we heard that day, ten days after surgery, was, “Your labs were better than your biopsy.” It carried the power of a thousand Outta Heres.
Followups have followed, and all has flowed smoothly against the backdrop of the first half becoming the second half and the Mets going nowhere across six months, yet I eagerly anticipated our going to the last Sunday of the year together. I always do, but this time more so and differently. It would have been nice had the Mets put together something more closely resembling a winning effort en route to their 9-1 loss [12] to the playoff-bound Phillies. It would have been nice to have left the park not subject to bulletins from what has been institutionalized as the franchise’s biennial managerial search. It would have been nice to have known for certain if the Mets’ final record is 74-87, 75-87 or 74-88. But mostly it was nice sitting in Section 328 for two-and-a-half hours with who I was sitting with, occasionally clapping, occasionally groaning, constantly aware that in ways that elude the box score, it doesn’t get any better than this.