Traveling Disaster

Back in the offseason, my mental calendar had a circle drawn around June 8-9: Mets in London!

A trip could be fun, particularly if Emily and I convinced our Phillies-fan friends to join us. That plan got kicked around with vague seriousness for a while, was downgraded to maybe and then died a quiet death before Opening Day, as too many things got in the way. But I was still intrigued by the Mets playing baseball on another continent. What would the park they played in be like? What reception would they get? Would the English find the whole thing as baffling as we find cricket?

Alas, my plans weren’t done being scrambled. I was scheduled to be in Maine for the series, which wasn’t a big deal: There are plenty of flights, we now have Internet, etc. But then things started to happen.

First my Thursday night flight got cancelled, a victim of storms at the midpoint of the route. (A route Delta seems to cancel at the drop of a hat, but let’s not get cynical.)

As I waited for Friday night’s do-over, I learned a storm had pulled the power lines’ mast off the house at some point since I last saw it in September. But I was assured that while an electrician’s services would be required and one should tread a little carefully, there was power.

Turned out there was power, but the Internet hookup hadn’t proved as resilient. It was toast.

Not ideal, but 5G is really robust in this part of Maine, so I was confident I could watch the game on my phone. Heck, I could probably even send the picture to the TV with a little fiddling.

Except the game was blacked out.

And there it was. I’d fussed and fiddled my way to a dead end. Even if everything had worked out as originally planned, I would have been experiencing a flashback to my AOL dial-up days.

Experienced through the radio feed, Mets-Phils in London was just another Mets game. I checked in on Bryce Harper‘s football-style celebration later and read about Francisco Lindor‘s Union Jack glove, but mostly I got Keith Raad and Pat McCarthy being genial about English vocabulary. (Nothing against those two gentlemen, but I really wanted to hear Howie Rose thrust into his own remake of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, complete with Howie reminding everyone that he is absolutely positively indubitably not from Connecticut.)

Deprived of visual pomp and circumstance, all I got was a Mets game — and a very typical 2024 Mets game at that. Sean Manaea was really good until he really wasn’t. His implosion was assisted by some iffy defense, with Starling Marte‘s deterioration as a defender front and center. There was some bad relief, not enough hitting, and a familiar result, an intervening ocean notwithstanding.

I was miffed I didn’t see any of it, until about the middle of the fourth. Then I decided that had most likely been a kindness. Funny how some plans work themselves out.