These days, you don’t have to be in the New York area — or the outer limits of AM radio range — to keep up with the Mets. You just need an MLB account and a certain amount of cell service.
Well, and a little luck.
The beginning of the Mets’ game against the Red Sox found me in the southwest of Washington State, where a handful of roads skirt vast tracts of wilderness and eventually emerge to run along the Pacific. Most of this is timber country, with the scars of logged areas giving way to acres of newly planted pines and then to sections of old forest, huge and dark and mossy. It’s gorgeous, though a little intimidating for someone who grew up on Long Island without mountains.
Lots of trees, not many cell towers.
This affected a number of things about my improvised trip — I wanted to see a new bit of the world — starting with the route I’d carefully programmed in Google Maps. When service disappeared so did my map, leaving me to feel my way using road signs and memory — and remembering with a smile that this was the way we always did it before the Internet. (At least those of us who didn’t have a road atlas in the car. Remember those?)
The MLB feed was a little easier to access than Google, for whatever reason, so Howie Rose and/or Keith Raad would be chattering away through my car speakers and then vanish, leaving me contemplating mountains and trees until they returned. MLB Audio generally picks up where it left off, so delays accumulate until you’re several minutes (or more) behind the actual game, something important to remember should someone else in the car glance at GameDay. (I was by myself, so there was neither peril nor opportunity there.) When the feed’s available, you can advance it 30 seconds at a time and so catch up, but I decided it was more important to not drive into trees than do that.
And anyway, I don’t really mind. The game may not quite be live, but it’s live for me, and a certain tension gets added to the proceedings if the feed cuts out with a pitch on the way to a hitter with a 3-2 count and runners that need driving in. During these silent lacunae you wonder what’s going to happen, consider the fact that it’s already happened, and go down other quietly philosophical rabbit holes.
(Less amusing: My dumb rented Audi would not play nice with my phone, taking CarPlay away randomly and sometimes silencing everything until I could get to a town and put things temporarily right again.)
In fits and starts I heard Luis Severino [1] set Red Sox up and knock them down, aside from a run that scored after a Brandon Nimmo [2] misplay. I heard Francisco Lindor [3]‘s heroics and the Boston defense refusing to let the Mets get too far ahead. I heard the Citi Field crowd, a welcome change after all this time on the road. I heard Howie and Keith speculating about Sarah Sze Hat Night, which delighted me because Sarah is my college classmate, and it’s quietly amazing (amazin’, even) to flash back to freshman year and then forward to now and the unlikely development that someone I know making a Mets giveaway item. (A pretty neat one, too!)
Anyway, in time I left the forests and the seashore behind and passed by Olympia (with its signs for Sleater-Kinney Road, another unexpected touchpoint) and returned to Tacoma. As I checked into my hotel Phil Maton [4] was grappling with a last trio of Boston hitters. I hit something as I was juggling pens and credit cards and phones and so saw on another screen that the game was a FINAL — no surprise given how many delays had accumulated.
Good final or bad final? The Mets weren’t so far out in front that a Boston uprising and a failed Mets counterattack was impossible. But I had a good feeling about it — the Mets are playing some of their best ball of the season right now, and while that’s only as good as the next game, when it’s happening you can see it and hear it and feel it. (Pick two out of three depending on your current media consumption.)
Maton got the last hitter and confirmed what I’d devoutly hoped and mostly believed: good final [5]. Better final, even, what with the Braves idle and so now just a skinny half-game ahead of the Mets. Cue a quiet little celebration in the hotel lobby — a delayed one, sure, but live for me.