I’m writing this twelve hours later than I should have. Will I remember what happened yesterday? You’ll never know, I’ll just make it up if I don’t.
I went to my second Met game this week, this one against their hated crosstown rivals the New York Yankees. It’s Good versus Evil. I’m on the side of Good. Of course that’s morally, in terms of quality the Mets are not very good and the Yankees are great. Good was the underdog. The numbers favored the Yankees but they still have to play the game.
Alan’s season tickets are for seats that look good on paper, second row of the upper deck between home and first, but are actually bad. Our view is obstructed by the safety Plexiglas and railing at the top of the stairs. To make it worse whenever someone uses the stairs they walk in front of us. We usually don’t need to sit in them as not many people come to Met games and we sit right behind home plate. There is no stairway in the front of the seats there. As in intelligently designed stadia they stairway is from a tunnel behind you. The Mets put very little attention in designing the cheap sets, very typical of the Wilpon mind set. Because the Mets were playing the Yankees the stadium was packed and we had to sit in our assigned seats. I ended up missing several key plays because my view was blocked.
None of that ruins the evening. The game is about the game and it was a great one. For the second time this week the Mets game from behind to win. Wheeler pitched a fine game and kept the Mets in it. It was the Yankees’ bullpen that melted down, not the Mets’. One of my favorite players, Michael Conforto drove in the two go-ahead runs in the 8th. Once again I shouted myself hoarse.
It took me a while but I have mastered the commute from the new apartment to and from Citi Field. That means knowing exactly where to stand on the platforms. I’m always right by the nearest stairway. That doesn’t help with waiting for the trains. I waited for over ten minutes for the D train on the way home.
Do you think it strange that I so disparage the Mets’ ownership and so love the team? You shouldn’t. As Seinfeld said, “We root for the laundry.” You put 25 players in a Mets uniform, and that’s who I root for. It’s exactly the same way I feel about the United States. I hate President Trump even more than I hate Fred Wilpon, but Trump is not America. He’s a cancer on the country I love. People forgot that the full quote is “My country right or wrong, if right to be kept right, if wrong to be set right.” That’s important to remember the day before Independence Day. Let’s try another quote, this by Thoreau in Civil Disobedience:
The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt… Others, as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders, serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God. A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it…
When it comes to my country and my team I might not be a hero but I’m a patriot. My team right or wrong.
Wise Madness 