Ode to the Mets

Every (ahem) week, I write my nephew letters about sports that he mostly doesn’t read. They centre on my support for the New York Knicks, Yankees Mets, Giants, and Tottenham Hotspur – and his love of Chelsea, LeBron James, and prop bets.

I am trying to spare you the glorious details about New York, for now. I think it will take several years, and hundreds of pages, to articulate the odd concoction of electricity and nostalgia and prospect that is the Big Apple: a city that, from borough to borough, and avenue to avenue, leaps in and out of the largest collection of costumes I’ve ever seen.

I say “costumes” because this Wonderland is always performing but never pretending. All at once New York is an elastic break dancer, a thespian concealed in peculiar stage light, a power broker collecting their daily miles in the middle of Central Park, a legend ashing a smoke outside the Comedy Cellar, a center fielder trying to cut off a runner with a launch towards 2nd base, and a mild-mannered ambivert quietly slipping into red-and-blue spandex. I have never seen so many different kinds of people attuned to such complexity, and so voluntarily compliant with the threading between them that makes such a quilt even remotely conceivable. America will always have a considerable amount of work to do, socially; but I always suspected New York respectfully opted out of the group project long ago, and I was right. It was like I was on another planet, for seven glorious days – and I’m certain I would encounter far fewer surprises landing on Mars, partly because there are no baseball stadia in outer space.

I have several colleagues who are strong candidates, in my opinion, to be amongst the finest human beings on the planet. I was surprised at how many were willing to accompany me to the Yankee game against the Rays on a hot and sweltering Tuesday, and I quietly anticipated the foil of a rain delay. It was a quick train-ride to the Bronx, during which (to be honest) I forget what most of the conversation was. (Sometimes, clutching the pearls of that week, a very specific moment in a very specific place will come to me just before my alarm goes off. The illiteracy of it all now is such that I can only hear music where there were plans for bagels, musings about the hotel, revelatory disclosures as to how Broadway or the Met were all within walking distance … I am hanging onto dreams, lad, and only a handful of souvenirs to affirm I was not asleep the entire time.)

I’ve seen that street, right under the bridge, right by the stadium, where vloggers will incite fans to say rude things about the Red Sox or the Mets, or disclose their greatest all-time Yankee. I have a line somewhere about wanting to alight in Yankee Stadium when I die, to shimmer among the saints that are Ruth, DiMaggio, Berra – I thought I’d already done so, surrounded by pinstriped angel wings on all sides.

We got ice-cream and sandwiches and water at a dynamic corner store, everything in the decorative and aesthetic touches declaring “Yankees!”, including the sandwich menu whose options were named after fielders and pitchers of common lore and uncommon valour. We walked past a few bootleggers and their stalls to wind our way into the stadium, and personally I was charmed by the idea that ownership lets my guys hawk (let’s call them) replica jerseys right outside the show. I would’ve bought one – a ‘99’ obviously – if I wasn’t so stunned by my surroundings just then.

Crudely, I now describe Yankee Stadium as a sort of continuation of the subway ride you take from Manhattan to get there. It doesn’t betray any real interest in colour, and once you’re inside … well, I remember thinking to myself, Is this meant to be some kind of colosseum? It stretches from one end to the next, a little bit like a folded tortilla, so you always feel like it has only two opposing sides, with (nevertheless) densely populated edges. That industrial feeling, the steel and the stoic ID of this baseball brand, is only exacerbated by one’s exposure to punishing heat on an afternoon like that Tuesday.

To get to our seats we walked through dark corridors that made me think someday someone will shoot a heist movie here. One masked Yankee fan will remark to the eaves, It wouldn’t hurt to spruce this place up a bit would it, Mr. Steinbrenner? And another will angrily retort, But that’s not why we come, is it? It’s not curtains and shit that got us (just in case the audience forgot) 27 World Series rings.

I’m still shocked at how affordable and easy it was to book seats right by the Bleacher Creatures, whose customary roll call I now don’t remember witnessing. I watched Max Fried warm up right by our side of the field, captured it, and wrapped the scene later that night in a tragic Ella Fitzgerald number for my millions of Instagram followers. With Aaron Judge out of the lineup today I already knew what was happening – I’d known on the flight over, days before packing my bags. I was here, I could feel it, to say goodbye to my complicated relationship with the New York Yankees.

Ben Rice hit a single early in proceedings and, even though I’d perused an injury report the night before, I mistook his knee-high stockings for Aaron Judge’s, which caused two of my most zealous co-pilots to mistake Ben Rice himself for Aaron Judge. Cody Bellinger stood right there in centre field and I was certain my life had peaked. He hit a homer I want to say in the 5th inning, and the Jumbotron helped detonate the atmosphere immediately. I have to say, home-runs look quite disappointing in real life. The ball just loops mischievously over a wall and disappears, a little bit like when you lose a football as toddlers, because someone’s blasted a free-kick right into the neighbours’ yard.

Somewhere around the 7th inning the machine politely asked us all to stand up for God Bless America. We left in the middle of the 8th, to beat subway swell. Baseball is a long and challenging chore if one team doesn’t have much to look forward to after the All-Star break, and I felt bad for my company. It was almost 11pm. On the train ride back to the hotel, or Bryant Park for reflections and musings, an announcer did a couple of call-and-responses for how great it felt to grab the win. All the seductions this place transmits you through screens, Vanity Fair articles, or crackling headphones – it appears all of it is real.

*

Saturday afternoon was wrought for several reasons. It was hard to escape that this was effectively my last day in New York, and to digest that there is exactly only one way to return and sustain a reasonable existence here.

I began the day with serious business. Natty took me to a diner she fondly associates with her own arrival in the city, many years ago. She showed me a bar behind a tiny door where off-Broadway actors go for post-game beverages, and then we hovered around the New York Public Library. We floated into the gift shop, where I successfully avoided purchasing anything, right before I located the MLB store where I purchased a Mets hat and also your new Yankee fit. I walked past or around Radio City Music Hall, a McNally Jackson, a Nintendo outlet, and the rest of the Rockefeller Center to get there, and could scarcely believe my eyes again, or my legs, or my body. I had a friendly conversation with a sheepish Red Sox fan who said the store was laid out like a baseball diamond, you just couldn’t see it maybe for all the merch. I guesstimated he’d been standing at centre-field when I walked in, like Bellinger a few days before or Jarren Duran on his cursed Red Sox. He smiled and said you could say that, yeah.

I wandered around Chinatown around lunchtime, kind of survived a difficult conversation at an otherwise lovely brunch situation, then whizzed towards the subway at Canal St. a little flustered. I’d barely rode the subway alone that whole week, if at all, and was a little worried I’d end up somewhere else entirely. My heart went faster and faster as the digital display, not always present on New York trains, cleared stop-after-stop to approach Queens. More Mets hats, more Mets jerseys, a few lonely Giants ones, began to board. I’d meet two more wonderful colleagues at Citi Field if I didn’t flub the connection, and if one of my companions managed to stroll over without any further complication. “They’ve just ordered everybody off the 7,” she texted. It’s all the acutely distressing dialogue I seem to recall most clearly.

I said to you on our call yesterday that for the last few stops, now packed with Mets orange-and-blue, I thought I rode right into panels I’d seen in the Spider-Man comics of my youth. My heart spun around in my chest to the steady drums of ‘Brandy Alexander’ by the Walkmen; Nas, the Ombudsman of Queensbridge, smacked my eardrums just before I breezed down all the stairs at Mets-Willets Point.

Maybe it was that vexing but mostly lovely brunch. Maybe it was the nerve of the idea that I was spending a Saturday afternoon in Queens. Maybe it was the fact that it had taken so long in my life to get here, and that it might take just as long to ever get back. Maybe it was walking down amongst all the Mets faithful, in that familiar, purposeful march of sports fans – be it football, hoops, you name it – swaggering towards duty in the final minutes before battle begins. Almost for sure it was all those signs, assuring me I could turn off the Maps app now; I could finally stop wondering if I’d travelled in the right direction. No one saw me cry just because everywhere in the air above my head it unreservedly said ‘Mets Baseball’.

I heard the speakers blast ‘My Girl’ when Francisco Lindor, Mr. Smiles himself, stepped out for his first at-bat. I missed a Pete Alonso homer going down to fetch homegirl, and homeboy too, but honestly I didn’t care. I was home, lad.