shellytown

Our first day of the last season of Shea Stadium was last weekend. Would that our second was today, an immaculate mid-May Saturday at the beginning of a Mets-Yankees series. First of the season, last of an era. What will a new stadium do for this flagging team of underdogs with a taste for the good life? But before we find that out, there is this strange season of sharp inhales and long exhales…

Our game was a day game in a double-header against the Reds. Cool spring day, clear with far away clouds. The Mets won despite a less-than-stellar performance by our star pitcher Johan Santana. We were hitting, a less-than-typical situation for us. A thrill to see back-to-back homeruns. A thrill to be among the people, our people. Cow Bell Man was wearing a Santana jersey and I didn’t recognize him at first. “Who’s the cowbell interloper?” I asked my husband. “That’s no interloper,” he said. “That’s Cow Bell Man. He wears other jerseys.” I love that my husband knows that. He is a baseball encyclopedia.

“What happens to the roster when they call up a player?” I asked, amid talk of our pitcher woes.
“Someone has to be sent down,” he said.
“Who?”
“Someone who’s pissed,” he replied gravely.

The minor leagues were where I first fell in love with baseball, really. As a poet, I appreciated the clockless innings and ample time to build an experience, a day or an evening. No clueless cheerleaders in stupid outfits. Happy people all around, drunk on the freedom of open-air beer. Back in Greensboro, I went with my MFA friends to Bats games and heckled visiting teams, made up games with peanut husks, and formed a haphazard and probably more annoying than anything fan club around a Bats player, whose family we eventually met. One of my fellow poets became the Bats mascot, Casey the Bat, and we came up with all kinds of ways to try to get him to blow his cover. Like it mattered. But he played along. We all did, back in those crazy days, my days of $375-a-month rent.

How you fall in love with something, someone, becomes a part of the relationship, and it forms a space at its center. A space you either protect because you continue to love the thing or the person, or destroy because you don’t. I carry a little bit of the Bats around with me now, as a Mets fan, despite the fact that the Bats were a farm team for the dreaded Yankees (who the Mets are now leading in the opening game as I watch from my couch). And I'm glad. It's a tender spot in there. I think of them when Gabe and I go out to the basketball court under the elevated tracks and throw the baseball I once fished out of the drainage ditch behind the Bats’ home, War Memorial stadium, before it was torn down and rebuilt, sometime after I left that world for this one.