Even At Their Worst, They’re Best With You

There’s always a little bit of heightened awareness on a night where there’s a high ticket giveaway. There are long lines, long wait times, and if you throw in heat and humidity you have a potentially volatile situation. I’ll admit that I have a habit to imagine the worst possible scenario and complain about the smallest things. After I got the Thor bobblehead I stood off to the side of the escalator to wait for my wife and friend and the usher told me “you have to keep moving.” To which I turned and said “Can I wait for my wife?” When I say “said”, what I really mean was that I turned my head dramatically and pointedly barked at him with crazy eyes. I don’t mean to do it, it just comes out. Inevitably, I just come home wondering why I’m so grouchy.

So you can imagine my mood on a hot night after Zack Wheeler gave up four runs in the first inning. Didn’t matter that we had gotten bobbleheads. And it just got worse as the game went along. Like in the fifth inning when Mike Piazza went on the jumbotron and said “Mets fans, you know what it’s time for.” I lean over to my wife and say “It’s time for Travis d’Arnaud to strike out.” He singled. Why am I so angry?

At 5-4 Oakland my sister, who was also at the game, texted me that she took credit for the four quick runs the Mets scored in the sixth inning on a Jay Bruce two run home run, a Travis d’Arnaud single, and a Michael Conforto double. She chalked it up to good karma. She saw a sad child with the Mets down 5-0, but the kid was sad because he didn’t get a Thor bobblehead. (He didn’t get a Thor bobblehead because the Mets only give out 15,000 to get people in the park two hours early to buy extra food and drink … but then they don’t have all of the stands open right away but I’m just getting angry again.) So my sister gave the kid her bobblehead which could have gotten her about $100 on eBay (or $50 to the guy who was going around the park offering $50 for a bobblehead thinking that there’s somebody out there who hasn’t been on eBay). No matter what the score was before or after the act, the act was tremendous. But the fact that this happened at 5-0 and then the Mets came back? That’s heartwarming poetry that I’m going to take advantage of as a blogger because I’m not as good a person as my sister.

The Mets finished the comeback with a Lucas Duda pinch hit single up the middle off lefty Daniel Coulombe in the eighth which tied the game, and then after a Hansel Robles scorless inning with the Mets one out away from extra innings in the bottom of the ninth, this:

Perhaps I’m grouchy because I had expected this season to be so much better than it has been. Perhaps I’m grouchy because the underachieving season has made the number of Citi Field outings left to go to finite, with each game counting down to zero after which there’s a long winter ahead. That the only reason to go to games is for the bobbleheads and the food, which makes me seemingly just like everybody else in the park who just wander around with no rhyme or reason and no clue as to whose view they’re blocking. (There were people walking upstairs during the Flores walk off home run with seemingly no clue that something big had happened.) But I’ve learned that focusing on the game at hand and not worrying about the standings can give each day a happy ending, made happier by Wilmer Flores’ walk off dinger.

And I’ve learned that I need to calm down or I’ll never enjoy anything ever again. And that I’ll never be as good a person as my sister.

Today’s Hate List (Which I Know Is Contrary To Calming Down And Enjoying Life Like I Just Said I Need To Do)

1. Matt Joyce
2. Khris Davis
3. Bruce Maxwell
4. Reggie Jackson
5. Sean Manaea