In Bizarro World, There’s Pastrami

I should have known Thursday was going to be out of the ordinary when I was on the Shake Shack line and I saw a guy with a “Minaya” jersey on.

I should have known Thursday was going to be a little strange when the usher for our section kept kicking people out of the first two rows of for the pure sake of keeping them clear. This happened from game time until the ninth inning. Nobody sat in them legally … the only purpose the empty rows seemed to serve was to save the vendors an extra trip upstairs, and let them cut across the section. I don’t know if that was the intended purpose, but intended or not it worked, I guess.

I should have known Thursday was going to be coo-coo for cocoa puffs when the woman at the food stand tried to woo my birthday celebrating friend with free samples of pastrami. Even took the time to put it on a nacho with onions. (I think they call this thing a “pastracho”, which sounds a lot like a brand of stretch pants.) But if the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, then this deli meat on a tortilla had my friend offering up a verbal contract of polygamy … as long as it came with the pastrami, of course.

I should have known Thursday was going to be wacky when the Mets got three runners on in the sixth inning while I was in the bathroom, and I was crazy enough to consider hanging out in there until the end of the inning to continue with the good karma. But then I realized, if karma really did exist, would it be hanging out in a men’s room at Citi Field? I compromised by leaving the bathroom, but staying behind the section. That didn’t work so well.

I should have known Thursday was going to be off the charts when the Mets came back from 4-0 down to tie the game, thanks in part to Aroldis Chapman throwing more balls out of the strike zone in his inning of work than R.A. Dickey did in his first five. But also thanks in part to that good ol’ Mets elbow grease that has been famously turning their abstract qualities such as “grit” and “heart” into tangible runs. It wasn’t so much the comeback that was unexpected, but that it was my pastrami loving birthday celebrating eternal optimist friend who was the one who turned to me in the initial stages of the comeback saying “I’m not feeling this one today”, and I … the curmudgeon … replied with “I think they’ll be fine.” This doesn’t happen in a normal day. Usually, my friend is the one who says “why can’t we go 162-0”, to which I reply “because this is the freakin’ Mets we’re talking about.”

And I definitely should have known all this when a back-up catcher put the winning run on base with a drag bunt.

But the final clue was when Ronny Cedeno hit a three run homer. And not only a three run homer, a three run homer which would have been gone at Citi Field sans Party Deck to put the finishing touches on a highly improbable 9-4 win. Ronny Cedeno weighs less than Ike Davis’ average, and he’s hitting baseballs over the Great Wall of Party City. This could all only mean one thing: The Mayans are screwing with my head. Gotta be. Think about it: This is the year it’s all supposed to end, and David Wright is hitting .411 … four hundred and eleven. David reached that mark with two more hits including the game winner when he drove home Mr. Speedster Catcher with an RBI double. Four-eleven.

You’re good, Mayans. You’re really good.