Let’s Make All Our Days More Bannery

So by all accounts, the return of Banner Day was a hit. Assuming that it will return next season (it better), it’s time to take it back more toward the levels of what it once was.

I attended Banner Day in its “heyday” (or what I call the heyday basically because I was there). 1984, 1987, and 1988. I was proud of myself for producing my first banner pretty much by myself along with my buddy, and not resorting to asking my mom for help. But then my mom created the banners the other two years … not because I needed help but because she was depressed that she didn’t get to help (painting was fun for her, and she’s really good.) But that’s how much a big deal Banner Day was.

What made Banner Day unbelievably cool to me was the fact that it took place between games of a scheduled doubleheader. Imagine walking in through the center field fence and seeing 56,000 people. That’s a rush. It was worth the wait to get in and worth missing the last three innings of game. (In 1987 I had the radio call on my headphones and I was the de facto play-by-play man for Lee Mazzilli’s game winning hit against the Pirates to end game one of that doubleheader, and I couldn’t have imagined having any more fun being in the stadium.) But damn, 56,000 people seeing you and your banner along with everybody else’s is really cool.

But to me, the decline of Banner Day came with the abolition of scheduled doubleheaders. Sure it took a while between games of the doubleheader, but nobody seemed to care. And if doubleheaders were still around, we’d still have Banner Day. But when the greedy owners and corporate types of baseball decided that single admission doubleheaders took three cents out of their pockets and crushed them forever, Banner Day lost a little of its luster. And after ’96, it went away for almost forever.

Now I realize that scheduled doubleheaders are sitting at a table playing poker with the dodo, the Sony Walkman, and Joe Piscopo. So that’s never going to come back … not even one because one lost gate will prevent the Wilpons from being able to afford the next D.J. Carrasco. So Banner Days, much like the one on Sunday, will be forever paraded in front of … best case scenario … less than half full houses. Because while people will gladly sit through a parade of banners if they’ve already been sitting there for three hours, very few people will go to a game three hours early unless they actually have a banner. And that’s a shame because people work hard on their banners. Their reward should be that 40,000 people should see it. But corporations getting their way over common decency will always be the way of the world, and we all have to deal with it.

But here’s what the giveback should be for that: Televise the damn thing. I honestly don’t remember if the post doubleheader banner days fo the past were aired before the game or not. But back then, there wasn’t an entire network dedicated to the Mets for the most part. Televise the damn thing. What would really be pre-empted, the 25th and 26th straight showings of Geico Sports Nite? For one day a year? If 40,000 people in the stands cant see them, how about the hundreds of thousands at home? This can’t be televised for an hour once a damn year? Who’s seeing these banners besides, each other, and the four judges? With the hundreds and thousands of sporting events that are on television that shouldn’t be, the Mets can’t put Banner Day on their own network for one hour so that these people that worked hard can be seen by their family and friends for more than three seconds during the pre-game show?

Luckily, they still televise games. And R.A. Dickey showed why he should win Player of the Month of May, a gold glove, an All-Star nod, the Nobel Peace Prize, the presidential nomination in 2016, and the 1989 Grammy for best Hard Rock recording. For his second straight game, Dickey and his knuckler struck out batters in the double digits as the Mets shut out the Padres again. (And wouldn’t you know it … Ron Darling was right on the button. 5-2 in the last seven.) And I tell you right now, if Tony La Russa doesn’t pick R.A. Dickey to represent the Mets in the All-Star game and join David Wright, he is going to be the recipient of the most acid-tongued blog post ever written by man. And that should probably be televised too.