27 World Championships… and Still No Class

This is going to have to be brief, but having been in attendance last night, I feel like I have to post something.

Great win.  Possibly the best game this team played this year.  The game was big.  The hitting was timely, and powerful.  The pitching was spectacular and efficient.  Ryota Igarashi was throwing gas in his first game back, but had no command; no matter, Frankie picked him up and got the save.  We don’t need to talk about that feeling we all had in the top of the ninth, the one where you are incresaingly sure you are about to puke in your hands.

Johan came up aces; Bay brought the big flies.  David Wright made a couple of nifty plays at 3B, and had a beautiful frozen rope double off the left field wall.  I even pretended he didn’t strike out twice when he stepped into the box in the fifth.

I have no voice today.  Generally it takes me almost a week to recover my voice after Mets-Yankees or, back in the day, playoff games.  Judging by the sound at the game, I am not the only one who is hoarse today.  It was great to hear Citi Field erupt when Bay hit his first bomb.

Aside from the game, there was this:

We could tell these guys were going to be trouble from the first inning

 

Yes, the image is blurry (does anyone know how to take good pics with a blackberry?), but if you look very carefully at the center of this picture, you will see my two section mates for last night’s game, Massengill and Summer’s Eve.  I wish I could say these guys were the exception, but who would I be kidding?  More and more, they are the rule.  They started taunting shortly before first pitch.  When the Mets scored 4 in the second, they stepped it up a notch.  When the Mets added two more in the fifth, they really ramped it up.  I wanted to ask them if they were actually watching the game or if they knew the score, but I thought better of it; that only makes it worse.

Big moment here for Summer's Eve: He counted to one out loud.

It must be great to be a Yankee fan.  After all, the Yankees never lose.  When they score fewer runs than their opposition, the game doesn’t count.  When the Yankees beat the Mets in these games, the Yankee-fan crowing never stops.  But when the Mets win, it’s a chorus of “enjoy your meaningful games in May!” or “This is your World Series!”  As the Mets started to open the game up, the Yankee fans lost all interest and started reminiscing about their 27 world championships, and, demonstrating that keen intellectual edge, correctly noted that that was 25 more than the Mets had won (actually, 27 more, if you factor in that the 1969 and 1986 World Series were both cancelled when the Yankees didn’t make it).  After Sergio Mitre threw a purpose pitch at Jason Bay (yes, it was obviously a purpose pitch), they were so bored and stupid and running out of people to mock that they were begging Santana to throw at every Yankee batter who stepped in.

He's SO gangsta.

Anyway, back to the douche brothers.  I tried most of the night to snap the above image, because it really encapsualtes what these guys were all about.  There was nothing in particular going on at this point in the game when I finally managed to capture S.E. doing the signature twin-six-shooters-homeboy-gangsta-wave dance, or whatever you call this.  I think it may have even been between innings.  But what better time to “represent?”  I would so love to see this guy go do his little dance in East New York or Washington Heights.

In a way, these two almost ruined the game for me; instead of rooting for a big Mets win for its own sake, and actually being able to enjoy the suspense and the eventual triumph, for me, from the sixth inning on it became all about serving up some justice and making them walk out with their heads hung low.

I guess the important thing is, eventually,  they did.