Arts & Entertainment
The Freelance Retort: Take Me Out To the Ballgame
When I was a kid, "between innings" entertainment meant watching a guy trying to carry a bunch of beers back to his seat without spilling
Drawing by Bernie Moloney
The Freelance Retort by Brian Moloney
Z and I took “ourselves” out to the ballgame, the other day; out to Citi Field, home of the NY Mets to be precise….because I know some of you folks are precision freaks.
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And it was an excellent time to go, because the Mets—at least for now—are on an upswing.
I say, for now, because if you’re a Met fan or just a fan of baseball in general, you know that the Mets are one of those teams whose fans must apply the prefix, “long suffering” to the word fan.
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Which is actually something we’re proud of…so be advised not to share a table with us come lunch time.
Yeah…
No matter how well things are going…we’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Fans of longtime, successful teams, such as the Yankees, never wait for the other shoe to drop. In fact, on the contrary, they actually expect someone to come and polish their shoes.
So it was a fun day at the old ballpark.
Well, actually—again in the interest of precision—it’s a new ball park that opened in 2009, to replace the last new ballpark, Shea Stadium, which opened in 1964…that replaced the first ballpark, the one that George Washington used to frequent during the revolution…I think.
And that ballpark was known as the Polo Grounds once home to the Yankees in the early 20’s and the New York Giants baseball team until 1958…you know, before they up and left for the windblown confines of Candlestick Park in San Francisco.
I bring up the Polo Grounds because it’s where I attended most of my earliest major league baseball games, back in 1962…that is, if you consider the version of the game those early Met teams played, major league baseball.
But it didn’t really matter what the quality of baseball was, back then…what mattered was you were going to a baseball game…and you were going with your dad.
I wrote about all of that and the reasons why I became a Met fan some time ago, so I’m not taking another trip down nostalgia lane, here. But it struck me, as Z and I stood on the security line, outside the stadium, for 20 minutes…as if we were preparing to board a flight to Brussels, how much things have changed since those early days. I wondered just what my dad would have thought of the new 21st century version of, “take me out to the ballgame”.
Back then, all my dad needed to be entertained at a ball game was a bag of peanuts, a cold beer and scorecard. Okay, sure…sometimes he went a little crazy and brought his own pencil, but that was only because he found those little nubby ones to be incompatible with his little nubby fingers.
Instead of buying tickets through some on-line computer site from the luxury of home, he walked right up to a dingy, stadium ticket booth and negotiated for the best seats he could wrangle from some guy with a cigar sewn into his mouth, who held the unique power to banish you to a seat behind a support pole in the grandstand, just because he didn’t like the shirt you were wearing.
And once the negotiations were concluded, amicably, and those magic ducats were in hand, the only security issue that was of any concern, was avoiding that suspicious puddle of brown liquid pooling by the gate.
Once inside this cramped, dark, mysterious structure…
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