Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Yeah, I got nothing to say. But I do have 6 years of photographs.

I look forward to speaking to a ticket office representative in a few weeks when the information regarding partial plans is available.

If you’ve just arrived, please see the Update to this post.

The phone rings. I don’t recognize the number, I Google it and see it’s from the Mets. I answer.

“Hi, Caryn, this is Josh from the New York Mets. I wanted to see if you’d heard about some of the changes we’ve made to ticketing plans, and see if you had any questions.”
“Why, yes, I do have a question.”
“Great!”
“Are the Mets going to re-sign Jose Reyes?”
“Well (laughing), you know, I don’t control that, we certainly do want him back…”
“Right, but that’s what I want to know, and I don’t think we’re going to commit to a ticket plan yet without knowing that.”
“So you don’t think that the Mets can win without Jose Reyes?”
“That’s not the point.”
“So if we don’t sign Jose Reyes, you’re not going to be here. I get it. Goodbye.” *click*

He hung up on me.
HE HUNG UP.
A representative of the Mets organization hung up on me.
In a million, trillion years, I did not expect that reaction.

Now, of course I know very well that Josh in the ticketing office has nothing to do with whether or not the Mets re-sign Jose Reyes. But, as we have discussed in the Metsgrrl household as recently as this past weekend, the fact of whether or not the Mets re-sign Jose Reyes has a direct impact on how many games we go to next year. Sure, you could say that the Mets might get someone else at that level (maybe), but it still won’t be the same as watching Jose Reyes play baseball.  Furthermore, the Mets’ ability to open up their wallets and do what it takes to keep Jose Reyes means something. It says something. It’s the Wilpons showing a commitment to the team and to the fans.

It is a perfectly reasonable question, and it’s one that I am pretty sure a lot of other fans are asking. And yet, it is a question that I got hung up on for, by someone in the Mets organization.

There are a lot of other ways Josh could have handled that situation. Instead of getting defensive, he could have laughed and said, “Gosh, me too! But do you have any other concerns that I can help you with?” He could have asked me how many games I went to last year, and he would have learned that I still made it to 25 or so games even without a ticket plan. He could have asked me how I was buying my tickets. He should have somewhere in my record that the reason I didn’t renew last year was because I didn’t like my seating location, and asked me if I was interested in coming out for a tour to see the new locations.

He could have tried to ask for the sale in any number of ways, continue the conversation, engage me, find out what my other objections were. Instead, he hung up on me.

This isn’t the first, second or third time someone in the Mets ticket office has been obnoxious to me for giving them an answer that was outside of the script. Last year I got attitude for explaining how we weren’t renewing our plan because we wanted a 25 game plan in a better location, and instead of being interested in that information (because maybe it would point to something the Mets could/should do differently if they wanted to sell more plans, because there were an awful lot of Tuesday-Friday planholders at Shea that loved their plans who have dropped out of being season ticket holders because they hate the 15 game plans and liked being able to see one game in every series), he got defensive and derisive and actually laughed at me. I don’t know if it was the same guy; it doesn’t even matter if it was.  I’ve also had conversations where I tried and failed to explain to the ticket rep that just because I could afford 40 games in the Promenade Reserved Infield didn’t mean I could afford 40 games in the Left Field Landing, where the seats cost twice as much. He just didn’t get why, if I would pay for 40 games upstairs, I couldn’t pay for them downstairs.

We are Mets fans. We like giving the Mets money. We like going to ballgames. We go to ballgames because they are ballgames whether the team is winning or losing. As our disposable income increases, we always imagined we’d be spending more on baseball tickets. Instead, each year, we spend less and less. (And we spend more money on road games, where we can get better seats for less money and be treated like valued customers.)

We are not the people the ticket office should be alienating. I know, we’re not buying seats in the Sterling Club and we’re not buying a full season (but WE WOULD BUY A 40 GAME PLAN IF YOU OFFERED IT IN THE PROMENADE RESERVED INFIELD), and plenty of people are giving them their money so we don’t matter.

But we should.

Addendum: COMMENTS ARE CLOSED. There are 37 comments already, either agreeing with me or disagreeing with me, but not breaking any new ground either way. Sorry, but I have to work and can’t keep up with this. I had no idea that this was going to be such a flashpoint. I’ve written probably half a dozen posts about the ticket office before and no one gave a damn.  I would remind you of the site’s Comment Policy and suggest that if you feel strongly about continuing the conversation, that you do so on your own forum.

Vote for me, so that the Yankees and Red Sox blogs don’t win (and thanks to Matt Cerrone’s retweet earlier today, I’m beating both of them right now).

You do NOT have to register to vote!

Vote early, vote often, and thank you!

Tuesday night, I sat in the first row of the promenade reserved infield, leaned over the railing, held my breath and watched Jose Reyes on third base, a base he had obtained by getting a single and then strolling over to second on a throwing error and then, of course, stealing third base.  This was after watching Jose Reyes make the Home Run Apple light up not once but twice, improbably, impossibly, twice - once was amazing but twice just felt supersonic.

And now he was doing what he does best, which is annoy pitchers as he dances while taking a healthy lead down the baseline. He is dancing down the third base line like he is going to steal home and he totally unnerves Aroldis Chapman, flame throwing Aroldis Chapman, and the fans who are in the ballpark erupt in a cheer without aid of scoreboard idiocy and I murmur, wouldn’t that be something? In this 3/4 empty ballpark on the second to last night of the season, wouldn’t that be something?

Wouldn’t that be something, indeed.

But watching Jose Reyes play day after day for the 7 years I have personally watched Jose Reyes play day after day has been something. He is infectious and electric. As goes Reyes, so go the Mets, and as stale a cliche as it was it was also 1000% true, for better and for worse. I loved the dancing and the handshaking and the triples and the base stealing, the claw and the spotlight and the dreadlocks and Profesor Reyes teaching us spanish, I loved watching him distract pitcher after pitcher as he would take a lead and he would dance back and forth and you can throw over to first or second as much as you like, he’s going and you can’t stop him. I loved watching Air Reyes as he leapt into the air to retrieve errant balls heading into the outfield, loved watching him zoom the balls back across the infield, 6-3 or 6-4-3, you are out, and that is Jose Reyes.

“We have Jose Reyes, and you don’t,” became our watchword at one point. I have sat next to fans at road games out of town who booed him one minute and the next were telling me that they had a tshirt at home with his name and number on it. He is the player every fan disses but in the next breath talks about having on their team next year. He is the guy that drives the Phillies and their fans bananas. He is not Derek Jeter, and we do not care. We don’t want him to be Derek Jeter. We want him to be Jose Reyes, and he is.

I am not going to talk about the things that I do not love, like injuries or errors, because that is not my job, that is not what I want to write about, because that is not interesting to me, because that is not what I am going to remember, because that is not what matters. I am going to remember Jose poised just off of first base and keeping Albert Pujols or Ryan Howard or Mark Teixeira on their toes. I am going to remember Jose sitting on the top step of the dugout, standing on the top step, being the first one up to congratulate whoever was coming back to the dugout. I am going to remember Jose and David Wright, cigars in hand, coming out to the fans the night the Mets clinched the NL East.

I was lucky I was there on the second to last day and not the last day, even though we have been there for the last days since 2006. (It was a day game; work is crazy; it is a holiday week; it is dumb to have all the final games be day games; fuck the Wilpons and MLB, you’re not getting any more money.) I spent the morning being angry at the Mets for pulling Jose, and then still being angry at the Mets for letting Jose take himself out: he answers to Terry Collins, and was there no one around that could have said, hey, I get it, but there are a lot of people here today and they came to see you and maybe we can do this better than the way you are asking us to do this. I also know that no matter what happened, if Jose Reyes had taken himself out of the game because there was an accident on the Grand Central Parkway and there was a burning school bus full of orphaned children and he ran to the burning bus and singlehandedly saved each and every child all we would read was how Derek Jeter would have done it differently.  (Seriously sometimes I think the Mets front office says, “No matter how we play this we’re screwed, so fuck it, just do whatever you want, it won’t matter anyway.”)

And now I am doing the thing I didn’t want to do, which was write about the things I wasn’t interested in writing about. I do not want to write about what might happen next, because we don’t know, no one knows. I have gone from “He’ll be back” to “They don’t have the money” to a kind of calm acceptance. There is nothing I can do about it. TBF has gone through a similar continuum, but we both end at the same place, which is that it will be very hard for us to give the Mets any money for baseball tickets next year if Jose Reyes is not back.  It will be hard to go to games, it will be hard to watch games, it will be hard to watch him with whatever other colors he has on his back—and of course, there is a continuum there as well, with pinstripes and South Philly red being a fate worse than baseball death.

I scored Tuesday’s game so carefully because I wanted to make sure I had that scorecard from the last night I saw Jose Reyes as a Met. Jose Reyes made me proud to be a Mets fan, made me cheer, made me scream, made me jump, made me love baseball even more.

Buena suerte y gracias, Jose. Muchas gracias.

Dear Commissioner Selig:

Your actions at last night’s Mets-Cubs game at Citi Field on 9/11/11 were reprehensible. Not allowing the Mets players to wear the NYPD and other First Responder hats - at a meaningless game you co-opted as a platform to grandstand MLB’s relevancy - was inexcusable.

Learning that you not only denied the Mets’ official request to wear the hats, but that a MLB representative went the extra yard to confiscate them from the team at the conclusion of the pre-game ceremonies, so that no one could defy your order and do the right thing and wear them anyway, makes me ashamed to be a fan of Major League Baseball.

As a result, I will not purchase one new item of MLB clothing, whether a New Era hat, a Majestic Athletic shirt or jersey, or any other officially sanctioned MLB item, for the duration of 2011 and for the entire 2012 season, and very likely beyond that. My household could previously be counted on spending significant dollars in MLB merchandise every year; I can assure you that will no longer be the case.

Sincerely,

Caryn Rose

==

NOW WRITE YOUR OWN LETTER. You have the address. Don’t email, don’t tweet, don’t just blog about it, don’t comment, don’t sign a petition - write your own letter and put it in the mail. That will count. That will make a difference.

WORD, Largehearted Boy, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn are pleased to present a night of baseball storytelling (and free beer provided by our pals at Six Points brewery) featuring readers Jens Carstensen, Jason Diamond, David Gutowski, Sean Manning (Top of the Order, Things That Need Doing), Howard Megdal (Taking the Field), Caryn Rose (B-Sides and Broken Hearts). Attendees may be required to sit according to team affiliations.

Details here. Hope to see you there.

We knew it was bad.
We knew there were rumblings.
I had people coming to this site and posting comment after comment insisting that the Wilpons had no money problems, that to say otherwise was bullshit (and worse).
We heard the rumors that the Mets were wholesale dumping blocks of tickets with ticket brokers at deeply discounted prices, who were then recycling them through StubHub and the other broker sites, which was why there were so many cheap tickets out there for so long.

And now, this. This is just about as far rock bottom as you can get. (I was originally going to say “Even the Astros aren’t selling tickets on Groupon” but oh, yes, they are.)

As someone who still holds tickets to six games this year, it’s infuriating. Friday night against the Braves is a discount ticket? When I paid full price (at the season ticket holder discount) earlier in the year? Do you know how much it upsets me to think about the obnoxious calls to and from the Mets ticket office earlier this season, with their arrogant attitude, about why aren’t I renewing my ticket plan? 

Everything I want to say isn’t nice, isn’t polite, isn’t anything except the result of a world of anger and disappointment and misery - the same world that you are all living in. It’s not new. It’s just the bottom of the hole.

Last night I said that I was looking forward to see how the Mets were going to some how spin, obfuscate or otherwise justify the ticket price increase next year. TBF insists they wouldn’t dare. I say, just wait and see.

Six more games. I suppose we will still go, because we bought the tickets, we spent the money, and when baseball is gone for the year, I will miss baseball.

But they’re not making it easy on the fans to show up or give a damn.

But after a miserable, swift, embarrassing 10-0 shutout in Philadelphia, I do not want to see him yukking it up on social media. I just don’t. Especially not so close to the end of the game (given, that end came VERY EARLY LAST NIGHT, but still).

Is it just me? Probably.

For $41:

 
• Seating in the exclusive Big Apple Reserved section  
• $18 food and beverage credit [so essentially your ticket is $23, which is about what the Big Apple seats are worth in my opinion]  
• “Connect” T-Shirt and name tag sticker [Generic MLB shirt with Mets branding]  
• Automatically eligible for in-game Twitter giveaways during each inning

I hate the Big Apple seats and find them to be very, very overpriced, even with a $18 food and beverage credit (because they only do that because they hope that most people won’t use all $18 of theirs) and the rest of me says, “NO ONE ON AT&T WILL HAVE SIGNAL ANYWAY.”

Let’s take a look at what other teams are doing for Social Media Night.

The Phillies have done two versions of this event:

For $70:

 
• Game ticket in the Terrace Deck (Sections 430-434) [These are even worse than the Big Apple seats in my opinion]  
• A Social Media Night t-shirt  
• Admission to an exclusive catered buffet pre-game tent party  
• Access to a Q&A session with Tom McCarthy (Phillies Broadcaster), John Brazer (Phillies Director of Publicity), Todd Zolecki (MLB.com Phillies beat writer) and hosted by Scott Palmer (Phillies Director of Public Affairs)

A series of different events, priced at $26:

 
• Game ticket for the Rooftop Bleachers [Worse than the Big Apple seats]  
• $10 food and beverage credit included with your game ticket  
• A unique rally towel  
• And the chance to win prizes throughout the game!

I think the $70 was a little too pricey but at least it was interesting. The $26 version seems pretty low on value.

Cardinals:

“The Cardinals are excited to announce their first 2011 Social Media Night. The $20 price includes a T-Shirt*, Lower Left Field Box ticket and access to a pre-game Social Hour.”.

They had the best t-shirt out of all the social media night shirts: “Tweet Me In St. Louis.

$20 is the right price for this kind of event in my opinion, and these seats weren’t in the upper hinterlands. Plus, the shirt is pretty neat.

Mariners:

$23 
Includes:

• View Box seat for the game
• $5 TicketPlu$ concession stand credit (must be used on this date)
• Access to the pre-game happy hour event at the Patio at the ‘Pen
• FREE Social Media Happy Hour T-shirt!

Thanks to the crappy new MLB standard for stadium maps, I can’t even find View Box unless I know what level and section it is, so I can’t comment on the quality of the seats. It’s again in the right price point, however, and puts a focus on a happy hour where you could, you know, actually put faces to tweets.

Astros:

Tickets cost $45:

• A game ticket in the Budweiser Patio — the area contains three rows and seats a total of 108.

• A Social Media night t-shirt (and like last year, we’ll offer an array of men’s and women’s sizes)

• Dinner: what we serve will be up to the fans. We’ll invite fans to vote on three choices through Twitter, and whatever gets the most votes is what we’ll serve. We’ll also throw in kettle chips and popcorn, and a half-pint of Blue Bell Ice Cream for dessert.
• An appearance by an Astros player. For the April 16 event, Pence will join us from 5 p.m. to around 5:15 (the game starts at 6) and will help hand out prizes — autographed baseballs and other signed items — that we’ll give away during our Twitter trivia contest. The contests will be conducted solely on Twitter.

• A mix and mingle with other Social Media fans. We hope you’ll take lots of pictures and post them on your Facebook pages as well as tweet about the fabulous time you’re having with your tweeps at the game.

You can laugh at the Astros, but they were doing these events last season too, and work hard (in my opinion) to make them interesting and worthwhile. I do find the $45 price point to be a little high, but they are feeding fans and they’re having a decent player show up.

I feel like these types of events are empty unless there’s been some attempt to embrace or integrate into the existing social media community. Having a Twitter account and doing Trivia Thursdays does not equal engagement. I know, it’s New York; I know, they don’t need to do it - but I’d argue that right now, especially right now, the Mets need to hire someone to do social media engagement full time at full throttle, and give the fans a reason to feel like they are part of this team. Because we could use that right now.

From a West Coast correspondent: Carlos Beltran shirts in the AT&T Park store.

It’s just wrong.

Murphy out for the year, Reyes to the DL, and the New York Times with the breaking news that casual fans might not have a lot of reasons to go out to Citi Field.

It’s not a lot of fun right now, I’ll give you that.

I never keep score at games. I don’t do it mostly because I can’t take pictures and take notes during games and keep score (although I know people who do all of them). But I am tired of taking photos sitting upstairs. I have some sort of creative block that is making me bored in the extreme and I don’t take any pictures and then I go home and have nothing to work with. So I decided I would stop lugging the camera, and would instead bring the lovely scorebook I bought from Eephus League at the beginning of the season, which I have never used.

The verdict: it’s a nice little scorebook. I needed some binder clips to keep the page from dog-earing on me, and my pen was awful, but I was scoring easily and well, and only needed to consult with TBF when Dewayne WIse was caught stealing at the top of the 7th.

I like keeping score; I get keeping score. I never thought it was weird or odd or geeky, but then again I am the woman who takes notes at concerts and used to write down setlists. I always viewed keeping score the same way. I never had the need to do it because TBF keeps score, every game, every single game, even some at home on tv (he always keeps score during the All Star Game). He designed his own scorecard, and tweaks it every year. There are things he tracks that I did not bother to - like pitch count - and there were things he marks that I decided to mark differently (he writes PU for pop up, and I decided to just draw an arrow in the bottom right hand corner).

You will notice, of course, when I stopped keeping score. I am actually lucky that I did not fling the scorecard off of the Promenade in frustration. The worst part about that play - okay, maybe not the worst part, but it didn’t help - was the visiting family behind us, who were from France, or had relatives who now lived in France. There was a parent explaining baseball to the various children, including the little girl sitting behind me, who was sharp as a tack, and understood everything her father was saying. Even that girl asked, “Why did he do that?”

Why indeed.

I used to tweet during games, partly because it was fun and partly so I could remember things I wanted to write about later, but now that Citi Field is officially an AT&T dead zone by about 6:30, that’s no longer an option. The keeping score helps with stopping me from going crazy from dumb things being around me, from people doing the wave out in left field, from noticing that there is no more t-shirt launch during the 7th inning and instead the Pepsi Party Patrol does this inane thing behind Mr. Met that looks like a 6th grade interpretative dance performance while he sings “Take Me Out To The Ballgame.”

Most of all, it helps me concentrate. Baseball has not been my friend since the passing of my mother; my brain has an extreme case of monkey mind, and instead of baseball calming it, all it did was make me anxious when I lost concentration or couldn’t figure out what was going on or realized that I’d zoned out for four batters and didn’t realize the Mets were up.  I like the idea of filling up my scorebook with the games of the season, and having that to put away with my ticket stubs and other souvenirs at the end of the season.

I want the season to be over as much as I don’t want it to be over; I want something to be definitive, I do not want to keep teetering on the edge of almost being good and giving us hope and then two games later playing like the Banana Splits for the rest of the series.

My first encounter with Mets’ fans uneasy relationship with Carlos Beltran was early in the 2006 season. The game went into extras, everyone around me in Section 12 left, and I headed to self-upgrade myself to the Mezzanine Boxes. A few minutes later I was joined by half a dozen Latino kids in their late teens, who had snuck down from the Upper Deck.

They sat there, laughing and punching each other, and yelling things at the field in Spanish. It was one of my classic “I hate that I live in NYC and don’t understand a word of Spanish” moments.

And then, Carlos Beltran came to bat, and then, they got into it, standing in unison and yelling things down at the field, cracking up as they leaned over the railing and hurled what I assumed were insults towards the field. They would crack up after every line and almost dive back behind the railing as though we were the only ones there and they didn’t want Carlos to know what they were yelling.

It wasn’t until two of them almost fell over the row onto me that they noticed I was there. They apologized profusely.
“What are you yelling?” I asked. “I need to learn baseball Spanish.”
“At Beltran, you know?”
I nodded sagely, even though I did not know.
“Here, try this…” one of them said, and then rattled off something in Spanish so fast I couldn’t have repeated it if I tried.
“No, man, you can’t teach her to say that,” one of the others said, elbowing him.
“Well, what about…” and he tried something else.
“My mother would hit me if I said that in the house,” another one said, shaking his head.
My tutor peered down at the field, as Carlos was walking away, and squinted as though he was thinking very hard.
“You know, just this - YOU’RE A BUM, CARLOS! A BUM!”
They cracked up again, laughing uproariously as though it was the funniest thing ever, falling back into their seats and offering me some peanuts from the enormous bag one of them had inside their backpack. Definitely not Shea Stadium issue.

I understood “bum” very well, but I had missed out on Early Beltran. I went to 12 games in 2005, but spent those games just barely keeping my head above water, trying to learn the rules, follow the game, not get overwhelmed the minute after the first pitch was thrown. Back then, baseball just seemed so breathless, so all encompassing. Back then, the fact that I could by the end of the season identify a Met by his uniform number was a tremendous accomplishment.

I remember the game with the horrible accident with Mike Cameron, and I remember the aftermath. It’s when baseball started coming into my consciousness on a regular basis, but not enough for me to have any kind of grudge against Carlos Beltran.

And then there was 2006. And I remember watching him in the outfield, just admiring the athleticism. People would complain “he doesn’t try” but I would be puzzled - don’t we want our baseball players to not have to ‘try’ every day? Don’t we want them to just be good at what they do? Carlos Beltran was good at what he did.  I remember reading an interview with him after he caught that ball on Tal’s Hill in Houston, that he said that when he was on the Astros, every day he would practice catching balls on that hill, so that when the time came, he would be ready to do it. So that when he did it, he made it look like it was nothing. 

When it was anything but.

My favorite Beltran memory remains that game against the Cardinals in 2006. August 22. TBF noted at the time that this was the closest I had been to a playoff atmosphere. Shea was super-charged, electricity crackling in the air:

And then - and then - the 9th inning.
One out.
 Lo Duca gets to first.
I’m watching the clock, calculating that maybe I can get home at a reasonable hour, maybe it’s going to be okay, maybe we can tie this one up, even with extra innings I’ll be okay, TBF ran home after work to get the car so we aren’t stuck in G train hell. Beltran to the plate. He stands, touches the base with the bat. I can barely remember it now and I need to go set the DVR because dear deity in heaven, I need to see it again.
And then it launches, and people are on their feet, except I have learned enough to not do that automatically any more, but people are on their feet with feeling, and I can’t find the ball, and then I see it at the same moment I rise to my feet, and I stop looking because I want to see what’s going on in the dugout, except the dugout is empty and every one is standing around first base, angled up the third base line, I’ve seen this happen on tv with other teams at other games and love that our love and our intensity and our passion is paralleled at that moment through the players.
And Beltran crosses home plate and bounces - yes, Beltran BOUNCED - into the joyous waiting huddle which immediately engulfed him in raucous celebration. “Taking Care of Business” plays, everyone is high-fiving everyone they possibly can, no one is running out just yet, wanting to watch the celebration on the field, wanting the moment to last just a little longer. I am beaming. TBF is glowing. The scoreboard reads:
BUY ONE CARLOS, GET ONE FREE.

[You can read the rest if you are so inclined.  It is one of my favorite pieces of baseball writing, as it so happens.]

Since there will be one jerk who has to come in here and remind me of that other game in 2006 when he didn’t take the bat off his shoulder, I’ll point out that I was there, too. I was there, Box 761, Row A, Seats 3 & 4. I was there, hanging over the rail in the first row of the upper deck, holding my breath and hoping and praying with the rest of you. But that was not all Carlos Beltran was, and that was not all he brought to the team. If you can’t see that, I offer you this diagram of facts and figures over at Amazin’ Avenue. But if you can’t see that, all the facts and figures in the world probably won’t matter, and I will tell you to go call WFAN and tell someone who cares.

Now I need to find someone to buy me a Giants shirt with #15 on the back.

Vaya con Dios, Carlos.

Tonight is likely the last time I have watched Carlos Beltran play baseball in a New York Mets uniform.  It wasn’t a bad last game.

I wanted to take a million photographs and then just gave up. I just wanted to watch him play, watch him at bat, watch him in the outfield. I wanted to remember what it was like to hear his walkup music, watch him come out of the dugout, watch him stride over to the plate and draw that J in the dirt. I wanted to stand up and applaud him when he came to bat in that first inning, and I don’t know why I just didn’t do it, why I worried about blocking the view of the people behind me, and I didn’t want to get into a discussion about What We Will Get For Carlos Beltran. (As it was, the conversations around me on the 7 train ride and the rest of the game was like being in the comments section of MLB Trade Rumors.) I did, however, applaud pointedly and loudly when he hit that double, and I felt better.

I wished it had been a quieter night at Citi Field. I wished that it hadn’t been a night of THE METS WELCOME Day Camps R Us (I’m not making that up) and the summer interns from every big 5 accounting and law firm in the city. It was loud and boisterous and it had nothing to do with the actual game. There were matching shirts, there were multiple cycles of the wave, there was the father behind me talking about Dillon Gee’s no hitter at the end of the third inning (no seriously, he was telling his young son that he wouldn’t be able to take him home early), there were hipster Cardinals fans sitting in everyone’s seats but their own and giving you attitude when you told them to move. 

I wished we had better seats. I wished I took more photos. I wished I had worn my Beltran shirt. I wished I had bought that Beltran jersey a few years ago. I watched him and Jose talk throughout the entire game, I watched Carlos bring Jose his hat and glove at the end of the half innings, I watched them laugh and high five. I wonder if they think about that they are playing their last games together.  (Yes, I was a barrel of laughs at the game tonight.)

It has not been a great few months in el casa de metsgrrl. Knowing that at least one of my favorite baseball players is about to leave the Mets is not making it any better.

I will write more later, because he deserves more, but for now, at least, this is goodbye.

p.s. My novel is out tomorrow (7/20)!! Please come take a look. I am proud and excited and happy, please, check it out and wish me luck!