Friday, March 31, 2006

OUR STORY BEGINS…

In 2004, when I moved back to NYC, we went to one game together - I don’t know why we didn’t go to more, probably because I was dealing with moving and unpacking and settling in. But in 2005, that all changed.

I can’t tell you what it was, exactly; we were living together (for all intents and purposes) at that point so I had a better idea of how many games he was going to. And we didn’t have a lot of other plans for the summer. I do know that at some point I said, “I think we should plan on going to a lot more games this summer,” and, well, we did. I went to 10 games last year, at least two of which I went to on my own (after TBF had gone back to the Midwest to work for the year).

Having the friends-as-baseball-fanatics, as well as other friends who had the Tuesday-Friday plan, gave me a lot of ideas. From the friends-out-West I understood the importance of getting in on any kind of seasonal plan before the new stadium was reality.

And I liked it.

And I kept trying to talk to TBF about it, but he is, shall we say, a little more fiscally conservative than I am.

I had a really good month at work last November, about the time the Mets were emailing me to put down my deposit now for the 2006 season, and so I just did it, thinking that we would just talk about it later.

And then I got my phone call from Vito at Guest Services. I guess it’s time to talk to TBF.

He was a little speechless when I told him we were going to get the Tuesday-Friday plan for 2006. Good speechless, but it was a little scary for those first few seconds when he didn’t say anything.

I went out to Shea in December to pick out our seats, and give them the rest of our money, and started my first official season as a baseball fan on April 2, 2006.

This blog is an attempt to chronicle this first year. I wish I had had this brilliant idea back in December, and I could have started writing then. I am a writer, so generally, the way I remember things and work them out and commemorate important events is to write. But in this case, I was loving baseball even more because it was something I *didn’t* have to write about.

But, I’m a writer; I write. So I am starting this for real in June, and having to go back and reconstruct everything that happened before then. It is likely (okay, probable) that the early posts on here will suck as a result.