Clareified

LET’S GO METS!!!! (Flickr photo essay…I even stopped being a lazy ass and put captions in! They are funny. So…comment!)
Ok, I’ll be the first to admit that way back in December when Karol sent me an email forward saying “I got four bleachers seats tickets to a Yankees/Mets game in June for you me Ronnie and Peter,” I was all “That’s my Christmas present????”
I mean, my momma raised me well enough to always say thank you when someone buys you a present, but dude…I hadn’t been to a baseball game in six or seven years and I certainly didn’t do bleachers!?!!?!?!
But let me tell you! Best Christmas present in June EVER.
OHMYGOSH.
On the ride back I was trying to figure out if the best part was that the Mets SHUT OUT the Yankees, or that the Mets ended their losing streak OR that the Mets ended the Yankees winning streak OR that…I could go on and on.
I got out of work early, and since Karol had been giving me grief all day because I wasn’t planning on wearing any Mets gear, I decided to go shopping for a shirt. I looked some over, picked one out and bought it.
When I picked Ronnie up from work, he looked at me and said “did you just get that?” (D’oh…I thought I took the tags off…) I said yes and he said “Guy? Why didn’t you get a Yankees jersey?)
It’s like he doesn’t even understand the concept of Mets fandom!!
“Well, at least you got the one guy who isn’t sucking for you guys.”
“Who?”
“David Wright.”
“What?”
“Your shirt…number 5…David Wright…third baseman…”
Huh…look at that…there’s writing on the back…
“ok…so I guess he’s my favorite player now.”
GOOOO DAVID WRIGHT!
When Peter got in the car wearing a Munson t-shirt, he took a look at me and said “I’m not sitting next to her in the stadium…I don’t want beer on me.”
Ohh…that’s why Karol wanted me to wear Mets gear…that bitch.
Indeed, as we walked from the parking lot (where Ronnie stripped off his Brooklyn t-shirt and just kept on the wife beater so he could buy a new Yankees t-shirt) some guy starts yelling “David Wright? I gotta look at fucking David Wright on the way to Yankees stadium,” this kept up for a while before I remembered….heeeeyy…that’s me!!
I turned around and smiled. Er…grimaced…it was going to be a looong game.
“Don’t worry Dawn…I got your back…even with the Mets Jersey,” Ronnie said putting on his Yankees jersey and shaking his head at my young, misguided, naive Mets folly.

Indeed, our bleachers section…and yes…wooo…blleeeecheeerrsss…as we climbed and climbed and climbed, and then said excuse me eighty two times on the way to the other side of the benches…I asked…um…a wee loudly…”wait…did we pay for these seats??”
Ok, ok I may have become a bit of a spoiled little rich girl off the corporate box seats I’m used to. A world where there’s menus and waiters and people speak civilly to one another regardless of their outfits…ahhh…money…but I digress.
So, there I am, sitting on a bench, a thousand feet in the air, surrounded by the enemy.
Ronnie, who evidently believes that a “quiet Yankee stadium is no stadium at all” started chanting hardcore right away.
Let’s go Yan-kees.
Come on Boobbeeee (Abreu)
How much did you guys pay for Beltran? BAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAH
That’s right Clemens, make them look stupid.
Aaaasssshooollllee, assssshhooollleeeee.
At one point, he looked over his shoulder to some guy in th eway back row and said “hey, you start chanting something, I’ll join in.”
And it wasn’t going well for my Mets, there was a wild pitch and a Yankees guy got to another base.
The Mets outfielder closest to me looked so sad, I turned to Peter and asked who is was.
“Shawn Green.”
“Oh, the Jew!” Karol pipes in, “he’s the only Met I like.”
“He looks so sad,” I said.
“Dude. He’s a MET! You’d be sad too!” Ronnie chimes in.
I started to root for Shawn Green, but boy oh boy did he suck…he missed a pretty standard play AND struck out all three times at bat…to which Karol commented “Well, that’s what he gets for working on the Sabbath.”
But then things turned around!!
There’s this guy Gomez! He bunted and then made it to first — at first I yelled at him for bunting, but then when he made it, I was all ok with it. AND THEN HE STOLE SECOND!
(Again, at first I yelled at him for leaving first, but then I learned to trust in Gomez.) Leading me to invent the chant “Let’s Go MEEEZZZZ.” Trust me it’s not as easy as it looks… think “let’s go Mets”…but don’t say Go twice. Try it. It’s fun.
And then Reyes bunted and like stole a million bases! AND THEN THE METS SCORED!!!
So that everytime Ronnie said “1986!” I said “Scoreboard!”
And it was awesome.
(I later switched to “1986? Is that how old Roger Clemens is?” because I thought that was cleverer.)
Young Ron Lad, as you can see, was quite the animated Yankees fan, irking the two angry Mets fans in front of us.
“When are you going to lose your voice? Seventh inning?” One dude asked Ronnie.
“NEVER! I’M NEVER GOING TO LOSE IT.”
“Yeah, your voice or your virginity,” the other guy responded.
This then lead to the often repeated “YOU WANNA KNOW WHAT HAPPENED IN 2000″ which Ronnie became famous for throughout the bleachers for the rest of the game.
(Although, my favorite Ronnie chant had to be ‘IT TAKES A SECOND TO GET MY JOKES!” Said melodically and loudly after his previous chant fell flat.)
There was some scuffle with the seats and we had to switch rows and then kick some little kids out of our seats and then there was a girl screaming that she paid for her ticket and expected to sit down. (To which Ronnie replied (again, loudly and melodically): I STOLE MY TICKET!)
When we moved, we ended up in a little oasis of Mets fans! I finally had other people to high five and jump up and down with as the Mets scored a run on a solo homer and then we watched Clemens fall apart and get yanked.
Ronnie and one of the guys started yapping about highest paid teams and became friends.
I told the guy Ronnie was my brother, asked him which one of us he thought was adopted and then said Ronnie and I both went to high school in Bay Ridge.
Which is all totally true.
Of course, when he later asked if me and Ronnie “hang out down by Hofstra,” and I said no — Ronnie’s stupid uglier sister blurts out “Dude, she’s like 45 — she’s not hanging out anywhere.”
I yelled scoreboard!
Oh and the bleachers have a fascinating food distribution system.
You order up peanuts and someone offers to “catch it” for you.
Can you imagine! No. You can’t.
About half way through — after incessantly asking Peter what was going on (Who’s batting? Delgado, Dawn…look they have the name on the scoreboard; Are we ahead in the count? Depends on what you mean by we. Did something bad just happen: No. (Which would make me go “aww” because that means something bad happened to my Mets.) Why don’t they have a little diamond box on teh scoreboard that tells you if people are on base? Because you can look down at the real diamond and see for yourself.) it was suddenly the seventh inning.
This is sooo fun. We sang THREE songs…one was “why are you gay?” by the village people, then God Bless America (I kept looking around for the singer until Peter told me it was a CD) and then the Cracker Jack song.
Me and my Mets people were keeping it real…although everytime we started chanting “Let’s Go Mets!” The Yankees fans would start chanting “something vulgar and inappropriate the Mets” and it would confuse me.
I covered my face all through the eighth inning because “right about now is where the Mets always break my heart.”
To which one of my compatriots said “you can’t think that…it’s true…but you can’t think that way.”
(They warmed my heart when after the first Met run and I was chanting scoreboard, they said “shh…don’t jinx it!” Then we high fived.)
There was one brawl in the bleachers and the cops came and dragged a man away.
Oh, and we saw Sam the dealer selling peanuts or cracker jacks…but you guys don’t know who he is, so that’s less interesting than hearing that when the dust cleared, the METS WON!
The Yankees didn’t even score.
Didn’t. Even. Score.
I don’t even know why they bothered showing up. Losers.
HAHAHAHHAHAHAHA
Scoreboard.
OK, Ronnie. So. What happened in 2000?
Mets in ‘07.

This entry was posted by Dawn Summers on Saturday, June 16th, 2007 at 1:43 am and is filed under Mets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.