Through Everything, Baseball Is Our Normalcy

Baseball means many things to many people. This game has been with us through everything, every year, from spring to autumn, and we like it that way.

Now that the sport and the entire world have been placed on hiatus, we all find ourselves longing for baseball. It’s our normalcy. For me, the yearning brings me on journeys through my memory with hopes of striking stitched-leather gold.

Growing up, the New York Mets were not very competitive. I’d become a full-fledged fan very early on — from the day I could read, my preferred content was box scores; ask my mother — but having arrived at this party we call Earth in 1983, I missed out on the actual party at Shea in 1986.

By 1991, between WWOR, SportsChannel, and WFAN – barring west coast trips; school nights, amirite? — I was a fanatic. Keith Hernandez, Dwight Gooden, and Gary Carter hooked me, but David Cone, Dave Magadan, Howard Johnson, and Hubie Brooks, among many others — were the ones who reeled me in.

My father worked in the commercial insurance industry and the Mets were largely awful through the bulk of the 90s (403-501 from 1991 through 1996), so tickets came in bunches. Those were the good seats. But back when a $10 bill folded into a handshake with a Shea usher turned your upper deck tickets into field boxes, it was really always a great day at the ballpark.

Those good times continued, through the acquisition of Mike Piazza, which coincided with the Mets’ late-90s resurgence and their early 2000s success, then through their brief submergence back into mediocrity (we see you, Shane Spencer and Karim Garcia), and the thunderous return of Shaking Shea, starting in 2006.

These were the days, my friends. Talented youngsters in David Wright and Jose Reyes. Big money free agents in Pedro Martinez and Carlos Beltran. Battle-tested veterans in Carlos Delgado, Cliff Floyd, Orlando Hernandez, Paul Lo Duca. That team didn’t reach their zenith, with the infamous Collapse of 2007 high (er, low) lighting that era, along with the similar fate they suffered in 2008.

Fresh off a Reyes-manufactured walk-off win over the Cubs on a rainy Thursday evening in Flushing, New York headed into the final weekend at Shea a game behind Philadelphia in the National League East and a game behind Milwaukee for the NL wild card.

Following a Friday night loss to Florida, falling two games behind the Phils but keeping pace with the Brewers, Johan Santana took the hill for the Mets. Unknown to anyone at the time, Santana had been pitching on a torn right meniscus over the final month of the season.

What came next was one of the gutsiest sporting performances I’ve ever personally seen, resulting in the loudest I’d ever heard Shea roar and the hardest I’d ever felt Shea rock. Santana’s three-hit, nine-strikeout shutout to vault the Mets into the wild card lead brought thousands to their feet and tears to eyes.

Those are the experiences that I recall when I need those unrivaled good vibes that baseball brings. Nevermind what happened the next day. Forget about the team moving your longtime season tickets from the mezzanine section behind the plate at Shea to the upper right field corner at Citi Field for its inaugural season.

Forget about Opening Day 2013, when my father told my brother and I that he had been diagnosed with stage IV cancer in the parking lot before the game. Forget the fact he was gone by Opening Day 2015, having passed away on March 12 of that year.

Know what I won’t forget? Working evening shifts to watch Spring Training games with him over his final weeks and taking care of him like he took care of us for so long. On March 9, just a few days before he was gone, the Marlins scored nine runs over the first three innings in a forgettable Grapefruit League game in Port St. Lucie.

For the life of me, I can’t remember how, but the Mets scored a run in the bottom of the third, prompting my father to lift his head and say, maybe, the second or third sentence he’d uttered that entire day, “We’re making a comeback, baby”.

The Mets lost 13-2 that day, but the rest of 2015 played out as if it were a script written just for us. That magical run, regardless of how it ended, brought us solace in a time of grief. Normalcy in a time of uncertainty. That’s all we wanted.