Breakfast with the Mets

There might be just one person in all of Northern California who is THRILLED that the San Francisco Giants are playing a pair of 10 AM games this weekend. And that person is yours truly.

I’ve been in Richmond, a dirt-poor, crime-ridden city (think: Camden, NJ) just north of Oakland on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay, for the past four months. I took a semester off from my studies at Seton Hall to do volunteer work at a high school and Boys & Girls Club out here. It’s probably been the best thing I’ve ever done; I’ve had some very necessary time and space to grow and mature and help young people, my passion. There are really only a handful of things I miss from New York: my family and friends, my car, and, of course, the New York Mets.

But the last part ends at 4:10 this afternoon my time. The Mets are on the TV and the radio again.

Sure, they’ve had more than their share of national broadcasts already. But national broadcasts are really made-for-TV events, not baseball games. They’re placed in awkward time slots (even more awkward times out west than back east), filled with extra-long commercials, and fail to capture the flow and the feel of a “normal” baseball game.

Sure, I did get to watch a couple of “normal” Mets games on TV the first week of the season: DirecTV was showing their free preview of the out-of-town baseball package. But since I don’t get paid and I don’t have the cajones to ask the poor community I live in for $200 so I could watch a few baseball games for a couple months (I come home June 29th, just before the season’s midway point ), one week was all I got. (Not to mention it was the first week of the season, against less-than-stellar competition, and they went 2-4 anyway.)

Finally, the Mets are playing three “normal” ballgames. And I get to watch all three. Not on ESPN or FOX or TBS (aka The Braves Station), but on a normal local network. All is Wright with my world. Another perfect day in NorCal is punctuated with Reyes of sunshine. I can leave all my worries on the Pelf once more.

The Mets can get swept, I can lose a lunch bet, and I will still be the happiest man in America on Monday morning. Pelfrey can have yet another disastrous inning and make us all believe his spectacular April was an aberration. Johan can serve up 5 more home runs (not likely if you’ve seen this Giants offense in recent years, but with the Mets one never knows), and Bad Ollie can make yet another short and unproductive outing. Nieve can be overused and ineffective, Jerry can double-switch Wright out of the game three more times, and Jason Bay can go 0-for-15. And it won’t matter at all.

You see, it’s never been about wins and losses with me. All I’ve ever asked for from the Mets was for them to be there, 162 times over the course of six months. All I need from the Mets is three hours where everything going on in my life can take a back seat to a simple activity that I have no control over: a ballgame. And finally, that ballgame is coming to me in living color.

You can bet that I will schedule my weekend around 10 AM baseball games. Tell me, when was the last time you could say that?