Shea Bridge Sundays: Baseball Will Come
We live in a weird, weird world. But baseball is on its way back.
Welcome to Shea Bridge Sundays. When we’re off the clock, we’ll keep things fun: we’ll steer clear of hard-hitting analysis and stick to the lighter side of the game.
***
At first, we see an usher from behind. There’s a glance of the field to our right, perfectly sunny and green, then it’s back to the usher as he walks towards the Shea Bridge. A man walking in front of him is wearing a jersey that says, for some reason, “MAMA’S 20,” and to the usher’s left, there’s a fan wearing a different one: FAMILIA 27.
A mother and son pass us. Up ahead, we see a boy, maybe eight, in an Alonso t-shirt. Crossing the Shea Bridge, the orange and blue surface glinting in the son, we pass the bullpen gate, fairly crowded, and see the empty lots of Willets Point beyond the exit. The plaza in center field, with the Shake Shack and the beer stand, is sunny and crowded. We get a distant glimpse of the stands from straightaway center, and they’re still mostly empty. But they’ll soon fill up.
This isn’t just some amalgamation of bittersweet Citi Field imagery; this actually happened. It was September 29th, 2019, and I was at Citi Field for the last game of the season. Jacob deGrom was about to win his second consecutive Cy Young Award; Pete Alonso was going to be the Rookie of the Year. The Mets had missed the playoffs, but by a small enough margin that after slumping through the first half, the end result of the season seemed like a victory.
Why was I taking a video? I didn’t have much of a reason. I knew we wouldn’t be back at Citi Field for a while: all the way until April 2020, if you can imagine. I’d fallen in love with the 2019 Mets the way I hadn’t for any Mets team before, even the pennant-winning 2015 club. And one last time for the year, I was back at Citi Field on an absolutely beautiful day. So I figured I would grab some video, a few pictures, and when winter got especially cold, I would look back on what I’d taken and remember that baseball was just around the corner, as it more or less always is.
Really, though, I was thinking about how we wouldn’t be back at Citi Field for a long time. Maybe I knew something.
Now, of course, we look back on that world with something that feels like reverence. We were outdoors together at a ballgame, and the biggest problem we had was Adeiny Hechevarria coming back to Queens for his revenge.
Readers of Shea Bridge Report will remember how that game played out: one Mets bullpen failure after another, a dramatic Joe Panik home run in the eighth, the Mets fall behind again in the tenth. Down by two runs, with two men on and two out, Dom Smith, returning from the Injured List, came to the plate for his first at-bat in two months. The ball cleared the fence. Smith rounded the bases. The Mets won. We haven’t been back to Citi Field since.
Now, of course, we’re in a perfect storm of uncertainty. Vaccinations are scheduled to begin any minute now, and by early April, millions of doses will likely have been delivered. Millions of Americans have had the virus already. Meanwhile, we’re only about two months from what would be, in a normal year, early Spring Training reporting dates. The Mets have a split-squad game scheduled against the Marlins on February 27th, 83 days from now.
Will baseball be ready to return by then? Probably not. But sometime around then, a few weeks late, perhaps a month? Maybe. No one knows what the specifics will look like, besides joint experts in public policy and vaccinations. Maybe Opening Day will go on as scheduled, in Washington on April 1st; maybe we wait until May 1st, or June 1st, or some other time during what promises to be a roller-coaster of a Summer. Hell, most of us are still stuck back in March 2020. But baseball, alien as it seems, is on its way back.
After Smith’s home run, and the celebrations and the montage and one last glance down at the field, I left the stadium. Down the steps on the first base line, out on the field level, through the rotunda, and out of the stadium…up the subway steps, but then I stopped. I walked back down the steps to the parking lot, and took one last picture of Citi Field, shining like a gem in the darkness.
It’s still there waiting for us, just as it was. One of these days, we’ll grab the last seats on a crowded seven train and pull up to Citi Field, the sun shining, clouds here and there, burgers already sizzling. Players warming up, vendors hawking concessions, scorecards on sale…one of these days, the world will be right again.