The Sunday Memory Drawer - Shea Loge Section 7 Through the Years

My Shea seats after the last game at Shea Stadium. Continuing on with Part 2 of my book essay, "The Saturday Plan."

I graduated from college, and, except for Shea on Saturdays, I had no idea where I was going. The same could be said for the Mets. The team was dismantled, or, in reality, dis-Seavered. The Mets were now controlled by a Norman Lear sitcom---a baseball team run by three madcap career women known as the DeRoulets. I was equally directionless. My Communications degree hadn’t given me a single clue as to what came next other than student loan payments. Yet, by some sort of rote, I kept my Saturday plan. Perhaps one last connection to youth and college. My luck at finding a job was about as sparse as the Shea crowds. I wanted to be a writer like Neil Simon, but was about as successful as Neil Allen.

To make matters worse, I now recognized no one else in Section 7. Consistency had been slain in the loge. Brown wooden seats became blue plastic ones. I now had trouble finding people to go out to games. Don’t tell me you still have those tickets, they would say as their lives always got in the way. I could have upgraded my seats to an even better location. I didn’t. There was something about my seats.

These years and games and Saturdays and players blurred together. Torremaddoxmontanezkobellockwoodyoungblood. I remember one Saturday game that was scoreless for about six or seven days until a Lenny Randle somebody ended it with a homer. That was it for excitement for about eight years. Trying to incite a riot, the Mets turned every Saturday into a giveaway day. Besides incredibly bad baseball, I was also getting Met gym bags, golf caps, wallets, and photo albums. I used similar measures to fill Seat Two. Sure, it’s September and it’s cold and the Mets are about two hundred games out of first place, but you have to see this guy they just called up. Mookie something or other. I gave thought to ending my Saturday tradition. I didn’t. There was still something about my seats.

Coincidentally, the Mets and I got unfunked at about the same time. I landed in broadcast management and also started to do a lot more writing, some of which actually got read. Nelson Doubleday bought the team. Disco was dead, but my Saturday tickets became a hot commodity again. My best friend from high school, who had been a Seat 2 fixture prior to the Tom Seaver fire sale, was singlehandedly propelled back by the mere presence of that very Mookster. The Saturday plan now included night games, which was fine because I had long ago eschewed the South Bronx subway safari in favor of a Toyota Corolla. And they played lots of oldies between innings. Songs that I had heard Jane Jarvis play on the Thomas Organ in 1968 were now blared via the original 45s. My childhood had become my own nostalgia.

And the team was getting good, to boot. A Dwight Gooden two-hitter. Darryl’s ninth inning heroics. Strawberry Saturdays. I began to keep an elaborate scorebook and even charted the Met starting pitcher, making me the only one in the section who could instantly call up a pitch count. And, we once again saw the same faces every week. In particular, there was the young couple at the other end of our row. We watched them come to games as newlyweds. We watched her come to games in that family way. We watched as Mom stopped coming to games so that her husband could bring their young son.

The 1986 season was our ultimate reward for sitting through five years of Doug Flynn’s potential. Once again, it was the World Series and time for long underwear and Ray Knight games. This time, my Saturday plan earned me two seats in the flight pattern on the first side of Terrace on the Park. On the Saturday night that would become Bill Buckner’s five seconds in Hell, I submerged down to the loge to visit a friend. I ventured past Section 7 to see just who was seated in my usual throne on a night that should have been mine. It was Bob Costas of NBC. All those years of Saturdays and heartaches, just to have my seat surface at the Will Call window. I hoped that Bob’s pitch count was off by two.

With the Mets as perennial contenders and ultimate pretenders during the late 80s and early 90s, my high school best friend and I never missed a Saturday. Maturity had turned us into baseball analysts. We over-managed. We under-managed. We barely managed at all. And we watched as, Saturday after Saturday, the Mets always had men on second and third, nobody out, and wouldn’t score.

In the adult era of my Saturday life, there were those odd occasions when my high school buddy couldn’t sit in Seat 2 and the replacement part would be---a woman. In earlier years, Seat 2 featured an extremely low feminine quotient, partly because I didn’t invite many and partly because I didn’t know many. Eventually, testosterone did triumph, and I realized that, yes, women, too, could enjoy baseball. I even ended up taking my mother to a Saturday game, as she had taken the Baseball 101 master class as taught by Adjunct Professor Tim McCarver. She enjoyed herself immensely, but retired after one game to return to the sanctity of WWOR.

Later on, I ran into a girl who I had a major crush on in college. I hadn’t seen her in ten years, so, naturally, it made perfect sense to take her on a Saturday test drive. I had forgotten she was originally from Baltimore and might have been a third cousin of Andy Etchebarren. With the wounds of 1969 still apparently fresh, she rooted against the Mets the whole game. A mental note was made and baseball was never discussed again.

Dinner last night: Smoked pork at Lou.