Baseball anniversaries
I missed the fortieth anniversary of my very first ballgame earlier this week. June 29th, 1975: I know my mother and my late Aunt Alice (the biggest Mets fan in the family) took me but I don't remember who else was there. It was a Mets-Phillies double-header at the old incarnation of Shea Stadium, the one that looked like a Wonder Bread wrapper. Tom Seaver, my first baseball love, started the second game, while Jerry Koosman started the first. Yogi Berra was the manager (he was fired a few weeks later).
The Mets lost both games, of course. The event that stuck in my mind (and made it possible to look up all the other information above) was the relief pitcher Bob Apodaca getting smacked square in the nose with a line drive (from Johnny Oates, the only batter he faced, in the ninth inning of game 2). His bloody face was on the back page of the New York Daily News the next day. Perhaps that should have put me off baseball for life, but by then I was hooked. That big patch of green grass in Flushing, hellhole though it may have been, was love at first sight, and I've never regretted it since. Even when they traded Seaver to the Reds; I just switched primary allegiance to the Yankees, admittedly a good move in 1977, and no one told me I couldn't support both teams.
Another Mets anniversary is tomorrow: 30 years ago, Mets-Braves, July 4th, 1985. One of the oddest games ever played, I think still the single latest finish in MLB history - and after that they shot off fireworks in Atlanta at 4 am! I watched most of this game on TV, but I couldn't stay up long enough to catch the end, with Rick Camp (a very poor-hitting reliever) getting the only home run of his career, the Mets scoring 5 in the top of the nineteenth inning and giving up 4 in the bottom of the 19th, just squeaking out the win. At the link, I see the Mets apparently ate some raw meat on the bus afterwards. Good times.
The Mets lost both games, of course. The event that stuck in my mind (and made it possible to look up all the other information above) was the relief pitcher Bob Apodaca getting smacked square in the nose with a line drive (from Johnny Oates, the only batter he faced, in the ninth inning of game 2). His bloody face was on the back page of the New York Daily News the next day. Perhaps that should have put me off baseball for life, but by then I was hooked. That big patch of green grass in Flushing, hellhole though it may have been, was love at first sight, and I've never regretted it since. Even when they traded Seaver to the Reds; I just switched primary allegiance to the Yankees, admittedly a good move in 1977, and no one told me I couldn't support both teams.
Another Mets anniversary is tomorrow: 30 years ago, Mets-Braves, July 4th, 1985. One of the oddest games ever played, I think still the single latest finish in MLB history - and after that they shot off fireworks in Atlanta at 4 am! I watched most of this game on TV, but I couldn't stay up long enough to catch the end, with Rick Camp (a very poor-hitting reliever) getting the only home run of his career, the Mets scoring 5 in the top of the nineteenth inning and giving up 4 in the bottom of the 19th, just squeaking out the win. At the link, I see the Mets apparently ate some raw meat on the bus afterwards. Good times.