Thursday, April 12, 2007

Home Sweet Home

I went home last night. And although it was cold, windy, overall unpleasant and the Mets got beat in a slow, boring game, it was good to be home. As we drove down the ramp towards Shea, with Pearl Jam's cover of "The Boys Are Back In Town" blasting, it felt like I had never left. I wish there was more about the game and the experience to report, but it was too cold to really pay attention to anything and nothing particularly interesting happened, except that a cat ran onto the field at some point. The last time this happened, the Mets won the World Series, so that bodes well for our chances this year, I guess.
Oliver Perez is, well, what I expected. He was great in his 1st start, dreadful last night. The most frustrating thing about a guy like him is that he is so clearly talented with exceptional stuff, so that every time he goes out there and pitches lights out, we will think that he has turned the corner and will be good from that point on. But I have a feeling that this two-game pattern will be a decent sample of what we can expect from Perez this season.
Good job by Mets fans deciding to pick on Jimmy Rollins whenever he does anything that can possibly be construed as screwing up. Yesterday, there were jeers for him after he failed to make a play on a groundball that hit the pitcher and got redirected. Let's hope this treatment continues for the rest of the year going forward.
As a side note, last night a Mets fan and Yankees fan got arrested because they got into a fight, which led to a loud "Yankees Suck" chant. Now, Eric has always hated these chants at Mets games as he feels that the focus should be on the Mets, not the Yankees, and I guess in a way it validates them when we do that. And some might point out that Yankee fans will never do a "Mets Suck" chant at a game, explaining that Mets fans have an inferiority complex when it comes to the Yankees, and they don't care about the Mets. I would point out that many of the chants at Mets' games are in response to instigation from an obnoxious Yankee fan, not out of the blue, and that in all the non-Mets/Yankees games I have been to at Yankee Stadium, I have never seen Mets fans behave the way Yankee fans do at Mets games, instigating and picking fights. So I think this might be a better explanation for the disparity in chants and makes me more comfortable about the chant in general. Because when we chant "Yankees Suck" what we are really saying is "That guy and is an asshole, and so is anyone like him."

1 comment:

Eric said...

You've told me this theory, and it's plausible. But we shouldn't be suckered into it, because the background is lost on TV.

I was foolish - I really thought after his first start of the year we wouldn't see a 7 walk outing from Perez this season. I wasn't handing him the Cy Young, but I thought he'd be better. Now I don't know what we'll be getting from him.