SOLSC March 18: Baseball Season Looms

(if you are not a baseball geek, this may not be for you)

            ... and my Mets fever is rising. It has been tempered somewhat by the recent season-ending injury to Edwin Diaz, Mets closer extraordinaire — injury suffered while he was celebrating (!) his Puerto Rican team’s victory in a World Baseball Classic game last week. He may have been personally responsible for the Mets winning 20 to 25 of their 101 wins.

            I was thinking of all this today as I took the train to Norwalk, Connecticut, to meet a group of other Mets fans who have been gathering annually for at least 35 years, just before the season starts. Our organizer is Dave G., the head back in the late 1980s of a group of Mets fans who kept score according to a scoresheet designed by baseball historian and sabrmetrician Bill James. In the beginning, each fan committed to score 10 to 15 games a season, fax them to a central location where the marks on the scoresheet were converted to computer data, and got paid $10 per game.

            I got involved around 1990, mostly because I loved the scoresheet. (While the standard scoresheet made it easy to see who had scored a run, this new one made it easy to see who got the RBI. Moreover, this new sheet provided space to keep track of balls and strikes, something I had done in my own invented scoring system before I knew a standard one existed.) A year or so later, the central location and payment disappeared (this particular business model that intended to sell this data to teams or sports media didn’t work out), but Dave continued to convene us and a varying number of Mets fans every March. We usually met at microbreweries in New York or southern Connecticut, though for a few years we met at Bobby Valentine’s bar in Stamford, even inviting Valentine himself to regale us with tales of his career as a player and manager.

            Essential elements of every gathering were postmortems of the previous season, guesses for how many games the Mets would win in the upcoming season, and Dave’s devilish trivia in a Jeopardy format. Questions might include “what player hit more than 30 doubles every year between 1900 and 1907?” or “what pitcher had 175 strikeouts in 1931 at age 31?” Questions were not always this esoteric, but they did require more than a casual knowledge of baseball history. I have a more erratic knowledge and usually score at or near the bottom of this trivia contest.

            Today’s meeting was at an Irish bar, and as it happened, Ireland was playing England in a Six Nations Grand Slam competition in Dublin. That game was on three large screens suspended from the ceiling, and the bar was packed. At every good move or goal or point scored by Ireland, the place broke into cheers; when the game was over, music was piped in, very loud, and voices of patrons continued very loud. While the 14 of us ate platters of bar food and drank pints of beer, we were able to talk to the person next to us or across the table. But the trivia contest required Dave to repeat his question numerous times, and if one person didn’t get the right answer, the rest of us couldn’t hear the wrong answer and maybe repeated it. However, it was fun to see old friends and meet new ones. And baseball season, with a host of new rules, opens in less than two weeks.

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I’m participating in the 16th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 18 of the 31-day challenge.  It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to slice about.  Join in!