SOL March 27: Baseball!

I am a huge baseball fan. It started with Don Larsen’s perfect game in the World Series of 1956. Could someone actually do something that was perfect? Then it wasn’t impossible for me to be perfect in my life.

            At the time, I was living in a Philadelphia suburb, so of course I became a Phillies fan. Being a Phillies fan in the mid-’50s was good practice for later becoming a Mets fan. But first I had to go through a Yankees phase: when my husband and I were first in New York and lived on the Upper West Side, I thought we must live closer to Yankee Stadium than to the Mets’ Shea Stadium. Then my daughter’s high school offered tickets to a Mets game late in the 1986 season, which turned out to be their World Series year. For the first time, I read the sports pages in the off-season so the new players and the gone players were not a huge surprise come April.

            A few years later I joined a group of Mets fans who had turned their fandom into a bit of money. They were the Mets scorers for Project Scoresheet, started by the baseball historian and statistician Bill James, who had invented a new way to score games that could be computer coded. The scorers only had to watch games, score using the Project Scoresheet system, then fax our completed scoresheets to the computer coders—and get paid $10 per game. Each year, in March, this Mets group of scorers met at a brewpub in New York or southern Connecticut (many of the men, and they were all men, lived in Connecticut), signed up for the games we’d score, talk baseball and play baseball trivia.

            Project Scoresheet failed as a business, replaced by the Elias Sports Bureau, but the Mets group has continued on. Last year our in-person meeting was canceled, but five of us had a watch-party for the Mets’ opening day. That may have been my first zoom ever.

            This year, we zoomed for our preseason gathering. A couple of the men were on grandfather duty, so baby sounds were background. We talked about the Mets’ prospects with their new, super-rich owner; we remembered all the superstars of the past who came to the Mets and didn’t perform; we wondered what had happened to former members of our group; we watched the Mets rather handily beat the Astros. Perhaps we will all go to a game this year—perhaps. It’s an hour subway ride from my home. I hope the positivity rate will have declined by later this summer.

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I’m participating in the 14th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 27 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!

SOLSC 25: Baseball Season Coming Up

            Opening day is just over a week away. So today I took the train to Connecticut to meet a group of New York Mets fans that has been meeting just before the season starts for almost 35 years. The group started as part of a Bill James initiative called Project Scoresheet.* The Project organized groups of fans for each major league team to score games with its computer database, and those groups met just before the season started to divvy up who would score which games. I joined the group in 1990, shortly before Project Scoresheet disbanded. But our group captain was a sociable organizer, and the group continued to meet every March, to discuss baseball and the fate of the Mets, and play baseball trivia.

            I’m not great at baseball trivia. I don’t remember who pitched, or even won, the first game I ever saw. I can’t tell you the lineups, positions, or numbers of every player on the New York Mets since their creation. But I know enough to guess that it was Tom Seaver who made 11 opening day starts for the Mets. I know that Terry Pendleton of the Cardinals hit a home run that dashed the Mets hopes for winning the NL East for a second year in a row (I was there). I know just enough not to make a fool of myself in a friendly baseball trivia game.

            Today we met at the Cask Republic, a bar/restaurant serving a multitude of craft beers. Everyone but me lives in Connecticut, so South Norwalk is a central location. These occasions are the only time I drink beer, but today I went for a very exotic sangria mix (it included coconut rum). In between eating, entering the Mets 2017 wins pool, and playing trivia (I came in last), we watched the UConn women beat UCLA.

            I donated Jack’s two Mets hooded sweatshirts – too big to fit me – as prizes, and showed around the rookie baseball card for Darryl Strawberry that I was given while in California, by a friend of a friend’s husband who happened to have been Strawberry’s high school Government teacher. When he learned I was a big Mets fan, he gave me the laminated card.

            There was still hulking piles of dirty snow here and there in Norwalk.

But the train station had some very interesting historic artwork, characteristic figures of many eras, from a Civil War soldier (right) to civil rights marchers (left).

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*Bill James is a baseball historian and statistician, and Project Scoresheet was a method of scoring games for computer input and collecting the information to sell to fans and teams. It was supplanted by Stats Inc. and the Elias Sports Bureau. I love this scoring method because it counts balls and strikes.)