Before this World Series began, I thought that anything more would be gravy. No Yankee sense of entitlement, just humility and awe at seeing this team-on-the-fly in the World Series, against a team that plays the game right. As a Met fan staying home and watching, I could not have wished a game like Friday’s for David Wright, but there it is – a two-run homer that energized the Mets, two more runs on a single later. And two Jeterian plays in the field – a scramble into the corner to fetch a ball and hold the batter to a single, and a swipe tag that was validated by replay. He didn’t dive into the stands and bloody himself. But he would have. I wrote about Wright nine days ago, and Tyler Kepner had a lovely column in Saturday’s NYT; I don’t have to go over it again – upstanding leader, solid player, and now, for one manic night, the star of a World Series victory. Noah Syndegaard’s strong six innings, perhaps you could trace them back to the day in spring training when Wright and Bobby Parnell dumped Syndegaard’s lunch in the garbage. Friday was the reward for Wright, for Syndegaard, and maybe even for Parnell who ran out of velocity in his comeback. No idea how the Mets will do, as of Saturday morning. But I would like to quote the eminent baseball sage, Johnny Damon, who on the night the Red Sox fell behind, three games to none, to the Yankees in 2004, stood in the crowded clubhouse at Fenway and calmly told reporters: "Unless I'm mistaken, we've won four straight before." (Turned out they had, eight times.) The Mets have had their own streaks in this run. And David Wright had a game that he and Mets fans can and should always remember, on its own.
Roy Edelsack
10/31/2015 10:20:55 am
Went last night with my son . Ridiculously emotional. The captain homers. Granderson homer lands right under us. Billy Joel. Mike Piazza. Standup to cancer (just lost my brother this year). Moment of silence for murdered police officer. Syndergaard goes high and tight, looks shaky but then figures it out.
George Vecsey
10/31/2015 10:48:59 am
It really was. It's hard to feel part of it watching the national/international network broadcast. I got some photos of the 7 train via somebody who was on it. My condolences to your family. GV
Mendel
10/31/2015 12:29:48 pm
No gratuitous bat-flip for Captain Wright. For now, at least, Citi Field has a home run moment to rival Piazza's post-9/11. Goosebumps all over again. 10/31/2015 05:47:42 pm
Thanks, George. You nailed it. I also enjoyed Roy and Mendel's reflections. Like you all, I don't know how this is going to end up, but I'm just grateful to be watching it -- and grateful, especially, for David and Terry. I know, for those pros, that it's about winning it all - World Champs and all that - but I'm just happy for them that they are in the World Series, in New York, with thousands of loving fans watching. I'm proud to be among them. We'll remember this magic run even if we don't win it all. So will David, how may be more physically brittle than any of us realize. But I'll save that nagging worry for another day. LGM.
George Vecsey
10/31/2015 07:20:45 pm
Peter, thanks for the note. The Mets are built on gratitude for their existence, going back to 1962 when first fans were happy to see Elio Chacon and Marv Throneberry and Jay Hook and the rest -- just to have National League ball back in NYC after the Dark Ages. I submit that Mets fans, young, sense the same thing. Nobody expected this.
Gao Dianmin
11/1/2015 06:06:40 am
My Dear George, How are you!
George Vecsey
11/1/2015 07:46:21 am
親愛高:好聽到你的聲音。
Mendel
11/2/2015 08:10:53 am
How long before a recap post, George. We're all going to need a place to wind down... Comments are closed.
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QUOTES
More and More, I Talk to the Dead--Margaret Renkl NASHVILLE — After my mother died so suddenly — laughing at a rerun of “JAG” at 10 p.m., dying of a hemorrhagic stroke by dawn — I dreamed about her night after night. In every dream she was willfully, outrageously alive, unaware of the grief her death had caused. In every dream relief poured through me like a flash flood. Oh, thank God! Then I would wake into keening grief all over again. Years earlier, when my father learned he had advanced esophageal cancer, his doctor told him he had perhaps six months to live. He lived far longer than that, though I never thought of it as “living” once I learned how little time he really had. For six months my father was dying, and then he kept dying for two years more. I was still working and raising a family, but running beneath the thin soil of my own life was a river of death. My father’s dying governed my days. After he died, I wept and kept weeping, but I rarely dreamed about my father the way I would dream about my mother nearly a decade later. Even in the midst of calamitous grief, I understood the difference: My father’s long illness had given me time to work death into the daily patterns of my life. My mother’s sudden death had obliterated any illusion that daily patterns are trustworthy. Years have passed now, and it’s the ordinariness of grief itself that governs my days. The very air around me thrums with absence. I grieve the beloved high-school teacher I lost the summer after graduation and the beloved college professor who was my friend for more than two decades. I grieve the father I lost nearly 20 years ago and the father-in-law I lost during the pandemic. I grieve the great-grandmother who died my junior year of college and the grandmother who lived until I was deep into my 40s. Some of those I grieve are people I didn’t even know. How can John Prine be gone? I hear his haunting last song, “I Remember Everything,” and I still can’t quite believe that John Prine is gone. ----- https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/30/opinion/death-grief-memory.html Jan. 30, 2023 Categories
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