Mets vs. Braves

I caught the first half of the Mets game on TV. It was good to see John Maine get in trouble but then recover for a change. He didn't get the win, but just seeing him have such a bad run in the fourth, and then be able to rein it in and settle down was reassuring. Shawn Green's hitting against Smoltz was pretty entertaining, and then it was pretty funny when he caught Smoltz's hit to add insult to injury. It's too bad I missed his game-winning RBI in the eighth. He's a good egg.

During the game, the broadcasters also mentioned that the Phillies had started their game off with a triple play, so this morning I looked around to find out what happened. Story here, video worth checking out.

I cut my viewing short to grab a burrito and head over to S     's house to watch Top Chef. Social interaction must always trump TV, even baseball on TV, and watching TV with another living human being counts as social. These are my rules. Not only did she have beers for me to consume, but she even whipped up a badass guac for my burrito (that is not a euphemism for anything, it was literally guacamole that I put on my chicken burrito). So now I owe her for Mets tickets and guac. The debt mounts! And here's her recap. I liked the show a lot, but her recaps are probably better.

And one final thing, which I don't know why I didn't link to this earlier, but Dallas Penn has made "Vote For Pedro" shirts. Awesome idea.

Mets vs. Braves

S      did indeed hook me up with tickets to last night's game, so I got to enjoy my poor, hapless Mets going down in defeat, 78-2. Sachar came along and the seats were really good! I snapped this picture before the game got underway, as El Duque came to take the mound (nh).



The cloud-obscured sunset provided a nice backdrop for this view of the construction equipment for Citi Field:



About halfway through the fifth inning people began leaving in droves. Friend Lee had even better seats from work and had spotted some empty ones nearby, so we moved down closer to the field to watch the massacre continue:



Pretty awesome! In this picture you can just make out Gary Cohen's shiny dome:



Sachar and Lee react to another brill Mets play:



Reading the game coverage today, I realize that I'm an idiot. I had been referring to this as Hernandez's second post-injury start, whereas it was actually his first. It sounds like everyone is taking his performance in stride, but I still would have liked to see him get a win.

Other than the actual game, it was a totally fun first visit to Shea. Sachar and Lee grew up going to Mets games and know their baseball. I always have fun trying to speculate about stuff that doesn't make sense when I've gone to games with Peter (how can the broadcasters tell what pitch he just threw?) or Kate (what's "BB" mean?), but people who actually know what they are talking about are good resources to have available.

On a related note, did you know that a bag of peanuts is supposed to be six servings? Ugh. I pretty much eat a whole bag every time I attend a game. And the ones at the Mets and Cyclones games are really salty and delicious (nullus). Ugh ugh. I had enough salt that my calf cramped up painfully in the middle of the night. That's a salt thing, right? Maybe in the future I will try to smuggle my own, smaller sack of nuts into the game.

Anyway, mad propers to S      for the tickets and to Sachar and Lee for the entertaining company. I will never forget my first time to a Mets game.

Mets vs. Braves and Women Sports Fans

What a game, right? I actually missed the top of the sixth in the transition from living room to the sports bar around the corner, so I don't even know how they got their three runs over on what seemed to be a tight Mets defense throughout. Or until the ninth, anyway. Still, awesome game. No homo on this, but does it count as small ball when the winning run is a homer? Whatever it's called, it's fun baseball to watch.

Unrelated, but a blog post that was somewhat tangentially baseball-related prompted a user comment linking to an older discussion on a (booooo) Yankees fan blog that is more or less about what sexist boors Yankees fans are. No surprise there.

Anyway, I read this several days ago, and aside from thinking that I probably know more women baseball fans than men (and that Peter and I are more likely to discuss the history of uniforms than statistics), I didn't give it much thought. But when I woke up this morning, the phrase the Bronx Banter guy used to characterize the sexist conversation happening around him—"[l]et's make fun of women because they don't have a clue when it comes to sports"—came back to me. What a hilarious thought! And my favorite defense (offered by multiple commenters in the original blog post) is that, well, for at least some sports, most of the knowledgeable fans really are men, so what's sexist about saying so? Even more hilarious!

Grant that the premise is true: women, in general, don't know or care anything about baseball. Well, we could say the same thing about, say, Dungeons and Dragons, or prog rock. Sure, there are dozens of women who play tabletop RPGs or listen to King Crimson, but they are scattered across the population and therefore sparsely represented. These pursuits are hugely male-dominated. But what would we say about a 14th-level paladin who sought to "make fun of women because they don't have a clue when it comes to" rolling for initiative? We would quite rightly identify the speaker as an insufferable dork, a hopeless geek who probably has a chip on his shoulder from not getting laid.

Not only that, but if we perceive that kind of attitude as widespread in the worlds of tabletop gaming, then that perception functions as an indictment of the entire hobby, and women's lack of participation is completely justified, a rational reaction to an environment hostile to women. It's like making fun of black people for not playing golf: this kind of inequity can not only not be made light of, it must actively be lamented, lest the male prog rock aficionado or white golfer immediately be suspected of getting into a hobby because of who it excludes.

But anyway, I don't grant the premise, as men don't at all appear to be overrepresented in the population of sports fans, but merely in the population of people who can only talk about or form relationships over sports. I.e., the population of geeks. Which, yeah, we've had a lock on since probably while most of the cavepeople were out bringing down a mammoth, these two cavedudes were out looking for specimens, making fun of women who didn't know the first thing about stone collecting.

Update: I forgot to mention something I noticed at the bar as I checked out the scores across the rest of baseball. First, watching the Yankees get whooped as my Mets came back to win was a treat. But then Seattle also won while Detroit lost, putting the M's ahead in the AL wild card race. So all my teams won and all my anti-teams lost. Awesome.