Since I can’t watch them on TV, I drove down yesterday to see the Marlins play the Mets. I had vowed to never again go to a Mets game at loanDepot Park – their fans outnumber the home team’s by about 10-1 – but I knew that early April was my only chance to see the stadium with the roof open.
And it was, giving fans that disconcerting thrill of seeing the outdoors indoors. I first experienced it as a child, at Connie Mack Stadium in Philadelphia: I’d enter the gate with my family, walk through dark, concrete concourses, and then pass through an opening to see a sunlit field. It never failed to amaze me: this pastoral expanse in the middle of a building in the middle of a city.
As always, I bought the cheapest seat – yesterday’s was in Section 136, upper deck in right-centerfield – and spent most of the game roaming. People in Mets jerseys prowled the concourses and munched at the tables on the promenade level. Their greatest concentration was behind the visiting team’s dugout, but they dominated every section. In extra innings, they grew very loud – even with an open roof – and I felt sorry for the Marlins players, hearing roars for their opponents while wearing their home whites. I suspect those roars contributed to the error that brought in the winning run.
This phantom home field advantage seems to be unique to baseball in South Florida. Rangers fans attend Panthers games, just as Knicks fans go to see the Heat, and Jets fans the Dolphins, but they never outnumber the home team’s supporters. Our other sports teams are strong enough to have attracted a large and vocal fan base. Only the Marlins suffer the hurt of feeling like visitors in their own stadium. It’s why I love them.
The Marlins beat the visiting Mets the other night but I didn’t see the game; I watched the Tampa Bay Rays play the Pittsburgh Pirates. I am still a Marlins fan, but I have to pay to watch them – on a subscription service on Prime – while the Rays games I get for free. I have not seen any stories about this illogical situation, making me wonder if local interest in the Marlins has reached a new low. Are we the only fans in the country who have to pay to watch their hometown team? And how does this affect the franchise, which, I always heard, didn’t worry about poor attendance at games because its main revenue came from television?
Unless things change, I’ll get to know the Rays better than the Marlins. They’re playing this season in the Yankees spring training stadium in Tampa (due to hurricane damage to Tropicana Field), so at least I’ll see the game played as it should be – under a summer sky.
Saturday evening we went to hear Seraphic Fire at St. Nicholas Church in Pompano Beach. Walking in from the back I saw something I had never seen before: a church food truck. The white lettering on the blue side identified it as “The Holy Grill of St. Nicholas” and included the slogan “Our COD is an Awesome COD.”
In his address to the audience before the concert, the priest said that the truck has served over 68,000 meals to the homeless in Broward County. Afterwards, he told me that it also appears at festivals, where it serves Scotch eggs and Guinness-battered fish and chips. Hence the awesome cod.
It’s said that writers never really finish a story or a poem or a book – they just send it off, finally, to an editor. This is probably truer with fiction and poetry, but I recently wrote an essay about travel books and, thinking it was done, sent it to a couple of magazines. Then Saturday night, driving home from a Seraphic Fire concert and listening to the BBC, I heard a report about the earthquake in Myanmar. I was actually about to change the channel and listen to something more cheerful, like bluegrass, but Hania asked to keep it on. As the reporter spoke, my mind turned to George Orwell, who spent time in the country as an imperial policeman, an experience captured in his novel Burmese Days. Remembering that book led me to think of a nonfiction book with a similar title, Italian Days, by Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, which I had forgotten to mention in my essay. Sunday morning I called up the essay and added Italian Days to the paragraph that lists excellent travel books of the 1980s, marveling at how, through the mysterious process of association, listening to a news report about the earthquake in Myanmar had provided me with a missing item from an essay on a completely different subject. This morning I will resend the amended essay to the original recipients, hoping that they were too busy to read the first version.
Speaking with Bill Maher last Friday, Dana Carvey told of how he got a call in late 1992 from President Bush – the man he had mercilessly imitated on Saturday Night Live – asking him to come down to Washington to “cheer up the troops,” meaning, as Carvey explained, the White House staff (Bush had recently lost his bid for reelection to Bill Clinton). Carvey said that he immediately thought of booking a hotel; he stayed, of course, at the White House. It was the beginning of a 26-year friendship.
Then this week, reading Jan Morris’s diary Thinking Again, I came across her thoughts on hearing of Bush’s death in 2018:
“I shall be sneered at for saying it, but the values I respected in him were the traditional values of the American Gentleman, and alas they no longer govern his nation and so set some standard for the Western world. He was, everyone seems to agree, straight, frank, brave, kind and friendly – in short, gentlemanly American, and I wish to God he was with us still. Don’t you?”