Metsography: The Fog Game

Welcome to my new, off-season feature here on "The Musings and Prophecies of M.Damus".

It's not a very original name, but I made a cool photoshop graphic for it last year which was put together at a particularly bitter time in my Met experience (can you name everyone in the picture?), and have been looking for an outlet for it. And since I have a feeling the Mets network will not be using the name, here it is:

"Metsography".

Metsography entries will feature the format from a couple of favorite blogs of mine...OK, so I don't really feature the format as much as I, er, rip them off. First, you may remember the Flashback Friday series from "Faith and Fear in Flushing". Don't expect these to be as organized. Also, there's bad-ass blogger Dave Murray's "Mets Guy In Michigan", which is as Dave calls them: "adventures in baseball and life". Mine are just adventures in baseball...

Because I have no life.

For installment one, I feature the fog game...or it's alternate title: "The Night I Got Kicked Out Of Shea Stadium".

A few points I want to make before I begin:

• No, I wasn't inebriated.
• No punches were thrown.
• Someone did almost die.
• I was in Shea Stadium for the entire game.

Are you good and confused yet?

This game was somewhere around 1990...this was when I was in college and I had a partial ticket plan which included Tuesday nights, Friday nights, and Opening Day. I got to meet a lot of great people who sat around me for a good seven seasons before I got a night job and had to forego the tickets.

The San Diego Padres were the lucky visitors, and I went to the game straight from school, which was within walking distance of Shea. I was taking some sort of Shakespeare class which required I buy a textbook the size of North Dakota, and I was none too pleased carrying this stupid thing all the way to Shea Stadium.

So I make it to the game and it's going swimmingly as I sit with my buds in section 29 of the green seats...otherwise known to Mets fans as "the mezzanine" (which I thought was named after Lee Mazzilli when I was really reeeeeeeally young). Then the fog was rolling in...and rolling in...and it rolled in so low that the game had to be stopped for about an hour.

A lot of people had left the stadium, but not us yahoos. We stuck it out. Of course, we needed something to do which would keep us occupied, and also get us on television. This is where my hippopotamus-sized soft cover book came into play. I had one of the guys throw me some crumpled paper cups as I used the book as a bat (although it operated more like those paddles used in cricket), as the crumpled cups sailed over the mezzanine and fell harmlessly to the loge section. It was a fog filled HR derby, although I was nowhere near as prolific as Bobby Abreu in Detroit.

As if they weren't already, here's where things got strange. Someone else wanted to hit. Being the fair person I am, I abdicated the book. Now I'm pitching...and the first pitch I throw ends up with debris flying well into the loge section.

Except it wasn't the cup...it was half of the book!

The glue that bound the book together failed...and the front half of the book went high into the night like a Darryl Strawberry moon shot. So here I go...down to the loge section to retrieve the other half of the book. As I miraculously find it lying on a seat, a woman asks me if it's my book. After I tell her it was, she tells me sternly that an older gentleman was sitting right next to the seat where this monstrosity of a half-book lands. Considering the size of this book, I conclude that this guy could have been killed.

Now you understand why I keep my true identity a secret...there very well might be a warrant out for my arrest.

And if that older gentleman is reading this...you're still alive?

No seriously...I apologize.

Now I head back to my seat upstairs, but I never make it. As I step off the escalator, I see my section 29 friends are being kicked out of the game by a policeman (well, more like one of those "rent-a-cops") that was roughly the age of dirt (Think Pat Paulsen from "Night Patrol"). One of the guys in our group argued that he was a Nassau County corrections officer...but that was met with "well then you should know better!" So there went our last chance to talk our way back in.

But then as we head back down the escalator in right field to the second level or..."the loge", we notice something unbelievable: our group got enough distance between us and the rent-a-cop to basically make a break for it, and re-enter the stands! So we casually stroll to an unmanned section of the loge, where we slip in and try to blend in with the rest of society to watch the rest of the game, which had resumed. The problem was, most of society had already left due to the fog delay so there wasn't any society to blend in to. And now the rent-a-cop, most likely fearing his job, was in the right field loge moving from section to section looking for us...fugitives from justice.

In between hysterical laughter, our group keeps moving towards home plate. And now the story takes it's final, mad twist. Another guy in our group notices a friend of his working behind the home plate field level...the good seats. And his friend is a cop...a real one. So here's how the conversation sort of went:

Fan: Hey how's it going!
Officer: Great! How you doin'?
Fan: Hey we're cool!
Officer: You staying out of trouble?
(Giggles from the group)
Fan: Yeah, we're behaving...hey, anything open down where you are?"
Officer: Yeah, come on down!

So the rest of the game was spent in the fourth row behind home plate...after being kicked off the premises.

Did I learn any lessons from that fateful night? Yes, I learned one important lesson...

Never let anyone else hit!

Next week: Terry Pendleton's role in a spike to Met fan injuries...