dr4b | Entries tagged with mets

Yesterday Nick and I went to the Mets-Marlins game. For the Marlins, we have Superman, aka Dontrelle Willis, pitching. In the other corner we have Zorro, aka Victor Zambrano, pitching. Amazingly, the Marlins didn't get off to a huge quick lead or anything -- but they did keep chipping away at our hero Zorro, with runs in the 1st, 3rd, and 7th innings, while Superman not only kept the Mets from scoring at all in a complete game (they only threatened once, in the first inning, when they loaded the bases with one out, and then Willis struck out Woodward and Wright), but he himself was also 1 for 2, singling with a walk, and scored that run I mentioned in the 3rd inning. That's so unfair, why do they get to have a pitcher with a lifetime .229/.262/.302 line?

There were these Hassidic Jews sitting a few rows in front of us, complete with kippahs and big curly sideburns and button-down shirts and nice slacks and all, except one of them also had a Beltran t-shirt on over his nice clothes, and another one had a Mets hat on over his kippah. Hee. It's so very New York.

After the game we debated what to do, swing dancing or going to Philly for the Braves game or what, and eventually what we decided on was that we were going to go find some really good Italian food because I haven't had real eggplant parmesan in foreeeever. So we walked all through the Upper West Side -- well, we crossed campus and then walked Broadway from 120th down to 88th or so -- and eventually ended up at a place called Carmine's. We watched the first few innings of the Phillies-Braves game while waiting for a table, and then we got more Italian food than you can shake several sticks at. The eggplant really was fantastic, and Nick, in his utter non-wisdom, also ordered rigatoni, because he is dumb and didn't realize that the portions were going to be huge. Well, we have lots of leftovers now, or more like, Nick will be eating rigatoni for lunch all week.

Walked back after that. It's nice being in a city full of people. Nick and I debated what to watch movie-wise after that and he made me watch the pilot episode of Firefly. It was pretty good, though I dunno if I'll ever get around to watching more of it unless some other people are watching it or something (were the Tacoma people? I forget).

Hmm, it's time for us to go over to the Bronx and see a Yankees-Orioles game. Whee!

Well, today was a pretty good day, even with the last part of it.

I went to the Mets-Phillies game in the afternoon to see Pedro Martinez pitch against Jon Lieber. I sat in a section full of Mets fans. There was this one super-newyork-lady sitting next to me who was really nice but totally talked the accent. "Heeyah, look in da binawkyooluhs, look at Michael [Piazza], ain't he gawt the best smoile? He's so gawgeous." I had specifically asked for seating under the cover, because I figured it would rain. Because I did that, it didn't rain for the whole game. And the Mets won. I spent the game pretending to be a Mets fan instead of a Phillies fan -- I was wearing plain clothes, so there was no team commitment there. I kept score, and the people in the section kept saying things like "You must be a big fan. Look at Pedro! Were you here when he almost gawt that no-hittuh?"

The highlights of the game included Todd Pratt getting himself thrown out early on (it was a 1-2 pitch and Lieber threw what honestly looked like a third strike, but the ump called it a ball, and Pratt must have said something because next thing we knew Pratt was walking off the field and Charlie Manuel was walking on to argue, and shortly after that he was also thrown off the field. Lieberthal came in to catch and the game continued. Unfortunately, shortly after that Lieber walked the bases loaded and soon enough the Mets were up 5-1. Even Pedro managed to get a single.

The funniest moment was probably late in the game. Carlos Beltran got himself walked, and then stole second base -- I'm not even sure Lieberthal tried to throw him out. On the very next pitch he stole third base! So of course the Mets fans start chanting "STEAL HOME! [clap clap] STEAL HOME! [clap clap]"

Yeah.

After the game I got Nick a birthday present of a Pedro shirt. He's such a Mets fan and he didn't have any Mets shirts. What a shame!

I went to meet up with

rkane after that. I got lost trying to get to where he works, but fortunately, he had more work to do. First I got lost by going the wrong way on the subway, and then I got lost in Bloomingdales, which is attached to the subway stop by his workplace. Bloomingdales is SCARY. We stopped by Neutral Ground after that to pick up some card holders, and it was full of Magic the Gathering players, who are also scary.

Mark, however, is not scary. Mark is awesomeness, and I really wish I got to hang out with him more, but that'd require being in the same city more often, which would also require things like me coming to town sometime when he isn't leaving town the next day. We went for pizza at a place called Lombardi's, which is in or near Little Italy. It had reeeeeeeally awesome pizza. Then we walked around town for a while talking, and for lack of anywhere better to go, headed back to his and Mike's place. There's a joke about how Mark kept getting bigger and bigger TVs all through college, culminating in this gigantic screen TV that barely fit through the door when they were in Doherty. Well, Mark's TV has grown even bigger now, as it's pretty much the ENTIRE WALL of the living room, with a projector.

We ended up watching Stuck On You, that movie with Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear as conjoined twins. It was really really Farrelly-awful for a lot of it, and somewhere along the line it became entertaining. We were both shocked it got a 6.1 on IMDB, but as it went on I could sort of understand why. I'm glad I didn't pay to see it, but I enjoyed watching it and getting to comment all the times it was just like "aggh! this is so BAD!"

Mark walked me back to the subway, and we had a conversation about how real life sucks. It made me pretty sad and deep-in-thought as I was riding the subway back here, which may account for what happened next.

I took the yellow line to Times Square and went down to the platform where the red lines go. I got on a red train. I went to 116th. Normally I'd get off at 116th and Broadway and walk over here to 120th. Except, uh, I got out of the train and I was at 116th and Malcolm X Blvd. Well... I didn't remember seeing that road before but I figured maybe I had gone through a different exit. So I walked to 120th and started heading west. Except, uh... I was nowhere near any streets I had seen before. It was really confusing. I walked around for a while and started panicking since I also didn't see any cops, cabs, or white people anywhere.

I called Nick. He goes, "Uhhh... I better come pick you up. Think you can wait there for ten minutes?"

Turns out I was in the middle of Harlem wandering around alone at 1am. It was a pretty nerve-wracking ten minutes, but eventually Nick got there and got me and we got back here okay. I suppose it should be considered a testament to NYC being more safe nowadays that I was lost in Harlem alone for around 20-25 minutes total in the middle of the night and nothing happened to me.

Turns out I'd taken one of the wrong red lines. Sigh.

The other funny thing is that I had been thinking earlier in the day that I'd probably like living in NYC... now I'm sort of re-thinking that.

Nick and I went to the Mets-Phillies game tonight. Despite the 7 train having the wrong mark on it so we got the local when we wanted the express, we got there at like 7:35, for a 7:10 game, which was rain delayed to 7:40. Perfect!

Ishii walked a LOT of people and then Bell and Utley hit a single and a homer to knock in 5 runs and knock out Ishii. Cory Lidle pitched a great game for the Phillies and even went 1-for-2 on the batting. The only thing that really sucked is that it did start raining again in the 4th inning, and was pretty heavy rain from the 4th until the 7th or so, which was annoying for keeping score (I had my scorebook in a plastic bag and I'd reach in with a pen to write down the frames as they happened).

So yeah, it was 6-3 Phillies in the 9th and Billy Wagner came in, and you all know how much I love Billy Wagner. He kicked a ton of Met butt and the game was over pretty quickly, ending with Marlon Anderson just looking at a 99 mph fastball.

Surprisingly few people actually made comments about my Phillies shirt, and there were several others at the park. I picked up a Mike Cameron 44 Mets t-shirt though, which I will wear around Seattle sometimes I'm sure :)

Beltran sucks! Zing.

I'm probly going back to Shea for tomorrow afternoon's Phillies-Mets game... Pedro Martinez vs. Jon Lieber. Should be fun. I'll wear the Mets shirt this time though.

In an effort to keep getting up early, I came up with a perfect excuse to get up at 9am today... to go to the Mariners game at 1pm! Yeah. See, baseball is good for me.

Seriously, though, the game was scary. It was sold out thanks to father's day -- I got the Safeco shuttle down from Northgate and got to the park around 12:30pm -- and there were huge lines at the ticket windows, and the lady's like "I only have single tickets and only in Field and Box". And when I got up there and said I wanted a single ticket, she basically said "35 bucks, and you'll be in the far parts of Field". Now I personally know that those are SUCKY seats because you can't see the screens and you're at a bad angle. So I asked about the 50 dollar seats. She had one that was 26 rows straight behind home plate. No shit, I took that one in an instant. I guess I'm starting a job tomorrow, I can afford it.

It was a HOT and SUNNY day out today, and the shade didn't actually cover me until somewhere in the 5th inning, although I did bring a hat so I don't think I'm sunburnt at all. The game was really a very good game, lots of fun to watch, high-scoring. The Mariners really hit up Tom Glavine for a ton of runs early on (it was 6-1 as of the third inning). It's kind of weird, since I mean, it's Tom Glavine, the guy could reasonably reach 300 career victories and is almost a shoe-in for the hall of fame. Meche pitched admirably for the Mariners, but when he hit the 100-pitch mark, he practically just fell over, loading the bases and then hitting Woodward to knock in a run. Well, we put in Matt Thornton to take care of the loaded bases, and all of the people scored. It's ridiculous that it inflates Meche's ERA like that and Thornton gets off with barely anything. 6-5. Fortunately the Mariners countered by exploding for 4 runs in the 6th, mostly due to Mike DeJean walking a bunch of them -- even walking in a run. The final score was 11-5.

nickjong called me during the final out to express his extreme sadness that the Mariners had swept the Mets.

It really wasn't all bad. Mike Piazza went 3-for-5 after going hitless all through the weekend. Ichiro was also 3-for-5, scoring two runs. The "new kids on the block", Morse and Rivera, combined for 5-for-8 and three runs scored. It's looking more and more like our middle infield next year will be Jose Lopez and Mike Morse, at this rate, given the hitting tear they're both on.

I sat around too many rude Mets fans though, who insisted on yelling and screaming a lot, especially things like "HEY BELTRAN, YOU SUCK, WE'RE NOT PAYING YOU 119 MILLION DOLLARS TO SUCK LIKE THIS, LOSER."

I noticed that Kazuo Matsui and Kazuhisa Ishii pretty much stood together leaning on the Mets dugout rails for most of the game. I guess Ishii pitched the other day and Matsui doesn't get played, so they can just chat in Japanese together.

Oh well. Mets sweep aside, I came home after the game and went out to Big 5 Sporting Goods because I'm running out of space in my scorecard book. I also picked up stuff for swimming, like a cap and goggles. Go me. After that I walked around Greenlake. I called my dad for Father's Day and talked to him for like two miles... er, like 35 minutes. The lake was nice. There weren't ducklings out today, I think it's too late for them, but there were goslings. They were with the big geese, and were fairly big themselves, but they were all fuzzy, which is how you know they're goslings.

On the way back from Greenlake I decided to drive past Megan and Josh's house and see how far they'd come with the fence. The really funny part is, I was about a block away from their house and my phone rings. It's Megan, asking if I'd want to go to dinner at Mashiko. So I'm like "Dude, I'm a block away from your house. No joke. I wanted to see the fence." So I get out and admire the fence (they have done a TON, almost completed the entire side that they needed to get done first) and we make plans for dinner... except since they're yucky from the fence building and I'm yucky from sitting out in the sun and then walking several miles, we decide to reconvene in a bit. A little later they pick up me and then Eli and we all go to Mashiko. (I finally gave Eli the socks I knitted him. I started those socks in like... Christmas 2002, and finally finished them a few weeks ago)

Mashiko is seriously good. We got the omakase, and M&J said they were picking up the tab for me to celebrate me starting my job tomorrow. So, I have no idea exactly what level of omakase we got or how much it costs, but I decided to be group secretary and write it all down, so here is what we got (in order, we got one dish at a time):

1. Rockfish sashimi with ponzu sauce, shiso oil, red shanghai peppercorns, and cucumbers in the middle
2. Oysters with spicy sauce and daikon sprouts
3. Skipjack and tuna tartare, with capers and sprouts and onions I think, and a raw egg yolk
4. Nigiri sushi: albacore, opa, scallops with prosciutto, and troll caught wild alaskan king salmon, or something like that.
5. Grilled swordfish with badass plum sauce potatoes. (I was specifically told to note that they were badass)
6. Some sort of awesome roll - it had unagi, avocado, sweet potato, walnuts, and was in a soy wrapper of some sort.
7. More rolls - dynamite rolls, amaebi rolls, atomic tuna rolls, and some spicy crab roll
8. Baked fish - halibut, we think, and some sort of pink fish that wasn't salmon
9. Dessert -- Plum wine sorbet, mochi ice cream, green tea tiramisu, and creme caramel (sorta like flan)

It was craaaaaazy and everything was very good. I even was brave and ate an oyster (my first ever -- they kinda gross me out). I will have to find an excuse to go back there sometime.

Okay, well, now it's 12:30am and I should go to sleep since I want to get up at 7 or so. I hope I can get to sleep despite nerves... we'll see.

Today was a pretty good day. I got up really early to meet Megan and Heidi at the gym at 9:15am. We did leg exercises today. Because my knees are so screwed up from my years of DDR, I have a lot of trouble with some of their leg exercises, so they taught me how to do some of the curls and squats on a machine instead of with their freestanding versions, which stresses my knees less.

After the gym, we went to Cyndy's for breakfast, which was pretty good. Megan and Heidi went off plant shopping at that point, and Josh said, "well, I'm gonna go watch baseball, you're welcome to come along," so I went and watched baseball for a while. Eventually they all went outside to work on the fence and garden. I was mostly useless but I did yank a few weeds out of the ground and help measure fence stuff. When Cory and Justin showed up, I ducked out and stopped off at home for a bit.

Then I headed down to Tacoma... hung out at Jeff and Wooko's place for a while talking about Transformers (and we even watched an episode of it, because Jeff is a dork), then we went over to the movie theater, where we met up with Chris and two of his friends, and we all saw Batman Begins, which was, god forbid, a Batman movie that didn't totally suck. Well, Katie Holmes is pretty retarded in it, but most of the movie was actually good. Honest.

Afterwards we went to Mory's for dinner, and played a starting game of SPANC, this new game Wooko picked up, which is pretty silly (but like many other recent Steve Jackson Games, has a reasonably popular artist (Phil Foglio, in this case) doing the cards, so if nothing else they're funny to look at). Ro and Brien joined us at Mory's, and afterwards everyone went back to the apartment to play board games, except by that point I realized it was midnight and I should drive home. So I did. And now I am here. And going to sleep soon.

By the way, I think the Mariners have somehow activated an Infinite Improbability Drive, as they managed to actually beat the never-lost-to-the-Mariners Pedro Martinez, with Ryan Franklin pitching for us, and with Sexson ejected from the game, so our infield was Hansen - Lopez - Morse - Bloomquist. WHAT THE HECK?! I don't get it, but... wow. Just, crazy. If the improbability drive stays on, maybe Ichiro will hit four home runs tomorrow and Mike Cameron will be miraculously healed and get to play.

Arr.

Yes, I skipped the Fremont Fair... I just didn't feel like dealing with a hundred thousand people. I might go tomorrow, I might not. We'll see.

Today, it was nice out, so I walked around Greenlake. I think I'm still hitting my goal of 10 miles for the week. I only hope I can keep it up once I start working.

I battled the traffic and went down to the airport hotels, and picked up my brother Danny and a friend of his from work Aaron. They were in Yakima for the week doing some stuff for work, and were flying back out of Seattle tomorrow morning. Coincidentally, tonight was a season ticket night for me at the M's, so Danny and I had made plans to hang out and go to the game. Aaron didn't want to get stuck down by the airport, so he came into Seattle with us. He wanted to go to Uwajimaya, so we did that first for a bit, and then went down to Safeco. Oddly, despite that usually my section at Safeco is full of empty seats in front of me, there weren't any unsold seats for tonight's game. So he got a third seat a few rows above us. Now, the two seats to the right of my seats are taken by these two guys who are also season ticket holders and also had the same seats last year, but I don't know the people on the left. When they hadn't shown up by the end of the first inning, we told Aaron to move down and sit with us, and he did. Then the people on the left showed up at the start of the 4th inning. How lame!

I actually spent most of the game talking to the guys who sit in the seats to my right. It occurs to me that even though I've been sitting next to them for a season and a half, I still don't even know what their names are. But at least we can boooo-urn Boone together, much to the horror of the little kids in the section who think Bret Boone is god.

Oh, and the Mariners won, 5-0. Jamie Moyer stayed in for most of the game, but he was taken out in the 8th with two down, after he walked the bases loaded. Amazingly, Jeff Nelson came in and struck out Marlon Anderson to end the inning, and he ended up getting a save after also taking down the 9th inning scorelessly.

Dobbs was optioned to Tacoma and Jose Lopez was called up. Lopez played 3B tonight, but it's possible he may threaten Boone into not sucking at 2B, if we're lucky. The Pat Borders Fan Club reports that Borders was 2-for-3 with two doubles -- the second double would have been a triple for anyone under the age of 40, even. He scored two runs. Ichiro hit a three-run homer, two, which was pretty sweet.

As far as the Mets go -- Ishii did a pretty poor pitching job. And sadly Mike Cameron wasn't playing! They did have him come out at the beginning of the game and bring the lineup card to the plate, and he got a huge ovation from the Seattle crowds. I was also sad that Kazuo Matsui wasn't playing, because I wanted to see him, but they put him in as a defensive replacement at 2B for the 8th inning, at least. He looks so weird since he cut his hair.

Oh yeah. And let me tell you that no words have sounded more odd than "Centerfielder Willie Bloomquist", but it turned out it didn't matter -- of the pop outs to the outfield, only one went to center; eight went to left field, and two went to right field. I guess it's because so many people were hitting righty against Jamie Moyer, maybe.

(I am really looking forward to seeing a Mets-Phillies game in New York, though. And I'm pretty sure the Mets will win tomorrow. Pedro Martinez has never lost a game in Safeco Field, or against the Mariners EVER for that matter, and Ryan Franklin is pitching for the Mariners. So the only question of course is whether Pedro will get a no-hitter or not.)

My brother wants me to come visit and see a Nationals game with him. I'm thinking Labor Day weekend actually looks perfect -- they're playing the Phillies, and the Mariners aren't in town here.

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Deanna

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February 2019

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Every Day an Adventure

Entries tagged with mets

Damn you, Dontrelle Willis

Adventures in NYC, both good and bad

Mets - Phillies

Mets, Mariners, and Mashiko

gym, fences, movies, etc

Mets vs. Mariners and stuff

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February 2019