Most Precious Blood‪.‬

I went to my first ballgame when I was seven. My father and his best buddy Danny Nelson took me. It was a Mets game, of course, because my father had brought me up a Mets fan--he'd played in their farm system--and, anyhow, to be a kid in Brooklyn in the 1980s was to love the Mets. You knew there was a team that you might have loved more if they had stuck around--the Dodgers--and the Yankees were on a pretty rotten streak and there was no one, except for Mattingly and Winfield, on the team worth cheering. As a kid, we didn't know or care about "elegance in pinstripes" and the great Yankee teams of nearly every other decade. We knew what we saw, that the Yanks were busy being a bad team. The Mets, on the other hand, were scrappers, champs. There was Dykstra, Backman, Mookie--a lot of guys you could really go for. And the first game I ever saw was in the middle of their championship run, on a Monday afternoon in July of 1986. It was Rusty Staub Day and Shea was packed. Atlanta was the visiting team, and a guy named Doyle Alexander was pitching for the Braves. Ron Darling was going for the Mets. He'd cut the Braves down in order in the top of the first. I sat there, with my program and yearbook, getting ready to keep the box score, as my father and Danny drank beer and ate peanuts. I was excited as all hell because Lenny Dykstra was leading off for the Mets and Lenny D was my man. In little league I wore the number four just like him and made people call me "Nails," which was his nickname. I had a picture of him up on my bedroom wall, and I'd even tried chewing tobacco one day to get that tough look that he always had. It didn't work out so well and ! puked like a maniac and from then on I chewed gum and pretended it was tobacco. Anyhow, Lenny D was leading off and I was nervous and excited and I felt the kind of wonder that the best kind of ballgame can make you feel. "You excited, Thomas?" my father asked, his beard brushed with peanut shell shavings.