Mendoza!

I am not going to be able to see the Dodgers when they come to Citi Field this summer.  But I wanted to make sure I got to a game at Citi Field and a baseball game seemed like a good way to start summer vacation.  The plan was to go to Cubs-Mets on June 22.  That was the first day I was going to be off because of summer vacation.  My last day of school was June 18, but I would have been off the next three days even if it wasn’t summer vacation because it would have been Juneteenth, Saturday, and Sunday.  So my dad and I were planning to go on Monday, June 22, but that game got rained out (I never bought tickets because the forecast looked pretty bad for a while).  The next two nights were the NBA Draft (which should be one night, not two) so we went on Thursday, June 25.  It ended up being Carlos Mendoza’s last game as the manager of the Mets.

This was our view for the game.

This was my 34th game at Citi Field in the 18 years that it has existed.  The only stadium I’ve been to more was Shea Stadium.  I don’t know the exact number of games I went to at Shea Stadium, but I went to games there over the course of 20 years and I would guess it was an average of about 2.5 games per year so I would guess I went to around 50 games there.  Of the 34 games I’ve been to at Citi Field, 22 have been against the Dodgers.  This time I was a neutral fan.  I would have been inclined to root for the Cubs because the Mets were wearing their stupid black uniforms, but there were other factors to consider.  The Cubs are managed by former Notre Dame baseball player Craig Counsell.  But Craig Counsell also complained about the Dodgers being able to count Shohei Ohtani as a position player.  He brought this up for no reason one time (it wasn’t when the Cubs were playing the Dodgers), but also his complaint is stupid.  If your roster is limited to 13 pitchers and you have a player that both pitches and hits, you should be able to count him as whatever you want to count him as on your roster.  The Cubs do have some former Dodgers.  They have Michael Conforto (perhaps the Dodger who contributed the least to last season’s championship), Justin Dean, and Michael Busch.  As much as I wanted to root for Justin Dean (he played in 13 playoff games in the playoffs last year with zero plate appearances, but the Dodgers went 12-1 in those games, including Games 2, 6, and 7 of the World Series), I couldn’t root for the Cubs.  Why?  Because although they have some guys I want to root for, they also have cheater Alex Bregman on their team.

Baseball is harder when you’re not cheating.

This was the final game of a four-game series against the Cubs.  The Mets had lost the first three.  It was Freddy Peralta for the Mets against Matthew Boyd for the Cubs.  Boyd pitched four and two-thirds scoreless and was taken out after 76 pitches because the way pitchers are used in 2026 is stupid.  Peralta pitched five scoreless and then came out with two outs in the sixth after giving up three unearned runs.  Michael Conforto drove in the first run on a single, cheater Alex Bregman drove in a run on a double, and then Ian Happ had an RBI single.  The Mets responded well, tying the game on home runs by Eric Wagaman and Jared Young in the sixth and seventh.  And then a perfectly good game was ruined by Rob Manfred extra innings.  Pete Crow-Armstrong drove in a runner who was on second base for no reason with an RBI double in the top of the tenth.  The Mets went down 1-2-3 in the bottom of the tenth and lost 4-3.  So the Mets allowed four runs and none of them were earned.  The first three were unearned because of a throwing error by shortstop Ronny Mauricio.  The last one was unearned because Rob Manfred put a runner on second base for no reason.  The night before, the Mets made six errors and gave up five unearned runs (and also five earned runs) and lost 10-5.  After the series against the Cubs Carlos Mendoza was fired.

Besides being subjected to Rob Manfred extra innings, it was good to be at a Major League Baseball game for the first time since I was in Minnesota ten months earlier.  Attendance was 36,035.  The game lasted three hours and 13 minutes and it was 76°.

I’ll finish with my thoughts on the World Cup.  I don’t have many thoughts because soccer is stupid.  I thought the thing I would enjoy most about the World Cup would be not watching it.  And indeed, I have enjoyed not watching it.  But the best thing about the World Cup has been seeing all these foreigners visiting the United States for the World Cup and realizing that the United States is pretty awesome.  I have many issues with soccer, but I’ll just mention two right now.  Why do soccer broadcasters use improper grammar?  They’ll say stuff like “Belgium have played well in the World Cup.”  Belgium is a singular noun.  If you said, “The Belgians have played well in the World Cup,” that would be grammatically correct because the subject of that sentence is a plural noun.  And why is the United States always referred to as USMNT?  I know it stands for United States Men’s National Team.  Why can’t we just call them USA Soccer?  Whenever I see USMNT, I just think United States Mutant Ninja Turtles.  So those are all my soccer thoughts for now.  I hope the United States wins to embarrass countries that care about soccer, but I’m not going to be watching because as a patriotic American, I definitely don’t care about soccer.