A Bolt From the Blue For Murph

Monday generally starts my weekend, with two days off as most everyone else runs off to their day jobs. I don't have a day job...other than this stuff, that and the other kind of writing; the one that's set to screen.

Then I work at night. 5 nights a week.

So, after catching up on sleep after a busy end to my week that is your weekend at Two Boots Hell's Kitchen, I woke up in Flatbush Brooklyn, got some work done, and ventured out to pay a bill at Best Buy at the intersection of Atlantic and Flatbush, where Walter O'Malley had wanted a ballpark and where one currently resides in the form of the ball of basket.

(Technically, it's at the intersection of Atlantic and Fort Greene Place, but you get the drift. It seems insult to injury that there's a shopping center with a round facade that, though not at all identical or modeled after Ebbets Field in any way, invokes the feeling of a former Ballpark in Brooklyn.)

As the Mets game got started, I had no headphones with me, nor did I want to buy any. So, like it was 1952 and I was walking around with my transistor radio, I hugged Prospect Park on the outside, starting at Parkside Ave, and heading up the Southwest street.

With fantastic sunset skies complementing the great houses of row, town and single family-style, that face the park, the game moved unbelievably on its way.

Prospect Park is not a perfect rectangle like its contemporary, Central Park, but perfectly fits what a city that's shaped like Brooklyn should have as its main nature-fabricating hub. In fact, the designers of both Central and Prospect, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, cared more for their Brooklyn masterpiece when it was all said and done. So, the street of Prospect Park Southwest is basically split up into two different long straight stretches that curves off somewhere in the middle. After having taken off around the beginning of the game, it must have already been the 4th inning when I turned onto Prospect Park West, which is at the top of the slope that heads to the park, otherwise known as the neighborhood of Park Slope. The game moving feverishly along, I had no idea the peak of aesthetics I was headed towards, though about a half hour or so before the peak of last night's game.

Though there had of course been some great skies already on this journey, the level that it got to by the time I got to the Flatbush/Atlantic intersection, where the Ebbets Field flagpole stands in front of Barclays, was absolutely breathtaking. I could tell there was a BBall game, since people were still scalping, but the place outside the arena was rather subdued, and I soon found out it was around the end of the first half, with Atlanta leading the new Brooklyn ballsquad. Around this same time, Dillon Gee must have had like 2 pitches through 7.

Eventually, I met up with a friend and found myself at Pork Slope, where Playoff Sports, of Hockey and Basketball type, were on, and not April Baseball in Miami. I understood. And I turned the radio off as to not be rude to my friend nor the patrons around us. Gameday it would have to be.

And the Gee ride was done. The Marlins struck first, and all I saw was, "In Play, Run(s)," words that only look good together when it's a report about your Mets team.

Luckily, Carlos Torres was able to slay the Giancarlo Beast on one pitch, and we were onto the 9th a lot sooner than any of us thought we'd arrive.

I had been actively conversing and balancing attention towards the game, and I believe I maintained it when the Live-Look-In was presented to me. Steve Cishek was the Marlin closing, someone I remember us handling in Miami once upon a time when Kelly Shoppach was on the team (he singled up the middle to give us an eventual 3-2 win back in 2012.) That one comes to mind occasionally, but it wasn't that fact that made me believe we could comeback. It's the 2015 New York Mets.

What an AB by Juan. I couldn't help it and uttered, "Yes!" out loud. Duda walked, and the Live-Look-In was done. Are you freakin' kiddin' me?! Right NOW?!

I was left to watch the gameday feed for Murphy's AB. Those words, however, that we saw earlier, entered the screen once more, this time on the proper side of things.

"In Play, Run(s)."

FANTASTIC!! I thought the game was tied.

I waited...and waited...

"Daniel Murphy homers (2) on a flyball to right field."

Alllllllriiiiiight.

I enjoyed some tater tots. What a night that ended a lot quicker than I expected.

And Brooklyn won, too.

No matter what, Brooklyn always wins.

Let's Go Knicks though...😁

And LET'S. GO. METS.