Some love for my Mets’ fans out there …

I’m a baseball fan. I love watching baseball. So on Friday night, after a night out with my wife thanks to a really cool babysitter (side note: I think she reads this blog occasionally?), one of the first things I did was to turn on the New York Yankee game. Nothing unusual there.

They were playing the Tigers in Detroit, and they were leading. Kind of a ho-hum thing. During a commercial break, I did what I often do. I flipped the channel to the other baseball game and the other team in town, the New York Mets. I’ve stated this before: I like the Mets. I root for the Mets – especially their very cool wordsmith/knuckleballer R.A. Dickey – at all times except when they face the Yankees. And even then, there is no dislike.

So imagine my surprise, my utter shock, at the fact that Johan Santana had a no-hitter going through 7 innings. Now, Santana is a wonderful pitcher capable of tossing a no-no at any time. But the Mets have never had a no-hitter in their history – which is longer than I have been alive (and I’m not that young)! For those keeping score at home, that would be more than 8,000 baseball games. It is a stunning baseball anomaly, one of the reasons I love the game.

And so the Yankee game took a backseat to the Mets game. I sat riveted to the TV, watching as Santana’s pitch count climbed and everybody worried about his surgically repaired shoulder. What would they do? They had to keep him in there: 134 pitches and a lot of drama later, he closed the deal and pitched the first no-hitter in Mets’ history. Which was very cool.

What was even more cool was his classy reaction to the feat. Unlike a lot of modern athletes, Santana got it. He got the history of it. He got how much this meant to Mets fans young and old. And he went out of his way to credit his teammates, all of his teammates. Very classy.