Photo of the Day: Mets Central, Gone Too Soon

Listening to the World Series this weekend, I heard one of the announcers say that in terms of sheer emotion, it could only compare with the 2001 Fall Classic—and that, of course, was, as much as anything, a primal scream, from a New York painfully wounded, for the Yankees to win just one more game, somehow, as if to blunt the still-searing pain of 9/11.

The New York Mets’ improbable push for the World Series championship this year had a different emotional dynamic, of course—the desire to attain a title not achieved since 1986. But I wanted to capture the moment, and the bold, brassy exterior of the Tonic Bar in Times Square offered that opportunity, in the form of this photo, this past Saturday.

At first, what came to mind about the ending of this series and this season was the famous essay “The Green Fields of the Mind,” by the late baseball commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti:

“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.”

But as I read on, another, less well-known—but perhaps more appropriate—thought from that same meditation summed up how I, as a Yankee fan, felt 14 years ago, and how —God bless ‘em!—hundreds of thousands of Mets fans have felt over the last 24 hours, watching two games slip away in extra innings: “how slight and fragile are the circumstances that exalt one group of human beings over another.”

See you in the spring, when the “sunshine and high skies” come alive again.

Photo of the Day: From Heroes to Zeroes

I just had to snap pictures of two action figures, representing the New York Giants and the New York Jets, this morning as I passed the Tonic Sports Bar in Times Square on my way to work. They simply seemed so symbolic of their teams’ maddening seasons.

There’s the sense of premature jubilation in the raised fingers, followed by the crushing realization that they had failed to show up against teams they should have beaten handily. There’s the shameless appeal to the hometown crowd.

And it ends, of course, with those 00s. No, they’re not the jerseys of the great Hall of Fame center Jim Otto. Nor, as the makers of these statues of Big Blue and Gang Green probably believed, are they diplomatic ways of not associating a team with a single player. Instead, the numbers have become emblematic of the teams’ slide toward absolute oblivion.

Funny, isn’t it, that, for all their differences in temperament and coaching philosophy, Tom Coughlin and Rex Ryan now stand with their teams at the same ugly pass.


Tonic features karaoke. Perhaps, before their next game, Giant and Jets fans can sing a Tom Petty song. You know the lyric: “Baby, even the losers get lucky sometimes…”