notes from the upper deck

o It feels kind of, er, un-American to sing “God Bless America” during the 7th Inning Stretch. It feels hypocritical that it is only done on Sundays. I’ll stand for “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” though.

o Mama’s of Corona is easily the best food I’ve found at Shea. It is buried on the field level, accessible to Upper Deck groundlings, via a back hallway at gate B3 (though this article says there’s one in the mezzanine, too.) (Thx, Gary.)

o Much more on Michael Lewis’s Moneyball as it sinks in. An odd side effect of the Bill James/Billy Beane school of general managership: though it rewards deep, impersonal stats, on the playing field itself, it often emphasizes classically idiosyncratic baseball characters, such as Chad Bradford, the sidewinding Alabama Baptist, or Scott Hatteberg, the pitch-count-racking catcher-turned-first-basemen. (I’m only four years late to the party on this one.)

o During the last homestand, Shea’s grass was cut in criss-crossed diamond patterns. This time out, it radiates outwards from homeplate like sunbeams, growing wider and bolder as they reach the outfield, each a miniature replication of a baseball field’s implied infiniteness.