Jews and Baseball

Orange and blue had a more cheerful meaning for us yesterday at Jewish Heritage Day in Shea Stadium.

An annual ritual, you can feel the heat, drench in the humidity, stuff up with glatt Hot Dogs, and shmooze with Jews of New York...it's just so spectacular, and who cares that the Mets always (almost always) lose on this special day(someone somewhere must be saying"blame the Jews").

History was made when a rookie, on his first major league at bat hit a three run homerun. Curiously, his name was Mike Jacobs. Could he be...JEWISH? No one knew, but I decided that he had to be Jewish just because, well, it felt right.

It starts with a concert of some sort. This year it was older folks singing American Songs in Yiddish, a little old even for me, a fortysomething boomer. But they blew shofars and posted each players name phonetically in Hebrew Characters. Only in New York...ah NY rocks!

Being a Mets fan is a great Jewish tradition of New Yorkers, most of whom originated in Brooklyn as Dodgers fans. When the Dodgers (traitors) moved to LA, a great void was left in the hearts of many. Yet the early 60's brought about a new hope, a new team for the new generation. The Long Island offspring, such as myself, were never able to even dream of rooting for the Yankees.

Alas, I was so zealous about giving my children a Jewish education, that I overlooked teaching them about this baseball heritage and I actually have TWO Yankee fans in my family. But lets not talk about that heartbreak, but focus on the positive quirkiness of the day.

A gentleman seated opposite the aisle from me, inquired as to where to find the Kosher Food stand. This guy was wearing a brown felt hat, dressy but dorky brown plaid shirt, formal brown pants and large lens type eyeglasses. Yet he was younger than I, extremely soft-spoken and polite. I suspected he had time traveled from another galaxy, which was why he didn't know that on Jewish Heritage Day, there is a Kosher food stand on every level of the park. He mumbled something about a wife, although the seat next to him was empty at the time, and since he looked on the religious side, I sort of formed a picture of what his wife would look like...kind of short, frumpy-frum, I thought. Yet when she showed up, she was thin, average height, not bad looking and who appeared very un-frum and new millennium like in her spaghetti strap tank with capri pants and slides. So much for trying to figure out our fellow Jews...I love to people watch and try to guess what lies behind the facade. My guess is they are newly married, that he's a baal-teshuva and she's not...uh yet...

My oldest son went to the bathroom and since he's 19 I usually don't get much involved in those details anymore. However, he returned with a story of a man in the men's room who vomited and collapsed right in front of him! His fellow potty mates just walked right over the guy and proceeded to the urinals to do their thing and completely ignored the fallen one! My son ran out, and found a door that looked like a place where employees would be. Sure enough that's where the(non-kosher) hotdog making people work, and as luck would have it there was already a paramedic back there attending to an employee who got hit in the head. Whew, so all turned out well in Shea stadium as the sick man was promptly carried out in a stretcher.

This still led to a complaint from my son about how lax the security is at Shea, whereas at Yankee Stadium there are so many more police all over the place. Yeah 'cos Yankee fans need more police, I say...