Citi Field

I bought a ticket package for the Mets this year off of a guy via Craigslist. He had purchased two 15-game "Opening Day" packages. He and a friend went to opening day, then he got engaged and moved to St. Louis. I bought the other 14 games from him for less than half price. Cool.

What this means is that we have the same seats for all of these games. What this really means is that so do the people all around us.

In 1972, when I was 10 years old, my family bought two seasons tickets to the New York Rangers. We kept these tickets for about 18 years. My relationship with the people around us was fun and unusual. Twenty-five to forty times a year (plus playoffs), we'd watch games together. They'd ask about my own hockey playing, school, college, jobs and so on. I was a kid, so I never asked back. In retrospect, I imagine I was learning what it was like to be a regular at a neighborhood bar. There was the friendly guy behind me who I imagined as someone's retired grandfather. There was the young, single, sort of awkward guy next to us who had found a regular place among this crowd. There was the couple down the row who ran a pool for a number of years -- for a dollar, you could pick a Ranger's name out of a bag, and if the player you picked scored the first goal, you won all the money. There was the guy two rows down who rooted against the Rangers, vocally, every single game. There were the two guys in front of us who, whenever someone was paged over the public address system, would shout in unison, "Your house burned down!" or some other horrible fate.

Lastly, there was my grandfather, who had his own place in this group as the cynical old-timer. He and I went to a lot of games together, and once we'd successfully arrived safely in New York (driving with my grandfather was always a white-knuckle affair) I always had a great time. When I went off to college, he would sometimes go down to games by himself. If he could find a space on the street, he'd give the ticket to a scalper he'd come to know and split the money with him. If he couldn't find a space, he'd pull over to the curb and give the scalper both tickets, and then drive home and watch the game on television. My grandfather didn't ever pay for parking.

I bought a ticket from that same scalper last March. I don't think he gave me a deal.