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October 17, 2006
The Mets are not afraid of you and will beat your ass!
[Franklin Stucco in Franklin Square, NY is overtaken by the orange and blue. Click for large image.]
Octoberitis strikes the Merry Swankster
Is there anything better than playoff baseball when your team is in the thick of it? My beloved Mets face the Cardinals tonight in a pivotal game 5 placing the winner one game away from a Fall Classic date with the Tigers.
Last week I mentioned the slower stream of posts was the result of extra attention being placed on finishing the 3Q Podcast. While technically true, I should mention that trips to LA for game 3 of the NLDS and an escape to Shea for the first two games of the NLCS also played a large role in sucking my attention from the rawkness. You can never take this stuff for granted, so for better or worse my lifetime loyalty to the Metropolitans is taking center stage. Everything else falling by the wayside. The dog is starving, the laundry is piling up and I'm pretty sure I'll be fired from my job if the Mets advance to the World Series.
I don't want to taint this this medium for partisan purposes, as I have no intention of alienating our strong St. Louis base (Merry Swankster carried Missouri in the 2002 election -ed). So I'll bring it all back to MS relevance using Yo La Tengo, whose band name invokes the ancient 1962 Met team and their language barriers:
[Yo La Tengo's] name comes from a baseball anecdote. During the 1962 season, Richie Ashburn, the center fielder of the New York Mets, was collliding again and again with Venezuelan shortstop Elio Chacón. When Ashburn went for a catch, he would scream, "I got it! I got it!" only to run into Chacón, who spoke only Spanish. Ashburn learned to yell, "Yo la tengo! Yo la tengo!" which is "I've got it" in Spanish. (via Wikipedia)
See also: The Young Manhattanite blog has a rundown of Mets theme songs.
Tags:Mets, NLCS, Yo La Tengo
Posted by Merry Swankster at October 17, 2006 02:00 PM
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Comments
The way I heard the anecdote, the pay off is that after Ashburn yells "Yo la tengo", Chacon stops and Ashburn sets himself to catch the fly...and gets creamed by his fellow outfielder, Frank Thomas, who didn't understand Spanish.
Posted by: mikeski at October 17, 2006 03:17 PM
