I love information. Baseball is a fount of it. One hundred and sixty times a year, for over three hours, it flows from the other world to me through the Mets. The camera focuses on a piece of trash on the outfield beneath the home run apple and Gary, Keith and Ron have the time to discuss which Looney Tunes their wives prefer. My wife’s favorite Looney Tune is Foghorn Leghorn. It seems Gary, Keith and Ron believe eating bananas will make you fat. They remind me of myself when I was a teenager. I squinted at the Jumbotron my first time at CitiField this season. The living instantiation of swag, Francisco Alvarez, 5’10”, Venezuela, catcher from hell, my husband, my beautiful husband, 22 years old, had a new tattoo, a stick and poke, red, all caps in shitty stick and poke font, across the center of his throat. What does it say, I asked Jessa, who squinted too. I grabbed her hand when I understood it said THE BEST. My heart dropped to my pussy. Starling Marte wears the Mickey Mouse chain because his five kids love Disney World. Every Met is different and every Met is beautiful. I don’t even care when they lose, which is all they did this year until June when something shifted. It was all they did when every single one of their pitchers was on the injured list. It’s so embarrassing to have this new rich daddy Steve Cohen when the things he buys, which are elite athletes, don’t make any difference. In June, a headline that went viral said the Mets turned gay and let Grimace throw out the first pitch of Pride Month and now they can’t stop winning. I was at the Pride game, at the end of that month, and the Gay Mets were as radiant to me as the Straight Mets who couldn’t stop losing. It says THE BEST I had gasped, holding Jessa’s hand. Alvarez sometimes runs the bases doing strong man arm, pulling his jersey up to reveal his bicep. There’s no reason he should have the black crosses on his cheeks. It’s decoration. I found his fiancée on Instagram. She has had the most beautiful surgeries which have resulted in a kind of perfection that drives me insane. I bring up her beautiful surgeries as beautiful information. I think surgery is beautiful and she has chosen pristine dimensions. For a day, I was crestfallen, my crest had fallen out. This is exactly like when I realized Pete Alonso not only had a wife, she was not only beautiful, but she had also, at some point, met Ke$ha. This is supposed to be about the 2024 season, but I love information which spreads far and wide and cannot be contained to a particular year. Jesse Winker was new. He showed up shortly before playoffs and was disgusting. He reminds me of the Geico caveman. He was almost as disgusting as our other disgusting player, Harrison Bader, whose walk up song is Ay Bay Bay, who we only call Ay Bay Bay. Our second baseman Jose Iglesias is the real Hannah Montana. When he’s not being a Major League Baseball player, which is one dream unlocked that almost nobody gets to achieve unless you are the best baseball player on every team you’ve been on since you were born, he’s a musician called Candelita. By the beginning of June, Mets fans knew the latest Candelita song OMG which had taken the locker room by storm, and then they started playing it for us whenever someone hit a homerun, and then they released the single on Spotify when we had only previously had access to OMG on Youtube. On Pride night, when the single would go on Spotify, and before the scheduled pregame fireworks, my friends and I wondered what was happening. The lights had gone down and these letters had appeared, dancing, on the jumbotron. OMG. And then Candelita emerged from the dugout, the opening notes of the song rang through the stadium, and we realized what was happening. In his uniform still filthy from playing a game of Major League Baseball, Iglesias took the pitchers mound, microphone in hand, and sang for us. There was not a dry eye in the stadium. The rest of the Mets, in uniform, came out for the second chorus to hype him up. I understood the girls in the archival footage from Beatlemania. I had no control over my body and my consciousness joined the one single consciousness that was being held in the stadium. It’s hard to explain. And if you weren’t there, there’s no point. The song is about remaining positive through life struggles, he explains. Something similar happened when Edwin Diaz came out of the bullpen for the first time since the injury that took him out for all of 2023. The lights went black, pixeled lightning bolts appeared on every screen, and the trumpets began to play. We stood, clapping. I myself was screaming like an animal, with no fear. I saw Ari’s friend in the row behind me, Anne. Her blue eyes were wide. Why is this happening, she mouthed. But I couldn’t stop screaming. I’d tell her later. Ari showed me on his phone that Keith Hernandez had some sort of weird affair with Julia Salazar, the local politician, and my heart raced. I loved him even more for being bad. Some of my friends were on drugs. We all lost the raffle. I ate pastrami and told Zach that I felt crazy from eating all this fatty meat. He told me I’d sleep well. Francisco Alvarez’s throat shone from the jumbotron. I can basically look at a still image of him, but I panic when I see him move, and he is always moving. Popping bubble gum is my favorite of his movements, but I can’t really look at the beauty directly. I haven’t had a crush like this since last season, when it was also on him. Like when I see him move, for instance when he spits, when he smiles, I feel uncontrollable desire coursing through my entire body. He’s 22 years old. I sort of understand men now. The season blends together because I am not a man, I don’t love baseball, I love information streaming. My dad calls to ask me specific questions about the playoffs but I have no specific answers, I tell him about THE BEST. As the season progresses, every Met becomes more beautiful so that by the end what my friend Phil and I are texting about from opposite coasts is how we can’t believe our luck, how we get to stare at these beautiful men we love. Phil loves Sean Manaea. He’s not my type. My type is El Troll which is what the children in Venezuela started calling Francisco Alvarez, because he looks like a troll. I don’t watch movies in the summer. The Mets made it to the playoffs when they never should’ve. We texted each other like I am so proud of them. I love when they are happy. My next door neighbor works security at CitiField. One day this summer I saw him cleaning paperback books on the stoop with Lysol. He put them out on the sidewalk the next day. Many were guides on how to write a novel. He stopped cleaning the books when he saw me and told me he had something for me. It was a baseball from Mets batting practice. I put it in my blue fruit bowl. I will end with a poem I wrote about and for Francisco Lindor, taken out of form and written in sentences. I was cautioned not to have an outer life more vibrant and intense than my inner one, I mean as a requisite for my job, the way I make money. I’m supposed to write the Complete Comedies. Steve Gelb from SNY asked you to talk about yourself. First you brought up your teammates. Your hit was only brilliant in the context of theirs. And pushed further toward yourself you drifted further away, almost through yourself so that you became part of the seats and the royal blue concrete behind you, the expanse of neon grass in Toronto. You were like no. Tonight I played for the people who take care of us like real jobs I mean like sanitation, fire department. It’s all written here on my 9/11 first responders glove. You said my job doesn’t matter, and smiled, and added how about Alvarez though. With the three-run homer. How about the best.