Get Your 1977 Mets Clipboard

The search for material to write about this week has led me to this New York Times piece from a few days ago, titled “A Drab and Cherished Relic of Shea.” No, it’s not about the home run apple in center field. It’s about a clipboard, given away to spectators at a game in 1977.

Yes, you may wonder, as I did, why you are reading an article about a clipboard.

But it’s a nice piece about being a fan.

Made me think about the Mets-related nonsense in my old bedroom closet in my mom’s house, collecting dust. Old yearbooks and programs, an inflatable bat, a bunch of hats and t-shirts, a few bobblehead dolls, some baseball card sets, towels and canvas bags…. I used to love when the schedule came out every spring and we’d think about which tickets to get, which 6 or 7 games we’d go see, chosen in large part because of the promotional giveaways.

And then you get older and… I don’t want a bobblehead doll. I don’t want a bat or a foam finger. I have a hockey puck on my bookshelf that I got at an Islanders game a couple of decades ago and I keep it only because three laptops ago, it was very good at propping up the back so that air could circulate underneath and the thing wouldn’t shut off whenever it got too warm. I come from a family that never threw things away and now I end up wanting to throw everything away, because stuff just becomes something you have to clean and store and move, and everything you actually need is available streaming on the Internet.

The point of this piece is… unclear, even to me, but I did want to point you to the fine New York Times article. The clipboard in the picture looks really dirty.