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Felix, Yankee Stadium and I

I was at the baseball game today between the Mariners and the Yankees at Yankee Stadium. Luckily, so was Felix Hernandez.

It's amazing how quiet 47,000 people can be, for an extended period of time - and how loud 60 or 70 Mariners fans dispersed among them can be. Felix absolutely owned that stadium. The place had no energy, and the crowd never had a chance to get interested, much less excited.

Even though we led by one puny run for seven or eight innings, the atmosphere inside the ballpark was that of a lackluster 9-2 laugher. It made for a very strange, almost paradoxical in-person baseball watching experience, and also an incredible one.

As the game moved on, my group of three began to notice another pocket of Mariners fans two sections over with a couple of large "KING'S COURT" signs. We ran into them afterward, high-fived, and chatted for a few minutes about Felix being awesome as masses of Yankees fans sullenly filed down the stairs on their way out.

If only for a fleeting minute, it felt as though the whole place belonged to we seven Seattlites, and everyone else had merely been visiting under the gaze of our benign mercy.

After the jump, a few of the things said by some of those Yankees fans before, during or after the game, and overheard (and enjoyed) by us.

"Shit, we suck. Our guys can't even get on base, this is bullshit." (You guys don't suck.)

"COME ON, ya BUMS!" (Classic New York.)

"Damn, Hernandez was good today. I guess they call him king or something?" (Yes, yes they do. Well done.)

"Fucking SHIT. FUCK!"

On the postgame subway: "Great, the Yanks lose to the fucking Mariners and I get a $100 fine for jumping the fare."

"Hey, Hernandez pitched a great game today, you guys hold onto him." (Incidentally, this was spoken by a gentleman in his sixties wearing a Mickey Mantle jersey who came up after the game to shake our hands. It seems like you can tell the classy, "true" Yankees fan from the casual, obnoxious one by the name on the back of the jersey.)

Anyway, I just wanted to share a few tidbits from my very first Yankee Stadium experience, and quite possibly the best one that I - that any Mariners fan - could ask for.

Felix is ours. Go Mariners!