The Boys Go See the Man

When you get a ticket plan, the tickets from later in the schedule seem like the stuff of science fiction: Amid the chill of February, who can imagine June 25, 2009? For all we knew back then, we might spend the evening mourning Michael Jackson, waiting for the latest news out of Iran and making merciless fun of the governor of South Carolina. This was a day game on Emily's plan with her dad -- a pair of tickets that threatened to go orphaned. Joshua's out of school and not yet in camp. I have some vacation time unallocated. Really, the answer was obvious: a father-and-son outing to Citi Field, with the added bonus that for today at least, summer actually came to New York City. Last time Joshua and I did this, Willie Harris wound up robbing Carlos Delgado and my son gave me a lesson in innocence and resilience that I vaguely begrudged at the time but soon came to cherish. Unsurprisingly, he's grown considerably as a baseball fan: Nowadays we banter about why battin...