It was a sleepy midweek afternoon game at the end of August, and the home team was 15 games under .500 and 20 games out of first place. When they describe the baseball season as a “grind,” these are the games they are talking about. There were 25,284 fans listed on the official boxscore; there were maybe 15,000 actually occupying seats at Citi Field.
The ones who came, they came for various reason: A friend had hooked them up with good seats. It was a chance to play hooky from work one last time before the end of summer.