About a year ago, I wrote a post here on UmpBump to express my utter dismay at how my Mets had begun playing Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” during the 8th inning at Shea. For one, I never, ever want to copy the Boston Red Sox (aside from that whole “winning championships” thing. That would be kind of cool). Secondly, it’s an incredibly annoying song that’s exacerbated by the choreographed movements (it ain’t dancing, people) of the audience.

On the other hand, I love the practice of Rickrolling. For those who are still unfamiliar with this wonderful phenomenon, it’s essentially a prank involving cultural icon Rick Astley’s song “Never Gonna Give You Up”, a tune that just gets sexier by the day. In fact, I currently have it as the #3 sexiest song of all time, preceded only by Corey Hart’s “Sunglasses at Night” and Billy Ocean’s “Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car”.

So you can imagine how elated I was when I learned a few days ago that the people over at Fark.com were going to Rickroll the New York Mets, who was conducting an online poll as to what song the fans wanted to hear this year during the 8th inning.

Replace Neil Diamond with Rick Astley? It’s too good to be true!!!It’s like Black Sabbath replacing Tony Martin with Ronny James Dio!

Well, the votes were tabulated and the results were announced yesterday. And it was too good to be true, like Tony Martin coming back to replace Ronny James Dio (I’ll stop this horrible analogy now).  Despite “Never Gonna Give You Up” winning the online voting with over 5 million votes, the Mets have changed the rules of the game. Instead of giving me a song that will make me giggle uncontrollably every time I’m at Shea this year, they’ve decided to have a run-off. Why? Because the majority of the votes didn’t come from Mets fans, but rather, from people with an actual sense of humor. As MetsBlog.com explains:

Instead of declaring Astley the winner, the team will hold a live, run-off vote.

Tomorrow, during the eighth inning, they’ll play Never Gonna Give You Up, followed by Living on a Prayer on Wednesday, I’m a Believer on Thursday, Movin’ Out on Friday, Sweet Caroline on Saturday and Build Me Up Buttercup on Sunday.

What? Those are my choices? If I don’t get Rick, I’m left with 1) a Bon Jovi song that’s overplayed and abused at karaoke bars across the world, 2) a song that was written by Neil Diamond and performed by a fake television band that initially didn’t even sing or play their own music, 3) a Billy Joel song that’s actually about how pathetically pretentious it is for people to try and pass their lifestyles off as being better than it actually is, 4) the song that I wanted to be replaced from the get-go, and 5) a song that was forever ruined by Ben Stiller.

And you want to know what the kicker is? I’m going to be at Shea this Saturday where I will have to listen to, you guessed it, “Sweet Caroline”.

I think Neil Diamond’s ghost is haunting me. What? He’s not dead? Huh. Fooled me.

I hate writing this on the heels of Coley’s recent post about the fan-friendly seating at Turner Field.

Thanks to my brother’s generosity, I’ve been going to Shea Stadium this year on the Saturday Ticket Plan, where the purchase entitles you to keep the same seat all season for every Saturday home game. It’s a pretty fair deal considering that if each game were to be purchased individually, the prices continually vary based upon who they’re playing.

Due to this relatively frequent sojourn to Flushing, Queens, I’ve been able to see the progress of the construction for Citi Field, which will be the new home of the Mets starting the 2009 season. As I come out of the Willets Point subway stop on the Number 7 line each time, the new stadium’s infrastructure is the first thing I see, since it stands literally right next to Shea beyond the centerfield wall. It’s a pretty exciting thing for us fans, seeing as even our home-team biases can’t quite disguise our feelings for the lackluster facilities of Shea (it’s our piece of crap, but a piece of crap nonetheless).

But along with this excitement also comes a dose of reality. We Mets fans know the deal. Citi Field will have 42,000 seats, which is basically 3/4 of the current capacity at Shea of 55,000. With the team’s success over the past couple of seasons come the bandwagon jumpers armed with more dispensable income than I or millions of other New Yorkers could ever have. Do the math.

Newsday’s Wallace Matthews tackles this very issue in his latest article. He talks to an elderly fan named Henry Goldman, who along with his wife have attended games at Shea for decades and they currently enjoy a similar ticket plan as I do. Problem is, the Mets are yet to assure the fans that affordable ticket plans such as these will even be available at Citi Field.

Matthews writes:

Henry Goldman’s fear stems from the stated policy of the Mets ticket agents stationed throughout Shea Stadium that the partial season ticket plan he and his wife have enjoyed for a quarter-century will no longer be available at Citi Field. “Being senior citizens, we can’t afford to go to every game,” he said. “Weekends are our time to go. If we can’t get that plan anymore, we’re finished. We won’t be able to go.”

What it basically comes down to is that as of this writing, the Mets have not announced their intention to create ticket plans aside from full season tickets. It’s either buy a seat for the full season or fight for individual tickets, which will no doubt affect the ability of many fans to see the Mets in person.

I know that it seems like I and people like Goldman are dramatizing the issue. But do consider the fact that so far in 2007, the Mets have averaged over 44,000 fans per game, which is already 2,000 more people than Citi Field will accommodate. When the new stadium opens, the interest generated by the novelty will create a tougher competition for the tickets themselves. The Mets can hike up the price of tickets quite a bit before they will find a lack of interested parties. As if that were not enough, NY State legislature has made scalping legal, which will no doubt exacerbate the issue.

I am not so naive as to make this out to be armageddon, or to paint devil horns on owner Fred Wilpon’s picture whenever I see it. I understand that this is a business and that in this multimedia age, there are many options out there where I can continue to follow my team even if I may not be able to attend the games as often as I would like. The Mets have a business plan to increase revenue, which I’d like to think will improve the quality of players on the field.

It’s just a far cry from the baseball I loved as a Little Leaguer, I suppose.

OK. I get it. Sometime between my junior high dances and 2006, Ottawan’s classically asinine “Hands Up” has been replaced by Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” as the song most likely to make people with no rhythm jump up and “dance”. Personally, I blame Jason Biggs, Steve Zahn and Jack Black. Equally to blame are the marketing geniuses over at Fenway Park, who made “Caroline” a staple in their in-between innings entertainment. Up until last year, I was fine with this. As long as this idiosyncratic ritual was a Fung-Wah bus trip away from me, it did me very little harm.

Then it happened. It was an invasion of epical proportions on my sensibilities. Shea Stadium hopped on the bandwagon. I cannot pinpoint exactly the date and time this started, except that I noticed it this past October. And it was there again this past Saturday when I made my first of many pilgrimages to wonderful Flushing, Queens (has a great ring to it, don’t you think?) in 2007. The worst part of it was that I’d say nearly half the stadium was into it. Doing the whole “Look, ma! I can open my palms every time Neil says Sweet Caroline!” thing, along with the ironically awful “SO GOOD!” chant.

Now I have never been a fan of stadium music to begin with, especially since Gary Glitter was charged of abusing children in Vietnam thus making me feel queasy every time I hear “Rock and Roll (Part Two)” for all of eternity. There is just far too much Good Charlotte in this world. And “Sweet Caroline” is probably better than Yankee Stadium’s penchant for “YMCA” as performed by their grounds crew. But this is almost at that level.

So to the good people at Shea Stadium, I implore you. Leave Neil Diamond to Boston. They can have him. I do not want any song that has been covered by Guster (this is true) playing at a Mets game. To top it off, Neil Diamond himself admitted that he wrote “Sweet Caroline” right after he ran over a child with a car and left her for dead.

Or was that Will Ferrell? I don’t know.