Whenever baseball begins again, and pitches hope to us, there will be no roll call from the Bleacher Creatures at Yankee Stadium, and the 7 Line Army will not be wildly cheering a Pete Alonso moonshot or willing Jacob deGrom to a Cy Young masterpiece.
Whenever they play and wherever they play, they will play without fans in the stands, held hostage to this cruel, heartless pandemic and singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” in the solitude of their living rooms for no one knows how long.
“I’ll say this til the day I die — I don’t care how bad of a day you have. If you can stand on a bench, and scream your face off for five minutes — you will feel better. Guaranteed,” says Vinny Milano, aka Bald Vinny, a former Bleacher Creature fixture and custom-printed sports apparel company entrepreneur currently making Yankees masks.
Section 203 will be empty at the Stadium. The Big Apple Reserved section will be empty at Citi Field. Darren Meenan started the 7 Line in 2012. This is what he says today to Mets fans:
“Everybody’s kinda rolling with the punches, doing what they can to stay safe. Everything gets so political, so people think one way or the other. Sports is supposed to be a release, an escape from all that stuff, from the everyday struggles of your job, or your family or your kids or your wife or whatever you deal with on a day-to-day basis.
“Although it’s not ideal and you much prefer to be at the ballpark and so would I, this is better than nothing, and I’m really looking forward to it. I hope they are, too.”
Bald Vinny, who hails from Bellmore, L.I., was 8 or 9 when he was taken to his first Yankees game by his Uncle Vinny. His favorite player growing up was Don Mattingly, and later it was Bernie Williams.
“Everybody is looking for some sort of distractions,” Bald Vinny said. “It’s been tough to be home and locked up and no live sports. Everybody is willing to make a concession as long as everybody can stay safe, but I think everybody’s dying for something to watch.”
Meenan grew up a Mets fan in Douglaston before moving to Medford, L.I. His favorite player growing up was Darryl Strawberry. His grandfather ran the press gate at Shea Stadium.
“So I was going to games before I could even walk or talk or know what baseball was,” Meenan said. “Being a Mets fan just was ingrained in me from birth.”
Bald Vinny led his first roll call in 1999.
“The whole roll call thing started with Bernie,” he said. “When we were in right field in the old Stadium, we had a good rapport with Bernie and Paul O’Neill.”
Meenan launched the7line.com in 2010, began group outings in 2012 and secured a licensing agreement with MLB and New Era Caps for his T-shirts, hats, outerwear and accessories in 2014. The 7 Line Army now has up to 20 group outings a year.
“The Bleacher Creatures, they’re well-known for many years, but they don’t leave The Bronx,” Meenan said. “When we go on the road, we’re going with thousands of people. For instance, in L.A., we were gonna have 2,000 people go to the game at Dodger Stadium on Aug. 8 — they’re not all New Yorkers. A lot of our road trips have upwards of two, three dozen states represented. So we’ll go to Kansas City, for instance, last summer, and I think it was 23 states were represented in Kansas City.
“Some people have gotten married because of the group, some people have become roommates … it’s more than just baseball for us.”
There are 600-plus season-ticket members today.
“We even have some people who fly back just to not miss our games, from Florida, from Chicago,” Meenan said. “It’s crazy.”
Bald Vinny has not been back at the Stadium since midway through Alex Rodriguez’s last season in 2016, in part because he was not licensed for his tees by the MLBPA.
“My small business was being threatened by some of the bigger players in the game, and it made me evaluate whether or not my time up there was worth it for the reward,” he said.
But COVID-19 has gotten Bald Vinny to reflect wistfully about some of his old Bleacher Creature friends and a possible return to the Stadium.
“The climate of life is different now,” he says. “Some of this online Zoom stuff has made me very nostalgic for things of the past and some of the people I haven’t seen, or hung out with in a very long time, so I would not rule anything out. I never say never for the future.”
The natives are restless. Meenan, who stays connected to the 7 Line Army via Zoom and the Houseparty app, excitedly mentions pop-up drive-ins playing old movies in Suffolk County.
“My plan for the group, at least locally, if we can figure out a way to do it safely and legally, is to start planning drive-in watch parties once this starts up again,” Meenan said. “Granted, we’ll have to be separated from the distance of our cars, but if we could figure out a way to do it where there could be bathrooms there, or so on and so forth, I’d love to be able to plan at least once a week or so for us to meet up and throw up a big projector and some speakers and everyone kinda just either sits on the roof of their car or whatever, and watch a baseball game together.”
The sounds of silence will be deafening for the players. They should at least know that their fans will be there in spirit. For now, that will have to be enough for all of them.