Today was the second time I had entered Wrigley Field since October 14, 2003, when some guy named Bartman made Felipe Alou go crazy in a playoff game by reaching for a foul ball. I was there for that game (and still have my ticket stub). Today’s game didn’t have quite the same drama. It essentially was over in the top of the first, when former White Sox player Todd Frazier hit a grand slam homer for the Mets.

So we spent the rest of the game observing things like the number of mound visits registered on the scoreboard and the number of players participating in them. On several occasions, the Cubs seemed to be channeling the movie Bull Durham, bringing half a dozen players to the mound to discuss wedding gifts, jammed eyelids, and cutting the head off a live rooster.

The Wrigley Field bathrooms definitely have been upgraded, or at least the one I inspected. The food still looks unappealing (I opted to bring a power bar from home instead) and the left field Jumbotron looks sort of surreal, but it helped light the field on a dismal day when the highlight of the action for the Cubs was a flock of birds taking up residence in short left field in the late innings.

Kyle Schwarber interacted more effectively with the birds, chasing them away, than he did with the Mets pitchers, striking out three times, and certainly more effectively than Tippi Hedren did in that Bodega Bay phone booth in 1963, a scene that couldn’t be shot today, because there are no phone booths, which also reminded me of the scene in the 1978 Superman: The Movie, when Clark Kent couldn’t find a suitable phone booth in which to change into his alter ego. Today, neither could Schwarber nor any of the other Cubs.