I always hated baseball. As a left-handed little leaguer, my options were limited. First base. Outfield. Pitcher. The glamour jobs — shortstop, third base, catcher — weren’t available to me. Those positions were for Righties.

The options shrank further. A pitcher was usually the best athlete on the team, the quarterback of the diamond. And the first baseman needed a great bat. My nearsightedness was an advantage to opposing pitchers. I saw the ball alright — late. Swing and a miss. The only position available to me was right field. The place where I could do the least amount of damage.

I quit playing baseball by the time I was fourteen. And while I got interested in football, basketball and lacrosee, baseball was always out there, somehow running like an app persistently updating in the background of my mind.

My grandmother was a rabid Mets fan. My stepfather, too. At any family function the two of them would get together and talk about the ups, and mostly downs, of the team from Queens.

Invariably, my stepfather Ed would talk about Bobby Thomson’s shot heard ’round the world. He was at the Polo Grounds when Thomson hit it. As an original Brooklyn Dodger (pre-Mets) fan, my grandmother Helen was on the other side of that miracle. But no matter what, they would agree on one lament: the exodus of the Dodgers from Brooklyn and the Giants from New York was one of the darkest moments in the history of the world.

They say baseball is something a father must hand down to a son. I started with my daughter.

She was a naturally gifted player — no doubt thanks to my wife’s genes. She played for a Little League Yankees team and has been a Bronx Bomber fan ever since. She went on to play highly competitive soccer but told me one day that she loved baseball and probably should have stuck with softball.

We raised our kids in Los Angeles, so naturally we’d go to Dodger Stadium as a family. That ballpark is magic. The way the light hits and the Googie architecture makes the place feel like it’s 1964 and the world is innocent and good.

My son became a Dodger fan and a keen student of the sport itself. He has a remarkable brain, and all of the stats light up his synapses. To this day I can ask him about any team or player and he’ll have a take and the numbers to back it up.

When we moved back to New York from LA, I decided to start paying attention to the Mets again. The team was doing well that season, a few games shy of the World Series.

In my spare time I read Roger Angell — the Shakespeare of baseball. I re-read Moneyball. I read Don Delillo’s “Underworld,” which as far as I can tell was partially about the aforementioned Bobby Thomson homer.

I’m now halfway through Jim Bouton’s classic, Ball Four, which reads like Catcher in the Rye if the catcher was actually Yogi Berra.

All of this has illuminated the nuance of the game. And that’s the thing with baseball, you have to be comfortable with nuance. The surface level is sort of dull. It’s the games within the game that make it fascinating. The pitcher painting the strike zone. The batter playing psychological games to gain some leverage. The ever-present threat of the bunt making a comeback.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s obvious stuff too. When the ball is in play there are always two options: sheer athletic grace or pure chaos — a grounder through the legs, a fly ball lost in the sun, a baserunner frozen between second and third like he’s forgotten his own name.

The last decade or so, the Mets have been true to their brand: high highs and low lows. Amazin’ and atrocious in equal measure.

So here I am. It’s May. The Mets are in last place, twelve games out of first, owners of the worst record in baseball. And what am I doing on a random Tuesday night? Watching the game.

When I was in my 20s, the coolest place in New York was a bar called Coffee Shop.

It was so cool that on most nights, my friends and I couldn’t get in. But on those rare occasions the doorman granted us access, Coffee Shop didn’t disappoint. Beautiful people— a lot of models from Brazil, as I recall — cool pre-hipster hipsters, great music, and good eats.

Fast forward to Covid, and Coffee Shop shuttered and gave way to the complete opposite of cool: a Chase retail bank.

Since that Chase opened on 16th Street and Union Square, I can count on one hand the number of people I’ve actually seen inside. Make that one digit. A pinkie.

Two blocks south, more evidence of the bankpocalypse.

On the northwest corner of 14th and University, I saw a storefront with no name and just a squiggly red logo on fields of white.

Minimalist cool, almost.

It caught my attention. Mostly because its white space remained shockingly free of graffiti. But it didn’t take long to figure out the logo belonged to a bank. Santander.

Another bank coming to Union Square. Whoo-fucking-hoo.

That corner was once an impressive Reebok store. Then a Mets gear pop-up. Then a 6-week Halloween costume joint.

Now a soon-to-be cold and lonely bank.

Heading west on 14th, over by 6th Avenue, three new residential buildings have gone up and completely transformed what used to be one of the bleakest blocks on the island of Manhattan.

The first building has yet to reveal a retail tenant. The second brought the neighborhood a decent café. The third building has just announced — wait for it — another Chase retail bank.

Am I surprised? Hardly. Disappointed? 100%

In my dream world, a new diner goes in there. Something to replace Good Stuff, which closed during Covid.

Heck, there used to be a Greek diner on every other corner of this city. Try finding a place now where you can have a real conversation over an omelette and an endless cup of coffee. It’s damn near impossible.

Instead, we get more bland, corporate, irrelevant banks. And for what? When’s the last time you used cash for anything? When’s the last time you thought you’d pop in to a branch for a business loan?

But I get it. The banks use these storefronts as media. The rent on a ghost bank probably lines up neatly with what you’d spend on billboards and local TV. And the ROI doesn’t scare anyone in finance.

The other day, I was walking on 17th and Seventh. If you’ve lived here for more than a decade, you know that address as the home of the late great Barney’s. Today, the empty store looks bright yet sad. Like what we all look like when the bar lights come on and we hear the words, “last call.”

Unfortunately, I can see an ambitious executive from the business development team at Wells Fargo eying the old retail icon to create some “retail presence” in the heart of Chelsea.

Well, New York doesn’t need another bank. We need a diner. And a deli. And an arcade with Pac-Man, Space Invaders and old school Bally pinball machines. And while we’re at it, how about another Barney’s? And of course, another Coffee Shop. And I don’t even care if I’m too old and un-hip to enter, I just want to know it’s there.

I have fallen out of love with Gramercy Park.

It represents, in miniature, everything that is wrong with us as a country right now. It is exclusionary by design. A two-acre monument to the K-shaped economy. A place where the iron gate is not incidental to the experience but is the experience. And, to add insult to injury, it is not even a particularly good park.

I once slipped my way inside. It was strange. Hardly peaceful, more like sequestered. Like being in the lushest prison yard. Or the animal side of a zoo.

When I walked back out onto the street, I could feel the eyes of my fellow New Yorkers. Their expressions landed somewhere between dismay and disgust.

I understood both.

I used to love this place. I found it romantic. An oasis of composure in a city that offers so little of it. And the key that unlocks your entry, that wrought-iron key, only 383 exist. How charmingly anachronistic. So Edith Wharton. So aspirational. I thought: someday, I will obtain one of those keys and earn my way into a park that keeps the riff-raff out. I was young. I was an idiot.

The history is exactly as gilded as you’d expect. Gramercy Park takes its name from the Dutch for “little crooked swamp,” which is precisely what one real estate developer named Samuel Ruggles purchased in 1831. He drained the swamp and reengineered it into sixty-six private home lots surrounding a two-acre park reserved exclusively for their owners. Each lot came with one, magic iron key. It’s a model that survives, essentially unchanged, to this day, making it one of the last private parks in New York City.

What began as a swamp became a stage set for old-money civility, complete with manicured hedgerows and a statue of Edwin Booth. If the name rings a bell, it’s the Booth part. He was the brother of John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln. Booth’s DNA alone should be grounds to open up this precious little patch of dirt. A reparation from the Booth family for the sin of their nefarious son.

I walk around Gramercy Park most evenings in an attempt to achieve my daily, influencer-recommended 10,000 steps. This allows me to observe. I see tourists approach with that particular wide-eyed hopefulness only New York can produce, only to retreat, baffled, from the locked gate.

I see dog owners arrive at the entrance with the hopeful body language of someone in search of a loophole, only to be foiled at the gate. You do not know disappointment until you have seen it register on the face of a Beagle.

And I see the homeless and the fentanyl-filled settle onto the park’s perimeter ledge, unbothered, occupying the one part of it that belongs to everyone.

There are better parks within walking distance. Washington Square. Union Square. Madison Square. These are parks that earn their place in the city by being, at minimum, in the city and open to all.

And then there is Central Park, that improbable democratic miracle just thirty blocks north, which makes Gramercy’s pretensions seem not just unjust but ridiculous.

Open Gramercy Park now.

Unlock the gates, remove the gatekeepers, let the Beagles in!

Failing that, key holders should face a tax so punishing it functions as a kind of civic penance. A payment for the ongoing insult of the thing.

Until then: fuck you, Gramercy Park. See you on my walk this evening.