New York Mets

The New York Mets enter the diary through two sharply different glimpses of baseball life in New York: a Yankees banquet where the Mets’ ownership becomes a social anecdote, and an evening at Shea Stadium recorded through the score as well as the outing around it. Together, these brief appearances place the club within the city’s overlapping sports and social worlds, while showing how the diary preserves incidental detail alongside the event itself.

The Mets in New York’s Baseball Social World

At a banquet for the Yankees, attended with Richard Weisman, the team was marched in and guests sought Reggie Jackson’s autograph. The evening’s Mets connection came through Averil Meyer, whose grandmother, Mrs. Payson, owned the club. Averil repeatedly told people that she owned the Mets; when her note to Yogi Berra, a former Mets player, was not passed along, she got up and retrieved it herself. The account makes the club present at a Yankees gathering through family ownership and a remembered player, rather than through the Mets’ participation in the event.

The same banquet account also records Howard Cosell introducing Andy Warhol as a Pop artist. That introduction belongs to the social scene around baseball and art, while the Mets detail arrives in Averil’s animated claim and her effort to deliver a personal note to Berra. The diary thus records the club as part of the conversation and connections surrounding a major-league gathering, not simply as a team on the field.

An Evening at Shea Stadium

On April 26, 1978, Warhol closed the office early and went with Fred Hughes and Averil to a Mets game at Shea Stadium. Averil drove her mother’s mini-Cadillac; the group had also to contend with the cold, and Hughes had given Warhol a winter coat that he needed. The practical details—the early departure, ride, and coat—make the game part of an ordinary evening’s movements rather than an isolated sports report.

The score remained 0–0 when they left at the end of the eighth inning. On the drive in, the radio had also reported a scoreless game, so the entry preserves the unchanged score across the outing. The diary does not record the final result or describe the play; its precise endpoint is the group’s departure with the game still tied.

The Club as a Diary Subject

These Mets references survive in a diary assembled from Warhol’s accounts of his daily activities. Beginning in 1976, weekday morning phone conversations with Pat Hackett supplied the record; what had started as a log of visitors, events, and expenses became Warhol’s own account of his life. The entries could include both social encounters and the small particulars of a day, making a family claim at a banquet and a score heard on the radio equally recordable details.

The diary’s accounting purpose also shaped its attention to circumstance. Warhol reported cash expenses, down to small telephone charges, and Hackett attached corresponding taxi and restaurant receipts to the typed pages. Within this method, the Mets appear not in a sustained account of the organization but in two situated records: a story about ownership and baseball connections at a banquet, and a score, stadium, companions, and departure time at a game.