Escape Pod · Escape Artists Foundation

Escape Pod 1038: Meet the Mets

March 26, 2026·44 min·4 clips

In the Shea Stadium bathroom, Bobby sees Mr. Met's costume head off, revealing a tentacled alien with one giant eye.

Bobby knows fear too well. He has been scared of the body and role forced onto him, scared of his mother's punishment, and scared that staying quiet might kill him. Now he is cuffed behind a chair, listening to another inning pass overhead and trying to read the locked room for a way out. The alien image will not leave him alone. Its eye, tentacles, and red baseball stitches keep pulling him between the danger in front of him and old summer afternoons on the sidewalk. Baseball hurts here. His father gave him the simple joy of catching, throwing, and following the announcers on the radio. That gift does not wipe away the rest. Bobby cannot make sense of a dad who could love the game and still refuse to love his son. Then escape starts almost stupidly. Lost in panic and memory, Bobby realizes he has stood up, slipping free from the chair without meaning to. It is dryly funny, and then it hits harder: survival sometimes arrives through the obvious thing panic hid from view. The story stays close to the room. Brief violence and bigotry sit next to step-by-step problem solving, family memory, and the unsettling horror of a body stitched together. The episode frame introduces Ace Tilton Ratcliffe as a genderqueer disabled metalsmith, multidisciplinary artist, photographer, writer, and death care consultant. The ending turns quiet, with a Carlton Fisk quote about overcoming, not achieving, echoing Bobby's move from terror into action.

As heard by us

A tense survival story where baseball memory and identity do the fighting.

Meet the Mets turns baseball memory into a tight, uneasy chamber piece, with Bobby's fear doing most of the work. A trapped body, an alien presence, and a trans life all press in at once, but the episode hits hardest when it stays with the smaller things that still hold him…

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Why you'd press play

Press play for a baseball-haunted survival story with queer nerve, memory, and bodily dread.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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