It’s been said that if one comes at an endeavor with a positive outlook, it makes whatever you’re up to that much easier. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, right? Not that playing a baseball game is a drudgery or anything, but there is a school of thought out there – famously [...]
When you watch baseball – or, really, do anything in life – for a long time, you can kind of get a feel for how things will likely play out. Experience and repeated observation can give a person a sense of what the scientific statisticians like to call probability and outcome. If an experiment is [...]
You may have heard about a football game coming up tomorrow, some minor affair involving teams from Kansas City and San Francisco. Besides the promised sideshow of the current hottest pop star on the planet cheering on her boyfriend and the attendant political theatre that has come along with it, this other-sport replay of the [...]
“That’s why they brought him [David Stearns] here, I’m telling you. [Steve] Cohen lost so much money and has to pay $100 million in luxury tax, and this guy is here to run the team like the Brewers.” – WFAN (NY) Radio host and self-proclaimed huge Mets fan Joe Benigno on the air. A large [...]
Your intrepid columnist is reading a wildly entertaining book at the moment, with the unlikely title So Many Ways to Lose. It’s a perverse history of the New York Mets, as told by a diehard fan, Devin Gordon, a contributor to the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, and ESPN the Magazine, among others. Mr. [...]
It’s an exciting time in and around MLB these days. The postseason tournament has begun and had that wonderful playoff combination you get when you have slightly less than half the League’s teams qualifying: some games taught and intense, some laughably one-sided. The first playoff round was the latter, with each of the four series [...]
The time has finally arrived. The ideal candidate, the object of the savvy Mets fan’s affection will be free to reciprocate in a matter of three weeks. Heck, he’s already free to negotiate with whoever he wants right now. David Stearns will finally have his Suds City chains broken and he will, if he so [...]
Five years. The guy said five years. Five years to a World Series championship. Well, we’re now in year three and the distance between where this team is and a World Series championship is about as far as between now and 1986. Steve Cohen is – purportedly: some opinions differ – a lifelong Mets fan. [...]
It took a bit of convincing. The early evidence flew in the face of what we’d all heard. A lot of us – myself included, of course, or I wouldn’t mention it – fell into the trap of thinking that how it is in the moment is how it will be forever. Patience is a [...]
I seem to start every piece I present here with the reminder to our readership – and myself – that we are fans. Fans who are not privy to the inner workings of the team we love. Fans who are not in the clubhouse every day to witness the interpersonal byplay of the players we [...]
Yesterday, my friend, the proprietor of this space, Brian Joura posted a reminder that yes, it’s still early. I, myself, had forgotten this little fact, even though I’d written something similar only a month ago. Amid the drudgery of this early season, when a team with World Series aspirations got out of the gate with [...]
We are fans. We forget. Sometimes we forget that -- in the cold of early spring or late autumn – this isn’t football. Small sample sizes and the freshness of the 17-game NFL season recently concluded often fool us into thinking how it is right now will be how it is in perpetuity. That’s a [...]