“Walk right side? Safe. Walk left side? Safe. Walk down middle? Squish, like grape.” – Mr. Miyagi to Daniel-san in the original KARATE KID So they’ve hit a season’s high in terms of winning percentage, climbing the dizzying heights of three games over .500. So they’ve taken a second step on the way to what [...]
Last night (7/4) was one of those games that felt really bad, then suddenly euphoric. Not in the same sense that Sunday’s ambush of the TGMR (The Great Mariano Rivera) was, the 5-2 win over the Dodgers (I will refrain from any snarky nicknames referring to their bankruptcy filing: there but for the grace of [...]
Four games, 52 runs scored, 69 hits, only three of which were home runs – all hit in a single game and two of those were grand slams. As Casey Stengel meant to tell us all those many years ago, “The Mets are amazin’.” Every cylinder of the offense is firing, the pitchers are unfettered [...]
I was vacationing in the Catskills last week, and I’m not sure if I missed anything. I know that the “meaty” portion of the Inter-League schedule began with a dreadful, boring three-gamer with the Angels at Citi – and what the hell is a Tyler Chatwood, anyway? Dropping two-of-three to an Anaheim squad which is [...]
Since their 3-1 start to the season, the Mets have scraped the .500 mark twice: on May 20 at Yankee Stadium, and then last night (6/15) in soggy Atlanta. That’s a couple of pretty fair ballclubs, isn’t it? It’s not like they bulldozed the Mudville Nine to get there: they did it at two of [...]
You would think that after 40 years of watching the Mets’ brand of baseball, I’d be used to it by now. I was about six-years-old when I finally kind of caught on to what this “base-ball” thingy was. Since then, I’ve seen some seasons where it’s been awful from Jump Street: 1974, 1977 through ’79 [...]
“Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?" A four-run lead headed to the bottom of the eighth is supposed to be safe. To paraphrase Howie Rose, I was putting this one in the books before the eighth was over. But we know the narrative these past two weeks, don’t we? This bullpen stinks [...]
Every now and then, even in a ghost-season like this one – ephemeral, amorphous, in flux, would-frighten-Scooby-Doo, “are they really there?” – following the Mets can be most entertaining. Take Sunday night (6/5) for example. Wonderful pitching from our friend R. A. Dickey, scoring like a Chicago election (early-and-often), even giving the Atlanta fans a [...]
Last week, a rush of news from the Ivory Towers of Flushing informed the world that hotshot fancier David Einhorn had sunk $200 million of his hard-earned moolah into a shaky-at-best operation known as the New York Mets. Over here, it was immediately viewed as good news . If I were to listen to the [...]
When a man’s right, he’s right. Terry Collins finally had one of the meltdowns for which he’s so famous on Wednesday night (6/1). Who could blame him? In a game which took on an all-too-familiar pattern, the Mets got outstanding starting pitching from Chris Capuano for six innings, then drowned in two feet of water [...]
I actually went to bed feeling better about the Mets than I had in a week. A win will get that for you, however it comes about. And when I woke up, it got even better. The Mets scored a run in the top of the first, then immediately gave four of them back, then [...]
I spend most of a week at a conference, then have computer issues for the rest of it, and look what happens. I was able to follow the Monday night follies (5/16) against Florida (http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/NYN/NYN201105160.shtml) and the dancin’ through the rain (5/18) vs. Washington (http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/NYN/NYN201105180.shtml) from the mostly unfriendly environs of the Tropicana Casino/Hotel in [...]