Both your bloggers offered somewhat fitful attention to Sunday's finale.
While Greg was occupied with cultural matters, I was planting stuff in our backyard, radio at my back. To which I supplied my own soundtrack. Dammit Pelfrey. Come ON, Pelfrey. Just relax, Mike. Big pitch here. You can do this. C'mon, Pelf. This game's FUN, dammit! PELFREY! COME ON! Call it impatience among the impatiens.
(Blogger ducks.)
Happily, somewhere between the last planting of the day and heading out for dinner (Sunday night babysitter — wooo!) Pelf finally came on. Or at least he acquitted himeself in a way that made you somewhat hopeful for the future, except for the walking people and the hitting people with baseballs. But you know what? Mike Pelfrey is 23 years old. If we play in October and he's an enigmatic fifth starter, that's fine. If much of his 2007 gets spent in New Orleans, that's fine too. Even if Pelfrey hasn't quite arrived by the time we're getting used to Citi Field, he'll still have much more in front of his horse than behind his cart.
“Well, I guess we're beginning our night by heading around the corner,” Emily had said when she found out about the 4:40 start. (I love my wife [1].) We ate nachos and drank beer while Livan iced Ramon Castro on an evil third strike and David Newhan (who I assume has a moment in him somewhere) hit one of those balls that looked good off the bat but not so good up in the air. We hung around just to see Lino Urdaneta reduce his ERA to finity, even though that looked perilous for a moment as a hop ate up David Wright and his doofy-looking zebra shoes — and during the inning I thought Urdaneta might be hyperventilating to the point of having a heart attack, which would have been a terrible way of proving that yes, he could have a worse outing than that long-ago day against the Kansas City Royals [2]. You think having a career ERA of 81.00 is bad, try having one that requires Topps to go download some special character set. (Actually, as custodian of The Holy Books I must report that Urdaneta has no Topps card [3].)
With Lino's moment over, we wandered down to Lucalli's (go!) and wound up pursuing a Family Circus-style tour of South Brooklyn while awaiting a table. Lucalli's is BYOB, so we backtracked to a wine store that we'd noticed had the Mets game on. (Coincidence? What site are you reading?) We got our $9.99 bottle of something or other as the TV announced the baleful tale: Diamondbacks 3, Mets 1.
The wine-store guy was surly and morose. Sure, maybe it had nothing to do with the Mets, but we like to project. We shrugged it off. Rest for the weary, Rustoleum for the underused, a learning experience for Pelfrey, the best day of Lino Urdaneta's major-league life (so far), and three out of four in the desert.