My back to the wall, a victim of laughing chance

This is for me the essence of true romance

Sharing the things we know and love with those of my kind

Libations, sensations that stagger the mind

—Steely Dan

I've crossed that fine line from theoretical home stretch to the beginning of the end of the line. This is no [...]

What if the Mets survive, but none of us do?

This is heart-attack stuff, brutal baseball in brutal weather, a Nor'Easter of cruelty and joy and panic and hope buffeting you and threatening to blow you down altogether. How many moments did that game offer to pierce the heart, whether with ecstacy or misery? It started [...]

Sometimes in the winter I'll be doing some household chore and I'll realize that for the last five or 10 minutes I've been brooding about a moment from the Mets' past, turning it over and over in my mind and wondering how everything could have gone so wrong. Sometimes I even catch myself muttering imprecations, [...]

Another summer at Perry’s. I can’t. I swear.
—Stacy Hamilton, Ridgemont High School, 1982

I will not tell you how dreadful Wednesday night’s loss to the Cubs was. You can infer that for yourself; you probably already have. I will not dwell on the eerie fact that at the exact same juncture in 2007 — the 158th [...]

I'm a Wild Card waiting

In the middle of the deck

You'd better get a bigger gun

I'm not dead yet

—Ralph Covert and the Bad Examples

Your 2008 Mets: By no means dead yet.

That was the win the Wild Card-leading Mets needed Tuesday night. We need more of 'em, but that one was the prerequisite. We can't take Advanced [...]

God bless Johan Santana.

In the beginning he didn't look particularly on his game — the Cubs were getting pretty fair swings against him, and I was more than a little sick to my stomach thinking of finding Johan on the wrong end of a 3-1 or 4-2 score, the recipient of stoic attaboys and brave [...]

“I have tickets for the Mets tonight. Great seats for probably a terrible game. I'll be by at five.”

—Ken Cosgrove, Sterling Cooper, 1962

Yeah, it was pretty terrible at Shea Monday night. Lifetime game 409, regular and postseason combined, might have a hard time cracking my personal top 400 had August 2002 never occurred. Enduring Marquis' [...]

I've had the good fortune to be on hand for a remarkable run of classic games at Shea Stadium — I was in green or red seats for the Grand Slam single, for the 10-run inning, for Agbayani's home run, for Bobby Jones's one-hitter, for the NLCS clincher in '00, for the first home game [...]