A recent Facebook status update from yours truly: Watching the 2009 Mets is like smacking yourself in the head with a pan for three hours a night. And yet here I sit. WHAP! WHAP! WHAP! WTF is wrong with me?
Livan is still in, because what's the point. Padres rotate around the bases like a pinball game. Mets make errors, strike out, hit into double plays. Jerry stares from the dugout. Perhaps later someone will fall down the dugout stairs or accidentally poach themselves in the whirlpool or pry off a fingernail with a taco chip.
It's a horseshit year. Pretty much everything that could go wrong has, and there's still eight weeks left of go-wrong that can't happen. I can't turn away, no longer how much I want to, because I know that soon after the pain ends there will be the playoffs with other teams and the sound of, say, Ron Darling on another station will make me sad. And soon after that there will be no baseball at all, and that will make me sadder. I will sit in front of football bored half to death and think that watching David Wright strike out wouldn't be so bad after all.
But right now the Mets are doing horrible things in what's about to be the middle of the night. And suddenly that added torment is too much. If I go to sleep, it's possible that I might dream. I might dream things that aren't true: that our lineup is rich with Carloses and Joses, that our front office can manage a roster, that the Mets can get through, oh, three or four days without some astonishing injury. I might dream it's 2010, as opposed to the waking nightmare that is 2009.
I think I'm going to get a head start on that now. If they somehow win, I'll miss it. That's fine. (And I'm sure Greg will chronicle it.) Blame me if you will.
And if I can't sleep, I'll comfort myself with Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets, available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or a bookstore near you. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.
to sleep, perchance to dream?
And to fix a goddamn open HTML tag.
Who are we kidding, I went downstairs and turned on the radio while goofing around on the Net. I'm hopeless.
BTW, we have a zero-tolerance policy for Yankee trolling. (Or any other kind.) Take it elsewhere.
For all who had forgotten the difference between the Mets playing crappily and the Mets flat out being a crappy team, Thursday night's exercise in hollowness served a useful purpose.
Other than that, I can't think of anything it was good for.
It's been a long time since Endy leaped into the heavens to keep our dreams alive…
How did we get here?
By not doing a thing to significantly improve the offense since that moment. Not at catcher, not at second, not in left, not in right.