6 pm: Go over Nationals lineup. Feel pangs of pity. Decide to pitch to contact to minimize their embarrassment, maximize chance that I can pitch every second or third day to ensure we win games more often than every fifth day. Besides, no point making that Dukes kid mad.

6:31 pm: Sheffield and Tatis in the […]

There is doubt. There is no benefit. You lost the benefit of the doubt when you blew a large first-place lead one September and a large enough first-place lead the next September while neither time leaving yourselves any slack to salvage a Wild Card. If you couldn't generate your own slack, we don't need to […]

How is it every time I look up I'm immersed in high batting averages? Even if the batting average has been devalued as a key determinant of offensive effectiveness, you'd figure a lineup in which six of the regulars are over .300 — Beltran and Castillo ranked 1 and 2 in the entire National League […]

One of my signs of spring is that I have to figure out once again how to work my portable radio.

No, I'm not an idiot. (Or perhaps I am, but this isn't the thing that proves it.) It's that my portable radio is a little lozenge of silver plastic whose various buttons had writing explaining […]

I sense those who really, really love Citi Field off the bat are, in essence, Homer in the episode of The Simpsons when he angered at the high prices and crappy merchandise he continually encountered at the Kwik-E-Mart. But it was all Homer knew, so he put up with it. “If he discovers the discount […]

After we lost that mildly disgusting 2-1 game to the Marlins, a friend offered sympathies. My response: “I don't know if you do this, but for me early April is Baseball Honeymoon — I'm so happy that my nights and days have normal structure again that losses don't particularly rattle me. And then it's April […]