I think I started getting excited around 3 p.m. — the Mets are playing tonight! Weirdly, it was almost like Opening Day II — no, I didn't have particularly high hopes, not after the torrent of injuries and bad luck and craptacular baseball that was the first half of 2009, and not after Omar Minaya […]

Livan Hernandez, being a student of baseball history, was not going to let the 40th anniversary of Tom Seaver's fateful encounter with Jimmy Qualls go by unheralded. No, Livan Lacking offered Tom Terrific a ballfield tribute: To celebrate Seaver recording 25 outs before Qualls' clean single, Livan decided to pay homage to a Hall of […]

Reality can be a plunge into a cold bath, or it can just be reality. Tonight I watched the Mets lose by a pair of grand slams to the Dodgers and didn't even flinch.

What good would flinching have done? I figured the Mets would lose, and just hoped it would be dull and pitiable instead […]

Let's run down what the New York Mets accomplished today.

1. They didn't commit a shocking mental or physical error.

2. Daniel Murphy gritted his way through one very good at-bat.

3. Johan Santana was terrific in a terrifying hitter's park.

But the first is damning with faint praise, the second was immediately rewarded with a double-play ball […]

I was supposed to be home in time for the game.

Instead, the flight back from Boston was delayed by the Northeast's apparently daily rain showers. The plane didn't take off until 6:30 or so, and it was after 7:30 when I was able to get MLB At Bat up and running. I navigated my way […]

A grim exercise, for posterity: With one out in the Brewers' fourth, Johan Santana walked a 29-year-old journeyman starting pitcher. He got Corey Hart to fly to center, but Fernando Martinez fell down, literally landing on his face to put runners on second and third. Santana walked J.J. Hardy and went to an 0-2 count […]

Oh my fucking God, y'all.

Truth be told, I never had any use for “Friends.” It just didn't work for me — I found the characters dull or actually irritating, and so never cared what happened to them. But I did think the method for naming the shows — each show is formally known as “The One With…” or “The […]

When you get a ticket plan, the tickets from later in the schedule seem like the stuff of science fiction: Amid the chill of February, who can imagine June 25, 2009? For all we knew back then, we might spend the evening mourning Michael Jackson, waiting for the latest news out of Iran and making […]

It's long been my contention (though not my co-blogger's) that Mets fans have never been comfortable with hegemony. Our history is one of miracles and belief; our flirtations with dynasty have generally ended with the amassed firepower aimed at our own feet. Even the '86 team needed a miracle a whole lot bigger than 1969's […]