Going into the weekend, I was pretty happy about our being the ESPN Sunday night game. Thursday and Friday night I worked and gave what attention I could spare to Howie and Wayne on the radio. On Saturday night Emily threw me a 40th birthday celebration at B61, which was enormous fun but meant Johan […]

After you get used to the season having really arrived and settled down to stay a while, baseball can be like a good dog — at your side and ready to match whatever level of devotion you're giving that night. Want to focus with laser-beam intensity on each and every pitch? Baseball's up for that. […]

As predicted, the Mets returned to Earth. Heck, they practically burned up on re-entry, came down miles from the rendezvous point, panicked and managed to blow the hatch and flood the capsule while waiting for rescue. I'm pressed to think what was the least fun: the errors, the parade of unlucky or bad relievers or […]

Baseball is full of hoary cliches that have become overused because they contain a fair bit of wisdom. Among them is the caution that no team is actually as bad as it looks when it's on the skids or as good as it looks when it's on a winning streak.

It will come as a shocking […]

OK, the Mets didn't play a particularly crisp game — it was cringeworthy when Carlos Beltran and Ryan Church both wound up south of Nate McLouth's eastbound fly ball, agonizing to watch any ball get near Daniel Murphy (unblemished though his record was) and disturbing to see the offense lapse into torpor against Jeff Karstens, […]

I'm heading for New Orleans for three days tomorrow (it will be an interesting trip, as explained in navel-gazing fashion here), so I was eager to get an evening of uninterrupted Mets before I departed.

“Uninterrupted” is an approximation for parents, though — the early innings, with John Maine looking like he was falling apart, unfolded […]

Wait a minute, we scored runs after the first?

Wait a minute, J-Rolls and the Flyin' Hawaiian and Utley and Howard were batting in the ninth (do they ever not?) and there was a two-out walk and the inning didn't end with a Met closer whirling around in horror to stare at a point somewhere above […]

On a lot of nights, the New York Mets are a pretty unstoppable baseball team from about 7:20 until about 7:45.

Unfortunately, the nights drag on, and so do the Mets. The orange-and-blue hare begins to coast. To hop only now and again. Then it goes to sleep somewhere, and you feel yourself go rigid at […]

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 […]

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 […]