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 […]

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 […]

Sorry, Luis Castillo's singles don't look like line drives in the box score. You can pretty much reverse-engineer whatever the number in the H column is back into little slap jobs or worm killers or humpbacked liners. But sometimes they're enough. Sometimes they wind up in the western side of J.J. Hardy's glove, too far […]

We're all of us — players, announcers, staff and fans — trying to figure out how Citi Field plays. But this much is for sure: It plays weird.

Two days after the inaugural saw a lead-off home run, a normally reliable outfielder drop a fairly routine fly ball, a speedster overslide second, a fine spot of […]