Quick take on re-inking Oliver Perez: He's the devil we know.

He's also shy of his 28th birthday and left-handed. It's far from unprecedented for guys matching that description to harness their gifts and their natural southpawness in their late twenties and become pitchers for whom you thank your lucky stars while fans of previous employers […]

As fans, we know very little about what's going on in the general manager's office. Beat reporters, pundits and rumormongers get what they can, but what they get isn't a tick-tock of phone records and meetings. It's a mix of honest-to-goodness facts, negotiating ploys, trial balloons, competing agendas, axes being ground, recycled tales, rumors and […]

Rickey Henderson is going to Cooperstown. Pedro Martinez might be going to Miami. Derek Lowe might be coming here — if he's not going to Atlanta. Oliver Perez? Nobody has ever been able to state with particular confidence where anything propelled by Oliver might be going. Billy Wagner might be coming to Citi Field in […]

2008 was the final season for Shea Stadium. 2009 is the first season for Citi Field. A little over three months from now, the 2009 Mets will find their positions on the field, a batter for the Boston Red Sox will walk to the plate, and from then on Citi Field will no longer be […]

Normally this is about the time I start settling into my long winter's baseball nap, kerchief and cap optional: The free-agent shuffling is about done, and it's a long hard slog to pitchers and catchers reporting, after which nothing whatsoever happens anyway. Best to rest up and get done whatever it is you get done […]

Of course it was Greg who sent me the link, from the awesomer-than-awesome Crane Pool forum: A Met fan's first-ever game, preserved in New York Times prose and baseball cards, a card for each of the men who'd played in it, the whole shebang beautifully framed by this Mets fan. How cool is that?

So cool […]

So with K-Rod barely over his tour of Citi Field, he gets a sidekick: J.J. Putz, whose name is pronounced “puts.” As in “puts down Phillie farragos, Brave brouhahas, Marlin mischief and Nat nastiness in the eighth.”

Unless he screws up, in which case it'll be pronounced the way I assumed it was pronounced until I […]

Ow, this stove is … not particularly hot.

Ow, this stove is … not particularly hot.

During other, long-gone and apparently equally endless offseasons, Bill Veeck used to call up one of his fellow owners and engineer a “dog-and-cat trade” — a swap of generally useless utility infielders or outfield caddies or what in a few more […]