It's a shame that, provided both are behaving more or less decently, players and fans don't interact more. Baseball's fun to play and fun to watch. (Of course, on a mind-bogglingly gorgeous night like tonight, sitting outside a bus station would be pretty much A-OK. But still.)

Take the bottom of the seventh. Carlos Delgado had […]

Not so long ago, Mike Pelfrey making it through the fifth inning would have been worthy of somewhat grudging attaboys. The Kansas righty had size, stuff, a first-round pedigree and the most-famous visible tongue this side of Gene Simmons, but he rarely had results. It felt like you could diagram most Pelfrey starts: He'd show […]

If the Mets have led you to claw fingernail marks in your own palms this year — stigmata I think we all bear — then this was baseball as sweetest absolution. Stagnation, frustration, expectation, exultation and exhalation were the night's procession, as some bullpen tightrope-walking was followed by a barn-burner of an 8th inning and […]

Now that's what a ninth inning ought to look like: Five pitches, no fuss, put it in the books.

Now this is the kind of pitching line you dream of: 9 IP, 0 ER, 3 H, 0 BB. 113 pitches, 85 of them for strikes.

Johan Santana is 11-7 in mid-August, but just look at this game […]

Facing the same team on consecutive starts isn't ideal for pitchers. Facing the exact same matchup that yielded a cringeworthy disaster five days before isn't ideal for fans.

Yet this time around, Pedro Martinez vs. Zach Duke turned out just fine. Pedro might not have had as good stuff as he did on Monday, but he […]

Wham! Biff! Pow! Sock!

The Mets were finally doing what they're supposed to do to teams like the Nats, the torrential rains that threatened to engulf New York had spared D.C., and Oliver Perez was looking unbeatable, benefiting from absurd movement on his pitches, overaggressive Nats hitters and a generous strike zone. I extracted some bitter […]

Faith and Fear does occasionally have some business to attend to, so periodically your bloggers get together to exchange blog-related news and ideas. (“Faith and Fear: The Interpretive Dance” will blow you away with both its kinetic nuance and its rococo wardrobe.) But tonight we were wary that the Olympics would squeeze the Mets off […]

So. Whew.

I know we're all in this together, but forgive me: I needed that one. Me. Jason Fry.

Because yesterday sucked.

The silver lining of Day 1 of unemployment turning into a Shea Stadium matinee turned out to be a downed power line. And it had been a lovely day — the game got off late and […]

Yesterday may have been the dreariest baseball game I've ever attended.

Emily and I were coming back from Philadelphia in a rental car, and with insufficient time to go home and get on the subway, we were stuck driving. We'd been warned about this, but it's true — it's hard parking at Shea when there's a […]