Well, on the plus side Aaron Heilman kept us in it several batters longer than I thought he would.

After we got an HDTV, Emily and I had to deal with a problem: The picture had such hallucinatory clarity that we'd frequently get distracted by fans in the stands. What's that lady keep doing? Did […]

Willie Randolph's Record Since Last Memorial Day: 76-79

Days Until Contract of Luis Castillo (1 for 4, 2 LOB, 1 Harebrained 2-Out Play) Expires: 1,226

Days Until Willie Randolph Is Fired: ?

Days Until I Give Up on This Listless, Unwatchable, Eminently Booable Team: -2

Well, the New York Mets are now officially what we've been saying they are for some time: a .500 team.

Stumbling to that dismal pass tonight, however, I had a dreadful thought: One of Willie Randolph's defenses for his tenure, as expressed to Ian O'Connor before Willie started seeing conspiracies at work in the SNY […]

That was the highlight of Keith Hernandez's story of finding himself in his first tornado around 1974: He opened the windows because he'd heard somewhere that the pressure differential could destroy a cheap apartment building, only his new stereo was getting wet, so he closed the windows, but he was still worried about the pressure […]

Every year I tell myself that the Subway Series doesn't mean what it used to. This year, the initial evidence seemed to agree: I woke up at 1:30 on Saturday, glanced at the clock and realized with what fuzzy horror I could muster that the game had already started. (I'd completely missed Jeter giving the […]

Mets, Yankees, fans, bloggers, media guys … we were all better served by not having nine more innings of baseball to chew over last night, and not just because the weather clock seemed to have suddenly turned six weeks backwards.

The Mets held their meeting, as teams do. The Mets said the meeting was good, as […]

I wish I could share my co-blogger's pluck, his acceptance, his relative calm. But I can't. The only comfort I can take from yesterday's disaster is that Willie Randolph's firing may have gone from an “if” to a “when.” But how much agony do we have to endure before then? How many losses? How many […]

Dorian Gray had a portrait that aged so he didn't have to. Maybe Aaron Heilman could try that trick.

With every bad outing, the portrait would get a little more squinty, a little more hangdog, a little more slump-shouldered, a little more looking like it just built into an industrial-strength lemon or walked into class and […]

The baseball gods have a vast assortment of cruelties, but one of their better tricks is the rainout-turned-blowout: You think there's no way the game will be played, only to have the weather hold off so you get a game after all — and then this gift turns out to be a numbing basket of […]

This post has been updated to reflect that it was indeed Patterson, not Freel, who tried to bat after Ross. Original post is in strikethrough below that, lest anyone think I'm pulling a fast one.

When a team bats out of order, my first instinct is to grin at the novelty of it. My second instinct […]