Less than an eighth of the season is gone, which isn't anywhere near enough time to draw conclusions about a player, team or pennant race. But we're fans — what are we supposed to do, turn off the set and take the long view? Nah, we draw conclusions every night, shifting our stances until eventually […]

Now that I've had a chance to settle into the new season, I've reached the point where I can stop watching baseball so anxiously, investing every out and every pitch with more intensity than it or I can bear for very long. Which is a relief: Until October comes, you can't watch baseball that way. […]

The poorest player on the New York Mets makes nearly $400,000 a year to ply his trade, but have a moment's sympathy if you can: Right now they're on a bus, and that bus is going to Philadelphia.

But at least they have memories of an extra-inning marathon that went from taut to excruciating to taxing […]

Once upon a time the Mets changed the way Jose Reyes ran, afflicting him with a limping gait like a horse afraid of stepping in a hole. In theory it seemed like a good idea, a way to cure the chronic hamstring woes that threatened to derail an electric but raw career. In practice it […]

Wow did I ever have a weird dream this morning.

I'd gone back to sleep for a little bit, but it was a couple of hours until game time, and that must have been weighing on my mind, because I dreamt a whole baseball game in my head. And not a good one.

You know how lots […]

It's the new guys who will heal us.

I don't just mean that Angel Pagan has been a revelation, that Ryan Church has so far proved a good bat and an excellent glove, that Johan Santana is Johan Santana or that Nelson Figueroa had a very nice night. (Or that even Raul Casanova chipped in when […]

So long as they end properly, tense, nobody-can-break-through extra-inning games are the coolest. There's the initial annoyance/delight of free baseball (emotion dependent on whether your team's the one that tied it up or the one that let it get tied), the settling in for the long haul once things aren't settled in the 10th, and […]

What we wanted was Met domination — Pelfrey to somehow rise from the prospect-turned-suspect dead and show no rust after being a spectator for an entire road trip, Delgado to bang more homers off the scoreboard and fewer throws off Chase Utley, Jose Reyes to work counts and lace liners and race around second, Beltran […]

I don't know what the heck a rulebook expert like Bobby Valentine would have made out of what just happened in Atlanta. I don't know what the rulebook even says regarding a mess like that. But sometimes the best thing to do is put the rulebook aside and work it out like 12-year-olds would have […]