If it wasn't Willie Randolph burning his entire bench in the seventh (whywhywhywhywhy), leading to the sight of Tom Glavine pinch-hitting in the ninth, it was Lastings Milledge air-mailing everybody south of the loge on a throw home, or Mike Pelfrey crawling out of the wreckage of his usual one bad inning, or Pedro Feliciano […]

Baseball, we all know, is beautiful down to its tiniest rituals and motions. The way the hitter steps out with just his front foot and blows out a long breath before swinging himself back all the way into the box. That pause, fraught with potential, when the pitcher looks down at the ball in his […]

Joshua and I are back from five blissful days up in the piney woods in Maine, a nice dose of anti-New York City for a New York City boy. My parents' summer house is idyllic for a kid who loves animals and learning about nature, offering no shortage of rewarding sights and sounds for small […]

A plea for Jose Valentin, AKA “Other Jose” when Reyes's cheer was adapted for his good deeds: In six to eight weeks please be careful crossing streets and going down stairs. Because it ain't your year.

Valentin's run of miserable luck (knee, wall-punching hand, etc.) has now culminated with a broken tibia, one I imagine will […]

In the morning I'm frequently awakened because a four-year-old just stamped on my clavicle, bounced himself next to my head, snaked the covers off me or is jumping up and down yelling “AND THE METS WIN!” This is one of Joshua's newer habits — he makes up baseball games and runs the bases. In his […]

A few years back I decided to torture Greg with a thought experiment: Would you want the Mets to win the World Series if you couldn't watch any of the season or postseason? (At least that's how I remember it. Correct me if I'm wrong, Mr. Prince.)

The answer I was expecting was a flat “no,” […]

If you went to bed at 10 and looked at the box score in the morning, maybe you thought, “Eh, ho-hum loss. Mets didn't convert hits, Padres got to Sosa early, Heilman stank.”

But it's not so. Or, rather, it's not the whole story.

Sosa was fine and the Mets fell apart late, but you could see […]

It'd be an exaggeration to call the Mets hot — like Greg, I'll need to be won over further before declaring our putative NL East leader fit for duty. Three out of four against the Reds? Sorry, but that's the stuff of necessity, not luxury. Lastings Milledge would seem to qualify as hot, and has […]

Not for Tom Glavine, who thoroughly earned No. 298 by baffling every Red who wasn't named Brandon Phillips. Glavine gets claps until my hands are sore. Same for the Mets' defense — the back-to-back sparklers from Gotay and Reyes will get the highlights, but David Wright had another quietly impressive game in the field. (Though […]

The Mets are in first place and the ship is not listing. But what ails this team is something that is sensed more than it’s been seen. Something is out of kilter — perhaps an approach to hitting, an approach to competing, an approach to winning.

That was Bill Rhoden in this morning's Times, and it […]