So, barring an expansion of the dog-and-cat trade awaiting out-of-options Jon Adkins, the roster appears set. And Moises Alou, David Newhan, Damion Easley, Chan Ho Park, Aaron Sele, Joe Smith and Scott Schoeneweis are ready to join the exalted ranks of The Holy Books.
Last season Philip Humber was the final addition to the orange and […]

Last night I got some welcome signs of spring.
First off, it was my fantasy-baseball draft — this will be the third season I've played since getting sucked back into the fantasy-sports black hole. I spent 2005 staring at the computer like a cargo cultist, amazed at the fact that there were players and stats behind […]

It seems amazing that our little blog can already have traditions, but here we are at the third annual edition of Spring Training Central Casting, in which players from the 2007 edition of Port St. Lucie are assigned to the unchaning roles that await players in every camp every year. (If you're feeling historically minded, […]

Last night, after Varsity Letters, a few of us blogger types were sitting around drinking beer and talking baseball, and the conversation came around to baseball names. And the one that I found myself groping for was Stubby Clapp — not for anything fabulous he did (5 for 25 as a 2001 St. Louis Cardinal), […]

When you're a basically solid team without a lot of job openings or questions, spring training is, ideally, all about what you're not. News? Bad. Questions? Generally bad. Particularly any that start with formulations like, “Can the Mets survive…” or “What's Plan B now that…” The absence of questions, beyond banalities such as work visas […]

Ah, Day One. As my partner noted, it was a bunch of sweet nothing.
I had the game on at work and so was only paying fitful, vague attention — which was fine because this was, after all, a spring-training game.
By now I'm used to this. About 10 years ago, it was different. I remember one […]

INT. — AN APARTMENT IN BROOKLYN — AROUND 6 PM ON OCT. 19, 2006.

JASON, an extraordinarily tired-looking man in his late 30s, enters stage left. He is dressed entirely in Met gear. He plops down on a worn couch in front of a coffee table, then quickly gets back up again.
JASON
(muttering and pacing)
Ohmygod, it all […]

This is the last weekend without a Mets game for a long, long time.
Ahh. It's February with a big winter storm on the way, but somehow it just got a lot warmer.