Oh that baseball, it is a funny game. One night it's as tense as can be. The next afternoon, it is ludicrous. A laugher for one team, an entity lacking humor for the other.
Joke's on us this time. When your best chance to stay competitive is to send Ramon Castro from first to home with two out down ten in the fifth, you try to chuckle and keep a smile on your face.
What over? Not Pelfrey, except maybe the thought that an off day means he is skipped a turn which means, in turn, Coach Rick can run him through a few more of his magical “bullpens” and perhaps yield Ollie-like miracles. Not Sele or Burgos either, each of whom lost the keys that keep a door shut. Not much on our side of the ledger (Reyes revives, Endy endures, Green gratifies) that accounted for beans in the scheme of things.
But try to find a good thought or two for our counterparts in Colorado, the serious Rockies fans who are lapping this one up and downing it with a cold clean Silver Bullet. I'm sure they're out there, I'm sure they needed this.
I don't have any particular use for the Colorado Rockies, but it's rather sad to see what's become of them over the last decade or so. They were the model franchise in waiting when I visited them in their spanking new playpen a dozen years ago, en route to the first National League Wild Card, performing marvelous offensive feats nightly in front of adoring throngs. Beyond conferring resident scholar status upon Superintendent of Schools Mike Hampton and installing that humidor (or humid-id-or, as Keith memorably called it last summer), I don't know what the hell happened to them. Nor do I much care. I sure won't when we're subject to Coors Field fireworks when the Mets are in Denver around the Fourth of July.
Still, bad for baseball that the most promising of its four most recent expansion markets has lost its elevation. You should have seen the Rockies fans in 1995. They were so enthusiastic, so into their duel with the Dodgers for first, so full of hope and passion. There hasn't been an N.L. West race since then that has involved them in any meaningful fashion.
They do seem to have a molehill if not a mountain of young talent: Atkins, Holliday, that irritating shortstop with a rifle for an arm and a howitzer for a last name…Tulowitzki, yes, that's it. Sprinkled in are admirable vets (Finley), annoying vets (Mabry), pesky vets (Carroll) and insanely overpaid vets (Helton). Their pitching is anybody's guess considering the altitude they spend half their time hurling through. It's looked good for two days, though.
The names may have been moved around but this is basically the same jumble of Rockies that comes to Shea every year and doesn't win too often. Colorado last recorded a victory here amid Mike Piazza's last appearance as a Met at the very end of 2005. Before then, their previous win was a Sunday in May 2002. How long ago was that? It was so long ago that Kane Davis took the loss.
Nowadays, to the extent we dare to be at all presumptuous about our standing in the sport, we sort of, kind of expect to beat teams like the Rockies. It wasn't long ago when we were the Rockies, expecting absolutely nothing but hoping like hell that our Phillipses and our Wiggintons and our Seos were going to mesh with our Piazzas and our Floyds to create a better tomorrow. When we'd rise up and take a game or — holy crap! — sweep a series, as we did from Colorado in August 2003, we'd cherish every inning and hold it as tightly to our collective bosom as we could until reality snapped back and slapped us in the face.
I'm pretty damn stingy about giving up games, but considering it's already gone, I'm willing to loosen my grip on this afternoon's for the sake of fans I've never met in a place I haven't been in a long time. They could use one.
Enjoy it Rockies fans and build on it. You play the Braves next.

Have you ever squealed in the literal sense? An honest-to-goodness squeal? Like a pig?

Have you ever pursed your lips and let out an “oooh!” like you were really amazed?

Have you ever reflexively combined a squeal and an “oooh!” again and again? It might sound something like this…

SQUOOOH! SQUOOH! SQUOOH! SQUOOH!

That was me when Endy put down the bunt that ended the game in the twelfth. It was really loud, too. Woke up the wife and everything. She’s the one who pointed out to me during Game Seven that Endy’s catch elicited a Warner Bros. sound effect from my throat. That was more an “uhAAH!” then an “oooh!” and less a squeal than a Hamilton Beach blender set on grate.

uhAAH! uhAAH! uhAAH! uhAAH!

Endy Chavez should go into ADR when he’s done playing, which is to say not for a very long time.

Of course Endy is about more than sound effects. He’s about sound baseball. It’s easy to take him at his leaping essence after he demonstrated The Strength To Be There last October 19, but as if we’ve forgotten, he’s a helluva player no matter what he’s doing out there. A helluva thinker, too.

Anybody can be blessed with speed (well, anybody but me and Ramon Castro) but Endy also has the gift of vision. He saw Clint Barmes playing back at second. He saw the drag bunt as a legitimate winning possibility. And he took what he saw.

That’s thinking. The Mets are good at that. The Met you tended not to think about before Tuesday night is a prime practitioner, or so we learned. No doubt a clever drag bunt into the devil’s triangle bounded by first, second and the mound is using your head as well as your feet. But a ball clean-and-jerked well over the left-centerfield fence? Damion Easley gave that one some thought and revealed it wasn’t just brute force at work.

Just after the game, SNY’s Kevin Burkhardt asked Easley what he was thinking about up there when he tied it in the tenth. Maybe because Damion had had two full innings to contemplate the answer or maybe because he has plenty of time to think in his job, he had a great and thorough answer.

“I’m just tryin’ to relax,” he said, walking Burkhardt and us through the whole at-bat, how he took one pitch that he shouldn’t have and then swung at one in his eyes that he was still obviously annoyed by. So he relaxed and he eventually got to Brian Fuentes, admitting later on “I kind of expected it to go out.”

The Shot Heard ‘Round Ten O’Clock may not have been the most dramatic home run in baseball history but Easley’s thought process was remarkably similar to that of another New York National League slugger who delivered in a late inning once. Bobby Thomson has been asked to replay what was going through his mind when he approached the plate to face Ralph Branca on October 3, 1951 probably thousands of times. The answer is always terrific: “I kept telling myself not to get overanxious…give yourself a chance to hit.”

In other words, relax. I thought of Thomson when I heard Easley. I thought how little baseball changes in the way these guys have to think their way through game situations no matter how much talent they may have. I thought, too, of how Jose Valentin was thinking clearly when he laid down a less celebrated but just as crucial bunt as Endy’s in the twelfth, the perfect sacrifice that moved Shawn Green from first to second. I even thought Ryan Speier was as heads-up as he could possibly be in trying to flick Endy’s dachshund of a drag to Helton with his glove. It didn’t quite make up for his maybe-thinking-too-much balk that pushed Green from second to third, but it was admirable in a desperate sort of way.

I also like how Willie Randolph thinks. When he was asked if this was his favorite game of the year, the manager did not sound like a fan. No, it was not his favorite — we left too many men on base for that. Good point, one he’s paid to remember, one we are free to forget, though I must confess I wondered as the zeroes were applied to the scoreboard how it was possible that two Major League teams, one of them our certified offensive powerhouse, couldn’t score for nine innings. Good pitching beats good hitting, but good hitting is good hitting. We’re just so used to scores like 7-2, 9-6 and 6-1, that 0-0 administers a shock to the system.

Though 2-1 is the balm that ensures a sound night’s sleep.

***
Say, here are the complete Major League standings through last night, April 24, 2007. Let me know if you notice anything similar to those for the close of business from September 3, 1990.

That’s what it took to beat the Rockies tonight — 485 feet of offense, in two equally unexpected doses. First came Damion Easley’s 400-foot drive into the bleachers with two outs and two strikes, a wonderfully ridiculous bit of theater (Down! To! Their! Last! Strike!) from the last Opening Day Met to crack the 2007 record books. And then Endy Chavez, somehow dropping a croquet mallet on a pitch at his feet and guiding it along that perfect, oh-so-hard-to-find line bisecting the pitcher and the first baseman, with the second baseman too far back to do more than bear panicky witness. Eighty-five feet worth of drag bunt, and one marvelously entertaining win. I particularly liked the way, on the replay, you saw that Ryan Speier’s desperate little heave had made it past Todd Helton’s glove and wound up rolling companionably alongside Endy, like a faithful dog curious to see what kind of neato adventure would be coming up next.

What came before was admirably succinct, if frustrating — both El Duque and Aaron Cook are the kind of pitchers who, when right, leave guys going back to the plate shaking their heads, feeling like they’ve been less overmatched than somehow unlucky three or four times in a row. If not for Shawn Green’s proximity, Carlos Beltran probably would have caught Troy Tulowitzki’s drive to the right-field fence — but then nobody who remembers pleading for Beltran and Mike Cameron to get up from the outfield grass in San Diego will ever fault Beltran for not catching such a ball. (And my goodness, the arm on Tulowitzki! He threw Reyes out on a slow bouncer like it was no big deal, and went in the hole to get Wright dead to rights on a play the umpire blew. Next year he’ll get that call.)

Extra-inning games always make sense after they’re over; when matters are final, the stops and starts somehow add up to a perfectly logical arc. At the time, though, you’re left wondering what flavor of free baseball you’re going to get. Will it be the dull grinding marathon that ends when a manager finally finds a dud in his clip of relievers? One that falls off the rails with some horrific inning that makes people do a double-take looking at the box score the next day? (7-1 … in 12?) One with lots of blown chances that leave you thinking no one deserves to win, or one of those knuckle-gnawers in which a runner on second with two outs gets you up off the couch to yell and clap?

And who’ll be the hero? You always wonder: One of the guys clicking through their lineup, or your lineup, or one of the bench guys left to be seen, leaving fewer and fewer candidates as the game rolls along? David Wright finally breaking through? Jose Reyes scampering around first and offering rapid-fire claps after a winning hit? Ramon Castro, the man brought in on the double-switch? Two batters before Endy I was struck by the symmetry of David Newhan finishing what Easley had started, a victory for the new Mets. (Nope. Too easy.) Or maybe it wouldn’t end so well. Maybe it would be Helton reminding you he’s not quite gone into that good night yet, or Matt Holliday telling you why fans in the NL Central already know his name, or Chris Iannetta bracketing Tulowitzki in a triumph for Rockie rookies.

Nope, none of the above. Easley and Endy and after all of the above, it ended so easily.

In the parlance of the pocket schedule, Monday night was a value date. Don't say there isn't truth in Mets advertising.
Five bucks for an upper deck ticket (Section 1!) bought the opportunity to watch the once, present and hopefully continuing first-place Mets easily quell the pleasantly pliant Rockies in an economical two hours and thirty-four minutes by the miserly hand of John Maine who makes more than all of us, but less than most of his peers, none of whom has matched his extravagant consistency.
Value all around on the first nonparka, practically shirtsleeve night of the season. Valentin cashed in with interest. Delgado hit the home run jackpot at last. There was outstanding outfield defense (Beltran's, Green's and, with a large enough lead to appreciate an opponent's effort, Finley's). There was Reyes running to second from first twice while Lo Duca batted. There was even a Mr. Met sighting in the red seats.
Warmth and a win. To turn Wes Westrum on his head, ohmigod, wasn't that wonderful?
This was my first night game of the year and it was good getting back in this particular groove, the one that starts smoothly with the 6:11 to Woodside and ends well with the 10:18 to Baldwin and includes the one and only Laurie. Why more Mets fans didn't take advantage of the weather and the prices I don't know, but fine with me. Does anyone remember legroom? I can't believe I'm saying this, but it was nice that the Mets didn't draw 55,000 for a change.
When we're winning and we're not freezing, everything insipid is practically charming. Tonight's unintentional entertainment was provided by two familiar sources: idiots in the row below us and the idiot box looming above left center.
The game was some 50 minutes old when the seats at our feet filled in with six or eight or ten (I lost track) college-age kids. They didn't seem all that interested in Maine's primacy or the Delgado bustout or, in the case of one young lady I wouldn't let out of the house if she were my daughter, underwear of a concealing nature. It was all about the yammering and the texting and the beer that was more expensive than the tickets. I've sat behind worse, but nobody more intriguing than one of the guys. He wore a blue Mets t-shirt whose back was blank until he or his little brother got a hold of it and made it read HERNANDEZ 17.
So? So he used white medical tape to pay his hero homage. The 17 looked close to professional, maybe something from a leftover Blue Jays minor league jersey, circa 1985, but the HERNANDEZ took on an accidental font similar to the name on your local Chinese takeout joint's menu. Picture TUCK LEI or SAM PAN, except now it's HERNANDEZ delivering your moo goo gai pan. Plus, the horizontal line in the R had peeled off, so it was more HE, followed by NANDEZ with an indecipherable emoticon separating them.
When Laurie and I weren't averting our eyes from the immodest thong girl, we bounced theories off one another as to what was the deal with HE NANDEZ. I mean, medical tape? Was somebody's gauze falling off an abrasion at home because this guy had to show his love for Mex? If Keith meant that much to him, he couldn't spring for silk-screening at the mall? It's not like he blew more than bucks on his ticket. Why not just go the Magic Marker route? And what about the missing line on the R? Did it just lose its gumption? Was it, like most bases, stolen by Jose Reyes? Is this man trying to tell us something besides he loves Keith Hernandez enough to show it but not enough to show it competently?
We could have asked him, but what fun would that be?
DiamondVision asked us several things and none of them was much fun, but none of them ever are. The quizzes are at least edging closer to baseball content than in previous campaigns. For example, nobody's asking whether Rome is 4,296, 4,298 or 150 Million miles from New York. Tonight's brainteaser was a multiple-choicer to determine Pedro Feliciano's favorite food. Turns out 85 percent of the crowd that saw fit to answer via cell phone (or 17 of the 20 people who must have participated) guessed right that he's a chicken, rice and beans man; Pedro retired his only Rockie on one pitch, so he can eat whatever he likes. I also learned recently that Billy Wagner carries six pieces of gum to the bullpen. You can win a lot of bar bets with tidbits like that, though you can probably earn a good crack in the mouth for even bringing stuff like that up in a bar.
Another bit of DV filler was recurring live coverage of the kitchen in what appeared to be the Diamond Club. There was no narration to accompany the video, just a chef preparing surprisingly mouthwatering entrees and a waiter picking them up. The message seemed to be you lucky people who chose one of the cheapest nights of the year to attend a game now have the privilege of watching your betters dine. Bon appétit!
There are 12 value dates on the schedule this season, only eight remaining. After next week, you have to wait until September 24 against the Nationals for a night of five-buck baseball. Pity. It has to be the last great bargain in Metland. Just as it hit me during Game Six last October that I was paying $150 for a seat that occasionally went for $5, I remembered Monday that I once paid 30 times as much to sit just a little to the left where I found myself six months later. Context is everything, of course, but relatively speaking, a Mets game is a Mets game. And a Mets win is such a deal.

I'll bet David Wright is in the lineup tonight. I'll bet David Wright, good health willing, will be in the lineup 158 times this year.
Would it kill Willie to sit him once in a while?
Boy is he pressing. I've never seen David look as lost as he does at present. Saturday, in particular, he seemed to be swinging at an idea of a pitch as opposed to anything he was actually thrown.
He'll pull out of it. The good ones do. When he does, lord help the pitchers who happen to be on the mound that week. Like anybody buying a five-dollar ice cream sandwich at Shea, they will pay through the nose.
But what's the harm of giving him a seat for a night? Or a day? I'm thinking Sunday. This isn't second-guessing (though I've never quite seen what's so bad about second-guessing since it might improve your next first guess). Watching David flail cluelessly on Saturday and seeing Damion Easley find his power stroke, I wondered aloud if maybe Willie should give David the day off tomorrow — now yesterday — and let Easley play third, partly to take advantage of the utilityman's momentum and keep him game-ready but mostly to take a load off David's shoulders for an afternoon.
I would have been shocked if it had happened. Willie doesn't readily rest guys, certainly not the ones under 30. And who'd want to not have David Wright in the lineup most of the time? But sometimes you're not helping yourself and you're not helping the team. So sit down, watch somebody else play, wave a towel like you're Lenny Harris. It's not as if you're going to lose your job to Damion Easley.
David won't volunteer for a day off and Willie won't initiate it. Both of them would say something to the effect of you can't sit your way out of a slump. Mr. Wright's neighbors in that fancy Flatiron co-op of his must be getting tired of hearing him take practice swings in the wee hours. I'm glad he wants to play baseball as much as he does. Once in a while he shouldn't. We don't need a Ripken per se. We need a whole club.
Though I'm highly pro-Randolph, it irked me a bit during the NLCS how the lineup remained so static even when it was clear the Mets were hitting with the donuts still attached to their bats. Granted, there wasn't much of a bench to deploy after Floyd went down and Endy went in, but a little juggling seemed in order. La Russa, of whom I'm no fan, kept finding spots for everybody and (grrr) it paid off. With Willie, it was the same eight night-in, night-out from Games Two through Seven, no shifting in the batting order, not even a hunch to play. The cumulative effect, save for the Game Four blowout, was lead weight on the offense.
This isn't October when you're going to roll your starters out there no matter what. This is April. This is a time to, if not experiment, then be flexible. To look at a 24-year-old superstar and see that he's struggling and take him aside and say “watch for a night,” and to look at a 37-year-old role player and take him aside and say “play for a night.” Easley and Newhan have had no chance and when we really need them, the rust may very well show. Same for the holdovers. Alou and Green have made themselves tough to rest, hoorah, but a little Endy here and there might make their long-term prospects (June, July, August) a lot brighter. As Delgado struggles, why not give Franco a start at first — for Franco's sake as much as Delgado's? And what's the harm of letting Lo Duca's finger and psyche heal an extra day? Castro couldn't be any hotter.
Keep 'em fresh, keep 'em sharp, keep 'em whatever you want to call it. Maybe you can't sit your way out of a slump, but you can certainly swing your way into a deeper one.

When I first heard the name “Kelly Johnson” two years ago, I snickered the stunningly puerile snicker of one who had spent too many morning hours listening to Howard Stern.

Kelly = a shade of green.

Johnson = ah, you know.

It wasn’t funny then. It’s twice as unfunny after today. There’s nothing funny about a Kelly Johnson. Or his bat.

Suffice it to say that for at least one weekend, the Braves are The Aristocrats of the National League East. They’re quite an act.

In deference to the obscene final score, I’ll forego the Cox jokes.

I was unfair to my old hometown of St. Petersburg earlier this week — turns out there's a lot more going on downtown than when I lived there, complete with core-city lofts and their attendant cafes, boutiques and what-not. Not bad for a city chiefly known not so long ago for the advanced age of its population, and stuck with the cruel nickname God's Waiting Room.
Oh, and now they have a ballclub. If you're a reader of this blog, you know that means…everything.
Yes, Jace, there are Tampa Bay Devil Rays fans, of all shapes and sizes and genders and types. Slouchy college kids with variant-color TB hats and Crawford tees. Little boys and girls decked out in obviously beloved replica gear. Fathers and mothers pointing to the field to explain a point to sons and daughters.
Honesty compels me to report that those plucky Rays fans seemed outnumbered by fans of the visiting Indians, and both teams' fans were outnumbered by empty seats. But the Devil Rays deserve to be graded on the curve when it comes to fan ardor. Witless, negligent, stingy — almost any nasty adjective you can think of fits the way Vince Naimoli and Chuck La Mar treated this franchise and city. (The way St. Petersburghers say “Naimoli,” it ought to be represented in the paper by dashes or a bracketed “expletive deleted.”) A decade's worth of standings tell you all you need to know about the acumen of whatever plan produced what you see on the field; Rays fans told me horror stories about the team's relationship with its home city, with the D-Rays bungling the few efforts to reach out so badly that it would have been better if they hadn't bothered. Considering what they've been through, those little kids proudly wearing their Kazmir and Upton tees might well be braver than I had to be when I was proclaiming my love of the Doug Flynn-era Mets to the sniggering, dirt-bike-riding Yankee fans of Setauket.
Naimoli and La Mar are gone, happily, and the Devil Rays have promise — Carl Crawford is so freaking fast I thought he'd teleported himself to second base. But turning that promise into reality? Better be patient. The Devil Rays are awfully youthful, and youthfully awful. Delmon Young works a count like he heard strike one meant you're out, and he's not the only Devil Ray to whom controlling the strike zone seems like a foreign concept. The Indians won, 4-3, but it didn't feel that close: You knew the D-Rays were going to make the kind of quietly awful little mistakes that kill teams, and they did. (And not everything can be blamed on youth: Old friend Ty Wigginton, who ought to know better, got thrown out trying to steal third with two out.)
But here's the thing: There are a lot of reasons the Devil Rays were every bit as bad up close as I'd imagined, but the obvious one turned out to be a red herring. Because the Tropicana Dome, shockingly, wasn't nearly as bad as I'd expected.
Yes, it's a dome — my pal Will and I kept shaking our heads over the fact that we were willingly leaving a perfect spring evening for air-conditioned sterility. (Though in fairness, that transition would be a relief in August.) The Trop looks horrible from the outside, like a giant spaceship designed by an alien species that's built a society around beige, and all kinds of weird on the inside. The roof is canted forward, like it's sliding off the building, and the famous catwalk rings aren't where your mind thinks they should be, giving the Trop an oddly seasick feeling. The field looks tiny amid all that concrete, the seats are uncomfortable, the uppermost rows have been covered with tarps as a toupee for irreversibly bad attendance, and the sound system may be the worst I've ever heard in a stadium. When the Rays showed one of those Get to Know the Team video features, I could understand maybe every 10th word.
But.
The dome itself is set amid remnants of industrial St. Pete — cuts for old railroad tracks and canals — and while that sounds odd, it works, giving fans natural paths across what would otherwise be featureless asphalt plains. There's a wonderful sports bar close by (Ferg's) that has a huge choice of things to eat, drink, watch or do, and was friendly instead of fratty even in the boozy, crowded hours after a depressing loss. Well, except for the drunk out-of-towner screaming vile epithets at Derek Jeter. Because I'm classy that way.
And the Trop has a suprisingly nice rotunda, wide concourses, good food and lots of choices, many beer choices at reasonable ballpark rates (i.e., merely exorbitant), friendly staffers, clean bathrooms, and even some surprises — the Mets game was playing on the far right of a trio of flat-panels just steps into the concourse from our seats. (I rejected the idea of spending my entire evening at the Trop standing in a hallway watching SNY, though by then it was obvious the game was a horror show.)
The Trop has a horrible field and stands surrounded by some surprisingly nice amenities. As the game went on, I realized that I'd had a lot of experience with the opposite — and I kept thinking about things that hadn't happened at the Trop. For instance, I hadn't picked my way across a fetid lake to pee, been exhorted to join the Dallas police while doing so, and wound up throwing a paper towel in the corner where the trash can should be. I hadn't trudged cursing up a broken escalator or been barked by an ancient, grubby usher before he resumed the sleep of decades. I hadn't been left to perch on the edge of a broken seat while some unidentifiable hideous something dripped on me. I hadn't turned my head to the side to peer out at a thin horizontal slice of field for nine innings while fearing my feet would skate out from me because the concrete was covered in some slick God knows what. I hadn't been made to feel like I should apologize to a surly employee for wanting a carbonized hot dog or a mushy pretzel delivered at a pace marginally speedier than continental drift. I hadn't had to say, “Yeah, let's drink some beers after the game. Go across the parking lot toward the highway, if he cops will let you — oh, if you hit unpaved streets with feral dogs you went the wrong way — cross the overpass, turn right, then walk a long way down that street and, um, there's a crappy hotel with a lousy bar.”
Shea Stadium has real grass, sits under the sky, and has an apple that has a certain high-school-production charm. But that's all it has over the much-maligned Tropicana Field. (And even that sky is frequently filled with scary close-ups of the silver bellies of large airplanes.) I've got countless great memories about Shea, and room for 13 months' more. But all of them have to do with the baseball I've seen there and the people I've seen that baseball with. The rest? If anything, it's an impediment to those memories. I know Shea's going away, and Citi Field won't magically make pretzel vendors nice or ushers awake. (Or our less-civilized fans any better behaved.) I won't pretend I ever had much sentiment for doomed Shea. But I think my visit to the Trop has killed the little that was left. When you're cheered by the average — “The toilet hasn't overflowed! The hot-dog lady doesn't need to be timed with a sundial! There's something besides chop shops across the street!” — you realize you've come to expect and accept the dismal.

Nice to see a little offensive pulse late in Friday night's game, but to paraphrase Jackie Robinson, a hit is not important except in the impact is has on other hits.
Met batters made no impact on Tim Hudson. He made the best lineup in the National League ineffectual and anything Mike Pelfrey did or didn't do moot. So for one night, it was meet the Moots, meet the Moots, step right up and…thanks for coming, arrive home safely.
Does the first inarguably noncompetitive loss of the season — though if Kelly Johnson doesn't make like Ordoñez and rob Reyes from one knee with the bases loaded in the fifth, it's 4-2 — bode anything serious? The Braves are in first by a half-game, they showed off some of that excellent pitching that used to be their regular-season trademark and Chipper Jones reminded us why he is a fungus.
It wasn't pleasant but it can be wiped away pretty quickly.
Oliver Perez, whose last turn in the rotation followed Jim McAndrew's, will have weather and stamina going for him, presumably. I'd mention how well he seems to do against the Braves but then I'd be forced to note how poorly he's done against just about everybody else. Let's go with he's due.
Pelfrey, I think, just needs to get comfortable. If he has to do it in New Orleans at some point, that's fine, too. He has too much talent, too much stuff and, I'm convinced, too much poise to not come along fairly quickly. Whereas Perez may never be consistent to our liking, if Pelfrey gets one excellent start under his belt, others will follow.
Also, if anything can be done to delete the smirk from Jeff Francoeur's face, let's make that happen.