In a lot of ways, this was the perfect baseball game: Tight and tense early, with some intriguing twists and turns, and then a leisurely gallop away from the field. During Glavine's third-inning duel with Ryan Howard (bases loaded, two out, forces of good clinging to a 2-0 lead) I turned to Emily and declared, “Baseball is so cool!” Because whatever the outcome, how can you not love crafty Tom Glavine willing his frozen hand to wing change-up after change-up (inside, outside, up, down, a little faster, a little slower) at a monstrous young power hitter who can not only hit the ball to New Jersey but also think with the situational acumen of a 10-year veteran?
By mid-summer I'll be hard-pressed to remember Glavine's six pitches to Howard — a non-decisive at-bat in an early-season game that turned into a blowout victory. But this is the absence that leaves us mopey and downtrodden in the winter: a little confrontation that leaves you staring at the TV and trying to think along with pitcher and hitter and nodding and clapping and frowning and holding your breath and saying silly things. Even the least-interesting baseball game is usually good for a moment or two like that. If winter's good for anything, it's eluded me.
And for the record, Howard walked, forcing in a run and making the score Mets 2, Phillies 1. Which was far from the worst thing in the world, as Glavine promptly carved up the once-terrifying, now vaguely pathetic Pat Burrell to end the inning. When the pounding was over, Charlie Manuel apparently had to be restrained from punching a talk-radio host. I think it's safe to say the vultures are gathering around poor Charlie. The Phillies being the Phillies, the odds are at least even that they'll do something equal parts panicky, PR-minded and just plain dumb. (Just as long as they don't do something that might actually work, like naming Jimmy Rollins player-manager.)
While 8-1 blowouts are always welcome, it was nice just to get to see some baseball. And nicer to send the boys down to Florida, where they and we shouldn't have to worry about aging hamstrings, slippery baseballs or whether a foul ball in liquid-nitrogen conditions might shatter poor Paul Lo Duca's finger. Catchers are tough hombres: Lo Duca has a bone bruise, which means he hopes he'll play tomorrow. If my intense life of typing and riding the subway ever left me with a bone bruise, I'd probably wrap my injured hand in a quilt and shriek at anyone who got within five feet to keep their distance. Lo Duca will most likely be squatting behind the dish in Miami with his hand in the line of fire, knowing at least one foul ball is likely to hit him in the exact same place. Great quote from Lo Duca, via John Delcos's awesome LoHud Mets blog: “I wanted to go in the corner and cry.”
Speaking of Florida, I'm heading that way myself, to offer the blogger perspective at a conference on sportswriting. (Talking about blogging will likely prevent me from blogging. I believe that qualifies as ironic.) Will be on the wrong side of the state to see Soilmaster Stadium up close, but as it happens I do have tickets to Devil Rays-Indians at the Trop. Mr. Prince will do the honors until I can return with a full report on catwalks, retiring Wade Boggs's number and whether there actually are such things as Devil Rays fans.

Loge 13, a blog dedicated to “the last days of Shea” — thus a blog after my own heart as any I’ve ever read — reminds us that today is the 43rd birthday of the place we call home for the next 18 months. The impulse is to stick the requisite number of candles in a four-tiered cake, light only some of them (because a third probably came without wicks), have the frosting from one level drip onto the level beneath it and, after being careful to step around the puddles of icing that have inevitably formed, blow the whole thing out as best we can…then go wait 15 minutes to use the bathroom.

Two trips to Shea in the first week of its second-to-last season remind me as always that the gauzy notions I tote in my sentimental schlep bag never quite match the stark real-time reality of the place. It doesn’t work, it’s rarely worked, it won’t suddenly start working from a form or function standpoint. Most public buildings probably need at least one of those two to be considered a success.

To which I say so what?

It’s too late for the birthday boy to start making resolutions. Besides, it’s a ballpark. Our ballpark. There is no type of structure in the world whose architectural and logistical sins can be held it against it less. When our minds wander back over all the days and nights we’ve indulged our passion and our passion has indulged us, “what were the widths of those concourses again?” probably won’t be the first thought that springs to mind.

Maybe a new ballpark can momentarily attract the curious and entertainment-starved with glossy come-ons relating to “multiple sit-down, climate-controlled restaurants”; “numerous permanent attractions”; and some strange commodity called “enhanced comfort” — and I won’t necessarily sneeze at that stuff when it comes to be — but that’s of primary concern to daytrippers and dilettantes.

We’re Mets fans. We want the memories, the ones we’ve got, the one we’ll get. All of ours since April 17, 1964 and through the early fall of 2008 stand courtesy of Shea Stadium. That’s nothing to sneeze at either.

I was at Shea on its 30th birthday, a win against the Astros. DiamondVision commemorated the milestone with a video montage of momentous occasions set to one of the most beautiful songs our house band the Beatles ever recorded. As John Lennon, who capably filled in for Ron Hunt right around second base, put it:

And these memories lose their meaning
When I think of love as something new

My next game is Saturday.

Recently Emily decided to change the pictures around in Joshua's room, a project that began with replacing the scattering of old framed snapshots competing for space on the bookshelves with relatively current pictures of people important in his life, and continued with removing wedding pictures and oddball landscapes from the walls in favor of art with a Brooklyn or baseball theme. (Or, in the case of his poster celebrating the first-ever Cyclones game, both.)
After some mild debate, we opted to involve the kid in the important parts of the planning, which is the kind of apparently straightforward parenting decision that would turn a Park Slope blog into cyber-Fallujah inside of two days. On the one hand, it's his room, so duh. On the other hand, at four and a half Joshua is naturally still inclined to a certain amount of magical thinking — plus he has his father's death-before-dishonor mulishness and can argue like a trial lawyer on trucker speed. So we broached the subject with exquisite caution, only to find our son in World's Most Agreeable Boy mode, and even demonstrating a mildly precocious eye for composition.
And then, as we were surveying this little family miracle, Joshua calmly announced that he wanted a picture of Jose Reyes in his room. And a picture of David Wright. Reyes should be fielding, he said, and Wright should be hitting a home run. And the two pictures should be in the same frame.
We can do that, Emily and I agreed after about a tenth of a second.
Joshua's request didn't quite come out of nowhere, as you might suspect from current environs. He has no shortage of Met gear for whatever occasion might arise, is the proud owner of a Met bobblehead with his picture for a face, and likes having the origin of his baseball signed by Wright, Pedro and Beltran repeated for him. (His cousin is a Delta flight attendant who occasionally draws a Met charter. Wright, by the way, signed the ball “Joshua, see you in the Big Leagues!” David Wright rocks.) And Joshua usually sees the first inning or two of each weeknight game, with another inning or so on the radio in his room while getting ready for bed, and knows the weekend brings those wonderful things known as day games, current Build-an-Ark weather excepted.
Still, you never know what will take, so we were pretty much the proudest parents in Brooklyn after receiving our marching orders. Now the only question is how big a truck Joshua will drive through this loophole in the parental rules governing presents and requests. A picture of Reyes and Wright, with Reyes fielding and Wright hitting a home run and they're in the same frame? Coming right up, son. Commission a copy of that Madame Tussaud's wax figure? We'll look into it. Build lifesize statues of Reyes and Wright out of platinum and sapphires? Hey, that's why they invented the second mortgage.
The photos arrived last week — Reyes is airborne on the pivot, having vaulted a prone Ryan Howard, while Wright is hitting a single in Game 3 of the NLDS. (I know, he wanted a home run. Hush.) The pictures were pretty cheap. The dry-mounting, double matte and framing? Um … the pictures were pretty cheap. Did I bat an eye at the price tag? Not really. The value of helping the kid grow up true to the orange and blue? I don't need a MasterCard commercial to tell me that.

With women’s basketball having recently bounced waywardly through the news and rain pounding down on our quadrant of the country, seems as good a time as any to mention that my last Girl of Summer has left the building.

So to speak.

The New York Liberty the week before last traded Becky Hammon to the San Antonio Silver Stars. They’ve received some very tall, reportedly talented young woman in exchange. I’m deeply sorry they did.

Perhaps you’ve heard of the Liberty and maybe even Hammon. They’re in the WNBA, the ten-year-old women’s basketball league I used to follow mostly a little, occasionally a lot. I used to follow any number of teams and sports that I don’t much keep up on anymore, but this one was kind of special. From 1997 to 2002, there was an unspoken simpatico between the Liberty and the Mets. The Liberty didn’t know about it. The Mets didn’t know about it. The only ones who knew about it were Stephanie and me.

On a lark, we went to one of their games at the Garden. It was like at first sight. What was there not to like? Liberty games were bright and vibrant, lots of good-natured folks, often with families, who couldn’t afford tickets to Knicks games or didn’t buy tickets to Mets games and probably didn’t feel comfortable coming out to most games.

We liked the prices. We liked the timeout shtick when they’d bring girls and boys onto the court to play musical chairs. We liked the t-shirts with shades of blue and orange. We liked Maddie (short for Madison) the overgrown, overstuffed doggie mascot. We liked the accessibility of it all: Don our Liberty gear (I topped mine with a Mets cap), hop on a train, watch a competitive basketball game played below the rim, cheer for a team called New York with a blank slate. The Liberty brought back for me the best of what I liked about basketball as a kid, evoking my lost passions for the Reed-Frazier Knicks (going to the Garden for and caring about a sport I once loved on a par with baseball) and the Dr. J Nets (the multitoned ball of the ABA and the sensation of being in on a thing that most people weren’t).

If we didn’t become Liberty diehards, we followed the team moderately to closely. We got to know the identities of the players. I squinted mentally and saw parallel Mets where I could. The face of the franchise was Teresa Weatherspoon, always smiling, always chatting, always finding the camera. She was Al Leiter. The other Spoon — Serving Spoon to Teresa’s T-Spoon — was Sophia Witherspoon. Sophie. Sophie wore No. 13. Overshadowed by Teresa (who was, at first, overshadowed by Rebecca Lobo whose 50 adorned the souvenir jerseys of hundreds of little suburban girls who didn’t care that she was almost always injured), Sophie became our favorite. My Fonzie. A picture exists of Stephanie and me in “dueling” 13s, lovetapping one another with the long teal foam spoons they gave out one night. SPOONS STIR UP THE GARDEN, I think they said.

Sue Wicks was the calm veteran presence…Robin Ventura for sure. Vickie Johnson moved beautifully and didn’t get much press. Had to be John Olerud. Kym Hampton was strong in the middle, not a perfect Piazza allegory, but close enough. Crystal Robinson nailed three-pointers like Rey Ordoñez stopped ground balls. Tamika Whitmore, a young, bruising, powerful player who had much to learn — I could have sworn Butch Huskey had left town.

The Liberty of the late ’90s and early ’00s could have used another slugger in the middle of their lineup. Or perhaps one more good arm. Sound familiar? The Liberty were Metlike and the Mets were Libertylike in their shared habit of coming so close that we could taste it and falling just short enough to leave us emotionally drained.

The Mets had their Braves and Yankees to overcome. The Liberty had one rolled into both, the Houston Comets. There was a time when I hated the Houston Comets. The Comets were the enemy. They had that one player who you had to respect (Cynthia Cooper = Greg Maddux), that one player you couldn’t stand to look at (Sheryl Swoopes = Chipper Jones), that one thing you couldn’t do anything about (beating the Comets = going to Turner Field). The Comets won the WNBA championship every year when the league started. They always seemed to do it at the expense of the Liberty.

It was hell. It was extra hell for those of us who had all the hell we could handle from being the Mets who failed to beat the Braves and Yankees when it most severely counted. Because we got to know the Liberty as our Girls of Summer, we couldn’t just come for the foam spoons and go home. We felt for them. We wanted them to win.

In late August 1999, it looked like it might happen. Stephanie and I excitedly attended our first playoff game (my first since the Knicks and Lakers in ’73). It was against the Charlotte Sting. I could hate the Sting for a couple of nights. Sports fans can do that. The hate translated to elation. The Liberty beat Charlotte on a Sunday night. Won the series on a Monday night. We were going to the championship!

Stephanie secured tickets for Game One at MSG. Of course it was against the Comets, best of three. First here, then two in Houston. Houston was favored. Houston was always favored. Wow did I hate them. I’ll bet Swoopes’ real name was Larry.

We saw the Liberty lose for the first time in our three years of rooting for them in person. We went home unhappy. We were down 0-1 and the teams were traveling to Texas. If we couldn’t beat our bitter rivals on our own turf, what were the chances we could do anything against them in their den of horrors? (Fucking Braves…I mean Comets.)

Saturday afternoon. September 4, 1999. Four o’clock start. And we’re getting slaughtered. We were down a lot at the half. The Comets were cruising to a series sweep. I bolted to catch a train to Shea, a Saturday night game with Joe versus the Rockies. Didn’t like deserting the sinking ship and leaving Stephanie to fend for herself, but the Liberty were going to be over soon enough.

Liberty games were broadcast on WWRL then but for some reason that station hadn’t picked up the finals. There was no radio. Not much to hear, I imagined. Still, I needed closure. When Joe and I arrived at Shea, I sought out a pay phone (this was my last Sprintless summer) and called Stephanie for the bad news.

“How did the Liberty do?”

“They won!”

Poor, delusional wife of mine, I thought. She really hasn’t grasped how sports works.

“What do you mean they won?”

“They came back.”

“What? What happened?”

What happened was a furious New York rally that left the Liberty down by two with the clock rushing down to zero. Houston’s arena management, never having read how Dewey defeated Truman, released championship confetti from the rafters. It fell all over Teresa Weatherspoon as she heaved a desperation shot from beyond mid-court. A prayer, they call it in basketball.

It went in. Teresa Weatherspoon drilled a three-pointer from what had to be 60+ feet away and the Liberty won. They extended the series.
A miracle. Amazing. And it happened at Shea, home office of miracles and amazing.

No, technically, it didn’t happen at Shea, but that’s where I learned of it, that’s where Stephanie and I shared the most delirious, most delightful, most delicious sports moment we’d gone through together since the Giants won Super Bowl XXV and we cashed in big on an office pool, even if this was over the phone and after the fact. The Liberty’s eventual series loss was neither surprising nor diminishing. We had Norwood wide right. Now we had Teresa and the shot. With any luck, as 1999 pushed ahead, we’d have some Mets moments to match them.

I returned to my seat, where Joe was dutifully filling out the lineups in his scorebook. I told him the Liberty won. It didn’t pierce his consciousness. Not that much does when Joe is focused on his scorebook, but in this case, I was the one with his head somewhere else. Nobody at Shea that night probably gave much thought to the New York Liberty, but I did. That Al Leiter pitched us to a win on the strength of a Fonzie homer made it all the better — a cross-gender, pan-ball doubleheader sweep. We stayed on the Braves’ heels and we evened our series with the Comets.

That’s right, they were both we. In my mind, T-Spoon hit a home run.

Becky Hammon? She was a rookie in ’99. She’d start playing more in 2000 and eventually, as the Libs we knew retired or were traded (something that seemed untoward, but the WNBA is a professional sports league), she became the face of the franchise. I didn’t really have a parallel Met for Becky Hammon back in the day, but I guess with the teeth she flashed and the squeals she elicited she was soon enough more or less David Wright. Except the Liberty went from good to bad on Becky’s watch and we stopped paying attention because with Vickie and Sue and Kym and Rebecca and Tamika and Crystal and Sophie and T-Spoon no longer in residence at the Garden, it just wasn’t the same.

Still, as long as Becky was handling the ball and making the plays and showing up on the next generation of Liberty fans’ backs, we had a connection to those New York Liberty we, it is not farfetched to say, loved. And as long we could connect to those Liberty, we still had an active thread that connected us to the Bobby V, Mike and Al, Robin and Rey-O, Reeder and Fonzie and Oly and Benny and so on Mets who we also loved. We had one 1999 Liberty/Met still in our midst.

Now we don’t.

It's quite appropriate that Saturday afternoon's game was the 325th regular-season affair I've attended at Shea Stadium. Any game whose chronological standing ends in a multiple of 25 finishes off a sheet in The Log, my trusty steno notebook in which I've jotted down the essentials of every game to which I've ever been. I reach the bottom, I turn the page.
Just as the Mets must after losing to the cellar-dwelling Nationals.
Turn the page, fellas. Turn the page from this:
4/14/07 Sa Washington 2-5 Hernandez 5 177-148 L 6-2
I'll read my code one spare day and perhaps recall all the futility of this specific Saturday loss. Or perhaps the green won't echo after all. Fine. I'll be better off forgetting the clutchless hitting (everybody), the boneheaded fielding (Wright), the inane baserunning (Beltran), the indifferent starting pitching (El Duque) and the relentlessly criminal umpiring (Mike “Angel” Winters for both his whack-a-mole strike zone and spastic thumb) that contributed to today's 6-2 L.
Just about every element of what could go wrong in a baseball game went wrong for the Mets, which could get and keep me very down right into the teeth of tomorrow's nor'easter (can't imagine anybody will be wearing 42 around here Sunday afternoon). Remedy? Turn that damn page, figuratively and literally.
But before I do, here's some of what is not included in The Log, but some of what its chicken-scratchings may someday jog:
• The flag atop the Citi construction site blows one way while the Shea centerfield flag flies another. And neither of them have anything to do with the flags that ring the existing stadium. What's up with that? By the way, a construction site is a perfect backdrop to Shea's essentially unfinished motif. They could just leave it undone, stay at Shea and after a few years we'd probably come to view the girders and pits as remnants of Nickelodeon Extreme Baseball that we'd simply never noticed before.
• Beachballs bopped around with glee, dropped out of sight to jeers and reappeared magically the next inning. Who brings beachballs to games in April?
• Bag searchers and ticket scanners now say “Welcome to Shea,” with no discernible sign of an exclamation point. You can just feel the mandatory fan-friendly training in action. I say it fades by next homestand and is utterly gone by May.
• There's a men's room almost directly behind home plate on the highest level of the ballpark. It has maybe six urinals. The line for it after the game is longer than it would be if it had more. Why a bathroom in the middle of its largest level has the fewest plumbing fixtures possible is one of the great unsolvable mysteries of this doomed edifice. (The ladies room next to it also queued for miles, so we assume it is also inadequate to its assigned task.)
• This is actually left over from the Home Opener, but as long as we're indulging in tile talk, I was surprised to find a paper towel dispenser actually dispensing paper towels on Monday after the game. Having availed myself of its contents, I wiped my hands dry on a towel and looked to toss it into the washroom's trash can. Except the trash can had been removed and, in its place, stood a veritable Everest of used paper towels. This means somebody decided the logical thing to do with his used towel was toss it in a corner where there should have been a waste basket. The next fellow decided the same thing and, by tacit communal agreement, Mount Paper Towel burgeoned from the porcelain earth. (I couldn't pass by this erstwhile molehill without topping it off.)
• “Sweet Caroline” takes a little longer to get the crowd revved without a playoff or Home Opener atmosphere or a Met lead. But the people come around with the oh-ohs and the so-good-so-goods eventually and the point of “SC” is to engage the customers. Still a great singalong anywhere, anytime (yes, yes, Fenway, I know, I know) but it feels just a bit old suddenly, and not because it hit the charts in 1969. Mr. Mojo never rose again after '99. Armando claiming “Who Let The Dogs Out?” as his mound music post-2000 never sat quite right. There's a fine line between crafting traditions and leaving the past in favor of the present.
• Gosh 2006 was nice.
• I saw a 37 14 41 42 shirt, our FAFIF exclusive, at Shea on somebody I'd never seen before. But it wasn't a surprise because I knew CharlieH, one of our Golden Circle commenters, was going to be debuting in his and Del Unser-knowin' dad's Saturday seats — Mrs. CharlieH's Xmas present to her man. Swell guys both. I thought Charlie was crazy to have removed his jacket to show off his good taste in tees, but in the sunlight of the upper deck, temperatures were surprisingly tolerable. Likewise, the postgame transit picture was clearer than on Monday. (Maybe that was the problem today — we need Traffic and Weather to work against us if we want an optimal sports report.)
• One of my longest-running (sometimes trudging, ultimately loyal) Mets relationships picked up almost exactly where it left off in September. The last time I saw my buddy Joe, a Mets companion of seventeen, now eighteen seasons (and quirks all his own) was for a weekend loss to the Nationals. Some things never change. Joe and I are on a six-game losing streak together, causing genuine concern between the two of us that we may never witness another win side-by-side at Shea. We're back at it in a week, but the world always comes to an end when we take in a loss.
• This was the day the world didn't come to an end when we lost. Oh, I didn't enjoy the result nor how it came to pass, but I allow the Mets two losses a year. They're permitted to post a first loss of the season (that's the “get it over with already” loss that keeps me from imagining how awful it will feel to miss out on 162-0) and a first loss of my Shea season. By definition that comes early on, so I'm still in that “baseball's here!” mood, the one that permits me to shake off horrendous defeats at the hands of irritating opponents and patently crooked officials.
Watching baseball…seeing friends…sitting outside…fuckin' A.
Page turned.

The black uni tops made their first 2007 appearance Friday night. They'd been gone long enough so they had a decidedly welcome and retro feel to them. Maybe a relic of the late '90s of Piazza and Leiter and Luis Lopez, they nonetheless looked good on Julio Franco (don't you dare call him a relic) and Mike Pelfrey (he's five) and several relievers (one more effective than the other) and, if you can forgive a little projecting, the two best players to ever wear any combination of black, white, blue and orange. Led by Reyes and Wright, the Mets are back.
Back in black.
Back in first.
Too soon?
Indeed, the final 152 are often the hardest, but still, it was a losable game to the allegedly lousy Nats — what is Ronnie Belliard doing haunting the middle of our diamond? — won on a night when the Braves got flogged by the Fish. Mike and his mechanics may have been taken in by the cold that never ends, but he never committed the full Ollie and he left affairs in a manageable state for the relief firm of Feliciano, Heilman, Shoney and Wags. Julio had made several appearances this season but had forgotten to bring his batting average. No more. It's a cool (very cool, almost icy) 1.000 after breaking the 2-2 tie. Props as well to Carlos Delgado for continuing to be unstubborn and occasionally going the other way. His summer slump didn't dissipate until he discovered left field in 2006. Bunting or hitting away, I'm glad he's rediscovered it.
Jose? He just keeps getting on and coming around. How close am I to being spoiled? When he advanced to third on a wild pitch in the first I was ever so slightly disappointed because it meant he couldn't steal the base. Pretty good batch of boxscore from J.R. doing what he does anywho: 1 hit, 1 walk, 2 runs, an eventual steal, a couple of nifty grabs in the field and one annoying strikeout to prove he's human.
David? He's built of more than wax. This two-season hit streak is beginning to feel real, real, real. Two more hits for him, a well-timed steal (coordinated with a heads-up swing from Greenie) and the run that got it won. Like every Mets fan who can handle neither prosperity nor the lack of loads of it, I'd been a little nervous since D-Dub started this skein. He may have hit in 12 straight at the end of last year, but there was a fairly ineffectual postseason after and a somewhat disappointing August before and not the most convincing of road trips recently. As 24-year-old superstars with 22-game hitting streaks go, I think he may be living up to our standards again.

Tom Glavine and Jamie Moyer had never faced each other despite having 85 years, 543 wins and 7518.2 innings pitched between them. Seems incredible, but it isn't really — Moyer came up with the Cubs but only overlapped Glavine for a year and change before relocating to the AL, where he stayed until late last year. (Of course, as Jayson Stark will surely note, Glavine and Moyer are now scheduled to oppose each other in their next starts. Isn't that always the way baseball works?)
You get older, you admire different things. Brains over brawl. Guile over flash. Finesse over bull-in-the-china-shop. Tonight seemed like it would be a pitching clinic and a celebration of all of the above: Two smart old lefties who changes speeds, outthink hitters and would die on the mound before giving in.
Instead, it was kind of a mess, with the cold playing havoc with location and rhythm, leaving two smart old lefties trying to MacGyver their way out of a corner. Glavine looked like a dead man walking early, wreathed in his own breath when he wasn't scattering it with uncharacteristic shows of anger; according to the man himself, he realized he was rushing and managed to slow things down. (Can you blame him for wanting to hurry up and get the hell back in the dugout on a night better suited for yeti?) Moyer almost managed to make a win out of duct tape and toilet-paper rolls and Jimmy Rollins home runs, but was undone by his defense, his teammates' slumbering bats and the buzzsaw that is Jose Reyes 2.0.
So in the end, what you got was a study in perseverance. Which, in a way, was a lot cooler. Anyone can ooh and ahh about 96 on the black and 12-to-6 curves. An old guy finding a way to win and another old guy keeping his team in the game on a night neither would describe themselves as anywhere close to masterful? That's to be appreciated on a different level, but it ought to be appreciated nonetheless.
As for Jimmy Rollins, I tip my cap. I was proud of the Opening Day crowd for giving him both barrels (as I was proud of tonight's sparse crowd of diehards for applauding Lastings Milledge's last AB for a while), but he recovered from an enormous public humiliation to play two pretty fine games in enemy territory. By now it's well-known that the Mets and Phillies are neighbors who've barely noticed each other over 40-odd years. But it shouldn't be that way. There should be rivalry and respect and rancor between these franchises and cities and fan bases, and Rollins may have finally helped it into being. I mean, why not Philadelphia? They took Chicago and St. Louis away from us, leaving us with Atlanta. But Atlanta's too far away and their fans don't show up for playoff games. Where's the fun in that?
Of course, if Rollins continues to be the only one who comes ready to play, there won't be much point.