What if pitchers and catchers reported to spring training -- and nobody cared?

Here in the New York metropolitan area, it's been a long and depressing winter. We here at Casa la Brilliant have had our share of tsuris, including a number of unexpected expenses, all punctuated by hot and cold running blizzards, and I'm not talking about the kind served up at the local Dairy Queen.

So with the Super Bowl safely over, and the Valentine's Day roses (for me) and cheesecake from Calandra's (for him) ensconced in their appropriate places, and the Project from Hell being finally released, and a brief tease of sixty-degree temperatures coming on Friday, it would ordinarily be time for a middle-aged woman's thoughts to turn to baseball.

Unless, of course, she is a Mets fan.

These are not exactly the best of times to be a Mets fan. We aren't like Yankee fans, who can never really enjoy their team unless they win every game and take home all the marbles every year. We're used to a certain amount of futility. But this year even the most masochistic baseball fan is going to have a hard time mustering any kind of enthusiasm for Fred 'n' Jeff Wilponzi's (™ Steve Somers) ragtag band of misfits and scrap heapers. When the best hope you can have for this year is that former Mets "Generation K" prospect Jason Isringhausen, now thirty-eight and coming off Tommy John surgery after a terrific career as a reliever, can manage to make the team and contribute, things are at a sorry pass indeed.

Carlos Beltran is insisting he can still play despite his reconstructed knee, Minaya's Folly Luis Castillo is still clogging up the bench, the ever-delusional Ollie Perez is still insisting he can contribute, and frankly, if you can get a team full of good prospects for José Reyes, I think you've got to trade him, at least until the ownership situation straightens out.

The best I'm hoping for this year is entertaining baseball played by a bunch of cast-offs and not-yets, kind of like the team was in 1982 and 1983, right before a small army of young pitchers came up from the minors and formed the nucleus of what would become a World Series-winning team. I'm hoping that the classy R.A. Dickey's fairy tale continues and that Angel Pagan continues to be -- yes, I'm going to say it -- the angel in the outfield. And I'm hoping that the Wilponzis finally realize that the game is over, the jig is up, and like Hosni Mubarak, their family legacy is not to be.

And that they don't sell the team to a famewhore like Donald Trump.

UPDATE: If nothing else, we can amuse ourselves by making "Hu's on Second" jokes, waxing nostalgic about how they just don't make baseball player names like they used to -- except for Boof Bonser, and when all else fails, we can make the obligatory Spicoli jokes about Tobi Stoner.