Messin' With The Kid

One of the things I had to do as part of the mountainous learning curves of my current job is to become versed in the jargon of oncology. Terms like RECIST, CTCAE grading, various forms of cancer classification, are now part of my daily vocabulary. I don't like having to look at the data from oncology trials, because the minute you look at the data, the 40 or 50 patients in an early trial become actual people -- people with cancer, usually advanced cancer, looking for any hope at all.

And so it was with a particular form of dread that I processed the news that former Mets catcher Gary Carter has been diagnosed with an inoperable, aggressive, stage 4 glioblastoma.

If you weren't a Mets fan in 1985, it's hard to relate to the excitement that fans had at the news that Gary Carter was coming to "our team." Frank Cashen, one of the smartest baseball guys ever to serve as general manager of a ball team, had hit upon the right formula for building a winning franchise -- grow talent from within, and anchor that young talent with solid veterans who still had a few good years ahead of them. Keith Hernandez was the first of those solid veterans, who came to the Mets in 1983 in the Great Neil Allen and Rick Ownbey Swindle. Carter was the second.

Carter was the yin to Hernandez' yang. Hernandez was smart, intense, aggressive. Carter was just as smart, just as intense, just as aggressive, but he covered it all with a smile that made you feel as if the sun had just come out on a rainy day. There isn't a player active today who plays with the same sheer joy that Gary Carter did. There was a reason they called him "Kid." You always had the sense that he'd play even if they didn't pay him.

Mike Lupica, on Carter in a play in game 6 of the 1986 World Series that is now all but forgotten in the drama of the Bill Buckner debacle:

Carter was the first one up with two outs and nobody on and the Mets about to lose the World Series to the Red Sox. This was Gary Carter, who helped make the Mets legit the way Keith Hernandez did before him, who had to keep Game 6 and that Saturday night and the World Series alive. Tough out.

This was Gary Carter, the catcher that year, already on his way to the Hall of Fame but now having gotten the stage in New York after all his years with the Montreal Expos, who was down to his last strike against Calvin Schiraldi, the Red Sox closer.

And in the quiet of the Mets clubhouse later that night, long after Saturday night had become Sunday morning, Carter repeated something he had been saying since one of the most famous baseball games ever played in the city of New York had ended.

One last reporter asked Carter what he was thinking when he stepped to the plate and he said, "I was thinking that I wasn't going to make the last out of the World Series."

It was the same thing he had said to first base coach Bill Robinson after Carter singled to left off Schiraldi and started the greatest half-inning the Mets have ever played. And in the excitement of the moment, Gary Carter might have used the kind of language we never used to hear from him in the clubhouse.

"I wasn't making the last out of the ----ing World Series," is the way Bill Robinson used to tell it.

Gary Carter has always been the nice guy, the affable guy, but that affability masked a will of steel. I hope that will of steel, and the outpouring of love, prayers, and support that have come from all quarters in the wake of this terrible news, serve him well as he deals with a therapy that is still all about burn-and-poison, because there just isn't anything else to do.

We'll be here in the stands rooting for him. Because when you're a Mets fan, you're used to having your heart broken, and our hearts are broken today. But just when you think all is lost, they pull off a miracle.

Gary Carter has already been part of one miracle when his team in 1986 managed to pull out a win no one expected them to, in the bottom of the 10th. Who knows? Maybe, just maybe, The Kid can pull off another one.

Bernie Madoff as Tyler Durden

It's becoming increasingly difficult to stretch the imagination enough to believe that the Wilpons had absolutely no knowledge of what Bernie Madoff was doing. I don't care how much people trusted Fred Wilpon, shouldn't the idea that people were only allowed to ask about their investments through the Wilpons; that they were not allowed to contact Madoff directly, set off some alarms? I mean, what the heck was this, Fight Club?

The rules, at Mr. Madoff’s request, were clearly stated in advance by the Sterling partners to investors invited into the club. Account holders were never to speak directly with Mr. Madoff or anyone at his business, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities. All communications regarding any of the accounts had to go through Sterling. Clients would receive monthly paper statements from Mr. Madoff, though the year-end tax statements were sent from Sterling.

One woman who, along with her husband, held several accounts with Mr. Madoff said she thought it was peculiar that they were told never to communicate with Mr. Madoff, but it did not stop them from wanting in.

“We never questioned the fact we weren’t allowed to contact Madoff because of our confidence in Sterling,” said the woman, who did not want to be identified as an investor with Mr. Madoff. “We invested because we trusted these two people absolutely; because they were big business and we assumed they knew what they were talking about.”

Irving H. Picard, the trustee trying to recover assets for victims of the fraud, has charged in a lawsuit that Mr. Wilpon and Mr. Katz willfully ignored repeated signs that Mr. Madoff’s enterprise was suspect. That investors were not permitted to contact Mr. Madoff is portrayed in the suit as an intentional and fairly elaborate way to erect a barrier between these individuals and him.

You have to wonder just what it takes for people to accept the "If it's too good to be true, it isn't" rule. It's easy to talk about greedy rich people in the context of the Madoff scam, but then I always go back to Loretta Weinberg, the reform-crusading New Jersey state senator who lost all of her retirement savings to Madoff through her money manager who invested it with Madoff. It might be easy to brand Weinberg as just another greedy rich asshole, but a million dollars in retirement savings accumulated because you lived frugally doesn't qualify one as rich anymore; not when the conventional wisdom is that MOST of us will need about this much in order to retire (and most of us will not have it).

After the 1987 crash, which coincided with the early years of the 401(k), people started to realize that what goes up could come down, and often does. In the decade from 2000-2010, stock returns were nearly flat, bank interest became next to nothing, and bond funds are usually considered as conservative investments. So most people saw their retirement savings barely tread water for most of the decade, and collapse during the crash of 2008. Those who stuck it out may have largely earned it back, but breaking even from 2008-2010 is hardly the "historical 10% return" that most of us were led to believe a growth-oriented asset allocation would yield.

So when you combine that reality with the "special" aura that surrounded the ability to buy into the Madoff Fight Club, it becomes easier to understand why people would want to get in on these returns. What's baffling is that they would buy into the idea that one should not look at the behind the curtain. Even in the (spoiler alert) hallucination that was Fight Club, members got to see who Tyler Durden was.

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.

The Wilpons must be made to sell -- all of it

In case you're wondering why I haven't written about the situation in Egypt, it's because it's really difficult to work 15-hour days and have enough left of your brain at the end of the day (or in the morning, for that matter) to do cogent analysis of something that isn't my area of expertise. There are any number of people, some of them right here, who can do a far better job than I can of covering a complex situation that requires more analysis than I can do at a bleary-eyed 5 AM. If you're looking for a single source of information in Blogtopia (™ Skippy), you could do worse than checking out Juan Cole, for whom the Middle East IS his area of expertise.

So go ahead, tell me I'm fiddling while Rome burns, but YOU try having 100% accountability for a project with about 30% of the control and 0% of the authority and see if YOU can handle it and then come home and talk intelligently about the future of Egypt.

What I can talk about at this ungodly hour is baseball, particularly the giant flushing sound going on at $iti Field, where the involvement of the Wilpon family in the Bernie Madoff mess becomes uglier every day:

Elyse S. Goldweber, the widow of a former employee of Wilpon’s and Katz’s corporate holding company, Sterling Equities Associates, has charged in a federal lawsuit in New York that the company, Wilpon and two other officers breached their fiduciary duties by offering employees the chance to invest their 401(k) plan with Madoff. By the time Madoff’s scam had been uncovered, about 92 percent of the 401(k) plan had been invested with his fraudulent firm, all of it lost. Goldweber had $280,420 invested in her husband’s 401(k), and it was wiped out, the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit says that Sterling officers, as overseers of the retirement plan, were required to use “care, skill, prudence and diligence” in administering it, and to diversify investments “to minimize the risk of large losses, unless under the circumstances it is clearly prudent not to do so.” But Goldweber’s lawsuit contends that the officers — two of whom, the suit noted, were certified public accountants — fell far short of honoring that obligation.

The lawsuit, which was filed last summer and covers about an eight-year period starting in 2000, cites example after example of instances in which other individuals and institutions over the years raised alarms about Madoff and his firm, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, LLC.

Moreover, the Goldweber lawsuit noted that Madoff and his wife were investors in Wilpon’s and Katz’s real estate business at the same time Sterling Equities was offering his firm as an option in the retirement plan — something the suit says was never disclosed to employees.

“These reciprocal investments, and the close personal relationship between” the Madoffs “and the Wilpons created a conflict of interest so great that investing with Madoff should never have been an option for a 401(k) participant and likely caused defendants to purposely turn a blind eye to these red flags,” the lawsuit contends.

[snip]

The lawsuit contended that Sterling officers were not only negligent, but also conflicted. Madoff was an investor with Wilpon and Katz, as was his wife, Ruth. Over the years, Madoff and his wife have put millions of dollars into various Sterling entities. The lawsuit said that according to Picard, the trustee in the Madoff case, from the end of 2002 to the end of 2006, for example, funds from Madoff’s firm were used to invest more than $2.3 million in those entities for Ruth Madoff’s personal benefit.

Major League Baseball is a kind of screwy hybrid of private enterprise and public trust. MLB has approval rights over transfers of team ownership, about where and whether clubs can relocate, and a score of other rules. The MLB has essentially a monopoly over professional baseball at the major league level as a result of its antitrust exemption, but there's also this aura of poetry and heritage that always hovers over the sport, for all that other sports seem to have eclipsed it in the public's interest.

But Bud Selig had to have been thinking during his meeting with the Wilpons recently, about the impact on The Business for a franchise in the biggest media market in the country, even the also-ran franchise, to be in this kind of financial mess. Baseball hasn't even recovered yet from the steroid scandal, and now this.

I wrote earlier this week that Fred Wilpon is looking more every day like the Hosni Mubarak of baseball, in that he refuses to leave, he insists that the Mets be HIS family legacy and that the hapless scion Jeff, whose meddling brought the club to its currently appalling state, be the heir, and that Wilpon grandchildren inherit, lo unto millenia. That is why Wilpon, backed into a corner, is making an offer any smart investor would refuse: 25% of the team, none of the profitable SNY network, and absolutely NO say into how the club is run.

Now one could argue that with Sandy Alderson in the front office, the use of the Mets as a shiny toy by a spoiled rich boy is going to be less prevalent than it was during the Omar Minaya years. But there's some question as to whether Alderson was even aware of how bad things were when he took the job, and I have some questions about whether Alderson was sent in to be Bud Selig's Trojan Horse to try to get in there, look at the books, and see just how bad the situation is.

On paper at least, there are the glimmerings of at the very least a fun little ballclub brewing in Flushing. Anthony DiComa of Mets Cetera projects an opening day lineup that looks like this:

C - Josh Thole
1B - Ike Davis
2B - Brad Emaus
SS - Jose Reyes
3B - David Wright
OF - Jason Bay
OF - Carlos Beltran
OF - Angel Pagan
Bench - Chin-lung Hu
Bench - Daniel Murphy
Bench - Scott Hairston
Bench - Willie Harris
Bench - Mike Nickeas

SP - Mike Pelfrey
SP - R.A. Dickey
SP - Jon Niese
SP - Chris Young
SP - Chris Capuano
RP - Francisco Rodriguez
RP - Bobby Parnell
RP - D.J. Carrasco
RP - Taylor Tankersley
RP - Taylor Buchholz
RP - Manny Acosta
RP - Pedro Beato

The pitching is questionable at best -- a top three that can be either brilliant or appalling, depending on which Mike Pelfrey we see, whether R.A. Dickey can repeat his success of last year, and if Jon Niese is ready for the responsibilities of a #3 starter; and a bullpen consisting of maybes (Bobby Parnell), a head case (Francisco Rodriguez), and a bunch of warm bodies.

The team is saddled with Jason Bay for another few years, but if Carlos Beltran can be traded and there's someone in AAA who can move up, you're looking at a young team that at least is going to play hard and not just go through the motions. It's at BEST a third-place team, more likely a fourth, but I'll settle for Positive Signs over the wreckage of the last few years.

But when you have an organization that invested staffers' and players' 401(k) money with a scam artist like Bernie Madoff, and that apparently ignored all signals that something wasn't quite on the up-and-up about him, what kind of free agents are ever going to want to sign with this team? I'm not a fan of assembling a team full of overpaid guys on the down side of their careers anyway, but successful clubs are a mix of young talent and proven veterans who can mentor the kids along. That's what made the Mets of the 1980's successful (until they decided to trade everyone who didn't get along with Gregg Jefferies before realizing it was Jefferies who was the problem).

The Wilpon family may be the stuff of Shakespearean tragedy at this point -- a self-made man in the person of Fred Wilpon whose fatal flaw was trusting his old friend -- et tu Bruté indeed. But the fact of the matter is that the Wilpons will forever be wearing the Scarlet M of Madoff. And it is against the interests of Major League Baseball for them to continue to own a franchise. A 25% sale isn't enough. The entire organization must change hands.

A stand-up guy in Flushing

I suppose I really should weigh in on the New York Mess -- not the storm, but the baseball organization in Flushing, which is looking more like a fitting location for part of the Wilpon empire every day. I haven't yet, mostly because I am just too damn busy trying to get a project out the door (and falling flat on another one that I just didn't have time to do, which no doubt will reflect on my annual review, but I'm not sure how much more time I can put into work when I am going full-bore seven days a week since early December anyway.

But all that aside, Fred Wilpon are starting to look like the Hosni Mubarak of New York, insisting that his family retain full control of the New York Mets in perpetuity while expecting someone else to sink a couple hundred million into an organization which was so deeply intertwined with Bernie Madoff he might as well have changed his last name to Wilpon.

But in the face of this utter clusterfuck in Flushing, there's one gleam of light in the person of an erudite 36-year-old knuckleballer who is in no way affiliated with Scott Boras and recognizes what a boon even a modest multiyear contract is for a player. Fred Wilpon could learn something from R.A. Dickey:

“I’ve played on 14 one-year contracts, none of which have been guaranteed, so when the opportunity arose to have some financial security from a financial standpoint and also feel like I was treated fairly not only by the New York Mets as an organization, but also the city, it made it very easy for me to want to return for more than just next year.

“My goal at this point is to be the best bargain in baseball for the next three years. That’s my goal. To win championships, you really have to have an altruistic approach, in that I wasn’t out to break the bank from the get-go and I know that if I want to be part of the solution here, which I do, giving some things up, so to speak, might help the collective good, and I was willing to do that for this organization and still am.’’

How I wish he was a first baseman.

If you're going to field a team that sucks for the next couple of years (at least until the Wilpons come clean on just how badly they were burned by Bernie Madoff and sell the team), at least there should be jokes. The Mets have already acquired a guy named Boof Bonser, a name that hearkens back to the Golden Age of Funny Names that gave Mets fans Choo Choo Coleman, Pumpsie Green, Marvelous Marv Throneberry and Ed Kranepool. Now they've acquired Hu -- but he's not on first, he's a shortstop:

Adding to their stockpile of middle infielders, the Mets on Monday acquired shortstop Chin-lung Hu from the Dodgers for left-handed pitcher Michael Antonini and placed Hu on the 40-man roster.

Hu, 26, hit .317 with four homers in two separate stints with Triple-A Albuquerque last season, also batting .130 in 23 at-bats for the Dodgers. Hu is a .299 career hitter over eight Minor League seasons and a .191 lifetime big league hitter in 173 at-bats spread amongst four seasons.

Can't they move him to first? At least that .191 big league average would be compensated for by obvious, if feeble, attempts at humor.

Maybe the Mets can trade Carlos Beltran and a couple of minor leaguers for Coco Crisp. After all, if you're going to be the funny names team, might as well go for the gusto.

Why do the Founding Fathers curse the Mets from beyond the grave?

As any longtime Mets fan (or Mets victim, if you prefer) knows, July 4 weekend is fraught with peril. Yesterday's game was no exception, and today's promised to be no better. Saturday's game saw the Mets facing the hapless Washington Nationals -- and Stephen Strasburg, the 6'4" hype-machine phenom.

I don't know what it is with the Mets and the Nationals. Even when the Mets are great (and this year they still only qualify as "pretty good at times"), the still can't seem to figure out one of the worst teams in baseball. They can take two out of three from the Yankees, and then lose two out of three to The Team Formerly Known As The Montreal Expos. I'd say it's a question of concentration, but yesterday saw one great infield play by David Wright, aggressive baserunning, an ability to lay off enough Stephen Strasburg fastballs to make the young phenom look like Nuke Laloosh after five innings, scratching out a few runs on almost no hits, a great outing by the crafty pickup-off-the-scrap-heap R.A. Dickey, and what should have been a satisfying 5-3 win.

Until Frankie Rodriguez came to the mound in the 9th.

I remember when there was such a thing as a closer. I remember when Jesse Orosco was good enough that if he came out, you could turn the game off and go get dinner. I remember when Randy Myers would come out and you could turn the game off and go to bed, confident that the game was in good hands. Those days are long gone. It all started with "Heart Attack Johnny" Franco, and it's been downhill ever since.

They call him "K-Rod", as if giving him a moniker similar to the third baseman in the Bronx will somehow turn him into a similar kind of machine. But with now five heartbreaking blown saves this year, one wonders how anyone could think he's a stopper, and where one can find the factory that produced Mariano Rivera -- the real stopper across town who at 40 shows no signs that he's ready to relinquish the role.

It must be something about 4th of July weekend. I can hardly bear to watch today.

But of course I have to, because today is the fourteenth anniversary of the greatest, looniest, craziest Mets game ever played. And remember, this is the team that took sixteen innings to take the pennant against the Houston Astros and Bob Knepper in 1986 and went on to take the World Series the day after Bill Buckner entered the same Hall Of No Fame as Ralph Branca. It was The Infamous July 4 Game Against Atlanta.

Mr. Brilliant and I had gone into the city for the Macy's fireworks, and then to get something to eat with friends. We came home, watched a few extra innings, and fell asleep, only to wake up around 3 AM to hear broadcaster Steve Zabriskie say, "If you're just tuning in now, write in and tell us why." Of course we stayed up to watch the rest of it, and sure enough, there were fireworks after the game ended. At 4:00 AM.

But what I remember most about that game is this, described brilliantly last year by Chris Jaffe, who called that game "MLB's greatest game ever":

In the 17th inning, home plate umpire Terry Tata ejected Met star Darryl Strawberry and manager Davey Johnson for arguing a called third strike. When asked about it after the game, Tata responded with the words later engraved at the Tomb of the Unknown Umpire: "At three o'clock in the morning, there are no bad calls."

Next inning, a light appeared at the end of the tunnel. The Mets capitalized on Brave reliever Rick Camp's throwing a would-be double play ball into the outfield, and scored the go-ahead run for an 11-10 lead.

Atlanta had the bottom of their order due up. The hitters looked as weary as they must have felt. In a handful of pitches, the first two batters each feebly grounded out. At 3:30 a.m, the Braves were down to their last man; not only was it the pitcher's slot in the order, but they had no more position players left to pinch hit.

Thus Rick Camp strode to the plate, representing Atlanta's last and least hope. Even for a pitcher, he was never much of a hitter in his decade-long career. A few years earlier he'd gone 1-for-41 on the season. Now a reliever, he rarely even hit. This would be his eighth plate appearance on the year, and he hadn't had a hit all season. As he faced Tom Gormon at 3:30 a.m. on what was now July 5, 1985, his lifetime batting average was .060.

Gorman, now in his sixth inning of work, saw no need to mess around with Camp. He quickly got two quick strikes on the hapless "hitter." Brave fans still in attendance—and one truly had to be a fan to stay in attendance this late through all that rain and time—could at least console themselves that it had been a hard fought battle, even if Atlanta was doomed before the better team.

Ah, but here is where the game became something for the ages. Part of the appeal of sports is that you never know what will happen next. What has just happened and what ought to happen merely serve as indicators for what could and should happen, not what will. The next moment was so ridiculous, that it defied all logic and a damn good chunk of all illogic. An ape on a typewriter would have a better chance typing out the complete works of William Shakespeare by sheer happenstance than a repetition of this at-bat.

When Gorman threw his third pitch, Camp went for broke on the 0-2, two-out offering and took a mighty swing. Crack! He made contact, and the ball floated out past the infield, into the outfield, beyond the wall and to the stunned horror of the Mets, landed in the bullpen for a game-tying home run. The Met outfielder in pursuit was so shocked he fell to his knees and grabbed his head with his hands. The fans were ecstatic, as well they should be, for if any fans deserved to see something great, it was the small band still in the stadium. Suffice it to say, it was not just Camp's biggest career home run, but it was his only one. The game went on, tied 11-11.

You know the Braves were in trouble when Camp left the dugout to pitch the 19th inning. Fresh from his first and last homer, he had an unstoppably huge grin on his face. Upshot: he was not in the best frame of mind to pitch. In the space of three singles, a double, and two intentional walks, the Mets had a 16-11 lead, putting the game away.

Or was it out of reach? As difficult as it might be to top a five-run lead in the 19th inning, that would be nothing compared to what happened in Atlanta's previous turn at the bat. The Mets weren't leaving anything to chance, putting in star starter Ron Darling to pitch.

By all rights, it should've been an easy 1-2-3 inning. Two of the first three batters made simple outs. The inning stayed alive because Keith Hernandez, normally a superlative fielder, made an error to put a man on. With two outs, Atlanta went into its surreal clutch mode: two straight walks loaded the bases, and a single scored two runs. 16-13.

Not only that, but incredibly the tying run came to the plate. Again. Surely enough—you could not script it any better—the batter was the very last man on planet Earth the Mets would want to see represent the tying run with two outs in this Twilight Zone of a game. That's right, up there stood the god himself: the man, the myth, the legend, Rick Camp, only now he stood tall with a whopping .065 career batting average. Though the rain had long since stopped, I like to think a dramatic thunderclap occurred when he stood in the batter's box and faced Darling.

Just like last time, Camp fell behind quickly, and he stared down the barrel of a 1-2 count. At 3:55 a.m., Camp was in a perfect position to certify his position as the all-time grand master of the fourth hour of the morning, game-tying homer.

Darling threw his pitch and Camp swung. Somehow, someway, the ball miraculously sneaked past the uber-fearsome batter. Strike three. Game over. Camp, the most disappointed hitter since Mudville cut Casey, slammed down his bat on the plate in frustration. One can only assume in his previous 168 at-bats he had never been nearly so upset by any of the 83 earlier times he'd fanned.

The fans weren't disappointed. How could they be after witnessing a game like that? Even the players in the Brave dugout stood and applauded as the game ended.

However, many others would soon be very upset. You see, like all games scheduled for the Fourth of July, this one advertised a fireworks display. And sure, even though the sky was beginning to lighten, the Braves began exploding their picturesque bombs promptly at 4:01 a.m. The noise woke up many in the neighborhood, causing many frightened souls to call the police, claiming Libya was bombing Atlanta!

In his book "If at First", Keith Hernandez described how the next day, Tom Gorman (I wrote about this in 2006 and erroneously said it was Terry Leach) received a call in his hotel room from a caller who simply said, "Rick Camp? You gotta be shitting me!" -- and promptly hung up. And the player Jaffe refers to was Danny Heep, who last time I saw him at the closing of Shea Stadium looked like he could still play.

July 4. Hot dogs. Baseball. Everything that makes America great. Except that these days, it doesn't feel so great. And watching the Mets reminds us that no matter how well you think you're doing, utter futility is just around the corner.

The Sunday "Awwwwww......."

If this doesn't make you go all blubby, nothing will:

If you thought my sons, especially 11-year-old Gabriel, were excited before, the confirmation ratcheted up the tension. In fact, among local baseball lovers of a certain age — a very wide range as far as I can tell — Mr. Bay’s move here was more thrilling than when Timothy F. Geithner, also a Larchmont resident, was selected by President Obama to become his Treasury secretary.

Gabriel and his friends went into high gear. Every time they passed Mr. Bay’s house, they sought a glimpse of him. Once there was a near miss: they saw him driving off. A friend of Gabriel’s suggested bringing brownies as a welcome present. They also wondered whether Mr. Bay’s two children would play in Little League, and they were not discouraged when they found out he has two little girls. Maybe he would come to one of their games and give hitting tips!

The possibilities seemed endless.

And as time passed, the buzz grew. At dinner parties, adults argued about which house was Mr. Bay’s. (“It’s the green one near the library.” “No, it’s the one with all the windows.”) The village seemed more speckled with Mets shirts than in years past.

For his part, Gabriel decided to write Mr. Bay a letter and wrap it around a baseball. I quote in part: “I am a huge Mets fan (like die-hard even in the years when they weren’t so good!) Here is a baseball. Can you sign it and return it to your mailbox this week between 2:25 and 3:15 (so I can retrieve it).” He was going to put it in the Bays’ mailbox, but it was locked, so he stuck the letter and baseball between boards in their white picket fence.

I found something sweetly old-fashioned about all this. Gabriel wrote the note without any parental interference. He and his friends could walk past the home of a player on their favorite team, and it wasn’t a fancy mansion behind security gates. With the various scandals and multimillion-dollar salaries that sour many people on professional sports, it was redeeming to see their enthusiasm and hopes.

Gabriel went back to Mr. Bay’s house the day after he left the ball in the fence. It was gone. I assumed it had either been taken by someone else or simply tossed out.

The following day he checked again. This time he was wearing his Mets T-shirt with “Bay” on the back and No. 44. Again, no ball. I was rapidly losing interest and figured this would be another one of life’s sad little lessons.

On the third day he and a friend went by — and the ball was in the fence! Signed! Gabriel was overjoyed, and his friend immediately asked if he had another paper and pen, to leave his own message.

“This is the greatest day of my life,” Gabriel told my husband.

I’m sorry, Mr. Bay, if your fence will now look like the Western Wall in Jerusalem, where people leave notes to God. But thank you for answering a little boy’s prayers. And welcome to the neighborhood.

That, my friends, almost makes up for yesterday's 10-0 shellacking by the loathsome Phillies.

CeleBloggers

Unless you're enough of a geek to pay attention to the sidebars, which are only marginally less cluttered than my abode, you've probably missed a new blogroll category, CeleBloggers. Ordinarily I'm not one to link to blogs written by Famous People unless there's a good reason to do so, or unless their names are Sam Seder and Marc Maron, whose work we have adored lo these last five years.

But over the weekend I posted links to blogs by Roger Ebert and Lost's Jorge Garcia (Hurley). Ebert was a no-brainer. I wrote movie reviews for seven years and then took up blogging; Ebert has been writing movie reviews since seemingly the dawn of time, and then took up blogging -- and already he's better at it than I ever will be. Garcia was a whimsy pick, his blog being, well, Hurley-esque. And there's something just weird about a guy who plays a character who was marooned on an island -- twice -- in plane crashes (one seemingly deliberate) being pulled aside at the airport for additional security screening.

But tonight we add another CeleBlogger. I was considering reviving the "Brilliant at Baseball" box for the New York Mets, but after Mike Pelfrey fell off the mound for no reason last night, the Mets crawled back into a tie, Pedro Feliciano balked in what turned out to be the winning run and two ex-Mets, pitching far better for San Diego than they did for the Mets, proceeded to shut the Mets down for three innings, I just don't have the heart to do it. And that's not even mentioning the cat. So for now, we will just tuck Baseball Nerd, a.k.a. Mr. Keith Olbermann, away to knock back a few with Rog 'n' "Hurley". Call me a fair weather Mets fan if you must, but there's only so many times you can go through this.

In other words, it's a ballpark built by Dr. Victor Frankenstein

In the New York Times today, Ken Belson and Richard Sandomir try to make us forget that in just about a month, the Mets, Johan Santana's sore elbow, and Mike Pelfrey's devastated finances (he got caught up in the Stanford Financial disaster), will begin playing baseball in a park named for a bank that's only hanging on by its fingernails thanks to the American taxpayers:

The Mets’ new park, which will open its doors for a Georgetown-St. John’s baseball game March 29, is far more intimate than Shea and corrects some of Shea’s worst faults.

Citi Field will hold about 42,000 fans, 15,000 fewer than Shea. The park is enclosed and many seats wrap around the outfield, so it feels much cozier than Shea’s open-ended bowl, which favored watching football.

During an extensive tour of Citi Field on Tuesday, Jeff Wilpon, the team’s chief operating officer, spoke in the Acela Club, a restaurant in left field that will have 550 seats, table service, a bar and wine cabinets for frequent patrons.

“There’s all this light and air, and then you’re looking back at the field,” Wilpon said. “We want to make people feel they’re in a living room.”

A really, really, really EXPENSIVE living room. (So why not just stay home and watch it in your OWN living room?)

Citi Field has many nooks and crannies that are nothing like Shea’s tired symmetry.

To hold the melted butter?

The grandstand that hangs over right field, for instance, was inspired by the old Tiger Stadium, which Wilpon visited with his grandparents as a child.

To add to that "Frankenstadium" feel.

Citi Field’s exterior is a splendid architectural response to the dullness of Shea, while the inner bowl is muted. Shea’s candy-colored plastic seats are gone (along with generations of chipped paint on the handrails) in favor of dark green seats everywhere.

“Dark green is the color of a classic ballpark,” said Dave Howard, the team’s executive vice president for business operations, as he stood ankle deep in snow. “And we thought the other team in town would use blue.”

I think perhaps "bowl" is an unfortunate word to use to describe a home for the Mets, with its echoes of cleaning a commode.

And then the article quotes team owner Fred Wilpon on what the reality is about professional baseball today:

Everything has a new name, as well. There’s the Ebbets Club, the Delta Sky360 Club and the Caesars Club. Seaver, Hodges and Stengel have their names on three of the five party suites. The name game is not done, either.

“In this economy, you don’t turn down sponsors,” Wilpon said. “Anyone who’s willing to pay. ...”

Even if it's a zombie bank eating up taxpayer money that won the naming rights to the place based on bogus accounting.

Shea Stadium was famous for its various "ethnic nights." Sounds like Wilpon has his own vision of "Negro Day" in mind:

Wilpon said the team had not decided who would throw out the first pitch on opening day April 13. But he said it would be great if President Obama did it on Jackie Robinson Day two nights later.

This puff piece sounds like nothing so much as the franchisee of a new Bahama Breeze waxing rhapsodic about his new "Caribbean-inspired" restaurant that has absolutely nothing to do with any kind of recognizable Caribbean food.

Manna from Snark Heaven

If you live in the New York area, you know how much Yiddish and its bastardized relative, Yinglish, has pervaded the local vernacular. From a bagel with a schmear to Eliot Spitzer's chutzpah to shlepping bags home from Zabar's, you don't have to be Jewish in New York to know at least a little Yiddish.

But now, the best thing ever to happen to the New York/Yiddish connection has happened.

Actual headline from MLB.com:


Three-way deal could send Putz to Mets


If you're like me, your first thought is "Isn't George W. Bush too old to play baseball, even for the Mets?" But then your second thought has to be, what on earth has Seattle closer J.J. Putz done to deserve becoming joke fodder for the New York sports press if he doesn't produce? Especially since Endy Chavez was part of the deal and now the Mets have some serious problems in the outfield.

But Opening Day is still 3-1/2 months away, and for now we can comfort ourselves with giggling about how a real Putz is going to be playing for the Mets.

First Question: Why isn't he called "F-Rod"?

Why "K-Rod"? And what's the catch? How on earth did the Mets land someone who on paper looks like a real closer? And why wasn't there that much interest in him? When my mind is troubled about All Moves Mets, I find myself going to the Grand Oracle of Baseball, Mike Lupica, who can set my mind at ease if anyone can:

The Mets make a great deal here, by the way, getting Rodriguez on a three-year deal, for what averages out to be about $12 million a year. They say that Frankie Rodriguez's velocity has gone down. Right. It didn't keep him from getting 62 saves on a team that was supposed to go to the World Series this year until bad things happened to Rodriguez and the Angels in the first round against the Red Sox.

Of course something could happen to Rodriguez, because something can always go wrong with a pitcher's arm. But Rodriguez is 26 years old today and will be 27 when next season starts and you tell me how many top-of-the-line closers are out there who are this young and this good, even if he does have a whole lot of miles on him for a kid. You tell me how many closers like this ever came on the market at this age.

Now they have to hope that Rodriguez does something they want Johan Santana, another Venezuelan, to do, something Pedro Martinez didn't really do and Billy Wagner sure didn't do: They want him to close out a big contract the way he closes out baseball games. Pedro was a shell of himself by the end of his contract with the Mets and Wagner probably won't be pitching at all. They want it to be different three years from now with the kid known as K-Rod. They want him to be still saving games in New York and want very much for him to have gotten the last out of the World Series.

You can look at it this way: If Frankie Rodriguez is the Mets closer in the 2006 National League Championship Series, the Mets go all the way to the World Series. And they hang on in 2008 and they might have won the National League East going away instead of watching as their bullpen, without Wagner, a shot case by then, gone, hand the division and the National League season over to a team, the Phillies, that would end up winning it all.

Well, let's not get ahead of ourselves here. We all know what statements like "If the Mets get [blank], they go to the World series" mean, especially as long as Jimmy Rollins is playing baseball. But I'm a Mets fan after all, which means I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. So why was a closer this young so available without a fight?

Not with a bang, but with a whimper

You sort of knew it would turn out this way. It seemed inevitable that Shea Stadium, the dump in Queens with the worst bathrooms in Major League Baseball, no legroom whatsoever in the upper deck boxes, lousy food, and a history that contains more bad memories than good ones, wouldn't be able to go out in a blaze of glory. Not for Shea any late-inning theatrics, its 2008 denizens managing to live another day and send the aging Happy Warrior, Pedro Martinez, out tomorrow in a one-game, live-or-die playoff against Milwaukee, hoping against hope that Petey had just one more big game in his tired old arm. Because for every Bill Buckner in this stadium, there are a hundred Kirk Gibsons, and you just felt that it wasn't in the cards for Scott Schoenweis to somehow manage to redeem his season by getting guys out today.

Not even when Endy Chavez made that great catch in left field that reminded you of 2006, another game with Ollie Perez on the mound when Endy could make you believe that all wasn't lost, did you think the Mets would pull it out today, because that great catch meant that the Marlins were going deep, and that sooner or later, a ball off a Florida Marlins bat was going to go over that left-field fence.

Even the Monster Man himself, Carlos Delgado, who despite a miserable first half, managed to hit 38 home runs and 115 runs batted in, couldn't find the sweet spot that would allow him to hit the magic 40 home run total and carry this fragile team on his shoulders into the postseason.

It was an ugly loss, made uglier by the fact that it was a guy with a literally ugly name, Dan Uggla, who hammered the final nail into the Mets' coffin today.

And so Shea Stadium, a hideous orange-and-blue monster that has cradled luminaries from Casey Stengel to Willie Mays to the Pope to the Beatles to Ryan, Seaver and Koosman, to Doc, Darryl, Keith, and Ron, to the Subway Series of 2000 and Roger Clemens' 'roid rage at Mike Piezza in its ugly arms, goes to its eternal rest with its last memory being that of yet another Mets choke with seventeen games to go in the regular season.

In 1964, Shea rose next to the site of the 1964-65 World's Fair, an homage to American corporate know-how, in which companies like Ford and General Motors and General Electric and Travelers' Insurance showed us visions of a utopian future, made better by technologies developed by good old American know-how in good old American corporations.

Today little stands but the old New York State pavilion, a Jetsons-like relic fallen into disrepair like the Statue of Liberty at the end of Planet of the Apes, and the Unisphere. Shea Stadium was a relic of that kind of mid-20th century optimism; the kind of optimism embodied by the gonzo philosopher/manager, Casey Stengel, who never failed to talk up his team of misfits and has-beens.

And so, in a few weeks, Shea Stadium will be demolished, its seats and other souvenirs sold off to die-hard fans who will no doubt find that their seats just aren't the same without Jane Jarvis at the Hammond Organ. And next year, in the only piece of good news to come out of today, Jerry Manuel will be back, with the contract he's deserved throughout the second half, because no one would have been able to do anything with this bullpen. And he will manage his team in an ersatz hybrid of the Polo Grounds and Ebbets Field, a ballpark whose name is a South Park joke because the Wilpons would rather have the money from a teetering banking empire than the goodwill of calling the place "Jackie Robinson Field." And the Mets will play 162 games in this showplace where only the wealthy can go.

The rest of us will watch at home...where we can change the channel to spare ourselves the heartbreak of being a Mets fan.

The Lion in Winter

No, I'm not talking about John McCain, I'm talking about Carlos Delgado. After all, if Rachel Maddow has to be talked off the ledge, it's time to turn to the spiritual life, which as anyone who's seen Bull Durham knows, is baseball.

I've long had a soft spot for Carlos Delgado, largely because of his political courage and his history of humanitarian work and activism for peace. It was no small thing in 2004 when, as a member of the Toronto Blue Jays, he stayed in the dugout during the playing of God Bless America during the seventh inning stretch in a July game against the Yankees. You could criticize it as an empty, unnecessarily inflammatory gesture -- the kind of gesture that Democratic politicians don't dare to make, lest Chris Matthews and Charlie Gibson say mean things. But Delgado simply stated what has now become a fairly mainstream view:

"It's a very terrible thing that happened on September 11. It's (also) a terrible thing that happened in Afghanistan and Iraq. I just feel so sad for the families that lost relatives and loved ones in the war. But I think it's the stupidest war ever. Who are you fighting against? You're just getting ambushed now. We have more people dead now, after the war, than during the war. You've been looking for weapons of mass destruction. Where are they at? You've been looking for over a year. Can't find them. I don't support that. I don't support what they do. I think it's just stupid."

Today, outside of those who think they're going to get a chance to nail Sarah Palin and have decided to support the Endless War agenda of John McCain, this is hardly a controversial view at this point. We now know that nothing has been done in terms of actual national security, but a great deal has done to make the world less stable. And this baseball player knew it in 2004.

Delgado doesn't just talk the talk, though, he also walks the walk. He took an active role in the protests against the use of Vieques, P.R. for U.S. bombing target practice in 2003. He brings toys to hospitalized children in his Puerto Rico hometown on Three Kings Day every year. He provided videoconferencing equipment to his hometown's hospital so it could communicate with doctors in Boston. He's been awarded, in 2006, the Roberto Clemente Award for exemplifying humanitarianism and sportsmanship. And oh, yes -- having made his point, he now stands for the singing of "God Bless America."

Here's Delgado teaching a class on "Mental Preparation for Athletes" in Santurce, Puerto Rico on November 8, 2007:

And did I mention that he's also gorgeous?

Earlier this season, it was easy to hate Carlos Delgado. As his batting average hovered around the .200 mark, and the lackluster Mets under the laconic Willie Randolph looked to be sinking slowly and painfully in the National League East, it was easy to figure that Delgado was done; that at age 36, with the injuries and the slow bat speed and the attitude, it was time to cut ties with Delgado as quickly as possible and look towards the future.

That was then.

This is now.

Under interim manager Jerry Manuel (who has, in my opinion, done the kind of work with this team that warrants at least a 2-year contract to stay on), Delgado has looked like the Delgado of old. He's raised his average to an incredibly productive .266, with 35 home runs and 103 runs batted in -- extraordinary statistics when you take into account his dismal first-half production. Whenever you see the Mets dig in their heels and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat -- something they just did not do in the first few months of the season, Delgado is right there. Last night, with Ollie Perez looking like the Pittsburgh Ollie Perez instead of the New York Ollie Perez, Delgado smacked two home runs to help the Mets to a 10-8 win.

Now instead of the boos that met him earlier in the season, Delgado comes to the plate to chants of "MVP! MVP!" With Billy Wagner out for the season, and perhaps for his career, the role of "closer" may not be filled from the Mets' always-suspect bullpen, but from the aging first baseman with the social conscience.

And so Willie is done

In the wee hours of this morning, the Mets stopped playing Henry VIII, waiting for the swordsman to arrive from Calais, and fired Willie Randolph.

Like this is going to make one damn bit of difference.

Mets announcer and former #2 starter during the Glory Days Ron Darling had some thoughts last week about why this team is SO godawful:

“We’re back to the days where 35 is old again,” Darling said. “Except for the last 10 years, when a player reached his mid-30s, he was done, he was old. And old players play like horse-[bleep]. That’s the tradition of the game for the last 50 years.”

I'm sorry to see Willie go, because I don't think this team's problems are his fault. I was happy to see the Mets be the first New York team to hire a black manager, and I would hate to think that the next manager may be just another old white retread who's knocked around the majors for decades. While I got tired of listening to Willie's platitudes too, he is a classy guy and he deserves a better team than the Mets organization gave him to manage. But it's an unfortunate reality of baseball that the manager gets too much glory when teams win, and too much blame when they don't.

Those of us who have been following the Team in the Toilet (I mean Flushing) for decades remember the likes of George Foster and Vince Coleman and Eddie Murray -- aging stars who were brought in during Times of Mets Suckitude in an attempt to get something going. I wonder just how Fred Wilpon, who in theory was around when they brought in Frank Cashen, who quietly stocked the organization's minor league system with young pitching and young players like Darryl Strawberry and Wally Backman and Lenny Dykstra and ignored the yowling of the New York sports press until he could display these prizes for all the world to see, could possibly stand by while Omar Minaya stocked this team with retreads and scrap heap reclamation projects. Of course I don't believe for one minute that they stood by, I think they DEMANDED players who would "win now" -- players like Pedro Martinez and Moises Alou -- proven veterans who were good, solid players but on the down side of their careers.

The problem with "Win Now" as an organizational philosophy is that you end up with this -- a team with too many old, big names, and not enough young talent -- and no guarantees. This team was built to win now, but now was 2006, and they came in just shy of the goal. Now how much of this is Omar Minaya's fault and now much is the Wilpons, only those who were flies on the walls in the organizational meetings know for certain.

But this much IS for certain: the departure of Willie Randolph isn't going to make one damn bit of difference. Oh, this team will win a few games in a row now, like they did in Anaheim last night. But that won't change the reality that Carlos Delgado is essentially done, and Luis Castillo has no legs left, and Ryan Church may never be the same and it's questionable if someone who had two concussions in a month should even be playing. It won't solve the mystery that is Carlos Beltran and it won't magically create a left fielder to replace the ancient and always-on-the-DL Moises Alou. The bench is adequate, but Damion Easley can't play a half-dozen field positions at the same time, and even HE's 38. Endy Chavez isn't an everyday player, and Fernando Tatis was in AAA a month ago.

The reality is that there's no patching this team. There's no late-season comeback and triumphant return to the playoffs for this bunch of gimpy, if valiant, old warriors, a brilliant but mystefying young shortstop, a few young pitchers, and David Wright. So it's time to close the curtain on 2007 and look to the future. And it it means you have to field a AAA team around Wright, José Reyes, John Maine and Mike Pelfrey, so be it. Castillo, Delgado, and Alou are, I think gone after this season anyway. So are Pedro Martinez and Orlando Hernandez, if the latter comes off the DL. That potentially makes the team younger right there.

Metsgrrl has a list of 10 things she wants to see the Mets do right now.

I would add the following:

1) If you're going to fire Omar Minaya, hire Ron Darling to be the General Manager of this team. This idea comes from Mr. Brilliant, and I think it's a good one. Darling is an educated guy who's been watching this team for over twenty years (yikes). He's become a terrific announcer, not because he's such a great schmoozer, but because he clearly knows this game inside and out. He's a legacy of the Glory Years and he'd be embraced by a fan base that's pretty disgusted right about now. The Wilpons understand the Power of 1986, or they wouldn't have kept Howard Johnson as one of only two of Willie Randolph's staff to keep their jobs.

2) Start. Trading. Now. Start with the Yankees, who are in desperate need of starting pitching, with Chien-Ming Wang on the DL. Forget the crosstown rivalry. The Yankees may yet catch up, but the Mets have to look ahead. Swallow your pride and offer up Pedro Martinez (who's still a reasonably solid, smart, if fragile pitcher) and Oliver Perez (who's gone after this year anyway) for, say, four or five really solid, nearly-major-league-ready prospects. The Yankees are always a "win now" team, and this trade gives them two things -- a young pitcher that they can keep in the fold for a long time with enough money, and another old Red Sox player that they can use to taunt Boston down the stretch.

Assume that the nucleus of the Future Mets is David Wright, José Reyes, John Maine, and Mike Pelfrey. EVERYONE else is on the block. A team needs a closer? Billy Wagner can still throw 96 miles an hour and probably needs a change of scene right about now. You want a marquee center fielder? How many top-of-the-line prospects will you give us for Carlos Beltran? EVERYONE.

Yes, the Mets will suck royally for a year or two. But I'm always reminded of Frank Cashen taking Keith Hernandez down to Tidewater when Hernandez was so miserable after being traded to the Mets, to show him what was sprouting down there -- kids named Gooden and Darling and Fernandez and Terrell and Dykstra and Backman.

"Win Now" only works if you're the Yankees and have unlimited money and a seemingly unlimited ability to strongarm other teams into giving up their players for a song to plug holes in your lineup. The Mets aren't that team, and God knows this team is never, ever, ever going to "win now" as currently configured.

Wouldn't this just be, well, just so very METS?

Some of you outside the Noo Yawk area may not be aware of the new stadium being built for the New York Mets to replace the aging but somehow charming dump that is Shea Stadium. The new stadium, like the new Yankee Stadium on the other side of town, takes elements from parks that preceded it; from both Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds.

This computer-generated flyby shows you what it's going to look like:

I guess they're going to have to go back to this version of the theme song, since the one currently used for Mets radio broadcasts mentions Shea Stadium, though there's something kind of sad about a theme song that talks about how the Mets are really socking the ball when Carlos Beltran is trying to bunt for a base hit and scrap-heap pickup Fernando Tatis is looking like Ted Williams by comparison to the rest of this sorry-ass team.

It would have been nice if the Wilpons had been willing to name the new stadium after Jackie Robinson, though they did deign to create the "Jackie Robinson Rotunda", wherein you can think about the man who sucked up the hate of white baseball fans to pave the way for Barry Bonds, and as far as I'm concerned, gave his health for baseball. But the lure of easy naming dollars was too strong, and Citigroup won the bid. And so the new park is going to be called Citi Field.

As if it weren't bad enough, and yet strangely fitting, that the Mets are going to be playing in a multimillion dollar, state of the art ballpark that is an unwitting South Park joke, now it looks like Citi Field may yet, before it's all over, be the second coming of Enron Field:

In the latest campaign to save its ailing self, Citi plans on ditching more than $400 billion of so-called legacy assets over the next few years, eventually cutting up to $500 billion off its books. Investors are still in the dark about what specific assets will be tossed, but Citi hinted most of the slimming will take place in the consumer banking and securities divisions, as well as running off real estate assets, which the banking industry has become particularly conscious of lately.

[snip]

One question yet to be answered is who on earth it plans on selling these assets to. While the two-to-three-year timeframe gives Citigroup room to let the market ease its nerves, the thought of selling nearly half a trillion dollars of assets in today's market at anything less than fire-sale prices is laughable at best.

At any rate, Citigroup will shrink, banks will continue their uphill battle, and the troubled real estate market will give the banking industry more than enough trouble to chew on in the coming years. The saga continues.

So given how the Mets are playing and the recent front office drama involving Willie Randolph, perhaps a giant megacorporation being sold off piecemeal really IS a more fitting testament to this team than is a man of courage, guts, and class -- despite last nights bench-player win.

The Mets and the Achievement Which We Dare Not Speak Its Name

So last night a Mets pickup off the scrap heap, a former team draft pick named Nelson Figueroa, who was released by the Seattle Mariners last year after spring training and ended up playing in Mexico and Taiwan all year, pitched 4-1/3 perfect innings before surrendering a walk in the fifth.

The Mets are now 48 years old, and to this day, no Mets pitcher has ever thrown a no-hitter.

At least not while with the Mets.

Nolan Ryan was traded for Jim Fucking Fregosi in 1971 and went on to throw two no-hitters in 1973, and one each in 1974, 1975, 1981, 1990, and 1991.

Tom Seaver was traded away in 1977 and threw a no-hitter the next year.

Mike "Scuffy" Scott was traded away in 1982 and threw one in 1986.

Dwight Gooden threw one for the Fucking Yankees (/Gilliard) in 1996, two years after leaving the Mets in 1994.

David Cone left the Mets after five years in 1992 and threw one for the Fucking Yankees seven years after that in 1999.

Hideo Fucking NOMO even threw one in 2001, after leaving the Mets after one year in 1998.

I remember Bobby Ojeda throwing 6 no-hit innings at a game Mr. Brilliant and I went to once.

I have stayed riveted to a chair, unable to do so much as take a pee, lest I jinx the pitcher, more times than I can count.

And the Mets still don't have one.

It isn't that I expected Nelson Figueroa to throw a no-no last night. But in the annals of baseball poetry, the stars looked to be aligned for one. Here you had a kid who grew up as a Mets fan, who was drafted by the Mets in 1995 but traded in 1995, along with the aging Bernard Gilkey, for what was essentially a batboy, a box of balls, and a pack of Doublemint. He's bounced around baseball for thirteen years before finally coming home and getting the start last night because Pedro's injury necessitated another starter. His family, headed by his adorable father, who looks and sounds like one of those colorful guys they interview in documentary films about Great Baseball Moments, was there in Billy Wagner's donated suite; seemingly dozens of them, looking as if they were any other group out for a ball game instead of the family of the starting pitcher.

But because this is the Mets, it was just not to be.

But this is just one reason why baseball is poetry. It's one reason why, despite the steroids and the greed and the money and the TV networks and all the crap that has over the years done its best to destroy this game, every now and then a kid from Coney Island, plucked off the scrap heap of the majors; a kid who only ever in his life wanted one thing -- to pitch for the Mets -- got his chance last night and came within a half-game of making history.

And there's more. Figueroa is no dumb jock. He's a Latino guy who went to a Jewish college (Brandeis University) and got a degree in American Studies. He's also an electronics whiz and an artist who designed T-shirts for Major League baseball to sell after the 9/11 attacks to raise money for the families of firefighters and police officers killed that day.

Figueroa's story last nighIt's the kind of thing that makes people like Metsgrrl, who for my money ought to be the poet laureate of Flushing, Queens, write stuff like this:

I think it had all started to dawn on us what might be happening when one of the twins behind us says something that causes TBF to yell through clenched teeth, “But WE’RE NOT TALKING ABOUT THAT,” and then it dawns on everyone, and we all start briskly discussing the Yankees vs. the Red Sox and the moronic hordes of Yankee fans at Shea tonight, and how are Miriam and Julia’s parents, and anything except the thing that we’re all not going to talk about or otherwise acknowledge. My own superstitions get the best of me and I rule out even thinking about what we’re not talking about.

And then we got to the fifth inning.

After that first hit, we stood. We applauded heartily. We tried to get the people who were doing the whole OMG IT IS FRIDAY AND I AM AT A BASEBALL GAME DRINKING BEER! WOOO! to stand up and cheer with us but now they are not interested. They weren’t completely hopeless, because the next inning they started a “FIG-UR-O-A clap-clap-clap-clap-clap” chant, for which we like them.

At this point it feels a little bit like the bizarro world. The cloud and the half-empty stadium make it seem like we could be anywhere, because there are no identifying landscape features in the distance, since they are all obscured by the fog. And I start to think about how almost every night of the week, there is a baseball game playing somewhere, and there are people who go almost every night and people who go as often as they can, and there are places that get crowds like the one we have right now even on a weekend, especially if the team isn’t very good or is losing or isn’t very popular. But it doesn’t matter how many people show up, the game still goes on. The groundscrew takes care of the field, they rake the infield and the warning track, they chalk the lines. There are 9 men on the field and the game has the same rules. I could go to a baseball game anywhere in the world and mostly know what was going on, even if I didn’t speak the language.

This is what I think about sitting up in my cloud, watching Aaron Heilman be mighty and Joe Smith be okay and Billy Wagner kick serious ass. And then “Taking Care of Business” plays and I am sorry I did not watch the handshaking on the field more closely, after I came home and watched that fifth inning and then that 9th inning and the Kevin Burkhardt interviews with Nelson and his family and his father and hearing Ronnie’s voice crack in empathy and identification just a little.

And I resolve to remember this all the next time I think I’m too tired to go to the game.

Would you take financial advice from this man?

Lenny Dykstra. The very name is onomatopoeic, describing as it does a short, tough, plug-ugly guy with a chew of tobacco in his mouth and a Napoleon complex as big as the swing of his bat.

Perhaps more than anyone else, Dykstra embodied the swaggering, cocksure chutzpah of the 1986 Mets. Strawberry and Gooden may have had the talent, but for those guys in 1985 and 1986, before the seductive allure of money and drugs had ruined them, playing baseball was no different from getting up in the morning. It's just what they did. It's what they were made to do. Dykstra was different. He wasn't built for the game, but through sheer dint of hard work (until he apparently succumbed to the siren song of steroids), he was one of the most exciting players in the game. To this day, every time I hear the song Centerfield, I think of Lenny Dykstra.

It's understandable that I would have been a Dykstra fan. I know all too well what it's like to a short person trying to make it in a tall world and having to talk louder and try harder. But for all that he made the game entertaining, the steroids and the fights he got into later in his career were an ominous sign that once his career was over, Dykstra might succumb to the downward spiral that affects so many professional athletes once their careers are over.

But those of us who thought Dykstra was just a dumb jock of limited innate ability and even less intelligence who put all his energies into playing over his head were dead wrong.

He may sound like a burnout when he talks, but today Nails is a successful businessman, respected investment prognosticator with an investment newsletter people pay a thousand bucks a year to read, subject of a recent profile on Real Sports on HBO, soon to be publisher of an investment magazine for professional athletes that he hopes will represent the perfect confluence of capitalism and doing a service for his brothers in professional sports who may not have his financial savvy, and the subject of this charming profile in, of all places, The New Yorker magazine:

Mets fans of a certain age will recall a popular poster from 1986, bearing the word “Nails” in bold letters across the top, and featuring a shirtless Dykstra, wearing eye black and holding a bat against his shoulder. The nickname referred to his tenacity and also to his peculiar Southern California lexicon. (“MTV is nails,” he explained in his autobiography, also called “Nails,” which was published in 1987, when he was twenty-four. “Winning is nails.”) He was wiry then; he used to complain that Lenny might as well have been his middle name, given how often it was preceded by the word “little”: Little Lenny Dykstra. He is lumpy now. Referring to his suit, which was pin-striped, he said, “It gets a little tighter, you know?” His hands tremble, his back hurts, and his speech, like that of an insomniac or a stroke victim, lags slightly behind his mind. He winks without obvious intent. In his playing days, he had a term for people like this: fossils. Nothing about his physical presence any longer suggests nails, and sometimes, as if in joking recognition of this softening, he answers the phone by saying, “Thumbtacks.”

[snip]

For many ballplayers, the growing-up point does not arrive until after retirement, when all the freebies vanish and equipment managers and hotel maids can no longer be relied upon for regular laundry service. Dykstra last played in the majors in 1996, at age thirty-three. Improbably, he has since become a successful day trader, and he let me know that he owns both a Maybach (“the best car”) and a Gulfstream (“the best jet”). The occasion for our lunch, however, was a new venture: Dykstra is launching a magazine, intended specifically for pro athletes, called The Players Club. An unfortunate number of his former teammates have ended up broke, or divorced, or worse. The week before we met, the ex-Yankee Jim Leyritz, himself twice divorced and underemployed, had hit a woman while driving home from a bar. He never grew up.

[snip]

Dykstra did not attend college, and, like many accomplished autodidacts, he is ever alert for signs of condescension, but he relishes his newfound opportunity to meet executives in a boardroom rather than on the charity golf circuit, and studies their habits carefully, to the point of noting their preferred e-mail font sizes. He is open about the fact that many businessmen—“​graybeards”—​have a hard time taking him seriously. “It’s like I got hit with an idiot stick—took ten lashes on the way in,” he said of a recent meeting. The steady pursuit and accumulation of class markers and status symbols is a handy defense against such anxieties, and during a rare break between calls he led me to a different computer, in the front seat, to show off a photograph that he was using as his wallpaper. “This is my bird, here—that’s a GII,” he said. “I wasn’t going to buy a plane till I bought a Gulfstream, ’cause Gulfstream’s the best in the world—and there’s not a close second, by the way. That’s something that was important to me. Like, all my hard work? Gulfstream makes me feel like it was worth something.”

So maybe he's still trying to prove his dick is as big as that of the big boys. But if that's what he's doing, at least he's doing it in a way that has not only made him wealthy, but might help some of today's athletes from meeting the same fate that befell some of his compatriots. And if the idea of little Nails, the kid with the chaw of tobacco in his cheek who always seemed more like your pain in the ass kid brother who wanted to play street baseball with the big kids than like any kind of profesisonal, turning into this macher in business isn't endearing enough, perhaps this is:

“Wives are key, dude. They are key. It’s a tough life. Your husband is gone and it’s always about him, and then—can you imagine?—he’s done, and all that happens, and you got no money?” (The fact that he and Terri have been married for twenty-three years, through stardom and retirement, seems to surprise even Dykstra. “Terri’s a special person, and I’m a very, very lucky guy,” he said. “It took me a long time to realize that. You know what I mean?”)

Look at the shattered lives of some of his 1986 Mets teammates -- Darryl Strawberry with a shaky hold on sobriety after battling drugs, booze, prison time for tax evasion, and colon cancer; Dwight Gooden, newly out of prison after repeated battles with substance abuse; Wally Backman, who was fired from a job he hadn't even started yet as manager of the Arizona Diamondbacks after the team found out about an old arrest for DUI and the fact that he was just about bankrupt. Given that Dykstra always had that short guy thing about having to out-macho the big boys, you'd think he would have fallen twice as far, twice as hard, just to show that he could. Dykstra is charmingly aware of his own intellectual limitations, admitting that he doesnt "read so good", but he managed to learn about high finance via books on tape and found out that this is something at which he excels, whether through some kind of innate ability or the same kind of sheer guts he used to show on the field.

The Mets' 2008 season starts next week, and for every question that the presence of Johan Santana may answer, there are innumerable new ones. Can José Reyes' ego be kept in check so that he thinks of the team as much as his own stats? Can Mike Pelfrey finally get his act together to be a credible fifth starter? Who the hell is going to play the outfield? And is this organization going to wake up and realize that either this team has to get younger or do something about its strength and conditioning program? But in an age of eight-figure-a-year incomes, this year's Mets could do worse than to look back at the gritty little guy with the big chaw of tobacco in his cheek, and realize that when push comes to shove, ever-vigilant moxie trumps lazy talent every time.

Smokin' Aces

Mets. Cardinals. At Port St. Lucie. 1 PM. Today. On SNY.

(h/t and photo: Metsgrrl)

No. Just....no

Yes, I know José Reyes was a pain in the ass towards the end of the season. But the answer is not to trade him -- or David Wright -- to make room for a greedy 32-year-old with a history of not being able to hack it in New York:

Now Minaya, who is the team’s general manager, has another chance to sign Rodriguez, who, through Boras, informed the Yankees that he would opt out of the final three seasons of his contract. And there have been indications in recent weeks that the Mets may enter the Rodriguez sweepstakes.

This time around, he could make more than $30 million annually, and he will be in his late 30s, or perhaps even in his 40s, when his next contract expires. The Mets have never exceeded the luxury-tax threshold and could be forced to trade a marquee name to make room.

There is no question that signing Rodriguez would instantly make the Mets a better team. He would add at least 40 home runs and 125 runs batted in to the lineup and would be another marketable presence that could help sell tickets for the team’s new stadium, which is scheduled to open in 2009. He would also help the team promote SportsNet New York, which the Mets hope will become as big a force as the Yankees’ YES Network.

What is far trickier is where Rodriguez would fit in on the field.

The Mets locked up José Reyes and David Wright to long-term extensions in 2006, expecting them to blossom together into perennial All-Stars on the left side of the infield. The Mets would have to ask one of them to switch positions to accommodate Rodriguez.

The most likely candidate would be Wright, who in spring training volunteered to move anywhere if the Mets acquired Rodriguez. But where would he go? To first base, where Carlos Delgado is owed $16 million next season? With second base unsettled, they could shift Wright there, too, but even for the athletically gifted Wright, that seems like a stretch.

The Mets’ marketing campaign has featured the Wright-Reyes tandem, and the presence of Rodriguez would dramatically change how they would fit into the greater mosaic.

Sometimes the best acquisition is the one you don't make. Memo to Mets: Don't do it. Resist the temptation. Alex Rodriguez may be an offensive powerhouse, but you have quite enough of an attitude problem with Reyes these days. Don't make it worse.