Hey, remember this guy?
Yeah, you do.
No sooner than after I re-sized that image and wondered what was going on with Jose did I come upon this report from Ben Shpigel at The New York Times, and that paired with this makes me wish I could catch the next plane to Florida. If you don’t believe in click-throughs, this for me is the money callout:
“This is really the first day that I feel like I’ve made a lot of
progress in everything I did on the field,” Reyes said. “Taking ground
balls, very good. Hitting from both sides, very good. When I run now,
I’m able to pick my knee up higher. Before, I felt like I was running
with one leg.”
Con respeto, Jose: I think “running with one leg” is called “hopping.”
Two Boots Pizzeria (now Tavern) down on Grand Street is starting to grow on me. I met the owner, Phil Hartman, prior to the “Amazin’ Tuesdays” event and the concurrent Mets-Nationals game (L, 4-0), and he seemed like a swell guy. A swell guy who can push a mean cocktail. A swell guy who knew from the get that the rumors about Roy Halladay were just that.
A swell guy who sure likes his baseball cards. They grow on his walls like kudzu.
I question the reasoning behind placing Luis Castillo within the Bob Ojeda/Doug Flynn/Ron Darling trio; I can’t imagine what a conversation between those four would be like.
Swap out Doug Flynn for Lenny Dykstra, and I think you have the makings of a brawl or an odd stoner comedy.
If you then swap out Ron Darling for Mookie Wilson, you’ve got the cast of Police Academy 9.
Which brings me to this: I tell anyone who’ll listen to me that Doug Flynn was actually Steve Guttenberg in disguise. No one ever listens. Ever. I believe this baseball card confirms my suspicions, and I hereby demand a Senate select committee be organized to investigate the subject.
Or, at the very least, for someone to listen to my “Doug Flynn Is Steve Guttenberg, Goddamn It” Theory. It fits. It ALL fits.
Last night’s event, hosted by the aforementioned Hartman, Faith and Fear in Flushing‘s Greg Prince, and Mets By The Numbers‘s Jon Springer, sported a line-up that held infinitely more interest than the line-up presented by Jerry Manuel for the Mets tussle with the Nats. Greg Prince read selections from his book and his blog; Jon Springer walked us through Tom Seaver’s (eventual) signing with the Mets; Paul Lukas of Uni Watch had the sadistic thrill of giving us a quiz on Mets uniform history; Matt Silverman (co-author of Shea Good-bye) came bearing costume props.
By comparison, no two Mets got back-to-back hits. Omir Santos went hitless through three at-bats and six pitches. Chowdah dropped a decently-easy flyout. Oliver Perez walked six and hit Nyjer Morgan, and gave up four earned runs, yet in an example of why I should pack my bags and move to Bartlesville, Oklahoma, managed to LOWER his ERA a few ticks (7.99 before the game to 7.68 after). I mean, I think I just heard my brain make a squelching sound. That can’t be good. It just can’t.
Mr. Hartman, above, speaking to the crowd which was a bit restive, honestly. I blame it on a child’s massive birthday party jammed into a few booths in the unseen foreground.
Mr. Hartman made it known that every Two Boots is a Mets safe harbor. That’s for your edification; when I need to hide away as a Mets fan, I run out to New Haven, CT. It’s been my observation that few people there seem to care about baseball.
Greg Prince’s first selection prepped the crowd for the rest of the night’s direct baseball experience: some fans, when faced with daunting odds and dispiriting conditions, watch for the simple reason that “there’s no use giving up now.”
What a statement. A bizarre oxymoron of a paradox, that when applied to the current Mets season seems to cry out for a
force majeure abbreviation of the year: vacant Citi Field hit by meteor; the sudden and utter bankrupting of the Mets holding company, leaving their employees unpaid until such a time as a Kirk Kerkorian-type comes in to mop up the remnants like a slice of white bread on a Thanksgiving dinner plate; a plague of locusts. Any of these would be unwelcome occurrences. But certainly spectacular in their uniqueness. As I’ve said, the Mets in their current state are in Crisis. But it ain’t
Ragnarok.
Mr. Prince would read a few more times in the interstices–and for those unfamiliar with his ability to paint a picture with words, I highly recommend his blog and his book–but as the evening wore on it saw the arrival of other faces:
Jon Springer’s treatise on Tom Seaver’s Mets Eightfold Path was quite thorough. I was halfway through a slice of pizza and so I had to look it up myself later. But what YOU can do is either write to Mr. Springer through his website (he seems like an approachable fellow); visit Tom Seaver’s Wikipedia page, or pick up Mets By The Numbers or Peter Golenbock’s Amazin’: The Miraculous History Of New York’s Most Beloved Baseball Team.
However, if you’re going to drill through Wikipedia’s sources and pick up the Golenbock book, pick it up in a library. Why?
Here. Getting Tom Seaver’s full name INCORRECT is INEXCUSABLE. And if your editor made the change, what are you doing not catching something like that?
Lord. Anyway, any way you can get this story without me making a hash of a retread on a shingle. Essentially, it’s a wonder how the Mets’ most legendary pitcher and one of the premiere pitchers of the game came to them literally through luck of multiple draws.
Springer then introduced Paul Lukas, of Uni Watch, who proceeded to hand out sheets of paper. Quiz time.
Now, I went to Bennington College, and Bennington regularly cranks out professionals who break into a flop sweat whenever quizzes, tests, or full-on exams are in the offing. The school is home to the narrative evaluation, which is hell on anyone who decides they’ve had enough lack of structure and splits for a school with, you know, grades.
So I can’t stand quizzes. I let paper pass me by and listened. My guess is I could’ve answered five or six of the questions, based not on observation but inference and intuition.
Observation: no Met has worn number 98. Not that I’ve seen, anyway.
Inference and intuition: I don’t recall well the second verse of “Meet The Mets,” but I figure “All the fans are true to the orange and blue” is a lyric, while “when they suit up to play, the other team runs away” is more than likely not. Teams are not often in the habit of running away from the Mets.
You can find the quiz at Mr. Lukas’s blog
here. He will post answers tomorrow, but tonight you can see the winners there.
And hell, while I’m linking to every other webpage in existence, read thoughts from one of the winners over at the blog
Mets Police.
…Almost makes me wonder if the Mets have a higher ratio of blogging fans to fans who don’t blog than any other sub-.500 club.
(By the by, I spoke with Mr. Lukas at the end of the event, and he was kind enough to pose with his ’70s era Mets stirrups, which you can see on your right, there. I’m just about done with society if stirrups make any sort of pop-culture comeback (were they ever in? My sister seems to think so), but I’m all for team pride, however it manifests itself.
Besides which, he seemed to accept my reasoning for wearing black Mets paraphrenalia, i.e. I’m a messy eater. So there’s that. General fealty paid to a man whose attention to detail simultaneously awes and deflates me. Fantastic.
Speaking of Mets paraphrenalia…)
Matt Silverman wound up the night with an extended passage from his book, co-authored by Keith Hernandez. Now, I didn’t notice this last night, but in going over my photos from the event, I found something delightfully shocking. Ready for more pictures? Are you even answering these questions aloud as you read? Am I that hard up for comic material? It never ends.
Ignore the dude in the lower right-hand corner, who looks as though he’s posing for a freeze frame in the title sequence for Boston Public. Focus on Matt Silverman’s shirt.
Magnify, and enhance!
Yes. Matt Silverman owns a Mets tropical leisure shirt. And to boot, it looks as though it’s been worn lovingly over the course of several years; unless they come like that.
Mr. Silverman cemented his legend of cool when, upon quoting Keith Hernandez’s recollection of shooting his epic episode of Seinfeld, he pulled out the coup de grace:
Keith Hernandez mustache. Brilliant.
I haven’t read Shea Goodbye, but I have an interminable Sunday at Newark Airport ahead of me, and I’m done with A Fan’s Notes, which, again, has very little to do with sports and nothing to do with Mets baseball, having been written before the Mets had ever put together a winning season. I think it’s up next.
All in all, though, a great time, despite the fact that I am now 0-4 at Mets events outside the confines of a ball park. The next event is scheduled for late August, and I imagine I’ll be there. The September event is to be held on my birthday, and I can’t say as I’ll be in any decent shape to attend. However, if that night’s honored guests should include any former Met, or Steve Guttenberg, I’ll be there, too.
But you, dear reader, have no excuse. Unless you live outside the Greater New York metropolitan area. Or you’re not necessarily a Mets fan. Or you’re in jail, or visiting your sick grandmother, or have an insanely hot date planned that night.
In those instances and those instances ALONE, missing these events is acceptable.
First off, I was negligent in assigning full blame for Tuesday night. The order is fine, because of the atrocities committed. Nevertheless, Frankie Rodriguez came on to face the bottom third of the St. Louis order at the top of the ninth, and retired no one he should’ve. 
But there were some serious negative waves going on that night. A friend of seatmates managed to join us for the game–a serious Mets fan if ever there were, but who somehow found it necessary to tell me to “shut up” whenever I attempted a “Let’s go, Mets!” chant. Classy, man. Real classy.
Cow-Bell Man (left) and Big Man (right) were all smiles throughout, but the woman between them gave another friend a dirty look at the beginning of the game when the Geico Gecko came out to accompany the man tossing the first pitch:
Readers, no matter how much we may disagree on the issue of first pitches and their backslide into commercialism, let us not lose sight of the fact that on-screen, the Geico Gecko is a cute creature with a delightful accent, and who loves clams. 
Listen, any game that begins with Rihanna’s “Disturbia” blasting from the PA is destined to be problematic. But to leave with such a sour taste in the mouth… awful. Just awful.
omniality
Section Five Twenty-Eight 