This Cadillac ad neatly encapsulates everything that's wrong with us as Americans. Cadillac was always an evil symbol, especially in its heyday. It always stood for conspicuous consumption, for new money, for flashy clothes and pinky rings and showing off. Now it wants to stand for a reward for people who think life outside of work should not exist. Whether it's George W. Bush calling a woman who has to work three jobs to feed her family "uniquely American", or calling the long-term unemployed "takers", we have this idea that unless you're spending every waking minute either doing work or thinking about work, you are some kind of slacker.

I just got back from a three-day oncology meeting in Boston, where I spent a lot of time with one of my European colleagues. She's about to take off for two weeks in the Seychelles. She'll take three, perhaps four trips like this in 2014, because where she lives, people get vacation time. Lots of it. Six weeks to start. They don't take their laptops with them and they don't check their e-mail, and when they get back they don't have to pay in blood for having taken time off. They don't work weekends, either. They have two people on the same project that in the US there's only one assigned. On weekends they have fun. They don't spend their weekends running the errands or doing the housework they couldn't do during the week. Working yourself to death in Europe makes you a chump, not a hero. And despite the myth perpetrated by Cadillac, it doesn't make you a hero here either. You're still just another number, just another mindless cog in a vast machine. If you drop dead of a heart attack at your desk, they'll have someone in to replace you by the end of the week.

The group in which I work is still in the throes of a reorganization that's been in process for over a year. None of us knows what our title will be when it all shakes out, or to whom we'll be reporting. We're all told we can apply to jobs that will be posted, but it looks like it's all kabuki theatre -- that people have already been chosen for those jobs.

In Europe, it's not unusual to get a year of paid maternity leave. But here in America, the myth is that we're "crazy hardworking believers" and that's why we do it. We do it for pools and Cadillacs, or so they tell us, when the reality is that we do it so we can delude ourselves that management has any idea who we are and that we can't be replaced tomorrow with some other drone. We do our job better than anyone else? So what? They'll live without it if it'll save a few bucks, or get them a younger or prettier version, or can send it overseas and not have to think about it.

I could post this three-minute rant by George Carlin every single day:



Charles and David Koch don't work any harder than you do. Neither does Donald Trump. Maybe Mark Zuckerberg does, but you can bet he won't be when he's sixty. But we've internalized this idea that we have to Work Hard. 24 hours a day. 7 days a week. Until we drop dead.

All of which brings us to Daniel Murphy.

Daniel Murphy, for those who aren't familiar with him, is the second baseman for the New York Mets. Murphy isn't a natural. He works hard to learn how to field his position. He's got a decent bat and a mediocre but improving glove. He's not Derek Jeter, or Big Papi, or some other big-name ballplayer who can do whatever he wants. But here's what we now know Daniel Murphy is: He's a mensch. He's also persona non grata on New York sports talk radio.

What is Daniel Murphy's crime?

He missed the first two games of the season after his wife gave birth by C-section on Opening Day.

Mike Francesa: "You see the birth and you get back." Craig Carton: "Assuming your wife is fine and assuming the baby is fine...you get your ass back to the team and you play baseball." Boomer Esiason: "I would have said 'C-section before opening day."

Daniel Murphy: "It's going to be tough for her to get up to New York for a month. I can only speak from my experience -- a father seeing his wife -- she was completely finished. I mean, she was done. She had surgery and she was wiped. Having me there helped a lot, and vice versa, to take some of the load off. ... It felt, for us, like the right decision to make."

And good for him.

It isn't often that baseball makes it into the chick-o-rama into which Melissa Harris-Perry's weekend show sometimes devolves. But this story sure as hell did, and the fact that Chris Hayes is taking some time off following the birth of his SECOND child put it smack into MSNBC's radar.

It's good that we're having this discussion. It's good that Boomer Esiason apologized, but the fact that so many male sports announcers feel that your team (i.e. your JOB) should always come before your family, is troubling. But they're not alone. They're just a microcosm of what all of us who experience transitions in our personal lives go through.

And of course, since I'm rather self-involved these days (hopefully understandably so), I started thinking about the "widow brain fog" that seems to happen to about 95% of people of both sexes who lose a spouse. No matter how prepared you are, no matter how "done" you may have felt at times in your marriage, no matter if your life is "easier" without having to deal with someone who's angry and depressed and lashing out at you, losing the person with whom you've spent half your life tears a chunk out of your soul. You are not the same. You may FEEL the same for a while, but after the numbness wears off and the grief kicks in; the realization that this person Will Never Come Home, that Opening Day has come and gone and he is not here, that there's a Game of Thrones marathon leading up to the premiere of Season 4 and he isn't here to watch it or share Season 4 with you, that you are going to grow old alone -- well, it changes you. And you do not run on all cylinders. You dream every night that he is still here and wake up every day feeling like you've been hit with a sledgehammer. You're exhausted all the time. You're an intruder in your own life. But most of all you realize that time is short and life is fleeting. And you want to be able to smell the roses. The average duration of bereavement leave in this country is three days. From what I've been able to gather, it's not much better in Europe. If you need more time, you have to burn your vacation time -- IF you can get permission to do it. OR, you can look into a leave of absence, which is what I did, and I'm sure my experience is typical. If you are, say, suicidal and under the care of a mental health professional, or even better -- hospitalized or on suicide watch, you can get a disability leave. This protects your job and keeps you on company-paid health insurance. If your manager agrees, you can take a personal leave for a pre-defined period of time. It is unpaid, your job is NOT protected, you are on COBRA for health insurance (which decreases the duration of COBRA coverage if you leave your job), and if you are not ready to come back on the pre-defined day, you are assumed to have resigned voluntarily.

All things considered, I'm doing better than most people in my position. But I'm definitely not firing on all cylinders. If I could take four weeks off, say, with assurance of my job being there when I got back and continuation of health insurance, even if it was not paid, I would probably be doing a lot better. But I can't, and I'm not. One thing I'd like to do for activism in my retirement years is advocate for better bereavement leave or other accommodation for loss of a spouse or child. Because NO ONE can "suck it up and deal" after just three days.

Daniel Murphy is protected by the Players Union, so he will not suffer any consequences other than shitty remarks by talk radio rabble-rousers. But most Americans are not. Most of us are expected to show up every day, be tethered all the time, and show our dedication so we can delude ourselves that we have "job security." We give a whole lot of lip service to families in this country, but where the almighty dollar is concerned, we don't have a shit about families -- or people, for that matter.

Labels: American workers, Baseball, family values, New York Mets

(Originally posted May 30, 2012. Reposted 9/27/12 in honor of R.A. Dickey's 20th win in an otherwise dismal Mets second half)

It's sometimes difficult to get emotionally involved with baseball these days. This most poetic of games has become, like everything else in our society, a simple matter of dollars and cents. New ballparks that charge sky-high ticket prices. Players chasing ever-more-obscene contracts. Owners tainted by association with scam artists.

Last weekend I had the rare pleasure of being able to actually sit and watch a movie, and that movie was Moneyball, last year's Academy Award-nominated film based on Oakland A's GM Billy Beane's book of the same name. For all that there's something formula about it, there's also a hint of melancholy that hovers over the movie, which doesn't have the Big Dramatic Happy Ending that we expect from baseball movies. In baseball movies, the GM who failed as a player is supposed to win the World Series with his ragtag team of cast-offs and never-wases. The star manqué who after mysteriously vanishing, refuses to take the dive and hits a home run right into the lights, causing a shower of sparks to appear on the field. The lunatic who builds a baseball field in his farm succeeds in reuniting with his long-dead ballplayer father. A good baseball movie is supposed to leave you blubbering, because baseball is about nostalgia, but it's also about timelessness. It's a game that despite better bats and nutrition and workout equipment and performance-enhancing drugs and the multimillion dollars is still, as Trey Wilson's baseball manager in Bull Durham says, "...a simple game. You throw the ball...you hit the ball...you catch the ball." It's the same game that Honus Wagner played, and that Babe Ruth played, and that Jackie Robinson played, and that Reggie Jackson played, and that Gary Carter played.

And occasionally there's a Story. It's about Jim Morris, the A-ball dropoout who promised the high school baseball team he coached that he'd try out for the big leagues if his team won the district championship. Miraculously, at the age of 35 and after a number of surgeries, Morris had somehow developed a 98 mph fastball. He made it to the big leagues, even if only for a short time. With a Story like that, you get portrayed by Dennis Quaid in the movie. Or it's a story about Jim Abbott, who was born without a right hand and not only made it to the majors, but threw a no-hitter for the Yankees. The movie practically writes itself, and it's surprising that no one's made a movie about him yet.

And then there's this guy. Meet R.A. Dickey:



Two years ago, knuckleballer Dickey was cast off by the Seattle Mariners after rattling around the majors since 2001 and signed to a minor league contract by the Mets in 2010. This year, on a team that was supposed to find itself in a no-return spot in the basement of the NL East by now, Robert Alan Dickey is 7-1, with a 3.06 ERA. The story of a 37-year-old knuckleballer coming out of nowhere to became a near-ace (and "near" only because Johan Santana has come back as if he'd never left) is already enough to make a movie, or it will be if the Mets somehow manage to emerge from the shadow of Bernie Madoff and make it to the post season. This prospect is not as ridiculous as it sounds, because as of this morning, the Amazins were six games over .500, a game and a half out of first place -- a third of the way through the season. And Dickey was just named the National League's Player of the Week. This in a league that boasts the likes of Philadelphia's Cole Hamels and Washington's phenom Stephen Strasburg.

If Dickey were just a story of yet another guy who was on the verge of giving up baseball, only to finally get his Big Break in the Bigs, no one would buy it, because Abbott has a more compelling story and Jim Morris has already been done. But Dickey may be baseball's first true Renaissance Man.

This is a guy who studied existentialism and modern American literature at the Christian college he attended. This is a baseball player who is currently reading “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories,” by Haruki Murakami, likes sushi, is partial to Chopin's Nocturnes, climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro last January, and wrote a book in which he revealed that he was sexually abused as a child -- hardly the sort of stuff professional athletes want to admit. He's accessible to the fans, he's worked with a charity that rescues girls from sex traffickers, and he's a born-again Christian. He's what people THINK Tim Tebow is.

Here's Dickey playing pick-up wiffleball in Tompkins Square Park:



And here's his speech after being inducted into the Tennessee Baseball Hall of Fame:



The wonderful thing about R.A. Dickey, what makes him a true role model, is not that he can throw a knuckleball for strikes, or because you can say that those six games over .500 that the Mets are can be attributed to R.A. Dickey's knuckleball. It's because this is the best of what an American Christian man can be. He's pious without being self-righteous, his faith is humble, he recognizes that there is no incompatibility between the life of the spirit and the inquisitive mind's quest for knowledge. No matter what your spiritual path, no matter whether you follow baseball, there's no disputing one hard and fast fact: R.A. Dickey is a mensch.

Labels: a real mensch, Baseball, New York Mets, Real Christians

After watching the Mets get swept by the Yankees this weekend, I needed this: (Apologies to JP, but this was just too good not to share.)

Labels: Baseball, New York Mets, sheer awesomeness, Some Things Are Universal

It took fifty years, but if you were a Mets fan, tonight was Davey Johnson striking out in 1969 to give the Mets their first World Series win, Mookie Wilson's grounder skittering through Bill Buckner's battered ankles, Endy Chavez' incredible 2006 NLCS catch and Jesse Orosco falling to his knees in 1986 all rolled into one. Until tonight, NOBODY -- not Tom Seaver, not Jerry Koosman, not Dwight Gooden, not David Cone, not Ron Darling -- NOBODY had EVER pitched a no-hitter for the Mets.





And I didn't even watch. I can't even count how many times I've sat on the sofa watching a Mets pitcher flirt with history, only to find that the minute I had to get up to pee, said pitcher would give up a fat one to some guy with a .214 lifetime batting average. I can't even count how many times over the years I screamed at Tim McCarver to shut the fuck up because every time he'd say that some pitcher was throwing a no-hitter, said pitcher would immediately give up a fat one to some guy with a .214 lifetime batting average. I've even sat in the stands once, watching Bob Ojeda flirt with history for six and two-thirds innings. But while Dwight Gooden and David Cone both went on to pitich no-hitters with the Yankees, of all teams, and Tom Seaver finally got his no-no in Cincinnati. And let's not even TALK about Nolan Ryan, shall we?

But no one in a Mets uniform has ever been able to climb over that hurdle, until tonight. And I knew that if I turned on the game, Johan Santana would join the ranks of guys flirting with a no-no and then giving up a fat one to some guy with a .214 lifetime batting average. Because it always happens that way.

The only possible way I could be happier is if it had been thrown by R.A. Dickey.

But Johan Santana now has his own Story. Santana was always a class pitcher and he's a superstar, which already makes him special among the ranks of pitchers who have thrown no-hitters, who are more often than not guys you never heard of before or again. But Santana's story has all the baseball cliché you could want. He was traded to the Mets for, among others, top prospect Philip Humber, who threw his own no-no earlier this year. He's received some of the worst run support from this team, a record no pitcher of his caliber should have to bear. And most importantly, Santana is a pticher many believed Would Never Pitch Again after what usually is career-ending shoulder surgery to repair a torn anterior capsule. But after missing ALL of last season, Santana has been nothing short of spectacular, which is no doubt making Mets medical director Dr. David Altchek kvell with naches, since this achievement means you CAN come back from this relatively new type of surgery. And if you're Mets pitcher Chris Young, currently rehabbing from the same surgery in Buffalo, you've got to be feeling pretty confident after throwing six scoreless innings against Columbus last night and now hearing this news. Who knows, this procedure may end up being called "Johan Santana Surgery" the way Tommy John surgery is called, well, "Tommy John surgery".

But this is the way this team plays. In a year when everyone had the Mets picked to do absolutely nothing, they're in the hunt, they're playing the kind of scrappy, Put Me In Coach I'm Ready To Play ball that we haven't seen since the early 1980's, when a bunch of guys named Darryl and Doc and Wally and Lenny and Mex and Kid went out every day and played it like they meant it. And now this. The Holy Grail of pitching.

UPDATE: From the great Mike Lupica, who is really the one sports writer you MUST read after a game like this one:

Darling would talk when it was over, about how a Met finally threw a no-hitter in Queens and it was a Queens kid who saved it for him, Baxter of Whitestone and Archbishop Molloy and Coach Jack Curran of Molloy, crashing into that wall, reaching as far as he could, like he was reaching across all the years, catching a ball hit by Yadier Molina, ending up in a heap on the warning track.

Maybe it had to be Molina, who hit the home run that beat the Mets in Game 7 of the 2006 National League Championship Series. Maybe it had to be Adam Wainwright starting for the Cardinals Friday night, the same Wainwright who got the last out of that Game 7, who threw the pitch that Carlos Beltran took for a called third strike, bat on his shoulder.

And maybe it figured that Beltran hit the ball past third that should have been a hit because it hit the line, but was called foul by the third base umpire. Maybe it all had to happen like that on the night Johan Santana pitched a no-hitter.

This, my friends, is Goofball at its finest. Some days you win. Some days you lose. Some days it rains. And some nights Johan Santana, who many thought would never pitch again, throws a no-hitter.

Another update: Also, too.

And yet another: Howie Rose calls it:

Labels: Baseball, New York Mets, sheer awesomeness, things that make you glad to be alive

I have a confession to make.

I've been watching the Mets in April.

Oh, I promised not to. I promised that I would boycott this team until the Madoff-tainted baseball-inept Wilpon family sells the team. That was an easy promise to make, with the Mets universally picked for a last-place finish.

But then something happened.

The ragtag band of scrap-heap rejects, not-yets and never-wases started to actually play baseball.

The starting pitching staff, consisting of the newly-reassembled shoulder of Johan Santana, Renaissance man R.A. Dickey, new $25 million man Jon Niese, Z.Z. Top fashion statement Dillon Gee, and until recently, the million dollar arm and ten-cent head of Mike Pelfrey --a guy who every time he plays looks as though he'd rather be having a colonoscopy without sedation -- started showing that they can actually pitch. Santana is the rare case of a pitcher who missed a full year being reborn. Niese is already earning his new contract. Dillon Gee has been mostly great. And until a season-ending injury, Pelf was Pelf -- occasionally brilliant, maddeningly inconsistent. The bullpen is still questionable, but the offense, never expected to be anything special, shows signs of becoming something more than what Ike Davis has looked like in the first month. Perhaps most astonishingly, the Curse of José Reyes isn't coming to pass, with Reyes hitting .205 for the currently last-place Marlins and Mets rookie Ruben Tejada hitting .310. But more importantly, there are signs of life from three sluggers who had started the season in terrible slumps. Worst Acquisition Ever Jason Bay went on the DL after showing a few tiny signs of breaking out of his slump, but callup Kirk Nieuwenhuis has not only come up and hit .310, but has made some stellar outfield plays. David Wright is shining in his new role as The Guy now that he's not overshadowed by Reyes, and the deliciously-named Lucas Duda, whose name already has him called "The Big Lebowski" in some circles and "The Dude" in others, is a plate monster already, and might be a great player if he can learn how to catch an easy fly ball.

A few weeks ago I caught "Shea Goodbye", a film made at the end of the 2008 season. It isn't until you watch a compendium of Mets lunacy over the years that you realize that there is something about this team. Maybe it's the enduring legacy of Casey Stengel, the goofiest man ever to manage a baseball team. Maybe it's some kind of weird karma that hangs over the outer boroughs ever since the Dodgers and Giants decamped for points west. But there is something about this team, this organization, that doesn't change no matter who owns it, who manages it, or who plays on the field.

This team does not play baseball. This team plays Goofball.

Mets baseball isn't like anything else in the major leagues. Other teams play baseball. But when they play the Mets, anything can happen. 19-inning July 4 games where the fireworks are set off at 4 AM the next morning. Black cats show up on the field not once but twice, in different stadiums, bringing wins to the team both times. (Funny, though, that orange cats, who sport one of the team colors, do not bring as good fortune.) In the 1980s there was the "K" corner for Dwight Gooden's strikeouts, and the Coneheads when David Cone pitched. There was the woman rolling her hands behind home plate at the 1986 World Series, a tactic that you still see around the majors but with less effect. And the players play Goofball. It's multi-inning, four-hour marathon games. It's players going into vapor lock on the base paths. It's dramatic come-from-behind wins -- a Mets specialty.

Yesterday saw a vintage game of Goofball. After going into the 9th leading 4-0 in a game where they should have been leading at least 8-0 but intead leaving thirteen men on base, Tim Byrdak served up a fat one to Todd Helton, who promptly hit it over the fence with the bases loaded to tie the game. The way this team was expected to perform, that was the time to switch the channel to Holmes on Homes. But this is the Mets. And sure enough, in the 11th inning, the slumping Ike Davis drove in David Wright in the 11th and Ramon Ramirez, after giving up a long fly ball that was just barely snatched by Nieuwenhuis, won the game.

As I write this, The Washington Nationals and Atlanta Braves are in a tie for first place, with the suppoesd Worst Team in Baseball just a game back.

When John Franco was the Mets' closer, they used to call him "Heart Attack Johnny." They were wrong. This is an entire Heart Attack Team -- no matter who's in the bullpen or who's in the lineup. When the Mets play, you don't know what kind of crazy-ass stuff is going to happen. Because the teams they visit, the teams that come to town, think they're there to play a baseball game. But what they really should be brushing up on is their Goofball.

Labels: Baseball, New York Mets

"Ray, people will come Ray. They'll come to Iowa for reasons they can't even fathom. They'll turn up your driveway not knowing for sure why they're doing it. They'll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past. Of course, we won't mind if you look around, you'll say. It's only $20 per person. They'll pass over the money without even thinking about it: for it is money they have and peace they lack. And they'll walk out to the bleachers; sit in shirtsleeves on a perfect afternoon. They'll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines, where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes. And they'll watch the game and it'll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick they'll have to brush them away from their faces. People will come Ray. The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again. Oh... people will come Ray. People will most definitely come." – Terence Mann (James Earl Jones), Field of Dreams, 1989

And so they did. They came to Olympic Stadium in Montreal and they came to Shea Stadium in Flushing. They came to see the grown man with the curly mop of hair and the broad grin, the grown man already with crows feet around the eyes by the time he came to the Mets, the man they called "Kid."

I don't think Mr. Brilliant has had a happier day in his life than the day he came home from work singing an ode to hope that consisted of nothing but a repetition of "We got Gary Carter!". That 1985 season was arguably more fun than the World Series-winning season that would follow. It started with Carter hitting a walk-off home run to win against the Cardinals on April 9, 1985, and as the season went on, we saw the promise of the juggernaut that was to come the following year to steamroller its way over the entire National League.

Gary Carter was one of those guys that you couldn't help but grin when you saw him play. His joie de vivre was palpable on a TV screen or in the upper deck boxes. Every now and then in professional sports you see someone like this -- a player who just exudes joy in the game. Carter was one. José Reyes was another and may still be. In football, the Giants' Victor Cruz is another. So is the Knicks' new sensation Jeremy Lin. These guys love their game and invite you to love it too.

Gary Carter was something else, though we didn't really know the extent of it when he was playing. He was a devout Christian and cited his born-again experience as being in 1973, long before he became a hero in Flushing. As Darryl Strawberry said to Mike Francesa on WFAN tonight, Carter's faith informed every part of his life, but he never forced anything on anyone. I have no doubt that Carter thanked his savior after every win, but his relationship with his God was a personal one. I never once heard Carter invoke Jesus in a post-game interview. He never felt the need to ostentatiously kneel after every home run or thrown-out batter at second. He was just Kid...just a great ballplayer who seemed like, and apparently was, a Really Good Guy; devoted to his family, his teammates, and very quietly, his God.

I'm glad he had this, as the cancer that took his life today bulldozed it's way through his brain. I saw a photograph of him from just a few weeks ago, his face almost unrecognizably swollen from the steroids he was on to keep him comfortable, as he attended opening day for the college baseball team he coached. It was a terrible sight, but burning through were the eyes of The Kid, the genuinely happy man who had walked the walk without needing to constantly talk the talk.

As I write this, we are watching that April 9, 1985 game on SNY. It was nearly twenty-six years ago, Dwight Gooden vs. Joaquin Andujar. Those players are all middle-aged men now but on TV they are forever young, forever at the top of their game. And there is Kid, shaking off a fastball hit on the elbow. For all that I don't believe in the Christian notion of heaven, I hope there is one for Gary Carter, one where he can see the parents he missed so much on that day in 2003 when he was inducted into the Hall of Fame. And I hope there is a Field of Dreams there, where he can once again flash that grin and hit home runs and be young and healthy.

Yes, for half a decade, we had Gary Carter. And now he is gone. Thanks for the memories, Kid. Rest well.

Labels: New York Mets, obituaries, Real Christians

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.

Labels: cancer, New York Mets, sports

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.

Labels: Bernie Madoff, New York Mets, scams

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.

Labels: Baseball, New York Mets

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.

Labels: Baseball, New York Mets

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.’’

Labels: New York Mets

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.

Labels: New York Mets

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.

Labels: Baseball, FUBAR, New York Mets

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.

Labels: New York Mets, sheer awesomeness

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.

Labels: Baseball, bloggers, New York Mets

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.

Labels: New York Mets, unintentional hilarity

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.

Labels: New York Mets, snark

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?

Labels: New York Mets

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.

Labels: New York Mets

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.

Labels: activism, New York Mets