At Least the Mets Were Awake

If the Mets win in a forest and I don't hear the Giants fall, did it still happen?

Sure it did. But the Mets winning in a walkoff usually creates a great big resonant sound in my Sunday as long as I'm near a TV or a radio carrying the broadcast. And I was — I was inches from the clock radio whose alarm I presumably semi-consciously shut off prior to gametime, which then left me undisturbed for more than the next two hours and forty-six minutes. When I at last opened my eyes and saw the time, I thought that unless Steve Trachsel was pitching, Ed Sudol was umpiring or the forecast for rain-free skies was 100% wrong, I was spit out of luck.

Indeed, I flicked on my radio at the unappointed hour to hear tell of a strong Mike Pelfrey start, a decisive Daniel Murphy ninth-inning single and — tell me I'm not dreaming — a Luis Castillo blast to the second deck. It had all happened in the past tense. The Mets weren't winning. The Mets had won…had.

It had happened without me.

How strange. Not strange missing a Mets game. Even your faithful correspondent is occasionally (OK, rarely) otherwise engaged for a day here or a few hours there, but I wasn't out of town this time and I wasn't on assignment. I was just snoozing the Sunday afternoon away, a hazard of being a chronic night owl in a lark's world and using Sunday to “catch up” on the sleep I don't get the preceding six days of any given week. This has been known to happen in the offseason, with a 1 o'clock kickoff the victim, but so what? That's football. I can sleep through football and not miss a minute of it. But a Mets game? I slept through a Mets game? Not just nodded off during a dreary Mets game but completely napped all nine innings of what turned out to be, reportedly, a fine Mets game?

Oh dear. When I came to, I felt like the guest alcoholic character in some preachy videotaped sitcom's Very Special Episode, the one whose drinking is all in good fun in the first act Until Someone Gets Hurt in the second act (cue commercial). Except I almost never drink and nobody got hurt; I just like to be awake when everybody else isn't, sometimes not fully appreciating that biology insists I can't also be awake when everybody else is because everybody has to sleep sometime. Yet to sleep through an entire Mets win because my innate nocturnal nature sometimes gets the best of my daytime initiative, as if the nighttime version of me is Joel Piñeiro and the daylight version of me is the Mets lineup trying to hit Joel Piñeiro…

To drowsily if soberly paraphrase Bob Welch, 1:10 comes early.

You're likely not terribly concerned with what hours I keep, but we all hope David Wright is up and about without difficulty whenever he chooses. Post-concussion syndrome sounds bad and, after the Ryan Church experience, it's probably exactly that. No good came from the Mets' handling of Church's head while he was here but maybe it now represents a precautionary tale that will inform the Mets' attitude toward Wright's recovery. That is to say, leave him on the Disabled List — no matter how overpopulated it seems — as long as it takes. Don't let David stagger his way into the starting lineup because he says he's ready (and one assumes he fancies himself ready to rock right now). Hand him a remote control and tell him to enjoy watching his teammates from home.

And if he somehow misses nine consecutive innings, that's fine. It hasn't exactly been the kind of season that keeps one bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for 162 games.

Word from those awake and watching the Giants' telecast is the Faith and Fear shirt was picked up by enemy cameras and its content discussed. Let the world know what San Franciscans have just found about, and order your apparently full set of retired numbers here.