Can't add much to the “good defeat” concept except that there's no such thing even though I get what you mean.

There's nothing to overreact to from Friday. I came reasonably close to calling Glavine “Tom” for the first time when he escaped one jam or another. Despite that unlikely flirt with familiarity, I wouldn't overreact […]

Ya gotta be careful with the idea that there's such a thing as a good defeat, because the next morning you're looking at what that meant in the standings and in time off the calendar, and suddenly it's awfully hard to see the good. But still, I shut off the TV a few minutes after […]

Know The Score. Literally. If a game is over and you are wearing the sacred NY on your person, be prepared to inform the inquiring passerby. There's no better feeling than being able to answer, “Mets won 6-3. Benson got the win. Wright hit a homer. Beltran got three hits.” If the result is not […]

It was 1998. Bobby Cox threw everybody but Chief Noc-a-Homa at us to throttle our desperate bid for a wild-card spot. Mike Piazza, booed at Shea after his roundabout trip from L.A. to New York via Miami, seemed destined to head elsewhere. Our final memories would be seeing him standing helplessly at the dugout rail […]

In December 1981, Dick Enberg broadcast a Saturday afternoon football game between the New York Jets and the Cleveland Browns all by his lonesome. Usually he was partnered with Merlin Olsen, but NBC thought it would be a draw to hype it as a single-announcer affair. (A year earlier the network tried one with no […]

So tonight, returned from the land of pine trees, black bears and staticky losses against the Pirates, I wound up locked out and wandering across my little slice of Brooklyn. It's too complicated to explain and not very interesting, but the elements were a similarly locked-out wife without a cellphone; a two-and-a-half-year-old being entertained by […]

“Why don't you folks come in? We're very happy when parents take enough of an interest in their child's work to meet with us.”

“We wouldn't think of not coming, but to be honest, we're a little surprised that you're relying on a parent-teacher conference to tell us how he's doing. Don't you send home report […]

Pedro cures all. So much for the can't win on Sundays, can't win outside the division inside our own time zone, can't win when half of Team FAFIF steals away from proximity.

Ah, Pedro. I'd still prefer our ace do at least a flyover of Detroit Tuesday night (according to our redoubtable radio guys, Carlos and […]