No, not a fantasy of 8-1 or 21-1 or 161-1, though I'm happy to indulge in those. And no, we're not talking about '80s cheese-rock hits, though if you now have Aldo Nova stuck in your head, I apologize. (Unless you're now air-guitaring up a storm, in which case you're welcome. And I'll now avert […]

We're not quite in THERE ARE NO WORDS territory, but Karl Ehrhardt's sign from '69 works just fine until further notice.

To happily, nay

Before the advent of Retrosheet, I mostly depended on my memory which is reasonably reliable. Once the Braves lost to the Phillies Wednesday night, the Mets opened up a three-game lead in the National League East — and I had no problem remembering the last time the Mets were in first place by this much.

It […]

“Happy baseball teams are all alike; every unhappy baseball team is unhappy in its own way.”

The noted baseball scribe Tolstoy wrote those words sometime back, long before the DH, and they're as true for bloggers now as they were for newspaper men with lots of agate to fill with minute analysis then. (Anna Karenina also […]

Now we're really in an exclusive club, as in Best Six-Game Starts in Mets History.

1984: 5-1

1985: 5-1

2006: 5-1

Those '06-predecessors were good clubs. Darn good clubs. Wild Card clubs an era too early to cash in. Division-champ clubs if geography had been Warren Giles' strong suit back in the day. Division leaders they were, from time […]

The air that we breathe got more rarefied yesterday as the second-greatest beginning to a Mets season got that much greater.

1973: 4-1

1978: 4-1

1984: 4-1

1985: 5-0

1994: 4-1

1998: 4-1

2006: 4-1

Prorating, we're up to 130-32. Mathematically, it's in the bag I tell'sya.

Boy, ain't life grand with a big start? It's so the opposite of a bad start, know […]

No matter which team was your team today, you came back with a DWI — intoxicated by the performance of Dontrelle Willis or David Wright.

Yes, we finally beat the D-Train (8-1, 1.85, in case you missed it). Or, more properly, we no-decisioned him to irrelevance in the final accounting. Of course Dontrelle wasn't exactly starting […]

Those who expressed sentimentality over Shea's impending demise won a trip to sit inside its condemned walls for an hour this afternoon until postponement rendered the visit moot. Second prize was to sit there all day and all night.

Alas, rain, wind, generally glacial conditions and uncommon sense knocked off my first game at Shea for […]

By jumping ugly (or Uggla) on the Florida Marlins early, late and often Friday night, the Mets secured their third win in their first four games.

You probably have no idea how rare that is. But thanks to Retrosheet, you're about to.

It's pretty rare.

2006 is the first season since 1998 that has started with at least […]