Oliver Perez could have saved us a great deal of trouble had he been born maybe 10 years earlier and signed by the Joe McIlvaine regime in time to blossom for the opening of Turner Field in 1997. 'Cause, man, he would have been handy to have had around for most of the last decade.
A Braves killer [1]. An honest-to-goodness Braves killer. We have one. That's one against many. Finally, a fair fight. Imagine Oliver Perez, this Oliver Perez, firing strike three past one of the Joneses during the September '99 meltdown…or marching in from the bullpen a month later and effortlessly hanging up a scoreless eleventh…or outdueling the irksome castoff likes of John Burkett and Andy Ashby…or tagging out Michael Tucker so clearly that the name Angel Hernandez wouldn't elicit as much as a shrug from any of us.
Let us forget all that for now. Instead, let us remember that the curse of Turner Field blew away with the wind [2] last season. Dead, dead, dead [3], I tell you. Let us also not forget, however, that the mark of any horrible sequel is depending on the audience's willingness to conveniently dismiss what it saw in the last 15 minutes of the original. Never mind that the Mets swept the Braves in Atlanta in July 2006 or that we dethroned the hell out of them from April to September. God forbid facts get in the way of Revenge of Those Bastards 2.
I turned on Wednesday night's game and I thought there was something wrong with my TV, like it was stuck in the past. Gary Cohen was going on about the terrible things that happen on 755 Hank Aaron Drive, how they reared their ugly head in the person of Kyle Davies the night before, how when the Braves score first in this ballpark the Mets are 3-108 or something like that.
Gary! Stop it!
Yes, we lost the opener of this series. And yes, we lost two annoying games there in April. And…that's all. Everything before 2006, from Braden Looper's patchworthy [4] unraveling in September 2005 clear back to Bobby Jones' gripping problems in September 1997, is immaterial to the current state of the union. I'm willing to concede that the Mets '06 ATL-kicking isn't all that relevant save for that it wiped the historical slate clean. There's nothing black-magical about Turner Field anymore, just a good team in residence. So everybody, especially esteemed flagship broadcasters, please stop quivering in fear that Brian Jordan circa 2001 is lurking in the on-deck circle just because we lose one pathetic game. Somehow we came back and won an exhilarating game one night later.
The intramural season tally to date is Braves 5 Perez 3. To that you might say, oh dear, no Met except Perez has beaten the Braves. To that I say good thing we've got Perez [5].