Is it only the presence of the designated hitter that makes games in American League parks so intrinsically boring? Is it the knowledge that the Mets are just passing through? That these games couldn't possibly count even though, after 13 seasons of this, they obviously do?

The Mets are 4-3 in A.L. parks in 2009, though […]

How to keep up with the Mets when I'm away from New York City has been a question all my life. Picking between colleges in Connecticut and Massachusetts, I chose Connecticut because in 1987 that was within radio range of the Mets. Living in Washington, D.C. in the early 1990s, at the very edge of […]

The novice baseball fan might infer that a game lost by 15 runs is far worse than a game lost by one. I doubt there's a Mets fan after this weekend who wouldn't set the neophyte straight.

Sunday's blowout shutout in the wrong direction was, of course, a total embarrassment, but it was a standard whaddayagonnado? […]

Ya gotta love ballplayers. They put the brutal loss behind them, they say. They show up at the park, to a man they insist they don't mention among themselves the devastating events of the night before, they drown out their bad memories by turning up the clubhouse music and they go get 'em.

Congratulations, Mets. You […]

Of course I thought of Buckner. As I watched slow-motion replay after slow-motion replay, I thought of Bob Costas' line that the Bill Buckner play, October 25, 1986, is the Zapruder film of American sports. The Luis Castillo dropped pop fly was now the ball through Bill Buckner's legs for the 21st century.

I thought of […]

Something looked wrong with that play from the first tentative step Luis Castillo took back and to his left. Something was awry with his footwork, with the way he was staring into the night sky, with the set of his shoulders … I don't know, but something looked wrong from the start.

Granted, a properly paranoid […]

That's all.