Bad news is your late afternoon has been ruined by raintime in the Rockies. Good news is your previously pre-emptively ruined entire Thursday has been rescheduled as worthwhile, as the Mets will take on Coloradoans (be wary — they’re very well-schooled) tomorrow at 3 o’clock.
To fill the yawning gap from now until then, you can…
• Wish the best for Ike’s calf, David’s neck, Jason Bay’s who-knows-what and all the pitchers who aren’t able to pitch at this time. Stop getting hurt, Mets.
• Make sure your DVR is set for Mets Yearbook: 1970, 6:30 tonight on SNY.
• Remember the legendary Daily News sports cartoonist and columnist Bill Gallo, who has passed away at age 88 by reading this wonderful profile by Nathaniel Vinton from just a couple of weeks ago. Basement Bertha wasn’t fashionable, but she did love her Mets. Joe Petruccio, not surprisingly, pays a lovely tribute here.
• Buy your Pepsi Porch tickets for Mets Brain Tumor Awareness Night, Saturday May 28 versus the Phillies, and be sure to buy them here. When you do, you’ll be supporting a worthy organization.
• Consider what a fine and consistent voice Howie Rose has provided Mets baseball for nearly a quarter-century, whether as host of Mets Extra, play-by-player on SportsChannel/Fox Sports Net or lead man on WFAN’s broadcasts. Radio has become mostly a reason to bash Wayne Hagin — and he is bashable — but I think we overlook how Metsian a conversationalist we have in Howie when all we do is bitch about the other guy. He also gets eclipsed by the Gary, Keith & Ron electricity a little more than he deserves, but I’d feel lost without Howie in the car, Howie by the bed, Howie while I’m brushing my teeth.
• Put TV and radio into unique perspective by checking out Bob Wolff’s Complete Guide to Sportscasting, a book by the dean of sportscasters. It’s a lot of fun and includes a chapter focusing on how radio announcers for losing baseball teams can still be entertaining. I’ll leave it to your imagination what losing team he picks as his prime example.
Beautiful and beautifully written.
• Give yourself the present of 50 Met years with Matthew Silverman’s The New York Mets: The Complete Illustrated History. Mentioned it before, I’m mentioning it again. It’s an incredible tour of an incredible franchise. As good a looking book as you can imagine, yet the pictures only hold a candle to the writing, which is informed, intelligent and inviting. Buy one for you, buy another for a Mets fan you care about.
• Veer outside the Mets realm and consider The Cambridge Companion to Baseball. Very weighty title, but pretty accessible material on all the stuff you’ve kind of wondered about all your life.
• Come back to the Mets for Howard Megdal’s just-released Taking the Field: A Fan’s Quest to Run the Team He Loves. The cover is orange and blue, so if you didn’t know from Howard (and you should), you would be able to infer the identity of the team in question. You may recall Megdal’s candidacy for Mets GM last summer; the grand campaign and the ideas behind it are presented within. I’ve thus far mostly skipped around various chapters (which is how I tend to engage books when I first receive them), but it’s next on my reading list (though I don’t really have a list) and I’ll share my thoughts on it at a later date. But I’m really happy to see it come to fruition.
• Relive 33/66 great Mets wins through The Happiest Recap archives. If you’ve somehow scrolled right past this twice-weekly salute to the best games by Game Number in Mets history, get the lowdown on what it’s all about here.
• Follow me on Twitter @greg_prince. Follow Jason on Twitter @jasoncfry. Don’t follow Josh Thole, however. He doesn’t care for it anymore.
• Say “hi” to people you might not otherwise greet and get some things done, but be back at your Met readiness 3:10 Thursday. It’s supposed to stop raining and they’re supposed to play ball.
I think the Mets are becoming a latter-day version of the Red Sox (before the Red Sox became a latter-day version of the Yankees): short on wins, long on literacy.
And maybe someday we’ll have one of these.
But I wouldn’t bet my Collector’s Cup on it.
Amen, brother.
Re: Howie vs. Gary, Keith and Ron.
Keith has been wearing on me the last couple of years and especially this year. Too much about Rib Eye steaks, and he’s always getting two or three batters ahead of us, not in an analytical way, but in a homer way, as in, on a 1-0 count “if Bay walks here Thole just needs to lace a gapper to left center, and it’ll be two ribeyes and and a tie game”.
Maybe this is becoming more annoying because it none of the above ever actually happens this year.
Howie, on the other hand, is as great as ever, and he’s always very polite to Hagin, which can’t be easy…
Hope the tax paying residents of Nassau County put aside their fears and anger and vote yes on the referendum to build a new sports complex so that Howie can keep his winter job.