There are worse things than realizing your baseball team is bad.

For instance, there's realizing you long ago stopped noticing your baseball team is bad.

The Mets played the Marlins, and the Mets lost, with just a few bright flickers amid the gloom. There was Josh Thole, getting his first big-league RBI and continuing to show a […]

I'm standing on the LIRR platform Sunday morning, waiting for my train to Woodside. It is obvious from my garb where I'm going. Guy dressed in black, right through to his backpack, comes up to me and asks, “Who's pitching today?”

“Pelfrey,” I say. “Gonna have a nice comeback.”

“Comeback?” he laughs. “Fifteen out of the Wild […]

Liván Hernandez is gone from our midst, but the Elton John song they played for him at Citi Field when he did something well resonates slightly this Sunday, specifically the part, “when the New York Times said God is dead…”

I wouldn’t want to get that deep, but what does it say about the state of […]

Our two-game winning streak didn't become three, but we can take solace in the message inscribed on a sign I saw held aloft beneath the Pepsi Porch Friday night:

AT LEAST WE STILL DON'T HAVE HEILMAN

That's Aaron Heilman, the Mets starter turned reliever whose very sight at Shea Stadium, rightly or wrongly, was an automatic Maalox […]

I'm sitting with the Chapmans of recent Bar Mitzvah fame in the very first row of the Big Apple section in center field. It's a few minutes to first pitch. The Mets have taken the field and are tossing balls around to prepare them for the game. They do this all the time but when […]

They wear uniform tops with NEW YORK on the front and their unfamiliar last names on the back. They dress in a major league clubhouse. They test their skills against professionals. They generally don't look like they belong on the same field as the pros, yet there they are throwing and catching and running and […]

Oh, I remember games like these, Septembers like these.

The team has a playoff spot in its sights — and a pack of rivals that want the same prize. Your young hurler takes the hill; you know he’s good and can’t wait for the rest of the world to find that out. Your opponent is already […]

Tell me if this sounds familiar: Runner on first, ball hit through the infield to center…runner out at second.

I'm sure it does. But just how familiar is it? We're so used to seeing the 2009 Mets pull boners out of their oversized hats and then learning that such missteps are either virtually unprecedented or thought […]

We drove down to Long Beach Island on Saturday, with the Mets/Cubs game getting lost between happy escaped-to-vacation road-trip music and offloading a rented SUV’s worth of stuff into the beach apartment. The first eight innings of Sunday’s game were spent on the beach; digital enthusiast that I am, I forgot to bring an old-fashioned […]