In my spectacularly unambitious existence, one of the recurring mini-plans I harbor is to get up and hustle off to a day game to which I don't hold a ticket. Real spur of the moment stuff. I don't know that I've ever done it, but it always sounds adventuresome. Ultimately, as I sit on the […]

Well, rats.

It's a funny game — you go from marveling at being behind in exactly two innings to wondering how on earth the team got beat by the likes of Tomo Ohka. Stifled, in fact. Well, so it goes. I'll take 8-2 for the next 10 games with nary a complaint. Meanwhile, some thoughts:

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Good morning, fellow fans of the best team in baseball. Our winning streak is extended to seven, our co-best start in franchise history remains intact and so does our four-game lead over the second-place team — five in the all-important loss column, a queue I thought we might wind up visiting after vintage Glavine gave […]

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 […]