Who Ya Got?

The pitcher who's going on short rest?

Or the pitcher who's pitched a grand total of 8 and 2/3 innings in a month?

So who ya got?

If you were smart, you had the over.

It was pinball...a wild, wild game. How wild? The ESPN website ran a poll very recently...the question went something like this: "When someone has a big game, do you immediately suspect steroids?" I voted no.

But then Rafael Furcal went deep twice off Tom Glavine and I had to change my vote. Does it make me a bad person?

No seriously...here's what I thought: With all of the steroid nonsense happening, I wonder if guys have resorted back to bat corking. I wonder if hitters think that with the bigger fish that baseball is trying to fry, nobody is going to kill me about corking or souping up my bat with super balls. When I saw Furcal's first home run...the one where he reached out and hit a 385 foot one handed bomb...yes, I briefly suspected cork.

But it's probably that Brave envy that got to me again. Did it get to Tom Glavine as well? Must have...Furcal went deep on Glavine twice, and Glavine gave up six runs in 5 and 1/3 tonight. But we all know that Tom Glavine prefers normal rest...and any change in Tom Glavine's routine throws him off, and going on short rest certainly didn't help. Unfortunately, four days rest from this start lands on an off-day. Great.

Luckily for the Mets on a night when Tom Glavine was off his game, Odalis Perez was the opposing pitcher tonight...the same Odalis Perez that Ned Colletti has been peddling around the league, including to the Mets. This leads me to another thing that I wonder: If Omar Minaya was still in Washington or Montreal or somewhere other than Flushing, would Lastings Milledge would be a Dodger? Would Odalis Perez have been pitching tonight for the Mets? Would I have jumped off the back end of the upper deck...forcing construction of the new stadium to be built around my chalk outline?

Thank goodness we'll never know.

Because not only was Odalis awful, but Lastings Milledge was unreal tonight. You'll see the winning home run on the highlight clips...you'll also see the cannon that chucked Nomar Garciaparra trying to stretch a single into a double in the eighth. But it was the first inning triple that impressed me the most as he waited on an outside pitch and drove it to the right-center field gap instead of trying to hit it 500 feet as he usually did.

You know how the saying goes: "The best trades are the ones that you don't make because Jeff Wilpon is hogtied, gagged, and locked in the broom closet."

So stop one on this road trip is a successful one...and now on to Phoenix, where the Mets will catch a Diamondback team shaken up over the loss of bullpen stalwart and resident juice man Jason Grimsley (and by the way, if you want to speculate on who those "blacked out" names that Grimsley mentioned, check out the teams he played with post 1998, and come to your own conclusions). And the best part about going to Phoenix is that the Diamondbacks don't have a former manager that can visit the booth and tweak Ron Darling about beating him in a playoff series...because the Diamondbacks have never beaten the Mets in the playoff series...and certainly not a painful series in 1988. But at least Tommy Lasorda supports a good cause.