Your Grocer's Free Agent Market

Have you ever been to the grocery store, and you're looking for an item in the dairy section, perhaps for that special brand of reduced fat sour cream that you like...and you look and you look and you look and there is only a small handful of that brand left. Then you look at the expiration dates on them, and the date is one day earlier than today.

You could get another brand of sour cream, maybe a brand you don't like quite as much but you know is going to be fresh. You might even walk the extra two blocks to another store to look for fresher sour cream. But then you think...you know, the container does say "best by", which means that while the sour cream may not be at its freshest...may not be at its "best", it could still be pretty good, and go well with your tacos.

Or, it could have fungus and spores and put you in the hospital after you puke the colors of the rainbow.

That, in a nutshell, is how I feel about the Mets potentially signing Moises Alou.

I mean, maybe Alou is stamped with "best by 2004", when he hit 39 HR's and drove in 106 runs with the Cubs (in Wrigley), but he could still be pretty good as he was last season when he hit .301 with 22 HR's and 74 RBI's in only 98 games. But that's the key. He hurt his hamstring when the Mets tried to trade for him late last season, and this is the guy that's going to replace Cliff Floyd because Floyd is injury prone?

It's one thing to bring in older guys in bench roles (and let's face it, Damion Easley is the supermarket equivalent to Twinkies anyway...they aren't going to get stale, but they've got no nutritional value and no place in a main course anyway.) It's quite another to pencil in a forty year old for 500 at bats for a division champ.

Not to mention that signing would ensure the departure of Floyd who, while left handed and while injury prone, was the glue that made the Mets clubhouse a happy one...in this respect making him a latter day Ed Charles. (If you remember, Ed Charles was the wily old veteran who was the old sage of the Miracle Mets of 1969...and his departure was believed to play an underrated part in the Mets failure to repeat. I wasn't born in '69, but you'll just have to take my word for it.)

The 2006 Mets were a tasty meal. Hopefully, the delicious topping isn't due to spoil.

***

You all remember this, right?

Well, I bet you thought it would be the last time that I would share a mass transit line with a Mets personality...at least for the rest of the calendar year.

Yeah, that's what I thought too. However...

The line for the bus after today's 10-0 Jets loss was probably the longest I had ever seen...I was probably further back than I can remember, yet there were about 500-1000 people behind me. I thought I was lucky not to be in the very back, but then I heard a guy near me in line yell out:

"Hey wassup, Ronnie!"

It never occurred to me to look up until the same guy said: "Hey, that's Ron Darling."

Ron Darling? At a Jet game?

And stranger than that: He went to the very back of the longest bus line in Meadowlands history (I assume).

Ron Darling? Taking the bus?

He was too far away from me to say anything to him, but some considered adding an hour to their wait time to move to the back of the line just to hang out with Ron Darling.

Some considered offering their place in line to Darling in exchange for an autograph.

I just wanted to ask him how he got stuck working during the playoffs while Keith Hernandez got the whole damn month off in favor of Todd Zeile and Tim Teufel.

One thing we did notice was that the line hardly moved until "Ronnie" got on his cell phone. Us mere mortals thought it was to avoid the line altogether and order a car (which he should have done in the first place...1986 Mets shouldn't ride buses), but apparently he called Port Authority to complain, because the line moved significantly faster after Darling hung up.

"Hey, can we move his line a little faster here? I'm Ron Darling" -Ron Darling...maybe

Don't mess with Ron Darling.