The Best Trips Are Those Not Taken

I was going to be there this week.

Yup, Pittsburgh. It was on my calendar.

Thankfully, scheduling conflicts, booked up hotel rooms and most of all, general laziness kept me home for the Mets four game trip in Pittsburgh. So as down as I am about this team, the good news is that I could have been there to see it in person. Score one for laziness.

Because what would I have seen in Pittsburgh? J.J. Putz get hammered? Johan Santana getting no run support? Mike Pelfrey get hammered? J.J. Putz get hammered again? I could see all of that with a 20 minute train ride.

And a rainout to boot, which means that this baseball series, that the God you pray to has clearly forsaken, isn't going to end until July 2nd. A month long hell ride? Great. At least I wasn't there.

• Airplane tickets on Jet Blue: $80.
• Tickets to four games: $80.
• Four games worth of Primanti Brothers burgers: $30
• Scalped ticket to a Stanley Cup Final: $300
• Not spending any of that money and missing out on all the fun and misery of the Mets getting their carcasses beat like rented mules? Priceless.

(Y'all probably would have loved it if I was on that trip. If I had witnessed that mess personally, it might have produced the angriest, best, and probably last blog post ever on this site. I wouldn't have just died, I would have disintegrated right on the spot. Puff of white smoke so pronounced you'd have thought we had a new Pope. Carlos Beltran's post game rant? That would have looked like a Mother Goose rhyme compared to what you would have seen here.)

You know what else I would have seen? Jason Jaramillo drive home every single person on the LaRoche family tree. I believe Jaramillo's bat is on its way to Cooperstown after setting a record for driving in more family members in one game than anyone in history. It was fun listening to Gary Cohen: "Base hit for Jaramillo. Adam LaRoche scores ... Andy LaRoche scores ... Dave LaRoche scores ... Jennifer LaRoche scores ... they're waving around the crazy uncle who stuffs his bell peppers with chocolate mousse, and he'll score! And the Pirates take a 48-5 lead."

At least all this nonsense about adrenaline and roles and hand placement will stop as it looks more and more like it's a physical problem with Putz, as he's going back to New York to have his elbow checked out. That's not to say that it's a relief that he's injured, but at least he isn't going to be thrown out there anymore with a bone spur. As much as I had hoped that it was mechanical, it became increasingly clear to me that it wasn't. How it's clear to me and yet the team kept throwing him out there is, once again, amazing to me. Maybe the people that make the medical decisions were doing so on the basis of what they've seen on ER. Think about it: the show's run ends, and the Mets can't keep anyone healthy. Can we send them old episodes of Chicago Hope on DVD?