How I Reflected Upon My Life On My Day Off, By: The New York Mets

(Friday morning, in a dark dingy Yankee Stadium lockerroom...)

Willie Randolph: All right gang...you were all told to write a paper telling me what you've learned over this bad stretch of games, and how you reflected on it during your day off. I would like for you all to read your paper out loud. David, we'll start with you:

David Wright: What I did on my day off, by David Wright. First, I went to the Vitamin Water people to pose for a new advertisement, and then I shot a new commercial for MLB 2007. Then I read "The Winner Within" by Pat Riley to help make myself the best leader I could be. The end.

WR: Very good David. And how did it help you see how you can help us turn this around?

DW: I learned that when you see a fork in the road you should take it.

WR: Very good. Anything else?

DW: Uh, a raised fist means to go to the post?

WR: Okay then. Let's have someone else read their paper, eh...how about you, Aaron?

Aaron Heilman: I also read a book. I read Sandy Koufax's autobiography.

WR: Very good choice. And what did you learn?

AH: I learned a lot of helpful hints about being a good starting pitcher. He went into the mindset and the preparation necessary to be a starting pitcher in the major leagues.

WR: That's great, but...you do realize that you're a reliever. Have you learned anything about being a good relief pitcher?

AH: I learned that middle relief pitchers don't get book deals.

WR: Astute. What about you, Jose?

Jose Reyes: I hit the gym and did some extra laps in the pool...I gotta tell you, I feel great!

Carlos Beltran: And I picked him up from the gym and drove him home.

WR: That's great guys! That was a very nice thing to do Carlos, driving your friend home.

JR: Yeah, well...

CB: Shut up Jose!

WR: What? What happened?

JR: Carlos drove me to my neighborhood but then had to ask a policewoman for directions.

CB: Shut up Jose! You know it's been a while since I drove anybody home and I got confused.

WR: Well...it was still a very nice thing for you to do. And what did you learn?

CB: That I need Mapquest to drive a teammate home?

WR: Very good. Hey Joe, I see you ducking in the back. What did you do on your day off?

Joe Smith: I took a picture of myself and made it into a Sports Illustrated cover because I'm going to be a famous pitcher one day.

WR: Arts and crafts I see. And what did you learn?

JS: I learned to use scissors and crayons.

WR: All right then. How about you Paulie, what did you do on your day off?

Paul Lo Duca: I killed a guy.

WR: Why?

PLD: He looked at me funny.

WR: Did you do anything else?

PLD: I killed another guy.

WR: How come?

PLD: He flipped his bat in an American Legion game.

WR: And did you learn anything?

PLD: When you're pushed, killing is as easy as breathing.

Billy Wagner: Lighten up, Rambo.

WR: Hey Billy, what did you do yesterday?

BW: I looked for Filthy Sanchez, he owes me money.

WR: Did you find him?

BW: I thought I saw him at a gas station in Oyster Bay.

Jose Valentin: Really? I could have sworn I saw him at the food court at the Green Acres Mall.

Damion Easley: No no no, I saw him yesterday on top of the Statue of Liberty.

WR: Well, Rome wasn't built in a day. We'll work on finding Duaner during our next off day. Moises, what did you do yesterday?

Moises Alou: I've put every legal drug in my quad muscle and I still can't walk.

WR: And what did that teach you?

MA: That I'm old. I'm very, very old.

Julio Franco: Settle down, you're not that old, junior.

WR: What did you do on your day off Julio?

JF: The cage...all day. Worked on my ability to pull the ball.

WR: And what did that teach you?

JF: That you can't teach an old dog new tricks.

WR: Great. All right then, you're all dismissed. Now go out there today and make me proud.

In The End of This L.A. Story, Everybody Dies

Hey, more exclusive Mets/Dodgers highlights straight off the presses. This clip is a mere montage of Wednesday night's action:

Where Tuesday featured a meltdown of historic proportions (that game marked the first time that the 7-8-9 order of a lineup hit consecutive home runs where the 9 hole hitter was actually a pitcher), Wednesday's game was a suffocation of the ho-hum variety, a 9-1 beating behind the woodshed by the no longer offensively challenged Los Angeles Dodgers.

Yes, it was television too brutal to watch, yet I couldn't turn away.

David Chase's Sopranos ending forced viewers to bring something to the table and think. The Mets, meanwhile, are forcing bloggers everywhere to try to explain this 1-9 slide...and the best that I could probably do is stand at the doorway shrugging my shoulders making an unintelligible sound resembling a walrus when it's attacked by a polar bear.

No hitting? Been there. No bullpen? Done that. Slumping starting pitching? Bought the souvenir t-shirt. Tonight, the new victims to go along with all the old victims was the defense. No diving, vapor locks on covering first, dropped throws from the mound...it all added up to another carcass picked at by the vultures of Dodger Stadium (to go along with all the birds that picked at our carcass back in Detroit).

And guess where we go next? That's correct, the Bronx where every newspaper man, ESPN analyst, and head of state will be salivating at the bit to bury the Mets and are already writing stories leading this way: "Now that the Yankees have swept the Mets and have taken back the city..." It's enough to make this blogger go on media blackout besides actual baseball games for three days to a week and a half. Imagine if you will, how the Mets are feeling right now.

Well you don't have to imagine how Paul Lo Duca is feeling...you saw it on display after the game, head in hands...disgusted look on his face...ready to take a bat to something. Maybe he already has taken a bat to something. A wall? A toilet stall? Wilson Betemit's head?

It doesn't matter. Because taking a bat to any of those options only serves as a reminder that walls, bathroom stalls, and heads of Dodgers are not baseballs. And if you're not making solid contact with baseballs, there's no use wasting all those hits on other options. They'll need all the hits they can get come this weekend.

Don't Worry, Lightning Never Strikes Twice...Er, Three, Er...Aah, Forget It!

Three pitches...

Three homers...

One stunned blogger.

I'm lost. I can't even fathom this right now. Three home runs on three straight John Maine pitches to the 7-8-9 hitters in the order?

On a team that came into the game second to last in all of baseball in home runs?

And the pitcher flips his bat after the third home run without eating the batters box in his next at-bat? Oh, and let me reiterate that the last time this guy hit a home run was high school.

High school?

The same pitcher that now has two career wins, and both against the Mets?

Dae Sung Kuo against the rest of the league, Hong Chih Kuofax against the Mets. Phenomenal.

It's gotten so bad that Hilary Swank doesn't want to be seen in her Mets hat anymore, as she was during Monday's game. Perhaps she used it to wipe Alyssa Milano's blood off the floor after a particularly heated Mets/Dodgers argument. Now that would be a more anticipated matchup than Jorge Sosa vs. Brad Penny.

But here's the good news, the Mets are on the cover of Sports Illustrated this week. At this point, what's left to jinx?

R.I.P. Coach

By all accounts, Vern Hoscheit was a hard ass for all time. Baseball could probably use more of those right now.

Coaches like Hoscheit, a part of the staff for the 1986 champs, are a dwindling breed...and unfortunately, that breed is down by one as Hoscheit passed away Monday night at the age of 85 after a long illness.

A story was told recently by the Mets cast of characters in the television booth about how Hoscheit, the bullpen coach, made no exceptions when it came to being on the team bus. "Be on it, or be under it", or something like that. The only way to heaven for Vern, I assume, is on that team bus. Surely, it will be his smoothest ride ever.

May the bullpens in heaven be filled with many tomatoes.

Tea Totallers

And now, exclusive to you, are condensed highlights of Orlando Hernandez's performance against the Dodgers tonight...we start in the fourth inning:

Or were those Sunday's highlights?

And before you get on me for being fair weather, I'll remind you that as Met fans, you should understand that food tastes better, traffic moves faster, and air smells less smoggy when your favorite team wins.

When the Mets lose, we're grumpy. It's how we're wired.

I, my friends, am grumpy. And at this moment, I sincerely don't feel like putting things in perspective, keeping a happy face, turning the other cheek, noting that before tonight Hernandez has been nothing short of spectacular, or anything else that resembles positivity. This blog post, as are all blog posts, are not a reflection on how things will go the rest of the season, but rather a snap shot of how I feel at the moment. And guess how I feel right this very moment? I feel grumpy. I don't feel like spin doctoring, or being logical, or rational, or reminding myself (and you) that the Mets are still in first place. No, right now I feel like using Bugs Bunny as a metaphor for Orlando Hernandez.

Yes, Hernandez may be an innocent victim here, as the Mets lineup deserves scorn for not getting a hit past the sixth inning. And Paul Lo Duca deserves wrath for his idiotic throw to try to double up a runner after a squeeze play was foiled, costing them the fifth Dodger run. Even though it meant nothing, the play served as a microcosm of the horrible fate that has befallen the Mets since Doug Davis yo-yo'd them to death eight days ago. And you can't prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that after Lo Duca's mistake cost the Mets that insurance run that the air didn't come completely out of the Mets balloon.

But I can't find an appropriate video depicting a horrible throw to first base...and heaven knows I've tried (I even searched the term "midget toss", so don't tell me I haven't looked everywhere). Besides, Russell Martin taking over the All-Star balloting lead at catcher is probably punishment enough.

At a future date, hopefully not that far in the future, we'll all have a good laugh about this. We'll laugh as the hitting is good enough to overcome the pitching, and vice versa. But right now, the grumpiness seethes from my pores. I choose to embrace that. You may not, and that's your prerogative. Until further notice, and a couple of wins in a row, I'm grumpy.

All right, maybe a little positivity, but that's it.

No Birds Were Harmed In The Cooking Of The Mets' Collective Goose

In my younger days, we used to play softball in a magical place named Hoffman Park, tucked away behind the Boulevard of Death.

The problem that we often faced as softball players on the hard top surface was that every once in a while, some yahoo with bread crumbs would sit on the first base bench spreading bread crumbs and attracting every single seagull in Queens to have breakfast. So here we come to play and there would be birds everywhere. Fly balls were a problem, because you would look up for the ball and would have to dodge bird excrement instead.

How did we get rid of the birds? You never really got rid of them completely, but enough running around and pings off the bat usually did the trick. The same yahoo must have been at Comerica Park (or should I say Audubon Society Park today) with his bread crumbs making playing baseball in Detroit akin to playing catch on the Atlantic City Boardwalk.

Or playing softball at Hoffman Park.

But it's ironic that a stadium with big statues of scary Tigers all around (some with baseballs in their mouths depicting what would happen if a bird would get too close) could be prone to having birds just wander in and make themselves at home all over the outfield...or in somecases, across the infield. But I guess if birds were scared by mere statues, Alfred Hitchcock would have never had a career.

Speaking of irony, during a ball game that looked like an Alfred Hitchcock movie, the Mets came to the mound with a guy who looked more like Sterling Hitchcock today, as Tom Glavine waited until the fourth inning until a frame where he didn't even give up a run. I think we can safely assume that if one were to count the birds that roamed the outfield during today's ballgame, it would be a safe bet that the count would go not one higher than 295.

There's no reason for Glavine to be irritated at anybody but himself today. There's been talk about Glavine getting his jock in a bunch about bad defense and the like, but this was all on Tom today. The Mets are starting to fall into that pattern where they pitch well, but they don't hit. They hit, but they don't pitch well. Glavine had no excuses today, with Magglio Ordonez on the shelf as a late scratch, and Carlos Guillen leaving the game after the third inning with an injury. Instead, he gets beaten by Placido Polanco, and a protection-less Gary Sheffield. And another weekend comeback by the bats in the late innings (with help from Carlos Gomez's first major league home run) gets laid to waste.

And although the Mets scored seven runs today, they always seem to be one hit short these days. They seem to be leaving a ton of runs on the bases...including runners on third with less than two men out. One of those hits here and there would might have made this a winnable game. Instead, it was a football score on the wrong side as the Tigers scored more today than the Detroit Lions normally do.