Dream On

Lance Berkman has gotta stop eating Thai food right before he goes to bed. From Astros beat guy Brian McTaggart's Twitter, via Mets Fever:

Lance Berkman just told me: "Last night I had a dream I got traded to the Mets." He didn't say who the Astros got in return.

Funny, last night Lance had that dream where he's hitting .220 as a Met and Tony Bernazard is chasing him with an 18 inch needle trying to give him a cortisone shot while shirtless. And he woke up in a cold sweat and couldn't even make it to the bathroom before puking all over himself. Yeah, I hate when that happens.

Perhaps Berkman is looking for a change subconsciously, but will not admit it to himself. I couldn't find an interpretation of a dream involving a trade to the Mets, but if he's dreaming about a job change, perhaps these guys can explain:

The "you’re fired" dream could also be a sign of fear of rejection or an indication that you subconsciously want to end some relationship or situation (work or personal) in your life. Maybe you secretly fantasize about leaving your job or escaping from your cubicle. (...) One way or another, your dreams are probably telling you that it’s time to make some kind of change in your life.

If this passage helps you Lance, then it's time to go demand that trade. Maybe this passage can explain some other people's dreams as well. (*coughOmarcough*)

Stranger Than Fiction?

Forgive me, for it's so infrequent that I step out of character and break through the "fourth wall" as it were. But I might be in need of a serious mental evaluation.

It started when I went to sleep last night and all of a sudden I'm in a park. It was a park in the mold of say, Flushing Meadow Park, but it was just your basic non-descript park with lots of grass. Who's the first person I see walking in front of me?

Why it's Roger Clemens! He's wearing a Craig Sager-like purple suit, and an Arizona Diamondbacks cap. If you're looking for some hidden meaning in that, don't even bother. It gets worse from here anyway.

After walking past Clemens uncomfortably and trying to open up a safe distance from him, I see my wife ... at which point we sit down in front of a big movie screen as if it was Bryant Park. There's now a crowd that's starting to form, and Clemens is now behind us talking to his lawyer about something. So now I'm thinking that my cell phone is going to ring, and Clemens will be on the other end setting up his tape recorder. Instead he starts walking towards everyone shaking everybody's hand as if he's trying to win votes in New Hampshire.

Oh, and did I mention that Clemens was on a pair of stilts while doing this?

That's right. Roger Clemens is wearing a Diamondbacks hat and walking on stilts ... with a big smile on his face. Maybe the stilts signified his "rising above" all of his anger. Or maybe it signified the circus that the whole Roger Clemens fiasco has become. Or hell, maybe it signifies that I'm just a bizarre human being that shouldn't eat so close to bedtime, or read funny stuff like this before going to bed ... yeah, that's it. And Clemens is trying to shake my hand. I'm trying to ignore him like I ignore those guys on the subway who play Christmas songs on their guitar and then ask for money. But Clemens keeps his hand out practically begging for a handshake. So for the greater good, I give Roger one of those dead-fish handshakes to get him to move on ... which in retrospect might have been a bad idea considering how "strong" he is.

But then, here come his kids. And I don't know what his kids look like so these might have been some random kids with him, and they were wearing Texas Longhorn paraphernalia giving me the "hook 'em horns" sign. So I smiled and gave his kids (or the actors playing his kids) the sign right back (at which point I had an actual Texas Longhorn student teach/correct me in the art of the sign. I had a finger signal for him in return but I'm not going to get into that.) I must have made a good impression on the kids because someone told me what a good role model I was to them right before I woke up.

So that's it. This is my life without baseball to watch. I wish I had a punch line to the dream like "and then Mike Piazza showed up with a broken bat foaming at the mouth and knocked Clemens off of his stilts beat him with them and chased Clemens away from the park and we all ate ice cream and lived happily ever after", or "and then came Brian McNamee with a large syringe that he injected Clemens with except that he injected the stilts instead, and then Shawn Estes threw a beach ball at him and missed." But I don't. I have nothing. Nothing except the fact that it's January, and I'm a special brand of disturbed. If anyone can interpret this and give me back my normal dreams which involve the open seas, a warm sun, and an all-you-can-eat buffet, please don't hold back. I need help.

Divine Plan?

Are you there, God? It's me, Metstradamus.

Twenty years ago tonight, the Mets won their last World Series championship thanks in part to Mets icon Mookie Wilson and his ground ball though the legs of Bill Buckner.

Twenty years to the day later, I commemorate that moment by posting a picture of Mookie Wilson in a damn St. Louis Cardinals wool hat during Game 4 of the 2006 World Series.

Why?

Why am I being punished? What did I ever do to you? Did you really need to pour salt in my gaping wound? I understand that you have a divine plan, but no divine plan should ever include Mookie Wilson wearing a blood red wool Cardinal hat twenty years to the day that Jesse Orosco threw his mitt to you as a sacrifice to your so-called "divine plan".

And was Tsuyoshi Shinjo in your divine plan too? You remember him, don't you? After all, five years ago, you helped hasten the Mets' descent to the core of the baseball universe by presenting them with Tsuyoshi Shinjo.

Five years later...

...Shinjo ends his career with a Japanese league championship as a member of the Nippon Ham Fighters.

So let's review God: Tsuyoshi Shinjo fights ham, is a cult hero, and he retires on the very top of his game. Meanwhile on this side of the Pacific Ocean, Carlos Delgado attends the World Series as a spectator recovering from carpal tunnel surgery (probably from visiting this blog too often), Mookie Wilson is wearing a Cardinals hat, Satoru Komiyama still stinks, and I'm at home trying to calculate how many blows to the head with a whiffle bat would render me unconscious.

And did I mention the dreams I have been having? You know, the one where I'm playing poker with Mike Scioscia, So Taguchi, Terry Pendleton and Luis Sojo...and I go all in with pocket jacks but everyone else has pocket aces and the flop comes and it's three more aces? Surely you must be trying to tell me that everyone else in baseball has aces while all of ours are either hurt or old. Oh God, you and your symbolism.

Oh, and did I also mention that after I lose all of my money in the dream, Glenn Close comes out of the kitchen wearing her 1993 model Mets uniform and serves everybody boiled rabbit while Mike Piazza and Guillermo Mota are baking a bundt cake.

Yes God, that's a mighty weird dream. But it's no more weird than Mookie Wilson wearing a Cardinals hat!!!

By any chance, does your divine plan include ripping my still beating heart from my chest, rolling it down the streets of Pamplona to be stomped on by drunken tourists and bulls? Because at this moment I would welcome it. It would be less painful. If you had a sympathetic bone in your body, you would consider that course of action and end my pain and suffering once and for all before you do something really hurtful like embroil Gary Cohen in a money laundering scandal and replace him by re-hiring Fran Healy.

Yours in misery,

Metstradamus

(No rabbits were harmed in the writing of this post.)