Benjamin Grimm

Even if you miss a few games, there's no reason why you can't jump back in at any time.

I love the participation we get in early April! Final reminder that voting for April 5's Opening Day win over the Marlins will close some time tomorrow (Thursday) morning.

I thought it was young Joyce Kilmer.

Or your could tally innings by the top four starting pitchers. 6 down, 794 to go!

What happens when they try to register? I think the auto-registering feature is turned off because of all the spammers. If you can IM me the user names they want to use, and their e-mail addresses, I can probably get them set up.

Is that Fozzie Bear's foot?

The Commies?

I like the idea of the link to the IGT thread. Too bad it won't remain valid once the threads are eventually archived offline. (But the good news is that the link will still be good when it moves to the Recounts Archive subforum.)

My daughter, growing up a Mets fan in Phillies territory, remarked last year at Citi Field how great it was to be surrounded by "her own kind." It's actually become a novelty to me as well after all these years, and it is nice. I understand the concept of having disdain for the local teams. I wouldn't have thought I'd care one way or the other about the Philadelphia Eagles, but I always find myself rooting for them to have an early playoff exit (or to miss the playoffs entirely) so that the fans would shut up. The whole fandom thing seems awfully silly when you're on the outside looking in.

Edgy DC wrote: I had seen assholes managing teams in the other dugouts and thought they were comical. Somehow I never appreciated how they could really make the sport miserable to play. That's one reason I've volunteered to manage. I've seen jerk coaches and non-jerk coaches, and I want to help tip the balance towards the non-jerks.

What, Kristen doesn't want to join us?

4. Bad Ollie.

I can remember the names of four of my Little League teams. (Maybe that's all of them; I don't remember how many seasons I played.) I was on the Browns (in T-ball the teams were named after NFL teams), the Cubs, the Mohawks (that was an Indian tribe year; no longer politically correct, I'm sure), and the Athletics. We won a trophy the year I was on the Mohawks. Back then you had to actually win a championship to get a trophy; they didn't give them out for participation. As a Little League manager, I had the Mets my first year as a non-parent volunterr (in Smithtown) and then two years with corporate sponsored team names in Pennsylvania. In my current incarnation as a girls softball coach, I had the "Thunder" one year (Teams were named after local teams, regardless of the sport the namesake team played. There were Flyers and Sixers and Eagles and Phillies, too.) Last year and this year the kids get to pick the team names. Last year we were the Wildcats. (My daughter was terrified that we'd be the Phillies once she saw that we had red uniforms. She influenced the vote by persuading one of the girls who didn't care to vote Wildcats. It ended up being a very close vote.) This year, we have to name the team after an animal species. When we get our uniform colors, we'll try to pick the name of an animal that goes with that color.

Ah! Thanks!

I must've misplaced my glossary. What's a CSB?

I took my kids to that Philadelphia Athletics museum last year. It's not much, but it was a short drive. They seemed to get a minor kick out of it. If they liked that, they should really like the museum at Citi Field when we get there. I got the impression from chatting with the guys at the store/museum that they're pretty much Phillies fans now. Their allegiance stayed in Philadelphia; it didn't go to Kansas City and Oakland. I've often felt (when I think about it) that the wrong team left Philadelphia. The Athletics had a much richer history. They just happened to be in a down cycle at the time that the big rush of franchise relocations happened.

Cammack is the guy who hit the triple. A lifetime 3.000 slugging percentage as a Met!

It looks like Pedro Feliciano might be bumping Tom Seaver's face off this graphic some time in the next few months: Also, David Wright's 17th hit of the season will be his 1,000th, making him the eighth Met to reach that mark. The guy who looked like he'd be the eighth will instead (we hope) be the ninth; Jose Reyes is just 40 hits away. And we'll have a new team doubles king before long. Ed Kranepool has been the leader for decades, but he's only three ahead of David Wright, 225 to 222. He's held off challenges from Howard Johnson, Edgardo Alfonzo, and Mike Piazza, but it looks like Kranepool will finally succumb* to Wright. And if David gets 95 runs batted in this season, he'll move past Piazza (and HoJo and Kranepool) to take second place in that category, positioning him to take the all-time crown from Darryl Strawberry in 2011. Young David Wright is entering some elite territory. *That has nothing to do with sex, Fman.

Yeccch.

G-Fafif wrote: Keeping the team name probably helps in that regard. If the New York Giants had become the San Francisco Seagulls, I doubt the connection would have stayed as strong. I think that's probably true. The Giants and Dodgers do "feel" like their history stretches back to New York, much more so than the Orioles connection to their St. Louis days, which is almost never acknowledged.

Jerry says he'll use the same lineup as yesterday until the Mets face a lefty, which, I think, won't happen until Saturday. So more bench time for Pagan ahead, if Jerry sticks with that plan.

I'm not on board with 3 either, unless you're 20 or younger I suppose. If the Mets ever relocated, I'd be done as a baseball fan. I'd probably pay a little attention to them the first couple of years, but less and less each passing year. I image that some Dodgers fans, for example, continued to follow the team in LA while they still had familiar faces like Reese and Snider and Hodges but cared a lot less, if at all, about guys like Maury Wills, who came along later.

They put your face on the Gold Glove award? Or did Keith do that on his own after he received it? (I wouldn't put that past him at all.)

I don't understand switching loyalties as an adult. Rooting interest is, to me, a holdover from childhood, not something I'd get started on as a somewhat rational adult. I have a friend who moved from Long Island to Florida after college. For a while he rooted for the Mets from afar (thanks to Channel 9) but when the Marlins came along he jumped aboard. He recently asked me why I never became a Phillies fan. Even though I've lived in the Philly area for over 20 years now, I still see them as just another out-of-town team. My sister, however, married a Phillies fan and she now roots for guys like Cole Hamels and Jimmy Rollins and other non-entities. I don't get it.

No. I figure that most people vote at work (!) so I don't count days like Memorial Day or July 4 in the two-business-day rule. When there are no holidays, weekend (Friday, Saturday, Sunday) games close on Wednesday. Monday games close on Thursday, Tuesday games on Friday, Wednesday games on Monday, and Thursday games on Tuesday.