Benjamin Grimm

I'm sure I will. I'm still on page 1!

Wow. Endy the Expo and Bartolome Fortunado! I didn't know that Endy was the final Expos batter!

Wow. I wonder if his right forearm has a neon baseball player?

Voting for Wednesday night's win over Washington will close some time over the weekend. Schaefer POTG 9/10/08 - Mets 13, Nationals 10

No, it's not. I think the best matchups for the series were last night's, which didn't turn out well, and Sunday's. My unofficial prediction for the series was MIL-PHI-PHI-MIL.

VOTING FOR THIS GAME IS NOW CLOSED Totals for September 9, 2008 (10 votes) New York Mets 10, Washington Nationals 8 NameTotal PointsPoints AwardedPlayer PerformanceCarlos Delgado28.722.873-3, 3 R, 2 HR, 3 RBI, BB.Carlos Beltran19.481.952-4, 2 R, 2B, HR, 2 RBI, BB, SO.Ryan Church10.961.102-5, 2 R, HR, 2 RBI.Damion Easley8.920.891-3, 2B, 2 RBI, BB.Joe Smith7.470.75(W) 1.2 IP, 1 H, 0 ER, 1 BB, 1 SO.Luis Ayala7.000.70(Sv) 1.0 IP, 0 H, 0 ER, 0 BB, 1 SO.Brian Stokes5.980.601.0 IP, 0 H, 0 ER, 0 BB, 1 SO.David Wright4.880.492-4, RBI, BB, SO.Jos� Reyes3.750.382-5, R.Scott Schoeneweis0.790.080.1 IP, 0 H, 0 ER, 0 BB, 1 SO.Fernando Tatis0.580.061-3, R, 2B, BB.Brian Schneider0.470.051-4, R, 2 SO.Nelson Figueroa0.500.050.2 IP, 2 H, 0 ER, 1 BB, 0 SO.

NL East W L Pct3 Avg W Avg L Champions Wild Card Playoffs 1D Change 7D Change Mets 82 63 .544 91.5 70.5 87.19173 3.00352 90.19525 -1.85370 3.60872 Phillies 80 67 .521 88.2 73.8 12.70688 9.92088 22.62777 6.10147 2.93264 Marlins 74 72 .484 82.3 79.7 .10138 .01305 .11443 -0.01510 -0.15024 Braves 65 82 .493 71.9 90.1 .00000 .00000 .00000 .00000 .00000 Nationals 56 90 .403 62.7 99.3 .00000 .00000 .00000 .00000 .00000 The Mets were idle last night, but the Phillies defeated the Brewers. The Mets NL East odds drop by about 3 points, but they gain a little over 1 in the wild card hunt, for a net loss of almost 2 points. The Mets magic number remains at 14, but their NHOP* rises from 42.4% to 43.75%. (That's not good. We want our NHOP to get down to zero.) *NHOP: Necessary Happy Outcome Percentage. With 32 games that matter (17 for the Mets and 15 for the Phillies) we need 14 happy outcomes to reduce the magic number to zero. The lower our NHOP, the better the playoff odds. NHOP is pronounced with two syllables: N-HOP.

Of course it's on the table. I much prefer the division title, but playoffs is playoffs. I want to watch the Mets play in October.

Now Feliz doubles home Howard. 4-1 Phillies. I'm not pleased with Ben Sheets tonight.

Ryan Howard has homered and doubled so far; Phils lead 3-1 in the fourth.

themetfairy wrote: I love listening to Scully. I also enjoy Harry Kalas. Harry never did it for me. He has a resonant voice, but I never heard him say anything worth hearing.

Thankfully DirecTV now allows us to choose which team's feed we want to watch, so I only have to watch the other team's feed when the Mets are on Channel 11. But through last year, I was frequently listening to alien broadcasts. The worst, to me, was the Padres crew. The best, other than Vin Scully, was Cincinnati's.

It just doesn't seem right that Fran Healy spent more years in the Mets booth than Lindsey Nelson did.

Yes. It's a three-man booth the rest of the way. I'm glad they'll both be there for the last game at Shea. (I would have expected it anyway.) I'll probably TiVo that one and then burn it to DVD to keep for posterity. I'm sure SNY will carry all of the various ceremonies, whatever form they may take.

I have to hope that Phillies-Brewers gets rained out (or delayed) on Saturday. Otherwise I won't be able to watch the game. (With Pedro pitching, that might actually be a blessing.)

Well, context is everything. It was a tragedy in a baseball-fan sense. It didn't otherwise affect my life, although I was a bit jittery for a couple of weeks there. By October 1 it was just an unpleasant memory. But now I'm getting the deja vu feeling, so I'm more jittery than I would be otherwise about the Mets.

I just hope that Ron Swoboda doesn't google his own semen. I'd be a bit, I don't know, flustered, if he ever found this thread. I wonder how many people typically google their own name alongside the word "semen."

Edith Bunker's response: "I didn't know Carlos Delgado was Japanese!"

So does Lindsay Lohan having sex with a man. (At least, these days.)

The Twins-Royals game, that we don't really care about, has gone into extra innings, and the Royals have scored once, and are still batting, in the top of the 10th.

I think this is all very therapeutic. I just hope this doesn't happen again! Sometimes the other shoe does drop, you know.

I remember I was vacationing in California when that first 7-game lead dwindled away, and when it started to come back. I followed it all through out-of-town newspapers and the little scroll on the bottom of the ESPN screen on my hotel televisions. I also remember, perhaps right before that second series against the Phillies, Keith saying at the end of an SNY broadcast that the Mets were rounding into championship form, and were in good shape for the playoff push. (It might have been as they were completing their sweep against the Astros.) "Fun fact" about September 2007: The Mets actually had a .500 record that month. Prior to the notorious 5-12 ending, they had opened the month by going 9-2. I guess that's why Keith was thinking they were about to take off. Who could have seen a 9-2 followed immediately by a 5-12? What an unbelievable month that was. And the Mets were, at the time, running those "Your Postseason Has Come" commercials on SNY.

Twins have taken a 1-0 lead in the first.

John Cougar Lunchbucket wrote: The other crazy thing that night was the Phillies concurrently overcoming a 6-0 deficit and winning. That's the other thng about the Collapse. It was a big failure on our part to be sure, but easy to forget the Phillies had to play almost as good as we played bad to take it, and they did. Yes, that's why it was all so unlikely. The Mets had to fall apart, and the Phillies had to take full advantage of it. While the Mets were finishing the season 5-12, the Phillies were going 13-4. Had the Mets gone a mere 7-10, they still would have won the division. And even with the 5-12, if the Phillies had gone 11-6, they still wouldn't have caught the Mets. So it's fair to say that the Phillies won it as much as the Mets lost it.

Only one afternoon game today, and it does have pennant race impact as the Twins, one game out of first place in the AL Central, host the Royals. But the game we all care about starts at 7:05 p.m.: Brewers at Phillies. Jamie Moyer goes for the Phillies on three days rest. The Phillies, without the benefit of the offdays that the Mets have this week, are having some rotation problems as a result of the unexpected Sunday doubleheader. Ben Sheets pitches for the Brewers. Last time we saw him he was pulled after 5 shutout innings against the Mets. (Some kind of tightness, if I remember correctly.) But he recovered enough in his next start to pitch a 1-0 complete game shutout against the Padres on September 6. (5 hits, 1 walk, 7 strikeouts.) Sheets hasn't given up a single run, earned or unearned, since August 19, when he gave up 5 in 6 innings in a loss to the Astros in Milwaukee. So tonight's pitching matchup seems to heavily favor the Brewers. Let's hope things go according to plan. Anything can happen at Citizens Bank Park.