G-Fafif

Of the 8 onetime Mets on the ballot, only Lo Duca got no votes. One for Rogers, one for Benitez (wonder if it was the same writer who voted for J.T. Snow), 6 for Nomo, 6 for Alou, 87 for Kent (15.2%), and we've already noticed how high Piazza wasn't and Gl@vine was. Oh well re Mike, probably in a couple of years. Oh well re Gl@vine, though 305 wins were unstoppable (and deserving, he says through teeth gritted since 9/30/2007). Thank you to the 16 voters who preserved Seaver's record. They're crazy to not vote for Maddux, but it's appreciated. Good for Frank Thomas. Hope he invites Frank Thomas.

Padres sign Xavier Nady to a minor league deal. Mets do not do same with Mike Cameron.

KO on JC... [youtube:328jhwqz]t-OHPjIsisI[/youtube:328jhwqz]

The writer who didn't vote for Seaver out of first-ballot principle was [crossout]John Drebinger, with the Times from 1923 through 1964, and Spink Award winner the same year Tom won his second Cy Young, 1973.[/crossout] Deane McGowen who wrote for the Times from 1949 to 1981 and covered an array of sports. He admitted Seaver belonged, but you know...can't do a firstie. So if the three Pete Rose guys hadn't had cause to be Pete Rose guys and the open-heart guy was in better shape, Seaver would've come in at 429/430, or 99.77%. OE: Had Drebinger on the brain, conflated him with McGowen.

Robinson Cancel to coach in Braves system this season.

If he hadn't appeared older than dirt, I'm not sure he'd have made a major impression. Didn't really seem to suck, which is always one of the nicest things one can say about a Mets middle reliever.

Competition for Anthony Recker? Only from the front. The Mets have signed catcher Taylor Teagarden to a minor-league contract with spring-training invite. Teagarden, 30, presumably would join Juan Centeno at Triple-A, with Anthony Recker backing up Travis d'Arnaud at the major league level. Officially, though, Teagarden would compete with Recker for the backup catcher spot. Teagarden hit .167 with two homers and five RBIs in 60 at-bats with the Baltimore Orioles last season. He has a .206 average and 20 homers in 467 career at-bats over six seasons with the Orioles and Texas Rangers. a1SenDxZAbA

Ken Levine remembers his friend and colleague. He was your favorite uncle. Always cheerful, always there for you. His passion for the game of baseball was infectious and his zest for life was inspiring. Other than having to broadcast meaningless spring training games, I can�t think of anything Jerry Coleman didn�t view in a positive light. You can see why it was such a pleasure to be around this man. He was also incredibly humble. To baseball fans of a certain age, Jerry was a God in New York. Whenever we would go into New York to play the Mets, the pressbox attendants and TV tech people treated Jerry as if he were Prince Charles. And yet he always downplayed it. He shook everyone�s hand, asked how they were, and joked with them.

Tug + 10. My goodness. Potentially lost in the legend of McGraw (and he's one of the handful for whom "legendary" seems wholly appropriate) is how frigging good a relief pitcher he was. Probably the best lefty out of the pen in the National League between '69 and '73. One of my favorite facts I've found in my research is Tug still holds the record for most K's by a Met reliever in a single outing: nine strikeouts in four innings versus the Padres in 1971.

Somewhere, Rich Folkers is throwing up in the bullpen.

Kong76 wrote: The look on the faces of these people is funny. The President has thrown a baseball!! In color!! I still find it hard to fathom life didn't take place in black and white before color photography became the norm.

A Boy Named Seo wrote: Would you believe I've only been to 3 Met games in NY in my life? Two at Shea, and one at Citi with Sheila. Mets lost 2 of those 3 (maybe all 3??) but all of those times were great. Back to your regular scheduled misery. Even the miserable memories make me miss Shea on this cold, snow-packed day.

Was watching MLBN's 1989 version of "Baseball Seasons" earlier and when they wanted to honor first responders post-earthquake when WS resumed, they were on the mound at Candlestick. I wouldn't swear to it, but I wonder if 1986 was the last time big-game first pitches were thrown from the box seats. Though I don't remember first pitches as daily occurrences for a long time to come, the Mets did have one on July 4, 1986, to coincide with 100th anniversary of Statue of Liberty. They found a woman who was born that day (or thereabouts). She had been offered first pitch honors at Shea -- from the box next to the Mets dugout -- as well as an invite to watch the reopening of the Statue with then President and Mrs. Reagan. She chose the Mets because she said she was more interested in meeting Gary Carter.

Coldest Shea day for me was Game Four, 2000 NLDS, in the back row of Mezzanine in left field, fair territory, wind whipping off Flushing Bay directly onto my back despite multiple layers to shield me from the elements. Bobby Jones pitched a one-hitter, so I survived quite nicely. More randomly, one night early that season, it was freezing against the Reds and Manny Aybar took his fucking time throwing every goddamn pitch, ensuring that when he became a Met in 2005, he heard one home team fan mysteriously booing the mention of his name on Opening Day.

The 1984 article has Reagan doing it in front of the dugout, which makes sense if you remember that as late as 1969 (if you remember your World Series telecasts), pitchers still warmed up there as opposed to the bullpen. That would be where Reagan, from his broadcasting days, likely thought it would be appropriate. Then again, he might have just been told to stand there by the Secret Service or his political choreographers, and if the erstwhile actor could do anything, it was take direction.

Reagan indeed toes the rubber late in his second term.

Judging from this slideshow, Bush 41 seems to have been the sea change with presidents, having been the former Yale 1B and always looking for ways to show his regular guy qualities. Not that presidents are the sole first-pitch practitioners, but I imagine Bush taking the mound helped set a tone, the way Taft getting up and stretching allegedly invented the seventh-inning stretch (to say nothing of the fifth-inning nosh).

I took a stab at tracking this down some years ago and couldn't get anywhere. I do remember that as late as 1986, Jean Yawkey and Nelson Doubleday threw out first Game Seven pitches from their seats, as did others in that postseason. By 1993, dignitaries standing on mounds was common enough so that when Kevin Kline appeared in Dave, throwing out the first pitch at OP@CY, he was on the mound, and it seemed perfectly normal. VP Bush threw from the mound to Gary Carter on Opening Day 1985, so it seems to be one of those things that kind of shifted over time, as opposed to everybody getting an edict. What I don't remember until the late '90s was every game getting a ceremonial first pitch. It used to be just the very special games. Once it dawned on the "industry" that this was a sweet sponsorship opportunity, it seemed to proliferate. A buddy of mine who worked for Tribune Company when they owned the Cubs was granted first pitch honors once...one of at least three "first pitches" for that particular game, which he said was about part for the Wrigley course.

Intertwined with the result but not so much about the result (as oppose to the Gl@v!ne implosion of 9/30/2007, which was my worst result-oriented Shea experience in that it happened in the top of the first and, as with the shooting of Tommy in Goodfellas, we had to sit still and take it): July 10, 1998, Mets leading Expos, 6-5, going to the ninth on Merengue Night, the main attraction for a vast plurality of the crowd. I'm in Loge watching John Franco trying to hold the one-run lead. Many of the Merengueans are obliviously using Loge as their as their ramp to Field Level for the impending concert. I don't mean they were coming down the actual ramps. I mean they were climbing over rows of seats from wherever they came while the game was going on. Meanwhile Franco is blowing the game, the Merengue people are storming downward and the baseball-oriented Merengue people are thrilled that the Expos are rallying because their man Felipe Alou is managing and their other man Vladimir Guerrero is part of the rally. So you've got a ton of people not caring if the Mets win or lose, another ton of people rooting for the Mets to lose, Franco making sure the Mets lose by surrendering three runs and what felt like a very slim minority pulling for the Mets to not lose. We were overwhelmed on all counts. Mets trailed, 8-6, and lost by the same score...which was fine by almost everybody since it meant Alou the national hero was successful and the Merengue band would start playing. But it wasn't fine by me, who found the nearest object one could throw -- a three-quarters full bottle of Pepsi -- in the empty postgame concourse and hurled it against the wall while tossing off every epithet I could think of. My friend who accompanied me -- who was boiling in his own, lower-key manner-- was stunned silent and didn't say a word for the next ten minutes before mentioning, "I've never seen you get so angry." 1998 had not a few games like this. It had the Braves never letting go of their chokehold on the East (especially at Turner Field where we went 0-6, including 0-3 on the final weekend to assure our playoffless streak would reach 11 years) and the MFYs never letting go of their chokehold on the city and the McGwireans coming in six weeks later and Franco going 0-8 and now, out of nowhere, it had the fucking Merengue Night crowd joining those who seemed to be lining up against me and my team in my stadium, as in "where the fuck did this come from?" I mean, yeah, I understood the dangers of letting the MFYs in, and I got that McGwire was a phenomenon (the Cubs' one visit took place before Sosamania) and Franco was Franco (I watched him blow two other Friday nights sans soundtrack) and the Braves could hardly be helped, but this one just had it all...and Merengue. As postscript, for years the Mets broadcasters would insist, "The Mets have never lost on Merengue Night." Like fun they didn't. A-hole who sat behind me on the final Closing Day, 2008, spitting and cursing and telling Schoeneweis he should blow his brains out and insisting hats be removed for "GBA" and calling the ump a communist and screaming into his phone while getting updates from the Jets-Cardinals game at the Meadowlands and repeating himself in endless cycles was probably the single worst individual I encountered, and of course the echo collapse against the Marlins was a shiv to the heart -- along with the ballpark being torn down afterward -- but the ceremony kind of saved the whole thing. Single worst competitive moment that somehow transcended the blowing of playoff spots in '07 and '08: Benitez allowing the 4-1 lead to become a 4-4 tie on 9/23/01, setting up the loss in extra innings to Atlanta, effectively ending the September 2001 Mets Rescue New York dream...though the sweep of Montreal that followed up north set up even worse heartache at Turner Field on 9/29/01, which was, somehow appropriately, the combined handiwork of Benitez and Franco (they'd only pitch in the same game three more times, in 2003). That was the 5-1 lead that became an 8-5 loss, and truly end the dream. I rationalize away September 23, 2001, in that it (and not the Piazza HR of two nights earlier) is what signaled to me that life would return to normal because if I could be that pissed off about a baseball game after what Real Life unleashed on New York 12 days earlier, then, well, the new normal wasn't so new after all. But I told some kid minding his own business in a Braves cap en route to the 7 train after that game to go fuck himself, so maybe it wasn't my finest hour. Dishonorable mention for the Sunday afternoon in 2004 when overzealous security refused to allow me to walk the six feet inside Field Level in left to patronize a concession stand because my ticket was for Loge and told me if I wanted to talk to a supervisor about it, I'd have to go up to Loge, walk the length of that level and then sneak back down on the other side (right after having dropped a pretty decent amount in the new team store)...and the last unscheduled doubleheader of 2008 when between games I waited in a Mezzanine line a good 10 minutes for a pretzel to be told "the pretzels aren't ready" and was then not allowed to ascend back to the Upper Deck on a particular escalator because No Reason Given, I just couldn't. All of the above said, 402 regular-season games, 13 postseason games, 2 exhibition games, 1 public workout, 1 baseball card show, 1 concert, at least 4 postponements after I walked through the turnstiles, overwhelming heat in July and August, punishing cold in April and October, rudeness, idiocy, violence, drunkenness, filth -- yet no regrets.

2006 NLCS villain Jeff Suppan, with better timing now than then. Right-hander Jeff Suppan, a remarkably consistent pitcher throughout a career prime marked by strings of double-digit victory seasons who is best remembered for a few very strong October performances for the Cardinals in their championship seasons of 2004 and 2006, announced his retirement today. Suppan, a product of Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley who last pitched in 2012 for the Padres but whose best years came for Kansas City, Pittsburgh and especially St. Louis throughout the previous decade, purposefully selected 2 p.m. Pacific time on Jan. 2 to make the announcement, to honor his beloved late mother Kathleen, who died at that time of day exactly six years ago to the day.

1. I think Thoroughly Modern Millie was the first movie to which I was taken. A little later, Skidoo became my first and probably only M-rated movie. My parents didn't seem too concerned that it was considered suitable for Mature audiences. 2. Some guy walked over from several rows ahead during Cabaret and told me to stop randomly breaking into Johnny Nash's "I Can See Clearly Now". Though I was singing relatively softly and he seemed unnecessarily nasty, he was by no means wrong. Worst moviegoing experience at any age I can recall was leaving In The Line Of Fire with a sick headache from the butterlike topping on the popcorn. Went home, threw up and never permitted that stuff splotched on my popcorn again.

Game on the line in the ninth between 1974 and 1977, who could possibly be sexier off the bench than Eddie Kranepool?

The second annual Oscar's Caps, FAFIF's recognition of Mets pop culture sightings from the year just about gone by, both contemporary and vintage. (Much of it tracked in this here thread.)

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It's July 15, 1978, and you are there...in Cincinnati, that is! Only from the eighth inning, apparently, but still -- not too shabby. [youtube:21nd9069]TRktiIYZ6B8[/youtube:21nd9069]