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Edgy MD wrote: And for Backman's part, it sounds like baldfaced self-promotion. No, Wally still has his mustache.

[u:anegjuok]Elite Lineup of Marlins[/u:anegjuok] Pierre LF Solano 2B Dobbs 1B Ruggiano CF Ozuna RF Valaika 3B Olivo C Green SS LeBlanc P

Hefner 4.0

Yes, Wright; no Stanton. [u:2wq9ii4p]Mets [/u:2wq9ii4p] Mike Baxter, rf Ruben Tejada, ss David Wright, 3b Lucas Duda, lf Daniel Murphy, 2b Ike Davis, 1b Anthony Recker, c Juan Lagares, cf Jeremy Hefner, rhp [u:2wq9ii4p]Marlins[/u:2wq9ii4p] Juan Pierre, lf Donovan Solano, 2b Placido Polanco, 3b Greg Dobbs, 1b Justin Ruggiano, cf Marcell Ozuna, rf Miguel Olivo, c Nick Green, ss Kevin Slowey, rhp

Metstradamus features Jons Hamm and Stewart trading baseball barbs Monday night, as Cardinal and Met fans will do. Note JS slipping in a Cleon Jones that nobody in his audience or at his desk gets but probably everyone here will.

Former New Yorker profiled in The New Yorker. Lot of good stuff, particularly regarding the breakup. R.A. Dickey, the reigning National League Cy Young Award winner, sometimes seems like a sports hero dreamed up by a bookworm. He is a knuckleball pitcher, already the most ungainly of athletic specialists, relying on physics to make jocks look foolish. He wears his brown hair shaggy in the back, and has a beard that would please a thru-hiker. In 2011, inspired by Hemingway, he climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro�Kili, he calls it�and blogged about it for the New York Times. (�I take solace at least in the awareness of my own bravado.�) Every celebrity has a charitable cause, but, this past winter, Dickey actually travelled to the red-light district of Mumbai in support of his: curbing sex trafficking in India. He wrote about that for the Daily News: �It made me want to grab every downtrodden person I could find and walk them through the door, into the light and possibility, beyond the vile and violent world they�ve grown so accustomed to.� In spite of his millions, Dickey also professes to love public transportation, which he uses to visit museums in cities like Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., on the days he�s not pitching. �I mean, I figure, why not, you know?� he told me, in a Tennessee drawl. �I love art.� Dickey is impossible not to admire, yet one can�t help but wonder about those who embrace him too readily, now that they�ve seen him self-deprecating with Jon Stewart on �The Daily Show.� Are they even baseball fans, or do they just find it comforting to know that not all exceptional athletes are as boring as Derek Jeter or as vain as Alex Rodriguez? Conspicuous cosmopolitanism can be its own form of vanity, especially in a sport with a culture as lethargic as baseball�s. �Hurry up and wait,� baseball people sometimes joke, about the preponderance of downtime that overwhelms their daily professional lives. Instead of embracing multitasking, the game�s unwritten code seems to frown on it, and makes a virtue of enduring long afternoons between stretching and shagging fly balls with little more than sunflower seeds and headphones as distractions. In a losing clubhouse, at least, extracurricular activity is cause for suspicion, and, shortly before the Mets traded Dickey, last December, a column appeared in the Post accusing him of being a glory hound. Dickey was engaged in negotiations about his contract with the club. He was due to be paid five million dollars in 2013�good money, to be sure, but a pittance for a twenty-game winner�and his agent was seeking an extension, and a raise, to capitalize on his client�s newfound status, at age thirty-eight, as one of the game�s �lite players. The column�s author, Ken Davidoff, mocked Dickey�s infatuation with his own �narrative,� and accused him of being needy��a handful��and unloved by his less worldly teammates. The precipitating event for this zinger was a holiday party that the team had organized, at Citi Field, to benefit victims of Hurricane Sandy. Whether or not Dickey was admired by his peers, he was, after three seasons on the roster, undeniably popular among Mets fans, a lone bright spot in the grim years that followed the near-bankrupting of the franchise owing to the owner�s investments with Bernie Madoff. Dickey was asked to fly up from his home, in Nashville, to attend the party, playing the part of an elf. (Inevitably, a knuckleballer, even one who stands six feet two and weighs two hundred and fifteen pounds, would be cast as an elf.) There, also inevitably, reporters asked him about the status of his contract talks, and he took the opportunity to plead his case: he was old, yes, but well within a knuckleballer�s prime, and a bargain at a wage that was only slightly greater than the league average. �I feel like we�re asking for even less than what is fair,� Dickey said. �When people say, �It�s business, it�s not personal,� that just means it�s not personal for them.� To Davidoff, at the Post, this was Dickey showing his �true character,� putting his own feelings above the mission of the team. The headline��amazin�s won�t knuckle under dickey�s laughable threats to leave��gave the impression that the column�s author was serving as a mouthpiece for management, which appeared to be more interested in rebuilding for the future. Sure enough, in a matter of days, the Mets had found Dickey a new home, in Toronto. �My first thought in my heart was: You need to apologize, R.A., for the place that you did that,� Dickey told me, the day after he�d passed his Blue Jays physical��the day after all this crap,� as he put it, referring to the fallout from the Post column, and what he perceived as a hurtful smear campaign by the Mets, to placate a frustrated fan base. �Because I did it at a holiday party that was there to celebrate kids who had been displaced from Hurricane Sandy.� Dickey was back in Nashville, where strangers stopped him occasionally to offer congratulations: the Blue Jays had agreed not only to take on his contract but to extend it by two years and twenty-five million dollars�considerably more money than he had made in his entire career thus far. Yet as he drove around town, fielding calls from his agent (�Hey, did we put the shoe contract to bed?�) and ESPN (�It feels good to be wanted�my narrative is such that that hasn�t always been the case�), I got the sense that Dickey felt he�d earned a Pyrrhic victory. He�d loved his time in New York, a city that had bigger ambitions than baseball. �Seemingly, there was this culture where you could celebrate who you were authentically made to be,� he told me, and referred to the connections and friends he�d been able to make in the publishing and film industries while writing a best-selling book, �Wherever I Wind Up: My Quest for Truth, Authenticity, and the Perfect Knuckleball,� and participating in a documentary, �Knuckleball!,� that premi�red at Tribeca last spring. �You get to celebrate that part of you that gets overshadowed, because �the game should just be the game,� and you can�t operate outside that�you�re not a human.� He went on, �Now, it may have been more than what some people wanted. As far as the Mets were concerned, I don�t know.�

Newsday takes note of Strong Island boy making...I was gonna say good, but more like making progress. By Gregg Sarra Hicksville's Cam Maron calls it the grind -- the exhausting trip through the minors on the path to The Show. But the Mets' catching prospect is right where he wants to be. "There is a plan for everyone in our organization," said Maron, in his fourth season with the Mets' organization. "You have to be focused on the job and know where it's going to take you. I have been fortunate to be in a system that rewards work ethic and achievement with advancement." Some might say that Travis d'Arnaud, the Mets' Triple-A prize catching prospect, might be a huge stumbling block to Maron's road to the majors. But things can change quickly. D'Arnaud is on the disabled list with a fractured left foot. The Mets moved Dave Centeno from Double-A Binghamton to replace him at Las Vegas, creating a domino effect of movement throughout the system. "You never know," Maron said. "So you have to be prepared." Maron, currently at the Mets' Class A affiliate in Port St. Lucie, Fla., opened the season with two game-winning hits against the Marlins' Jupiter Hammerheads but fell off and entering Saturday was hitting .221 with a .241 on-base percentage. "The season is a long journey of ups and downs," said Maron, 22. "You have to be able to balance the highs and lows to be successful. I'm very pleased with my progress with the Mets." Maron was honored with the organization's Sterling Award in 2011 as MVP of the Kingsport Mets. "It was an incredible feeling to be recognized by the organization," Maron said. "Every year you learn a little bit more and the experience is immeasurable. I'm moving up quickly in the system." Maron's offseason training regimen and preparedness have helped him accomplish that. The lefthanded hitter batted .300 for Class A Savannah in the South Atlantic League last year. "We started training in his sophomore year of high school and he's the complete package," said hitting instructor Joe Francisco of Performance Factory in Farmingdale, who played in the Atlanta Braves farm system. "He has the big league makeup. He has the head and the work ethic and the intangibles that don't show up on a radar gun or a stopwatch. I think Mets scout Larry Izzo got a steal here." Maron has developed into a trusted catcher at Port St. Lucie, where the Mets will play a 140-game season. He said Mets catching coordinator Bob Natal has worked with him on his defensive skill set. "It's been easier to call games," Maron said. Maron, a two-time minor-league all-star, has thrown out 21 percent of would-be base-stealers in his minor-league career. Entering Saturday, he had thrown out five runners this season. "I'm getting five starts a week, so I'll play around 110 games this season,'' he said. "I've developed an excellent relationship with the pitching staff."

Box it and drop it to the floor of the ocean. Tejada 2.0 Buck 1.5 Harvey 1.5 Turner 1.5 Murphy 1.0 Familia 0.5 Rice 0.5 Duda 0.5

Niese 3.0 Tejada 1.0 Wright 1.0

Instream Sports asked me an eclectic bunch of Mets history questions tied into The Happiest Recap. The answers are here. Mull your own if you so choose. Great video clips, too.

Shouldn't this be in the Sky is Blue, Grass is Green, Sun Rises in East thread?

Slice and dice that smug bastard Sunday.

Wright 1.5 Valdespin 1.0 Buck 1.0 Davis 0.5 Tejada 0.5 Rice 0.5

Familia 1.5 Edgin 1.0 Turner 0.5

I'm all for this ASG being at Citi Field. I will watch it. If lightning strikes, I will attend it. I'm just sorry it took so long for the Mets to deduff themselves and go after one. Would've loved to have had a Shea followup to Hunt and Callison.

Harazin was Cashen's deputy for business circa 1988 when the Mets' "turn" was at hand. So if you're pointing fingers, save one for Al, maybe one for Frank and a big one for ownership that didn't care. The quote about "we'd rather host the World Series": I've noticed a few teams managed to both in the same season.

-mJ2Cfb8Egc Take me out to the ball game I want to sit in the stands and scream I wanna root for the losing team Like that day The stadium was Shea And I lived in a rally cap And the underdog would say �The So So Glos, �Son of an American,� Blowout (2012)

Different picture of same plate, sans pennies and trash can. Since the plaque doesn't mention the Mets, well, the hell with the Doubleday Batting Range (which isn't affiliated with the HOF, so I'm sticking with my correspondent's story).

NYG acquaintance of mine notes this final home plate from the Polo Grounds is on display (or near a trash can) in Cooperstown. Nevertheless, I like the Barr/Smith version better. WTF's with the pennies?

Marty Noble recalls how the Mets wouldn't lift a finger to bring Shea another another All-Star Game.

Hefner 3.5 Tejada 1.5 Wright 1.0 Davis 0.5 Byrd 0.5 Lyon 0.5

Jordany Valdespin and John Buck are on vacation today, too. Lucas Duda will be cleaning up. Ruben Tejada � SS Daniel Murphy � 2B David Wright � 3B Lucas Duda � LF Marlon Byrd � RF Ike Davis � 1B Anthony Recker � C Collin Cowgill � CF Jeremy Hefner � RHP

Just needing a fly ball and getting a grand slam (as if it's commonplace) always feels a bit greedy. But it did burnish the moment more than a fly ball that fell behind Kemp would have. Coaching third for the first extra-inning, walkoff grand slam by a Met since Tim Teufel was Tim Teufel.

I just noticed the date on this thread indicates the game took place in 2010. The Mets were pretty good at home in 2010. Carry on!