G-Fafif

How dare other team's players triple in our expansive, cavernous outfield?

If you didn't hear it on Fox (and who can keep the sound up?), Collins said it wasn't the same hamstring to give Jose trouble in the past; tightness and cramping. Which is what I get watching Curtis Granderson hit.

metsguyinmichigan wrote: Gee is awesome. And yet he never seems to get respect. Not as a batter...

metsguyinmichigan wrote: Just glad my new favorite player didn't injure himself throwing us the ball! There's a Kevin James vehicle in there somewhere. I can just see the trailer... Dave was a huge fan who wanted to be acknowledged by his favorite player -- but when he threw him the game ball...EVERYTHING CHANGED! "Hey, I'm you, and you're me!" "And my wrist hurts!" "ACOSTA! YOU'RE IN! YOU'RE FACING RODRIGUEZ!" "But I'm just a fan who's magically assumed the identity of the player who tossed me a ball!" "Quit kiddin' around and get in there and strike out A-Rod!" "I'm not Acosta! Hey Manny! You have to cover a Board of Regents meeting Monday night!" "Board of What????" DuDeBcpLITQ

Hey, it didn't look good for Manny Acosta the other day and he's fine. What, that doesn't make anyone other than MGIM feel better?

Howie willing to (perhaps) "assume" this is a "little speed bump for Jose," or at least not deciding this is fatal. Ed Kranepool, Lance Johnson and John Olerud, don't get your hopes up just yet.

"Felt tightness"; precaution. Remember, there was a game against the Cubs (rain delayed, played late at Shea) when they took him out for the same reason in 2007. Gave him the next day off. He was fine from there. So there is actually precedent for Not The Worst Imaginable. I'm gonna go with that.

Cross your fingers. And your hamstrings if you can.

WTF?

MFYs 13-3 since Jeter went out. So his absence makes everyone around him better.

Confirming the rumor that's been going around: The MFYs can, in fact, go fuck themselves.

Decent history of the song in the Wall Street Journal. A Mets Jingle Outlasts Its Author By JOSHUA ROBINSON Even to the most assiduous student of Mets lore, the name Ruth Roberts probably never rang a bell. But when she died Thursday night at the age of 84, she left behind one of the most universally recognizable elements of the franchise: "Meet the Mets,'' the catchy, brassy anthem she wrote in 1961. For half a century, this peppy jingle, which was written to encourage a skeptical town to "step right up and greet the Mets," which were then a brand-new team, has followed the franchise to two new ballparks. Through good seasons and bad, it has optimistically guaranteed that the Mets will deliver "the time of your life." "It's one of the most charming, endearing parts of the Mets' history," said Bob Thompson, a professor of music at SUNY Purchase and the head of the Baseball Music Project. "It was about the honesty and the purity of the game. It turned the spotlight away from the players and onto the fans." "Meet the Mets'' is actually slightly older than the team itself. It was commissioned in the fall of 1961 before the team's inaugural season. Roberts wrote it with her long-time collaborator, the composer Bill Katz, who died in 1988. At a time when sports music was dominated by fight songs about crushing the opposition to a fine paste, "Meet the Mets" stood apart by sounding decidedly chummy. Fittingly perhaps, given the Mets' years of futility, the song barely mentions winning. The single reference to success on the field�"Because the Mets are really sockin' the ball / Knockin' those home runs over the wall"�has, more often than not, stood as an empty promise. Sam Roberts, Ruth's brother, pointed out that the song was always meant to have that friendly tone. "This song is not about baseball," he said in a recent telephone interview. "It's not about the game and there's nothing violent about it. It's about having a nice day at the ballpark." The song remains in the Citi Field organist's repertoire. Versions are played during the SNY television and WFAN radio game broadcasts. But the primary sources of royalties on the song, according to the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), are reruns of two popular syndicated shows, "Seinfeld'' and "Everybody Loves Raymond,'' in which the song made cameos. "Meet the Mets'' was by no means Roberts's only hit. In fact, it was not even her only baseball-themed hit. A gifted pianist, she began traveling from her home in Port Chester, N.Y. to the legendary Brill Building on Broadway to sell songs when she was in high school. One of her biggest hits was "The First Thing Ev'ry Morning (And the Last Thing Ev'ry Night)," performed by Dean Martin. Her first major sports song was "Mr. Touchdown, USA," which she wrote with Katz and her husband, Gene Piller, in 1950. Six years later, they had their first baseball hit with "I Love Mickey,'' about Mickey Mantle. And in 1960, they penned "It's a Beautiful Day for a Ballgame,'' which used to be a fixture at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. So by 1961, when the Mets and the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson were trying to craft their image in a market that still resented the loss of the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants, Roberts and Katz were already well established. Several months before kicking off their inaugural season, the Mets decided to place their branding in the hands of New Yorkers. They ran a contest for a logo and also put out a call for a theme song. Roberts's entry was one of 19 songs they considered. (the team also paid a New York cartoonist $1,000 for a logo design that showed the Manhattan skyline set inside a baseball with cursive letters�a logo that the team still uses.) After some edits were made by the Mets' general manager, the song was finally released to the public in the spring of 1963. The original version was performed by the Glenn Osser Orchestra. It was played on the radio and inside the Polo Grounds in a bid to generate buzz for a team that had just lost 120 games. For the fans who could not get enough of it, the Mets sold 45-rpm records of "Meet the Mets'' for $1 as a souvenir of the Polo Grounds, the Mets' home during their first two seasons of existence. One side of the disc featured the classic version with vocals while the other had an instrumental rendition. According to one news report from May 1963, the records were immediately popular. The Mets sold more than 4,000 copies at the ballpark and through the mail during the first two months of the season. And in case fans still needed more "Meet the Mets,'' they could buy the sheet music for 85 cents. Over the years, artists have tried to update the song. In 1999, there was a rhythm-and-blues version floating around. And in 1984, the Mets tried to jazz up the music and tweak the lyrics, replacing "Bring your kiddies, bring your wife / Guaranteed to have the time of your life," with, "Hot dogs, green grass all out at Shea / Guaranteed to have a heck of a day." But none of changes ever eclipsed the original version. "It's so stylized, it couldn't have been written in any other period but the early 1960s," Thompson said. "It's so corny�and that's what makes it beautiful."

With his 123rd hit of the 2011 season, Jose Reyes now has as many hits through 82 team games (79 played) as Gary Carter and Lenny Dykstra did in 1987 and Darryl Strawberry did in 1986; Darryl went 0-for-33 at Shea in August of 1986. He has passed the 122 total of Wally Backman in 1984 and Charley Smith in 1965; Jose's to-date 2011 hit total would place him third on the full-season 1965 Mets.

BEST SINGLE-SEASON BATTING AVERAGE IN METS HISTORY Through 82 NYM Games 2011: REYES -- .352 1969: Jones -- .347 1998: Olerud -- .326

METS HITS IN A SEASON Through 82 NYM Games REYES 2011: 123 Johnson 1996: 112

Tejada 1.5 Reyes 1.0 Niese 1.0 Turner 1.0 Murphy 0.5

METS ALL-TIME HIT LEADERS Through 7/1/2011 1. Ed Kranepool 1,418 2. JOSE REYES 1,242 3. Cleon Jones 1,188 4. DAVID WRIGHT 1,182

Fman99 wrote: Lets stomp these arrogant shitdicks. Man I wish that worked into an acronym for METS.

When the Mets take the field... [youtube:325bungo]zTLmDuhV3AQ[/youtube:325bungo] When the MFYs foul the field... [youtube:325bungo]i-EN8dpAvBw[/youtube:325bungo]

metsguyinmichigan wrote: I never heard this line until sometime in the last five years: Oh, the butcher and the baker and the people on the streets, Where did they go? To MEET THE METS! Oh, they're hollerin' and cheerin' and they're jumpin' in their seats, Where did they go? To MEET THE METS! All the fans are true to the orange and blue, So hurry up and come on down - 'cause we've got ourselves a ball club, The Mets of New York town! I get a little weepy listing to the song. I'm guessing the replacement verses of "hot dogs, green grass, all out at Shea, guaranteed to have a heck of a day" in the later version over the "bring the kiddies, bring the wife" line was some sort of PC move. I think it was mostly about misguided marketing and modernization rather than that dreadful "PC" phrase that's infected the public discourse for far too long (/hops off soapbox). Worse than tinkering with the classic lyrics was the chirpy Hooray For Everything! delivery the second version offered. The Mets, transitioning from de Roulet despair to Cashen resurgence, were having a crisis of confidence before their results-driven renaissance and were (semi-reasonably) questioning everything about themselves in the early '80s. They even tinkered with changing the name of the team (it got into the papers and they shot it down), so it probably seemed to their benefit to "update" the image. The image pre-1984 wasn't doing anything for them at the gate, so, uh, it must be the image's fault. I'm glad "MTM" has survived and flourished in the 21st century. I love that the butcher and the baker and the people down the street emerged from the shadows of their meat market and their bakery and wherever they were hiding. Though, post-2008, I kinda like that somebody thought to shoehorn Shea in there.

Best team anthem ever. Make me want to stand and place my right hand over my heart. Thanks Ruth Robert and Bill Katz.

The 7, of course, is batting leadoff. Girardi's nightmare: Jose Reyes, ss Justin Turner, 3b Carlos Beltran, rf Daniel Murphy, 1b Angel Pagan, cf Jason Bay, lf Ronny Paulino, c Ruben Tejada, 2b Jon Niese, lhp

You knew these games were coming; you might be surprised they arrived in rapid succession. This is the Mets Majesty edition of THR. 076: 1985 -- Fireworks Night in Atlanta/Fireworks Morning in Atlanta 077: 2000 -- Mets losing 8-1 middle of the 8th; Mets winning 11-8 top of the 9th 078: 2008 -- Delgado gets hot, day-night doubleheader gets off to a fantastic start And... 076: 1988 -- Putting some Pirate punks in their place 077: 1998 -- Doing with difficulty what Jim Palmer once did with ease 078: 2004 -- NOW who's got the best Matsui in town?

From BASEketball: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KEvS-t-MDg I love that movie.

Murphy 1.5 Beltran 1.0 Reyes 1.0 Acosta 0.5