G-Fafif

Entering 2009, the Mets have lost ten games in which a Met has hit a grand slam, the most recent of them the infamous Murphy on third, nobody out ninth-inning debacle of last September. On the other hand, they had five baserunners thrown out last night and won on a walk.

The Prado is overrated as a museum, too.

Keith suggested Ramon's quad could be an issue in extra innings. His father once marveled to him, he added, that Gary Carter caught that entire nineteen-inning game in Atlanta 24 years ago. It's Johan's throw day.

Tatis goes Wig-Wam SLAM!

And here I thought you were answering this question:

It was Fran: "Shea will be ricking for Rock White!" I have yet to miss Fran Healy.

I'm so glad Kong didn't go headfirst.

="Kong76"]Thanks for clarifying. Since you mentioned the bases, safe at second ... Problem is we found first after this and I slid in from right field. Given the path you took, I would have mistaken you for Daniel Murphy as recently as two weeks ago. Not now, mind you, as no Met can currently do wrong.

Kong76 wrote: I didn't realize the home losing streak on Sunday dated back to July until G-Fafif told me. Nice to put that thing to rest in good game watching company. Same here, but to clarify, there was a win September 7, but there was also a loss. First exit from Flushing Meadow with unadulterated good vibes in 9-1/2 months. Also found Shea's bases marked in the parking lot, along with the "pitching plate," which I think is a pitching rubber, but well, either way there used to be a ballpark right there. Lots of clusters of folks taking pictures at each stop. Still needs chalking.

Deck swabbed effectively of poop. Lovely day for Mrs. Fafif and me in Prom, via MF and in conjunction with the Kongs, despite Idiot of the Day sitting behind me, a lady who started the first by consigning Livan to "an Ollie start" and ended it by complaining bitterly that Sean Green had to pitch because "Jerry wants to help him mentally in the head." Not sure where else one can be mentally helped. Some other minor annoyances could be easily catalogued but seven wins in a row forgives just about everything. Go team!

Sometimes it's quiet enough there so such would be appropriate.

Swan Swan H wrote: A 1-0 game is nice, but a blowout is like watching in a rocking chair. Shh! The Mets are going to start charging special rocking chair prices.

Still no sign of Matt Capps in this series. And Sid Bream remains safe.

Marvelous day at CF thanks to awesome game and awesome company in the form of bmfc1 and the sons of everybody's favorite [friggin'] fantasy camper. Think I saw Swan Swan H in a Viva Shea t-shirt. Called out his non-screen name but he didn't respond, so I could be mistaken*. My facility with dates is matched inversely by my inability to remember faces as well as I should. *I'm now thinking it was somebody else familiar from the online rounds. Either way, good game.

Bill Denehy's all right, but I really love that view beyond the 358 sign.

I was thinking, as his new mates pummeled him joyously, that maybe it was strange for Bream scoring the pennant-winning run at the expense of his old team. He didn't look the least bit conflicted at the moment of triumph.

Not sure if this qualifies as irony, but ironically, after last night's Mets-Pirates game had reached its satisfactory conclusion, I found ESPN Classic was running Game Seven of the '92 NLCS. I picked it up in the ninth, the Bucs leading the Braves 2-0, three outs from the World Series, Doug Drabek in command, Atlanta barely hanging on...and here come the Braves, and there goes a ball to Chico Lind that he can't handle and in comes Belinda and next thing you know Cabrera is up, Justice is scoring, Bream is tearing as best he can around third, Bonds sets and fires, LaValliere has to reach a little to his right, Bream slides and, by about a second, Pittsburgh doesn't go to the World Series. And they never come back to the playoffs, at least not from the vantage point of 2009. Of course Fulton County Stadium is enraptured and Braves are piling all over the leadfooted Bream. I was a Braves fan in that series, a Braves fan in the N.L. West, a Braves fan when it didn't conflict with anything the Mets were doing (and goodness knows the Mets had stopped doing anything long before the NLCS rolled around in 1992), so I was happy and almost ecstatic when Francisco Cabrera made himself fleetingly famous. But watching in the future, watching Leyland, Bonds, Van Slyke, Lind, people in a sports bar in Pittsburgh all grasping what got away...geez. There would be no return trip, there would be nothing. Some on that team would go elsewhere and do fine. Their fans haven't had anything since that night. They still wouldn't have had anything since that month, probably, even if they had won. Bonds would have left, money wouldn't have been spent and sixteen consecutive losing, hopeless seasons would have commenced. But what a way to take the plunge.

Francesa's still objectively unlistenable, but I can't stay away when the MFYs are floundering. Somebody called to mention Willie Mays' birthday was yesterday, and MF got intensely touchy. "This isn't a Willie Mays show," he huffed. "This is a Mickey Mantle show." Maybe the Mick can fill in behind the plate tonight, Mikey.

His one year as a Met made Mrs. Fafif a Brent Mayne fan. Or, more precisely, an article in the Snooze about how he rode the 7 to Shea made his a name she recognizes instantly, as opposed to, say, Alberto Castillo. A RARE APPLE UNLIKE MOST, CITY LIFE GRIPS METS' BRENT MAYNE BY THOMAS HILL Sunday, June 23th 1996, 2:00AM Brent Mayne removed his knapsack, slipped into an old wooden booth at John's Pizza, sidled up to his wife, Hillary, and leaned against a backdrop of carved graffiti. Just then, Mayne's wide eyes spied a dark jukebox across the room. The temptation was too great. He bounced from his seat, rifled through his bag for two quarters, plunked them into the machine and punched in his selections. Familiar strains of Bobby Darin's "By the Sea" provided accompaniment for the usual Friday lunch-hour cacophony of rushing waiters, clanging plates and gabbing customers. After a moment of silence, the Beach Boys began to wail, "Wouldn't it Be Nice?" A pattern was developing. Mayne smiled mischievously as he admitted his plot to bring the California beach to Greenwich Village on the first full day of summer. "It seems like some people have a way better perspective than other people," Mayne said. "And it seems like most of those people live at the beach. You can live with one pair of shorts a year if you have a beautiful beach to go to every day." But Mayne, the Mets' 30-year-old backup catcher, doesn't have the beach at his door this summer, as he does while living in Newport Beach, Calif. during the offseason. He has North America's largest urban playground in his backyard instead. And Mayne, the only Met who lives in Manhattan, doesn't want to miss anything while he's here. "It's just the energy of it," Mayne said. "Every day we get up and walk outside and it's like walking into an adult Disney Land. It's just bigger than life. It's something I've never experienced before." "It's so sexy," Hillary Mayne said. All his teammates in fact, almost all of the city's professional athletes opt for the security of the suburbs.But Mayne, who joined the Mets in December after a trade with Kansas City, saw only one way to approach his move headfirst. After receiving encouragement from his former Royals teammate and fellow Manhattan resident, David Cone, Mayne and his wife found their two-bedroom East Side apartment in April. They have not once regretted their choice. "We had to decide, `Do we want to live in the city, or on Long Island?"' Hillary Mayne said. "But it was an easy choice. A lot of people said living on Long Island would be like moving to L.A. and living in Riverside." Mayne isn't missing out on a bit of the Manhattan experience. He rode the subway for the first time this spring and immediately became hooked. Now he considers the train his primary mode of transportation. Both Mayne and his wife have discovered that the easiest route to Shea in the late afternoon occasionally is the No.7 train. Other Mets' wives have reacted with stunned incredulity at the revelation that two straphangers live among them. "They're baffled, they can not believe it," Hillary Mayne said. "They think I'm out of my mind. And they don't know what my husband's doing to me. They all have their cars in the suburbs." The Maynes rode a crowded No.6 downtown Friday afternoon. One passenger engaged another in a brief conversation about Dwight Gooden. Dressed in a red T-shirt, turquoise corduroy shorts and sneakers, Mayne stood silently beside them, offering no hint of his identity. Protected by the anonymity afforded to a backup catcher and his wife, the Maynes feed their enormous appetite for the city every day. They often wander through Central Park on the mornings of home games. One recent day, they stopped to play with a little boy named Buddy, as he whacked tennis balls with a bat. "He would hit the ball hard against the backstop, and just sit and watch until it came to a complete stop," Mayne said. "We were watching him for awhile, and finally, he asks us, `Do you want to play?' " The catcher and his wife could not resist. Finally, with Hillary pitching and Brent hitting, Buddy called from the outfield, "Is he any good?" Smiling, she replied, "Not really." Mayne then slammed one of his wife's pitches deep over Buddy's head. Slowly but good-naturedly he retrieved the ball, never aware that he was playing with one of the Mets. "You get to mix it up with different people," Mayne said. "That's a great thing about New York. The rich people have to rub elbows with the poor people. That's not so in California. There, you can cut yourself off from what you don't want to see. Here, it's impossible. "People in New York are supposed to be rude. That's not true. They just talk differently. They're just direct and straightforward. They tell you exactly what they think. You don't have to deal with cutting through a lot of crap." The Maynes strolled through Washington Square Park Friday, stopping to watch two 20-something men playing speed chess after maneuvering around a group of young girls jumping rope Double Dutch. A bare chested man juggling seven balls prompted Mayne to stare in awe. At such moments, he has difficulty believing that so many of the city's other pro athletes remain in their suburban bunkers. "I understand it's intimidating," he said. "We went through that. But I'm glad we did this, because you hear so many bad things. Maybe I'm just seeing it through rose colored glasses because I haven't been rolled or mugged yet." The allure of the city, however, has been far more satisfying to Mayne than the call of the ballpark. Playing behind Todd Hundley, one of the game's emerging young power hitters, Mayne started just eight of the Mets' first 73 games, and had just 46 at-bats. Mayne has spent this season having flashbacks to Kansas City, where he played behind Mike MacFarlane for most of his first four seasons in the big leagues. From the start, Mayne feared he would find very little playing time with the Mets. "I didn't want to be in a situation like I was in Kansas City," Mayne said. "So, my first thought was, `Damn, I'm going back to the same situation.' But if I'm going to be somewhere and not play, this is where I'd like to be." Todd Hundley is having the season of his life. In his own way, Brent Mayne is, too.

Stuff I forgot to follow up on that I'd been thinking of that doesn't involve Tyler Yates or Matt Capps: If this weekend seems strange having the Pirates in town, it is: Pittsburgh hasn't been in Queens on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday since 2004. (They did play a weekend series at MFYS II in '07.) Even rarer is the month this is happening. The Pirates, as a National League Central representative, have never visited the Mets in May. They didn't step foot inside Shea in the merry, merry month of May after 1993.

Rose came over in '79 and they went into the toilet (not to be confused with the septic tank where the Mets were then). Funny how Pete kept that winning formula under wraps for a year.

="Frayed Knot"]]I once came across, in a press release, a person who had a semi-colon in his name, as in Robin;on Diaz. We checked and checked again and it was really his name. What's up with th;t? He was named by someone who was only semi-conscious at the time. At least whoever named him didn't slip into a comma.

Strangely, first thing that occurred to me (after his '73 card) was "one of Walter Alston's coaches." I wonder if Ozark had hung in there a little longer in L.A. if he would have gotten the big job over Lasorda. Probably not as I get the sense Lasorda would shiv anybody who gets in his way. I seem to recall him being let go in Philly despite a fine track record because the clubhouse was considered that of a country club. Dallas Green was uberjerk and that was what you needed to win in Philly. Charlie Manuel must have more of that going than we realize. The definitive sports blog for people who root for teams that play in South Philadelphia explained Ozark to its younger readers as such: imagine Andy Reid being replaced and the Eagles winning the Super Bowl -- that was Ozark's role with the Phillies. How adorable they had to spell it out with football.

="John Cougar Lunchbucket"]I think the important point was that theior backup catcher is named Robinzon Diaz. How cool is that? I once came across, in a press release, a person who had a semi-colon in his name, as in Robin;on Diaz. We checked and checked again and it was really his name. What's up with th;t?