MFS62

And stay away from umpires. Later

They can't drive me crazy because in my case its just a short putt. So when I got home last night, my wife the Yankee, fan calmly said "Your team lost again tonight, didn't it?" It was a gimmie, not even a tap-in. On to the 19th green. (Hey, is the loser's lounge open during the season, too?) Later

Got that Sharpie. But I was thinking more toward the future. I was wondering about any shift in organizational philospohy. Seeing how starters can do in a relief role seems to make sense to me before you have to find out in a major league game. Its not just mental attitude and pitching approach, it is also seeing how quickly their arms rebound for the next appearance. Later

A few years ago, the Mets would have their minor league starting pitchers work some games out of the bullpen at the end of the season so they would be comfortable in that role when called up in September. That practice went on for a few years. When Humber was brought up, Willie said that he didn't want to pitch Humber out of the bullpen because "he is a starter". Has anyone read whether this practice has been formally discontinued? If so, since when? Later

Yesterday I saw a short blurb in the NY Daily News. It said that China will be entering a team in the upcoming Arizona Fall League. It then went on to say that "Duffy Dyer will be an instructor for the team". Later

Joe Schultz. Later

="Edgy DC"]="Johnny Dickshot"]In general xtra O beats the piss out of xtra D from the catcher. In general. In particular, I'd piss on a sparkplug if it'd help get a good start out of our pitcher tonight. Let me guess. You're a fan of the movie War Games? As for the choice of catchers, Willie usually gives LoDuca off for day games after night games. I'm guessing its Castro. Later

I don't care, as long as the corpse is cold. Later

You didn't post the writer's bio: ]Bill Madden joined the Daily News in 1978 after nine years at United Press International where he covered baseball, track and field and Olympics. He was the Daily News' Yankee beat writer from 1980-88 before becoming the News' national baseball columnist. In his 24 years with The News, Madden has broken numerous major baseball stories. He is the author of four books including "Pride of October: What It Was to Be Young and a Yankee," "Damned Yankees," in collaboration with Moss Klein of the Newark Star-Ledger, and two biographies of Don Zimmer. Ya' gotta' wonder about a guy who feels it is necessary to write two boigraphies of Don Zimmer. Later

Ta Ta to RFK Stadium: ]RFK Is Full Of Concrete Memories By Thomas Boswell Washington Post Sports Columnist Thursday, September 20, 2007; Page E01 Sometime in the next four days, I'll go to 2400 East Capitol St. SE to say goodbye to RFK Stadium. Don't know when it will be. Don't know how I'll feel. It's hard to believe that a big old beautiful dump of a park can be so much a part of your life. How can we both appreciate everything it's provided in the last 46 years, yet be delighted that we'll never step inside it again? Nobody was happier than me to see RFK open in 1961. And nobody will be happier to see it close to baseball on Sunday. In the years between, few got more pleasure from the stadium than I did, from its early days as a praised and copied modernist vision to its dilapidated end as a serviceable eyesore. RFK gave me a million memories, not one of them bad, from the old Senators to the new Nats, from U2 to 35 years of Redskins games. Thanks. But enough was enough long ago. Lemme outta here! Your whole life probably shouldn't be interlaced with one sports venue, but mine seems to be. With so many games in various sports played there in the last five decades, countless fans have a similar sense of that abundant feeling, an interplay between an utterly familiar place, comfortable repeatable pleasures and unexpected spontaneous memories. Just the letters "RFK" seem to set off a free-association mechanism in our minds. The huge white stadium with its flowing exterior lines arrived in town -- like the world's largest birthday present -- when I was 13. There might as well have been a banner over the entrance that said "To Tommy." D.C. Stadium, as it was called then, sat just 17 blocks from my parents' rowhouse in Northeast. It landed, like a flying saucer full of sports, just a quick bike pedal from my doorstep. Maybe I never got over the initial joy and that explains all the rest. On warm Sunday afternoons in the '60s, I'd come early enough for batting and fielding practice so I'd be sure to see the best of the Senators, even if only in their drills. Perhaps they knew it. If Eddie Brinkman and Paul Casanova didn't have the strongest shortstop and catching arms in the league, then they sure loved to show off for their fans because they made "infield" look like ballet. Then I'd watch Claude Osteen and Tom Cheney, or Dick Bosman and Joe Coleman, lose both ends of a doubleheader to the Yanks or Red Sox, albeit sometimes with a modicum of dignity. During school months, I'd be sure to take a math book, certain that at least one game would be more boring than algebra homework. Over the years, the recollections became a mountain. One night, three teenage friends and I brought a hand-cranked siren into the empty upper deck and made an obnoxious ruckus, then ran, flattering ourselves that we were being chased by some unseen authority other than conscience. As a fan, I saw one of Frank Howard's white-seat homers (the middle one). I leaned from the first row of the left field upper deck at the '69 All-Star Game to see a Willie McCovey home run smash through the face of the center field clock, the ball presumably decaying inside, unclaimed for years. The first time I ever was in the RFK press box, as a Post "copy boy," I scrambled after a foul ball hit by Willie Horton, eventually subdued it, then turned to show it proudly to my liege, the Post's dapper veteran baseball writer George Minot Jr. -- who was covered in the coffee I'd knocked all over him. By '71, I was allowed to interview an actual Senator -- second baseman Lenny Randle. So, no coffee in sight, I wandered onto right field at RFK during batting practice to ask him my questions. "I don't think you're supposed to be out here," he said. Since then, it is impossible for me to conjure any RFK moment that doesn't make me smile -- from the Redskins' 26-3 win over Dallas on New Year's Eve 1972 to reach the Super Bowl, to meeting soccer greats such as Johan Cruyff, who played for the pro team in Washington that went belly-up long before the champion United arrived. Even those demeaning exhibitions at RFK to drum up support for baseball in Washington had their moments. At age 75, Luke Appling hit a home run off Warren Spahn in an old-timers game, his ball barely clearing the 250-foot fence in left field. Spahn chased him around the bases, hitting him with his glove. The vignette got national attention. A year later, Appling returned, proud that he'd gotten more fan mail than he'd received in his whole Hall of Fame career. It took him months to answer every letter by hand. Over a third of a century, I've seen baseball come full circle at RFK. In '71, I wrote a sidebar about the Senators' pathetic last-season crowds: "The lines at the ticket booths before last night's game were two abreast and one deep." In one inning, I counted the entire crowd. By the summer of '05, with the Nationals in first place, crowds during one six-week pennant race stretch averaged more than 38,000 a game at RFK. As it has turned out, my favorite RFK moments are almost too fresh to be called memories, because they've arrived since baseball returned here three seasons ago. Without RFK, with its big league pedigree and 45,000 seats, major league baseball never could have moved the former Expos here on short notice in '05. So, as we await the new $611 million ballpark on the Anacostia waterfront, we should never forget to thank fading, funky RFK, which still will be home to D.C. United. Sure, its cylindrical design -- like other stadiums built in the '60s and '70s -- was perfectly suited to watching football, but so antiseptic, remote and inhospitable for viewing baseball that Camden Yards, and every other retro park, were built in an attempt to create intimate, quirky ballparks that were in almost every way the aesthetic opposite of RFK. Several times this season, when I've been one of the last people to leave RFK around midnight, I've left by the only exit that's still open -- the one at field level in the right field corner. You can still hear the cleaning machines and see the work crews, like specks in the upper deck. The light towers are on half-power. Every time, something pulls me from the grungy underbelly of the decaying park out onto the warning track underneath the foul pole. From there, the stadium rises above you with a monumental architectural confidence, a 360-degree sweep that takes your breath away as though you were at the bottom of a magnificent, multihued canyon. And if the moon hangs above, it's just a little too much. There is no other spot in the stadium that has comparable drama, where RFK's distinctive swaying roofline asserts itself so much. I doubt that in our new park, which will have 4,000 fewer seats, there will be any one perspective so magnificent, so equal to the city's other alabaster icons. Everything in the park in Southeast will, perhaps, be newer, more various and energizing and designed to flatter baseball's more intimate and human dimensions. But something will be lost. On those nights when RFK, in a half-light that mutes the flaws of age, towered over me and surprised me with its power, we had our natural farewell. Good luck, in these last four days, as you seek your own. Later

Willets Point wrote: Dickshot and MFS62 look a lot alike these days. Lawrence is pitching tonight because tonight is the night he throws the first no-hitter in Mets history. That would really screw up everything. Last year I predicted that Humber would be the first Met to toss a no-no. As for Dickshot and me. I guess that means there are TWO two good looking guys on this board. Later

Wilie said he wants to keep Pelphrey on his regular turn. A better question should be "Why not Humber?" Later

Willie yanked him out of a game for not hustling. It was several weeks ago. I also think that was when Jose started his decline. Later

Johnny Dickshot wrote: His head is so far up his ass I can't see it coming out in time. We're screwed IOW. Maybe that explains it. His head is up his ass, so his eyes are blocked and he can't see anything. Later

The way this team is playing in this series, I'm getting flashbacks to the 1962 Mets. Yeah, I know. The Mets killed LA during the regular '88 season, then LA won the playoff series. But I don't see the Mets being able to beat Philly should they meet in the playoffs this year. Just saying. Later

Amen to that! But IIRC the last time someone posted something similar - that they wanted to have a lineup full of "killers" (I paraphrase - it was maybe last year) they were accused of wanting to have a team too much like the MFYs. Later

The guys on radio said he reminded them of Mickey Rivers - always limped or looked injured, but when he had to, he could run "like lightning". Later

Willets Point wrote: Rather than double in size, make branch hall of fames in big cities like New York, Chicago or Los Angeles. Good idea. And if you're going to do that, how about St. Louis? And Boston? Or, they could do what they did with the Viet Nam memorial wall - they could build a mini - Hall and have it travel around to each of the major league ballparks and stay there for a full 3 or 4 game series. And if that is successful, have it visit the minor league parks. Also- my idea for resolving the "team hat" problem for players who spent substantial time with multiple franchises - have holographic emblems on their plaque hats, which change teams based on how you view them. Later

Nymr83 wrote: General Sherman of course. He swept Atlanta too. I am laughing out loud. Later

metbaseball wrote: ="MFS62"]I'm in the book. My contributions are in the acknowledgements and an anecdoteis on page 175. Unfortunately, they attribute it to me, and it is one of the recollections of that year that I didn't share with the co-writer. I related a lot of other stuff to him. No wonder its a great book. Later Cool. How'd you get all that info on the Mets? Howard By living through it. MFS62 stands for Mets Fan Since 1962. I ran into the co-author on a general baseball (non team-specific)web site, and started swapping stories about the growing pains of new teams. (He's a Jays fan from Canada) He's also involved with the group that follows Jewish major leaguers and periodically issues baseball cards of them. When it came time to write the book, he asked my permission to be quoted. He invited me to the signing at Barnes and Noble in New York, but I couldn't make it. Later

I'm in the book. My contributions are in the acknowledgements and an anecdoteis on page 175. Unfortunately, they attribute it to me, and it is one of the recollections of that year that I didn't share with the co-writer. I related a lot of other stuff to him. No wonder its a great book. Later

Edgy DC wrote: ="MFS62"]Schoeneweis has poisoned more games than China. Later Huh? It was an allusion to all the childrens' games and toys made in China that have been recalled recently because they contained substances that are harmful to children. Its been big news. Later

Al Moran. He had the shittiest looking batting stance you ever saw. And the results were comensurate with the stance. So he came back the next year and hadn't changed a thing. Same results. Later

Schoeneweis has poisoned more games than China. Later

Frayed Knot wrote: ]Not even did I not get a reply, but the Mets kept pitching Shannon up and/ or outside, ahd he kept hitting well against them. Don't feel bad. Herman Melville wrote Moby Dick and he never wrote back either. OK. Here's the obligatory BA DA BUM! you expected. LOL! Later