metirish

Well you probably only knew that cos you read the post...

With Beltran taking that honor the week before I have a little quiz, I just read the bit of trivia in one of the daily rags.. When was the last time the Mets had consecutive winners for MLB NL player of the week? Give us players and what year.

With that thinking Willie could have sat the whole team really...Arroyo was brilliant.

Reds catcher David Ross on the 61mph pitch that El Duque threw him and the ump called him out on... ] "It was a slider-sidearm-sssssomething," Ross said, shaking his head. "That's not fun." Felipe Lopez on the 53mph offering... ] "Fifty-three miles an hour," Lopez repeated. Now he was shaking his head, too. "I was waiting, waiting ... then waiting some more for it. Waiting too long. Since I've been in the big leagues, I've never seen a ball that slow."

I'm sure more than a few members remember this guy, cool article. ] Recalling the Time of the Signs at Shea By VINCENT M. MALLOZZI Published: June 18, 2006 One recent morning in Queens, Karl Ehrhardt walked over to his bedroom closet and unlocked the door to a dozen memories, every one of them in black and white. Karl Ehrhardt, a k a the Sign Man at Shea Stadium in 1969. Ehrhardt, 81, better known to fans of a certain vintage as the Sign Man of Shea, looked down at a pile of placards he once flashed in Flushing, bits of commentary designed to praise and inspire, or tease and rattle, the Mets and their opponents. From 1964 to 1981, the Sign Man, dressed in a blue shirt and a black derby emblazoned with a Mets logo, responded on cue to much of the drama played out between the white lines. One summer day in 1979, the Sign Man followed a bouncing ball into and out of the glove of Mets shortstop Frank Taveras. The Sign Man showed no mercy: "Look Ma, No Hands." And whenever the journeyman Jose Cardenal struck out for the Mets, the Sign Man never failed to hoist: "Jose, Can You See?" "I just called them the way I saw them," Ehrhardt said. A commercial artist from Queens who grew up in Brooklyn rooting for the Dodgers, Ehrhardt said he "adopted the Mets" in 1962, the year the franchise was born, five years after the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles. When Shea Stadium opened in 1964, the Sign Man set up shop, running his business of baseball barbs from a box seat behind the third-base dugout. Long before television coverage and giant scoreboards became littered with never-ending distractions, the Sign Man was the only sideshow in town. He took roughly 60 signs to each game; he once owned as many as 1,200, but only 12 remain. The letters were white paper spray-glued onto black cardboard measuring 20 inches high and 26 inches wide. "Before I went to the ballpark, I would try to crystal-ball what might happen that particular day," said Ehrhardt, whose signs had color-coded tabs for different situations. "I would read all the newspapers to learn who was hot and who was in a slump, stuff like that, and create my signs accordingly." One of his creations was the Frankenstein's monster sign, made specifically for weak hitters who rarely reached base. That sign screamed: "It's Alive! It's Alive!" Bob Mandt, a former Mets vice president for baseball operations, said of Ehrhardt: "Not all of the players were in love with him. It all depended on what he was putting up there." But Mandt said that even M. Donald Grant, the team's chairman at the time, could appreciate one dig, four sad words on the state of the woeful Mets in August 1965: "Welcome to Grant's Tomb." By 1969, Ehrhardt had become a fixture at Shea. That year, when left fielder Cleon Jones squeezed the final out of the World Series in his glove, the Sign Man, too choked up to talk, reached into his bag of shticks and pulled out: "There Are No Words." In 1973, Grant and the Mets flew Ehrhardt and his wife, Lucille, to Oakland, Calif., for Games 6 and 7 of the World Series. After losing to the Athletics, the Mets allowed the Ehrhardts to fly back on their team charter — with Mayor John V. Lindsay on board as well. Every member of the team, including Tom Seaver and Willie Mays, autographed a sign that Ehrhardt had held proudly: "Only the Beginning." By 1981, Ehrhardt began noticing signs of changing times. He said that the Mets, who had become a laughingstock, were no longer inviting him to team functions. "The front office was now run by new ownership, and they didn't like me criticizing the team," he said. "They turned their backs on me, so I just packed up my signs and went home." But in August 2002, the Mets asked Mandt, now a team consultant, to persuade Ehrhardt to return to help celebrate the franchise's 40th anniversary. Ehrhardt attended a game between the Mets and his once beloved Dodgers. At that game, he held this message high for fans of a certain vintage: "The Sign Man Lives." E-mail: cheers@nytimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/18/sports/baseball/18cheer.html

Valentin After such a horrible start to where he is now is just a surprise.

Torre will be holding meetings soon to solve this.

Rice V Miami tonight in College baseball?

Need to get him hot for the trade.

I think at this stage after seeing Lastings for a few weeks I'd be more than happy to seem him packaged to Oakland for Zito.

Miguel Batista's book is probaly better.

I beleive he does it after every AB, during a game recently it was mentioned that while visiting a school the kids gave Carlos a gift of a new book to use, apparently he said the book he has is the same one he has had for ever......

Great KTE ....should be a good series.

The A's have won ten in a row, Payton had 3 hits yesterday, as did Marco Scutaro .

I dig what Mr.Zero says...

Jon Stewart was fun...

I'm really starting to get concerned about Pedro's home run count this season....

Floyd is on the DL ..

Still no Floyd....go Pedro.

Sure I would like him on the Mets, what I find most that I don't like about him is that everything he says sounds to me like it came from a PR guru,he's all about his image I think.

Sure I would like him on the Mets, what I find most that I don't like about him is that everything he says sounds to me like it came from a PR guru,he's all about his image I think.

I remember from earlier this season Guillen talking about Jenks his closer..

To me he's being a fake "stand up guy".....that's just what I think.

I fucking hate Rodriguez....after the game yesterday he said this.... ] "If you want to write the worst article you ever wrote about somebody," Rodriguez said, "today is a good day to write about me. So if you want to rip me, go ahead. Rip away." ]"Whatever bad thing you want to write about me, go ahead and do it," Rodriguez said. "You'll probably be right." ]"If I was a fan, I'd probably be booing me too," he said. "If I were a writer, I'd be ripping me. But listen, the Lord has blessed me with a great hand. I'm not gonna sit here and whine and complain about any situation that I'm in." ]"At the end of the year, I know what I'm gonna do and I know what I'm gonna be," he said. "I'm gonna help us win a lot of games. I can hit, man. I'm a great hitter. I've always been a great hitter. So I know how to get it done. It's just a matter of going out and doing it. And right now I'm not doing it."

Glavine,Trax and Floyd look back at the bad old days .]METS INSIDER From dark days, a whole new ballgame BY DAVID LENNONNewsday Staff WriterJune 16, 2006PHILADELPHIA -- Cliff Floyd remembers when there was no light at the end of the tunnel. So do Tom Glavine and Steve Trachsel. Which makes what is happening with the Mets this season that much sweeter for the longest-tenured members on the club.After Wednesday's victory over the Phillies, the Mets claimed the best record in baseball by nudging percentage points ahead of the Tigers. Read that again. For those who suffered through the lean times in Flushing - that's a euphemism for the Art Howe Era - this runaway success has an almost dreamlike quality to it."I've never been on a first-place team before so this is entirely new for me," said Trachsel, a 13-year veteran who signed with the Mets after their World Series appearance in 2000. "You come to the ballpark expecting to win rather than hoping to play well - or hoping the other team screws up so you can win."That's the mindset when you finish 26� games out of first place, as the Mets did in 2002. Or 34� games back, as they did in 2003. The pinnacle for the Howe regime came in 2004, when the Mets pulled to within 25 games of the top spot, perhaps motivated by the knowledge that Howe, who stayed on as a lame-duck manager for the final two weeks, would be gone at season's end.Looking back at all that misery, no one is happier now than Floyd, who was scolded by the front office for his infamous "no light at the end of the tunnel" remarks during those dark days. He laughed about it this week. It wasn't so funny then."People were in denial," Floyd said. "I was saying to myself, 'What are they really looking at? Let me know.' We had no direction. Nothing was looking like, 'OK, down the road, maybe we'll be all right. We've just got to battle through this tough time.' It didn't look like that."Nothing was good. Everything was negative. You want to go home. Every time you go past LaGuardia, all you're thinking about is catching a flight and going home. That's how it was."Just as Floyd was saying that, he looked over at Jose Reyes, fully dressed in his uniform and swinging a bat in front of his locker - three hours before the game in a near-empty clubhouse. That's the enthusiasm a long winning streak and the prospect of a playoff berth brings. The Mets are bursting with a self-esteem that is radiating outward through the fan base and infiltrating the tri-state area."Everything is different," Glavine said. "We're more of a lead story than an afterthought. You sense the excitement that everybody has. Not only in our own ballpark, but on the road now."We've had huge followings on the road. That's obviously different from the last couple of years. Everybody kept telling me and has continued to tell me that New York is more of a National League town. They just haven't had a lot to cheer for in the National League the last few years."Inevitably, the discussion brought Glavine around to the dreaded Y-word. But after three seasons of being dwarfed in New York by that pinstriped shadow, Glavine, who's endured more than his share of frustration since leaving the Braves, finally can say the balance may be shifting a bit."We're not going to unseat the Yankees overnight or anything like that," Glavine said. "They are what they are and they deserve everything they get, attention-wise."But you just hope to get your little niche of the market, so to speak, and give your loyal supporters something to boast about. Because God knows, the Yankees' fans have had plenty to boast about over the years. You know the Mets fans are starving to do the same thing, and so far we've given them something to boast about."The Mets, especially Flushing veterans like Floyd, Glavine and Trachsel, are careful to add the caveat "so far" to any conversation about their rapid start this season. First place midway through June does not guarantee a postseason berth in October, but there is a prevailing sense the Mets will not be playing out the string. Trachsel remembers those dog days too well."In those years, you got toward the middle of August and September, and that's when it got real tough," Trachsel said. "It's like, OK, we've got to find something today, let's play spoiler. But you know what? Spoiler --."Floyd is disappointed that this probably will be his only season to enjoy the Mets' renaissance. The leftfielder is in his walk year and likely will be leaving right when the Mets are worth sticking around for."You hope you're part of the organization for longer than this year," Floyd said, "because they're going to be on TV a lot, the city's going to embrace them, Shea's going to start selling out, there's a new stadium coming. You can't really think of anything but good things for a team like this. At the end of the day, you go home happy a lot, and I think that's the best thing that can come out of this."I don't care if it's June. We'll take that over what's been happening here my last three years."