Edgy MD

Stupider, meaner, more indecent, more inflammatory/incendiary, less credible/verifiable, yet with more authority.

Interesting note that the futility record of 0-34 had previously been the lone property of Don Zimmer, also notable for getting hit in the head.

If you�re unfamiliar with the story, it will take about two seconds to catch you up: the Mets were playing the Royals over the weekend, so the camera guy needed to find something interesting to film. When will internet technology be developed that allows me to punch people like this?

Pretty dismal source material if you ask me. Robin Williams once had a routine where he relected on his newborn baby Christian and the bitter fights that they would have when Christian became a young adult (a stage I assume he's now well past). >> "What's the matter, Son?"! 'Ninny-ninny' wasn't good enough for you? Garp wasn't good enough for you? Popeye wasn't good enough for you?!" >> "Who you kidding, Pop? Popeye wasn't good enough for anybody!"

Worth noting is that there is a conspiracy afoot with Ruben Tejada. He is one game short of tying Ron Gardenhire in tenth place among apperances at short for the Mets. Clearly, Gardie relishes his top-ten status and has his buddy Backman giving the Mets bad reports on Tejada to keep him buried in Vegas.

I think there should be a Lyle Raymond Night and the team should wear ASTROWS jerseys. Check out how he starts off double spacing but bails on that because there's TOO MUCH TOO SAY!

Actually the story of a dopey, sad-sack stand up comic who figures out the knuckleball and finds himself in the big leagues would be a pretty good script to pitch.

WEVD sounds about right. Nice.

A mere six games more than Felix Millan, but active leader Daniel Murphy is only 37% of the way to catching Wally. He could play the rest of the season there and he won't even catch Tim Teufel in tenth place.

Also had Koo memories. But I have a surfeit of memories about that Mookie game. I think about it all the time. I watched the conclusion of Game One at my sister's seedy-assed Lower East Side apartment. Afterward, we went out to see a matinee (Risky Business, I'm pretty sure.) I was delighted to find game two still going (eighth or ninth, maybe) when I got back, and I watched that through until the Mookietastic end. I was the worst teenage visitor to an older sibling's city apartment ever. This might have been Foster's 1,000th RBI, but I believe that was the second time this play happened two weeks later, when there was an actual relay to first and Foster had to beat it in order to give Mookie a chance. I saw Simon and Garfunkle at Shea Stadium about a week later. We got there real early in order to get good general admission position, and we did, right up front. When the home plate gates opened, you figured there'd be a mad stampede for position, but there were still memories of the Who stampede disaster four years earlier, and besides, a good portion of folks who come hours early to wait outside the gate for a S&G concert in 1983 are good and baked by the time the gates open. Anymuck, Paul introduced a song ("You, Me and Julio"?) by saying, "This is sort of a Mookie Wilson song." For a shining minute, and the first time since I was eight, the Mets were more worthy of celebration than the Yankees. There would be more of that to come, but Mookie first kicked that door open. And being sixteen and standing in centerfield at Shea, it was surreal and perfect. Highlight of the show! Years later, like 1992 or 1993, I'm living in my grandmother's dilapidated boarding house in Rockaway. I'm the only boarder, trying to give my grandmother a few more years of nominal independence in her nineties, while commuting ninety minutes into the city, working for peanuts, and reading Joyce and Dostoyevsky on the train. I'm absolutely miserable, graduating into a recession and having no gumption to get my lfie started. There's some low-watt AM outlet that I stumble upon because it broadcasts Manhattan College basketball games. It was a station I hadn't been familiar with growing up, but I get a good signal in Rockaway, because I'm at the beach and all. I realize the morning after a game that the AM host is none other than the Amazin' Bill Mazer, venerable redheaded sports reporter for Channel Five. So I make that my regular morning station. He talks a little sports, he talks a little current events, touches on showbiz, and talks a lot about Jewish affairs. Definitely works from the center left, but a sort of retiring left --- folks who were radical decades earlier but are now polite older company (Gloria Steinem) always had a genial host in Bill Mazer. Genial... so I thought. It's not a sports show per se, but Bill knows his audience, and he still has his old freeby connections, so he occasionally does call-in sports trivia. And waddaya know, he puts the question out there that I have tattooed on my heart. "Who was the last Met pitcher to win both ends of a double header?" Two or three guys get to answer before I do, but they're idiots. I'm all over it. "Jesse Orosco," I calmly say. Bill takes a stressful deep breath. "What year?" "1983!" I speak confidently. I didn't even have to recall it. Everybody knows 1983 was the year Jesse Orosco was winning games in relief like he invented it, even as the Mets starting rotation couldn't buy a win. He was third in Cy Young voting that year. "You're not using one of those sports almanacs, are you?" Mazer comes back at me. "No! Wha'?" Seriously, there are books that will tell you this sort of information? Surely it's recorded somewhere, but how would it be indexed so you can just turn the right page on demand and find out who the last guy Met to win both ends of a doubleheader? What kind of crazy people do that sort of thing? And why does Bill Mazer think I'm one of them? "What DATE was the doubleheader?" He really hit the word DATE with an ugly cynicism I frankly didn't think the Amazin' had in him. I thought hard, not realizing I was damned if I did and damned if I didn't. I thought about the time of summer, the temperature that day, the proximity to the Simon and Garfunkle concert. "Um... July 30?" "It was July THiRTY-FIRST." Again with the cynicism, but I didn't want to hear it, even as I was putting my head in the noose. "Oh, well, I was close." "Listen," he says, "there's no point in doing these things if you guys are gonna CHEAT." "Wha... I DIDN'T CHEAT!" This shit is going out over the airwaves. "Listen do you want the tickets or not?" 'OF COURSE I WANT THE TICKETS!" (Fuck you, Bill Mazer, but hey... Mets tickets!) And that was the sorriest set of Met tickets I ever acquired. The game I ended up seeing with those tickets was the unexpected Mets debut of Shawn Hare, which I guess puts the game in 1994. I took my friend Fabio and my friend Donna, and we baked in the spring sun of the upper deck (thanks, Bill), made puns on Shawn Hare's name, and remembered sweeter teenaged times of Mookie Wilson and his mad dash, when I was young, beautiful, and innocent of any knowledge that Gooden was an addict and Mazer was a dick. A terrible Mets team did their part by beating the hell out of the Reds. I left New York and got my life restarted a few weeks later.

Yeah, maybe if this year can't be 1973, perhaps it can be 1983. I wonder what the dates were on Mookie's two mad dashes from second on George Foster grounders.

Brownie got 1 2/3 innings there on July 19, a few weeks after I made that post.

#$IKEMONEY$

Well, he's got about $60 million reasons to keep playing. Maybe more.

How grating must Young's play tonight be for fans watching from Colorady?

I'm OK with Hawkins in the chamber. Just keep an Aardsma and a Feliciano in the clip.

So who closes?

HAVE YOU SEEN JUNIOR'S GRADES?!?!

You know, I bet the Mets take a sniff around Jhonny Peralta.

Quintanilla will be available, I think.

Between Culberson and Flores, I'm starting to thing Ron Darling's 1980s salon mullet is coming back.

Keith just asked if Olerud has a shot at the Hall of Fame. Not until you get in, buddy! They're forgetting all about Jeff Kent.

Like his swing, too. Pitch recognition, not so much so far.

Davis reaching 11 times in 13 appearances. batdavisleadoff!

So, how about this pitcher wearing zero? Bring out the grumpy the old man in you or what?