seawolf17

Silver, thanks for validating my obsession with the Zooperstars. We saw Ken Giraffey Jr, Shark McGwire, and Clammy Sosa in Rochester several years ago, and I laughed so hard I cried.

This is great work, Elster. Create a table for a man, you get one nice table. Teach a man to use HTML, and he'll feed us for a season.

--------------------If you prick a Mets fan, he'll bleed blue and orange --------------------DANA BRANDAugust 28, 2005newsday.comThere is no good reason why I should care about the New York Mets.Like all baseball teams, they are a business. I should care no more about their success than I care about the success of a movie studio or television network. Yet I choose to care, deeply and powerfully. I have cared about the Mets for 43 years and probably will for the rest of my life. I enjoy my loyalty. I enjoy the irrationality and intensity of my loyalty.Although my allegiance is a choice, at a certain level, it is not. The Mets are part of my heritage. My parents grew up as Brooklyn Dodgers fans. Three years after I was born, they lost their team in a way that should have left them permanently disillusioned. In spite of that, they wanted baseball back and wanted me to have baseball, too. They did not, under any circumstances, want me to have the Yankees.As my interest in baseball awakened during the summer of 1961, my parents persuaded me to ignore the excitement of the race to break Babe Ruth's home run record. They persuaded me to ignore the first World Series of which I was aware. They persuaded me to wait to begin my lifelong love affair with baseball until the summer of 1962, when there would be a new National League franchise in New York, a team that would replace the Dodgers, a team that would represent the vast remnant of the metropolitan area that refused to be represented by the team from the Bronx.The central pleasure of my first year of fandom was rooting for a brand-new team. I loved the novelty of the blue and orange colors, and the cool, contemporary brevity of the name. I loved the logo, a baseball encompassing the skyscrapers and bridges of New York. It was the only team logo that featured a city, and it was my city. I don't remember minding that they were a very bad team, the worst in modern baseball history. I loved them wildly and intemperately. Anything they accomplished was good, and everything about them was part of me.The Mets were bad for all of my childhood, but I never lost hope. I dreamed of them winning the World Series the way I dreamed of winning a Nobel Prize, an Academy Award or a presidential election.Then came 1969, unforeseen and soul-filling, and neither I nor millions of others have gotten over it. The Mets remained the Mets, ordinary people competing against giants, yet they suddenly seemed to have magical powers. Everything happened as I wanted it to happen, reliably, inexorably. The young pitchers were perfect. The hitters hit when needed. Mediocre fielders made spectacular catches. The Mets won game after game and did not stop.For months, nearly every thought I had - every sweet, pleasurable thought - was of them. It was like being in love. I was too young to perceive the absurdity, and nowhere near old enough to value my emotion in spite of its absurdity. I simply enjoyed, and I never will forget how much I enjoyed the summer of 1969.For fans of my age, the summer of 1969 is the defining myth of the Mets.Yankees fans have their myth: The Yankees are invincible, the team of Ruth and Gehrig, the only team for whom a season is not a success if it yields only a pennant, for whom a bad season is an anomaly. The myth is a crock, of course. The Yanks have had plenty of mediocre seasons the last 40 years.The Mets' myth is the reverse. True Mets fans always think of the Mets as a fundamentally bad team that, every once in a while, briefly and magnificently rises up to play against type. When the Mets win, the fans feel as if they themselves have willed the team forward. We were the ones, with our slogans and signs, who took a last-place team to a pennant in 1973. We were the ones who drove Mookie Wilson's ball between Bill Buckner's legs in 1986. We were responsible for Al Leiter's perfection in the one-game playoff against the Reds in 1999. And we made Shea Stadium thunder in 2000, frightening the superior Cards and Giants into submission.Yankees fans do not feel responsible for what the Yankees do. But Mets fans feel they create the atmosphere that allows miracles to happen.What I want this year is another miracle. And this team will do. It is a Mets team. It is unpredictable and unbelievably frustrating. It doesn't look as if it deserves to win. But it has enough talent and spirit to allow us to dream. If things fall together the right way, the bumpy rhythm of this season could become smooth.Making the playoffs may not be likely, but fans who live for miracles don't need the odds on their side. In our doomed but beloved temple, we can yell and scream and lift them up. We again can have astonished fun, and the mystical sense of power a Yankees fan can't know. For if we win, we will have the pleasure of the unexpected, even of the undeserved.This is what has hooked us. This is what we long for. This is why, however much we hate them at times, we love to love this team. However good the Yankees become, they never tempt us. We are stubborn and resolute. We are millions. We are Mets fans.

Zvon, Piazzafan is stealing your thunder. KTE fight!

Me too... I feel bad voting for games of which I didn't at least see a good chunk. The boxscore doesn't necessary tell the whole tale. Maybe a guy who went 0-for-4 was much more worthy because of a key groundout or a key defensive play than a guy who had three worthless singles.

Hey, if you'd told me we last Sunday that woulda gone 5-1 in the first six games of this trip, I'd have taken that.

Nobody I'd rather see in this spot... than Chris Woodward.

KC wrote:>>>Edgy's back, now there's gonna be trouble!<<<I feel like it's one of those Tuesday morning where we had to explain ourbehavior in Monday Morning Mocking threads. Hope no one fell asleep inthe tub again or threw up on the coats in the bed room again.Ah, just blame it on one of the new guys.

Trachsel 6Wright 3Looper 1Hey, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Great IGT. All three members of the Knight family, a snice comment by our Astros-fan-in-residence, a homer by The World's Greatest Ballplayer, and oh, a big W in Trax's big comeback.

By the way... 6 2/3 from Glavine today and the $8 million option vests for '06. Root for six and out, people!

Pedro... a guy to follow Seo...

Why does everyone think we're going to see Anderson Hernandez or Chase Lambin or one of these kids at second base in September? It's not happening.Here are the infielders on the 40: 18 Marlon Anderson * 65 Aarom Baldiris 3 Miguel Cairo * 6 Jeff Keppinger 25 Kazuo Matsui * 16 Doug Mientkiewicz 35 Jose Offerman 7 Jose Reyes 4 Chris Woodward 5 David Wright That's it. We'll probably see Keppinger come up and get twenty ABs, but unless one of these other guys is a six-year FA this winter, there's no reason to add anyone else to the 40 right now.

1-0 would be a perfect record, especially if it came in his only game as a Met.

Terry Bross is right, but for the wrong guy. Wasn't Bross like 6'9"? He was enormous.

Dammit... I hate putting up a quiz but not being completely clear.Two more guys, in addition to Williams, Shinjo, Walker, and Fonzie, played exclusively with the SF Giants and the Mets, not spending any time at all as a New York Giant. Clues are above.

I chose two also. In a blowout win, you're rubbing it in the other team's face if you do something silly. In a blowout loss, second basemen pitch, batboys pinch-run, and forty-something middle relievers catch. It's all good.

I should have been more specific... San Francisco Giants, NOT NY Giants. Mays doesn't count. Sorry.

He's hot! Can he get the last two?

Yep.

Only six players have played exclusively for both the Mets & Giants (and no other major league teams). Name them.Hints:1) At least three of them should be obvious, as they're still active (although one of them is active in another country).2) The fourth has the most perfect winning percentage in Mets history.3) The fifth would be the tallest player in Mets history, were it not for Eric Hillman.4) The sixth pitched for the Mets in 1971, and the Giants from 1972-78.

Very funny. Falls short of the high standard set by Baseketball and South Park: BLU, but still very funny. I definitely skipped over the puppet sex scene... no need to have the carpet installers walk in at that point.

I feel two things...One, I feel like you should have put the Mets in the second row, so it looked more impressive.Two, I feel like a dumbass, because I was just absent-mindedly scanning the columns in the wild card standings, and I saw that two teams had played WAY more games against the NL Central than anybody else, and I thought "Hey, that's strange."Until I looked to the left. Duh.

Ladies and gentlemen, Uni Watch gives you... Joe McEwing.

Wow... Detroit actually lost a run between Scarlet's posts. Tough luck, Tigers.(JK, SK!)