Willets Point

And if we can beat them when they have all their douchebags, all the better.

soupcan wrote: He's been on my DL (Douchebag List) since September. Only since September? He's been a douchebag much longer than that. Like decades.

themetfairy wrote: Heilman is an enigma. He has stretches of brilliance, but he also has stretches of suckitude. Don't we all?

There's a lot of hubris in that poster, but it still made me laugh.

Church 1 Pagan 1 Santana 3 Schneider 1 Wright 4

Holy shit, the Mets beat the Phillies in Philadelphia. Hooray!!!!!

Grote15 wrote: ="Willets Point"]CWCID, Heilman recovers against the next two batters. I like that Willie left him in to regain some confidence because we're going to need him this season. We've still got the lead folks. Don't give up! Need him? For now....Maybe the jacket can bring him out of himself..or a regular regimen of Cymbalta.... Well, would rather he keep pitching poorly or would you like him to resume being an effective 8th inning set-up guy? Is it more important to you to hate Heilman or have him improve thus improving the Mets?

Now let's hope it's enough.

Lets get a run or two.

CWCID, Heilman recovers against the next two batters. I like that Willie left him in to regain some confidence because we're going to need him this season. We've still got the lead folks. Don't give up!

Fuck Me! This is a typical Mets-Phillies game after all.

Nymr83 wrote: Santana males the last out, i like that he was left in. I liked it too, but it doesn't seem to be working out so far. Maybe if he had femaled the last out it would be different.

Nice pitching duel, though.

And if he hits it deep into the stands, it cuts down on the chances of Phillies outfielder catching the ball.

The Phillies defense feels like an impervious net sometimes.

I'm hoping it was just one of those "need a breather" moments and not a real injury. No defensive sub announced, so I assume he's on the field.

Can Phillies phans be any more tacky, booing an injured player? Reyes stays in the game, and Wright is gentleman enough to get him to the dugout for a rest.

Please no head/neck injury for Reyes. Please no head/neck injury for Reyes. Please no head/neck injury for Reyes. Please slide feet first from now on.

"Oh, it's Pete Rose of the Philadelphia Phillies..." Joe Morgan was always the master of the obvious.

You know what would be a good Mets tradition? Singing the entire song of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," verses and all. The song is 100-years old this year, it was written in New York, and ties in with the city's vaudeville/Broadway music traditions. Perhaps they can even hire a cute gal to dress up as Katie Casey to lead the sing-a-long. It would be unique but still rooted in baseball tradition, teach history, and be a lot of fun. Plus it would fill up all of the Seventh Inning Stretch and they could move "Lazy Mary" to the 8th-inning break.

soupcan wrote: Bed? Dude its the middle of the day! Slacker. He's Australian. Those Aussies just drop off for a nap whenever they feel like it.

Benjamin Grimm wrote: Wait a minute... today's game is being played at Shea... AG's going to Nationals Ballpark to see Joseph "Benedict" Ratzinger (# XVI in your scorecard) open for the Vatican 9.

Opening Day 1964:

Beltran 2 Castillo .5 Church 2 Maine 3 Reyes 2 Smith .5

="Number 6":en7ovw52]="Willets Point":en7ovw52]Fans would start a "Lets Go Mets" chant - without prompting - even with the team several runs behind in the ninth inning.[/quote:en7ovw52] Not to threadjack too badly, but boy, do I ever wish the Mets would run a promotion called "Quiet Day," when they wouldn't pump loud music and force-feed cheers and crowd noise constantly throughout the game. Alternately, it could be called "Learn To Cheer All By Yourself, You Ninny Day."[/quote:en7ovw52] I'm down with that. It could coincide with a resurrected banner day. Btw, is it the chicken or the egg? Can fans not cheer without prompting from the PA system or has all the noise made it so that fans can't start their own cheers even if they want to? seawolf17 Apr 17 2008 04:43 AM Another missed opportunity for the Mets this year... one more Banner Day before the stadium closes. It's like the marketing folks are living underground. Fman99 Apr 17 2008 09:06 AM ="Willets Point":31lljaza]="Number 6":31lljaza]="Willets Point":31lljaza]Fans would start a "Lets Go Mets" chant - without prompting - even with the team several runs behind in the ninth inning.[/quote:31lljaza] Not to threadjack too badly, but boy, do I ever wish the Mets would run a promotion called "Quiet Day," when they wouldn't pump loud music and force-feed cheers and crowd noise constantly throughout the game. Alternately, it could be called "Learn To Cheer All By Yourself, You Ninny Day."[/quote:31lljaza] I'm down with that. It could coincide with a resurrected banner day. Btw, is it the chicken or the egg? Can fans not cheer without prompting from the PA system or has all the noise made it so that fans can't start their own cheers even if they want to?[/quote:31lljaza] Well there has been professional baseball games in the 'modern' era for 110 years, and the first 70 or so the fans somehow knew when to cheer and when to shut up. It's the Saturday afternoon Fox GOTW mentality. Casual fans are too dumb to know when they should cheer. All you need are lights and a manual scoreboard to show the count on the batter. Maybe a pipe organ for affect. Turn off all the rest of it as it's just noise. Benjamin Grimm Apr 17 2008 09:09 AM You see it as noise, and I do too. But for many fans, it's what makes a day at the ballpark entertaining. And that's why it's not going to go away. None of the teams want to replicate the 1910 baseball experience at the cost of thousands of paying fans. metsmarathon Apr 17 2008 09:29 AM i like the lights and the scoreboard animations and all that. 'whoop, there it is' when a met hits a home run, i think we can surely do without. maybe if they were able to keep current with the noisemakers instead of falling into tired cliches, it wouldn't be so bad... well, as far as celebretory songs anyways. the rest of the 'tell the fans when to cheer and how or else they won't' could go away, or be supplanted with more creative ideas. i dislike when they take something the fans do naturally, and turn it into a cheering-cue, like the jose-josejosejose-jose-jose thing. AG/DC Apr 27 2008 07:56 PM Sherman points to the obvious: http://www.nypost.com/seven/04272008/sports/mets/negativity_always_at_bat_108409.htm?page=0 Nymr83 Apr 27 2008 08:15 PM ]Btw, is it the chicken or the egg? Can fans not cheer without prompting from the PA system or has all the noise made it so that fans can't start their own cheers even if they want to? the whle thing for jose reyes started out as the fans, then the idiots decided that the fans needed prompting to keep doing it. oh and i HATE that whole "everybody clap your hands" thing. G-Fafif Apr 28 2008 06:08 AM Sherman writes: ]Yankee fans do the role call early in the game. Does that mean they call out each player's name and describe what his duties to the team are? Or that they are the most encouraging of souls? (Oh wait, the MFYs have nothing to do with any of this, but every columnist who used to cover them has to invoke them even when not writing about them. Silly me.) Post guy comes out against booing on Sunday, rain on Monday. Yippee. This will be anecdotal by necessity because, unlike Joel Sherman, I can't read tens of thousands of minds, but from where I sat on Sunday, boos did not pour down on Delgado's shiny pate after not taking a curtain call. He was applauded for his accomplishments and, when he didn't respond, it felt collectively shrugged off. Certainly in my section and, to my ears, in general. Carlos' reaction didn't at all feel like The Story while I was there on Sunday. Somehow I'm not surprised that it is in the papers and on the FAN this Monday. The dissatisfaction with a slumping slugger morphing into appreciation after he actually slugs reminds me of what George Foster experienced intermittently after being buried in his first year. He'd be booed, he'd break out, he'd be given a hero's greeting and then he'd be back to boos with the next couple of ohfers. Foster would tip his cap anyway. Didn't seem to win him any enduring points in the long run. AG/DC Apr 28 2008 01:53 PM Noble, Marty: Booing at Shea Stadium has become endemic and borderline shameful. Most folks who never have played the game at any level higher than Babe Ruth -- and I certainly am one of them -- have little sense of how difficult the game is to play. They appreciate success and demand it at all times. It's as if they believe a 25-0 season or .480 batting average would happen if the players put more effort into their performances. Because fans have the right to boo, they seemingly think it is their responsibility to boo, and they boo because they can. My sense of it is that a couple of thousand malcontents, still bruised by the events of last September, express themselves at nearly every opportunity -- even a leadoff groundout to short in the first inning. Then the followers follow as if booing is contagious. I suspect most of the boo birds would kill for an autograph and gush if they were to meet the same player they booed an hour earlier. The increased dissatisfaction among fans, I think, is prompted to some degree by the millions players earn and the intolerance for anything but success expressed by sports talk radio. Those shows harp on one or two isolated plays. One topic -- one misplay -- will be reviewed for 30 minutes. Even the hosts repeat themselves. If newspaper or Web sites were to react in the same way, you would read the same three paragraphs 20 times. The concentrated criticism and ridicule creates a distorted view of a play or the player(s) involved, and that misperception carries over to the people who attend games. More than ever, fans want to be part of the game, part of the in-stadium experience. I don't understand. When I was a kid, I went to ballpark to watch. I cheered the good plays and recognized the bad. I'm sure I booed a call I didn't like. I'm sure my father or uncle didn't allow me to boo anything else. New York likes to think of itself as a tough town. And I believe every high-profile, new player is tested by the fans; witness the boos for Johan Santana. Kevin McReynolds, a fine player, was booed far more often than he deserved. After he left he Mets, he said New York fans want a player to succeed, but if success doesn't happen, the fans' second preference is for abject failure. I don't think he was off the mark in that assessment. *62 Apr 28 2008 02:04 PM Booing at Shea didn't seem to be a widespread problem until after the fall to earth of the highly competitive teams of the mid-to-late eighties and 1990 .... after that, the crowds got progressively more ignorant each season. The collective intelligence these days doesn't even move the needle. AG/DC Apr 28 2008 02:23 PM That may be a late-comer to you and me, but its 18 years of Metfan ignorance. Metfan ignorance is old enough, in many countries, to appear in a pornographic video, or express legal consent to sexual relations with another. Metfan ignorance has the right to bear arms, own property, marry without parental consent, get an abortion, donate its body to science, and serve on a jury. With these new privileges come responsibility: Metfan ignorance would be tried as an adult in court. In the United Kingdom, Metfan ignorance can purchase tobacco, alcohol, pornography, go to war, vote, and model for pornography; (but reached the the age of consent at 16). Metfan ignorance can be admitted to, rent, or buy an MPAA-rated NC-17 movie. Metfan ignorance can play, rent, or buy an ESRB rated AO game. It's intolerable. Frayed Knot Apr 28 2008 02:32 PM ="*62"]Booing at Shea didn't seem to be a widespread problem until after the fall to earth of the highly competitive teams of the mid-to-late eighties and 1990 .... after that, the crowds got progressively more ignorant each season. Take the collapse of the post-'80s teams with "only" one WC to show, tack on the unlikeability of the squads that followed, add a pinch of the general reaction to the '94 strike, and then top all that with a decade-plus run of the cross-town team and those are ingrediants for the anger to be building for years. Met fans have sounded angry to me for going on 20 years now. They're merely angrier these days. ]The collective intelligence these days doesn't even move the needle. It's why I hate Met fans. G-Fafif Apr 28 2008 04:00 PM From a commenter named "the dude formerly known as bill l." on Brooklyn Met Fan, a couple of weeks ago: ]4/10/1976 Red Smith, New York Times �Temperatures were creeping into the upper 40�s, but a snaggle-toothed wind whistling in from left field lent a Joe Namath touch to an entertainment starring that other New York folk hero, Tom Seaver. This is a folk hero, incidentally, whom the folks welcomed back with boos because he earns more money than they do�� July 12, 1983 When Darryl Strawberry went to bat for the Mets in the eighth inning of Sunday�s game, many in the crowd of 17,666 at Shea Stadium booed. Strawberry has heard a lot of boos throughout his difficult rookie season. July 1, 1987 When Doug Sisk of the Mets complained earlier this season that he, Darryl Strawberry and Howard Johnson had been unfair targets of booing at Shea Stadium, they sounded like the latest victims in a phenomenon that started 26 seasons ago, at the beginning of the Mets� existence. The first player to draw the wrath of the crowd was Jim Marshall, one of the 25 original Mets. ��It was our opening home game on April 13, 1962, after we had lost our first two games in St. Louis,'� the outfielder-first baseman said. ��We were playing Pittsburgh at the Polo Grounds and Gil Hodges, a big favorite in New York from his days with the Brooklyn Dodgers, was supposed to start at first base. ��But Gil came up with a sore knee, so when the starting lineups were announced with me at first base, the capacity crowd let out with a long wave of boos. ��What do you think of that? Before swinging a bat or touching a ball, I was the first Met to be booed in New York.'� July 28, 1989 Carter Comes Back, but to Cold Shoulder Associated Press New York�Gary Carter would like the next two months to prove he can still play baseball. Fans at Shea Stadium needed much less time to decide. Carter came off the disabled list Tuesday and hit into a double play as a pinch hitter in the eighth inning. On Wednesday night, he started and was 0-3 as the New York Mets lost to Pittsburgh, 3-2. It was a humid night and the 40,000 on hand were not in a particularly charitable mood. With each out, Carter was booed just a little harder�� Mercury News Wire Services December 1, 1989, Page 8D, San Jose Mercury News (CA) Juan Samuel asked the New York Mets to trade him next week at the winter meetings in Nashville, Tenn., the New York Daily News reported today. Samuel was acquired June 18 for Roger McDowell and Lenny Dykstra, but he hit only .228 and had to endure booing at Shea Stadium, in part because he had replaced the popular Dykstra and Mookie Wilson. So Samuel told club officials he would not mind a trade. 8/24/98 NY Times �At a time when the Mets need all the help they can get as they battle for a spot as a wild-card entry in the playoffs, how does one account for the fans at Shea stadium booing Mike Piazza, their leading slugger, with an enthusiasm perhaps second only to their shouts to aatract the attention of the beer vendor? Newsday 4/4/2006 Beltran boos carry over. Byline: Wallace Matthews Apr. 4�Even in the best of times, it doesn�t take long for New Yorkers to isolate and attack a target. Yesterday, it took about a half-hour for Mets fans to lock on to Carlos Beltran. Who knows when they will let go? The boos rained down on the Mets� centerfielder early and often, pausing only when the final out of the game was made about two hours later and the home team had secured a 3-2 victory over the Washington Nationals. That was the direct result of Beltran�s peg from the left-centerfield gap to the glove of Anderson Hernandez to retire Jose Vidro trying to stretch a two-out single, but the cheers seemed more in response�� Daily News, April 12, 2008 �After being greeted with the longest and loudest ovation during Opening Day introductions Tuesday, Johan Santana had his official �Welcome to New York� moment Saturday. Flushing�s new ace and savior heard some boos at Shea as he departed the mound in the seventh inning of a 5-3 loss to .Milwaukee in his long-anticipated home debut.� SteveJRogers Apr 28 2008 04:31 PM ="Willets Point":2obz60rj]="Number 6":2obz60rj]="Willets Point":2obz60rj]Fans would start a "Lets Go Mets" chant - without prompting - even with the team several runs behind in the ninth inning.[/quote:2obz60rj] Not to threadjack too badly, but boy, do I ever wish the Mets would run a promotion called "Quiet Day," when they wouldn't pump loud music and force-feed cheers and crowd noise constantly throughout the game. Alternately, it could be called "Learn To Cheer All By Yourself, You Ninny Day."[/quote:2obz60rj] I'm down with that. It could coincide with a resurrected banner day. Btw, is it the chicken or the egg? Can fans not cheer without prompting from the PA system or has all the noise made it so that fans can't start their own cheers even if they want to?[/quote:2obz60rj] In another Met Online Fan Forum though that kind of attitude you are describing gets mocked with the Mets aggressive style of "in-your-face" PA antics. The "Everybody Clap Your Hands" the "Pepsi Party Patrol" t-shirt launch. The idea is that the Mets PA system is trying to create an image of the "real fan" and the fans on that board are replused by the idea that they (the Mets marketing department) know how real fans should act. AG/DC May 28 2008 07:27 AM So, Monday night, changing "Fire Willie!" in the ninth. Is that within the pale? seawolf17 May 28 2008 08:30 AM They only did it because Chris Rock told them to. metirish May 28 2008 12:09 PM Wayne Noble of Syracuse , in Colorado I think. Edgy DC Jan 02 2009 12:47 PM A I hearily endorse this thread as a Craney Nominee. Rockin' Doc Jan 02 2009 04:40 PM I am quickly coming to the conclusion that one of the prerequisites of a craney nomination is that I had little or no part in the thread. I think this is a great idea to nominate threads that contain great discussions and moments. We should get one or two more threads nominated and then start a thread for discussion and a poll for voting for the best thread of 2008.