Sunday, December 10, 2006

mets weekly

It would figure that the weekend I was engaged with houseguests and Christmas parties in Philadelphia… I would get an email message from Zoe saying “Great soundbyte, hon!” and for me to realize the DVR no longer automatically tapes Mets Weekly.

But we were home in time to catch tonight’s 6:30pm rerun and if you managed to watch (or catch one of the gazillion repeats), I am the one in black (wearing my trademark necklace, as seen in the logo - Hey, I had to come from work) talking about Willie leaving John Maine in the game.

TBF is ecstatic. I am mildly pleased.

Tuesday, December 05, 2006

cliff ‘em all

What, you thought I’d forgotten or something?!

I sat down Thanksgiving week to write about Cliff Floyd and what his presence on the Mets meant to me, and hit complete and total writer’s block. Everything I wrote seemed stupid or pointless, and didn’t come anywhere near capturing why and how #30 became my favorite player on the Mets the first year I rooted for them.

He wasn’t the obvious choice, after all, for a girl who started rooting for the Mets for real in 2006. And don’t get me wrong, I love DW and when TBF and I bought each other jerseys at the end of 2005, although I wanted a Floyd jersey, I knew it was a better investment to opt for the one with WRIGHT on the back.

(And I had no spiritual conflict with buying it or wearing it - although this year I am happy I also own #7, but that’s mostly vanity, so I don’t look like That Girl [the one with the pink hat who doesn’t know who anyone else on the team is].)

So before I understood those rows of numbers, I judged by how they hit and how they ran and if they hustled, and their dancing prowess in the dugout, how sportswriters talked about them, and how their teammates talked about them. In 2005, we got a window into Cliff Floyd via David Wright (and vice versa - but the media was giving us enough about DW at that point). Add to the mix that Mike Cameron, whose spirit I admired when he was playing for Seattle, counted Mr. Floyd as a good friend.

But I think it was the online chat that sealed the deal. Who wouldn’t love a guy with these kind of answers:

31yonkers5: What does it feel like to see a fan in the stands wearing your jersey?
Floyd: It feels awesome, it feels great! You should head out to the store and buy one, too!

Floyd’s answers were professional, but they weren’t patented MLB spin. He poked a little bit of fun at the dumb questions but he still answered them.

metsandsox: How could the voters snub you out of the Gold Glove last year? I’ve never seen a left fielder play like that!
Floyd: How could they? I asked myself that, too.

and the ultimate:
illflavored: What do you spend more time working on, hitting or defense?
Floyd: Hitting.
Anthony_Cocuzza: Cliff, what kind of car do you drive?
Floyd: I have an S500, a Flying Spur Bentley, SL500, Range Rover, Dodge Magnum, Cadillac EXT and Phantom Rolls Royce. And that’s why I work so hard on the hitting.

As Greg from Faith and Fear In Flushing so succinctly stated, “Cliff Floyd’s wallet is the one that says Bad Motherfucker on it.” And it was true, but there was heart and soul in there too, or he’d just be an arrogant jackass. He wasn’t.

So today, as Deanna from Marinerds so kindly reminded me that it was Cliff’s birthday, I thought I would try to sit down and write about him and thank him and say goodbye and wish him well.

I’ll leave you with the saddest part of the online chat:
Paul_Mastrola: Are the Mets the favorite team you’ve played on out of the four teams?
Floyd: Of course they are!
CESAR_VALVERDE: Are the Mets a World Series team?
Floyd: Yes, don’t you think so?

I will applaud Cliff Floyd for the rest of his career, and thank him forever for being one of the big reasons I fell in love with baseball.

Saturday, December 02, 2006

tommy can you hear me?

THANK MR. MET AND OTHER ASSORTED DEITIES THAT THIS DRAMA HAS COME TO AN END.

I started to get irked at the whole back and forth thing, until I decided:

If we didn’t have the internet, we wouldn’t have known every time Glavine decided to cut his toenails and every time Omar sneezed and no one would have been standing outside Turner Field reporting, “Today, the guy who changes the toner in the copier at the Braves organization office got a flat tire” just because there had to be SOME news to report.

All kidding aside, I am not sure that 100% of the angst was caused by Tommy. Or even 50% of the angst.

In any event, welcome back to Flushing Meadows, Tom Glavine.

Monday, November 27, 2006

MG.COM POLL

MG reader Katie L. helpfully submits from today’s NY Post:

“WHICH New York Met was so appreciative of a stunning blond stripper at Headquarters that he walked her out to his car, pulled a baseball jersey out of his trunk and gave it to her? The stripper, obviously not a sports fan, sold the uniform to one of her other customers later that night . . .”

Saturday, November 25, 2006

mrs. v. darling

My dear friend V. [previously introduced on this blog here] was visiting from Seattle two weeks ago, and I was excited because this was the only way she’d ever really get to see what was supposed to be my Mets Weekly debut. (Note: Hot Foot sez it’s now slated for 12/1. We shall see.)

Instead, she had to suffer through an entire episode of “A Profile In Orange and Blue”. My problem with this particular feature is not the content or the writing,  but because of that ridiculous, unnecessary British accent. Even V., as a non-fan, was mortified. “They’re not legitimizing the content by using a British accent to talk about American baseball,” was her comment. Seriously, MW, let’s revise that feature for next season, please?

The only good thing that came out of this waste of a half-hour was V. remembering—seemingly out of nowhere—her teenage girl-crush on Ron Darling. 
“You know, I used to have a crush on one of the Mets…”
“What?! Who?”
“He had dark hair….”
“What year?”
“I don’t remember.”
We keep watching.
“Wait, he played the same time as Strawberry, I remember that.”
I would have guessed the 86 Mets, but now I’ve more or less confirmed my theory. I keep digging.
“Keith Hernandez?”
“No, not him… I remember he owned a restaurant?”
I am dying to start text-messaging TBF but he is working today and I do not want to disturb him. I grab the computer and start Googling.
“Isn’t there a yearbook TBF has?” V. asks.
“No, no book.”
“Must be something on the internet?”
“I’m looking.”
As I look, and V. continues to watch Mets Weekly, more and more crumbs of memory come out.
I finally dug out the 1986 Mets Weekly special and all of a sudden-
“That’s it! Ron—Darling! I remember thinking how cool my name would be if we got married. Mrs. V. Darling.”
I cackle. V. grabs her laptop and heads for Wikipedia. She finds Ron’s entry, and sighs.
“Now, why would they do that? They have this TINY little picture of him… and all these GIANT charts! Clearly, they don’t know what’s important.” She turns the screen towards me, and I begin the monumental task of explaining to my friend why statistics are, actually, quite important.
“I remember, he went to Yale, he was intelligent, this kind of renaissance guy. And I remember my mother saying, ‘Why would he be interested in a punk rock girl from South Jersey?’ I would get insulted and inform her exactly why she was wrong.”

It turns out that during the 1986 season, V.‘s mom was very ill, and like many sons and fathers before them, V. and her mom could talk about the Mets without fighting - but of course the Mets were contrary to everything V. believed in and cared about at the time. And even these days, explaining to her friends why she was staying home to watch the playoff games, frantically text-messaging us throughout the games, was kind of hard to do.

But when someone loved baseball, it seems that it never completely disappears. As we were driving her to the airport and turned onto the Van Wyck just east of Shea, she was beginning the rationalization, trying to justify following the Mets again. And we are already planning V.‘s return visit to NYC in the spring or summer, where she will be joining us at Shea for a game or two.  If she plays her cards right, we may even be persuaded to take her to the SNY studios so she can get a glimpse of her former husband-to-be.

——-

Friday, November 17, 2006

it’s raining men

In case you didn’t see the Wright/Reyes photo shoot from GQ, Mets Grrl brings you selected highlights:

DEAR WILLIE: PLEASE KEEP CLIFF FLOYD NEXT YEAR FOR NO OTHER REASON THAN WE NEED HIM TO TAUNT THESE TWO ALL YEAR OVER THIS PHOTO SHOOT.

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

What’s Korean for “‘Let’s Go Mets’?”

Happily, one does not need to understand Korean to enjoy this comic strip:

(I particularly would love to know what the cartoon has Mr. Reyes saying.)

You can find the entire series here. Don’t skip the strip that compares and contrasts the two New York teams. And if anyone out there is fluent in Korean and can translate, drop us a line at metsgrrl at gmail dot com.

[Thanks to Bat Girl.]

Monday, November 13, 2006

ground breaking

It looks like D.Wright is throwing dirt in Bloomberg’s face.

Hey, a girl can dream, can’t she?

==

So I understand that there is all this outrage, and no, I cannot compare the outrage at the naming rights to what happened to almost every music venue in the country. Great Woods became the Tweeter Center, Brendan Byrne became the Continental Airlines Arena, and I don’t even know the corporate name for the Garden State Arts Center - the “opera on the turnpike” referenced by Bruce Springsteen in “Jungleland” - but I know there is one.

It can be a cold sterile lifeless place like the Nokia Theater, or it can be CBGB’s, which has all the heart and soul in the world, but ran itself into the ground because of years of bad business practices. 

I really only care what happens inside the place.

Would everyone be thrilled if the naming rights had not been sold but ticket prices went up $20 per seat?

Would everyone be thrilled if the ballpark stayed Shea Stadium but we couldn’t afford the kick-ass pitcher we need for next year? As TBF astutely pointed out, $20 million pays for Carlos Beltran and pocket change.

This isn’t what happened with Safeco Field, when Seattle was told that the citizenry was supposed to have input into the name, and we woke up one day and the place was named and that was it. They told everyone that they would be selling the naming rights. They didn’t even have to do that.

If you’re going to be upset about the naming rights, then you should be upset about the entire commercialization of baseball, and that train left the station years ago, didn’t it? I’m not trying to be flippant or irreverant, but I’m just not so sure what it matters what it’s called as long as what happens inside the place is what you come there for. Yes, baseball is commercialized. Even I wish I had experiened baseball when every between-inning interval wasn’t jam-packed with commercial sponsorship; that must’ve been awfully nice. I appreciate all of that.

But isn’t what matters what happens on the field, and not what the field is called?

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

marathon sunday and the mets

On Marathon Sunday, we are virtual prisoners of Greenpoint, as we live between the marathon route and the river. There are some ways around it but it’s such a bother and Greenpoint is so ebullient that there’s no point in going anywhere. Last year I watched the marathon on Bedford Ave., which is slighly cool in that every band in the zip code sets up to play along the route. I mentioned this to TBF, and his horrified response was, “If i was a marathon runner, I would be all, ‘Dude, I do not want to hear your sad bastard music. Play ‘Eye Of The Tiger.’”

TBF was very into the marathon this year and was full of maps and time points and was awake at 9:15 so we could go watch the wheelchairs come through right before mile 12. This a stretch of the course where the runners turn off Bedford Ave. in Williamsburg and head into Greenpoint. Aside from the water/medical tent/bathroom stop, it’s not a particularly populated section of the route, which is what we like about it.

I am struggling into polar fleece and warm socks while TBF purposefully dons his Mets sweatshirt and the traditional hat, pointing out that he was wearing those particular items of clothing because many out of towners participate in the marathon. I wanted to hug him for being so adorable.

So we spent three hours cheering ourselves hoarse and having a great time. And, we did, in fact, see about half a dozen runners wearing Mets paraphernalia, who earned a hearty “Let’s Go Mets!” cheer from us. We also got some independent chants aimed at TBF’s sweatshirt from runners sans team shirt but avec team spirit.

However, I had to admonish TBF several times from being slightly less polite to anyone wearing paraphernalia from the other New York team.
The section of course we were standing at was a corner bordering a park, and as there were no spectators, hundreds of runners decided this was the place to shave the course down from 26.2 miles to 26.1. Hundreds, of course, did not, and there were cries of “Cheaters!” from the runners.
“Wow, look at the guy with the Yankees jersey - he’s CHEATING, what a surprise,” TBF felt the need to broadcast.
*kick*
“No, look.”
*kick*

As for me, I modified my comments to “Yankees suck - but you’re beautiful, keep running!” which got a smile and a thumbs-up from the woman wearing the Jeter t-shirt.

===
I know things have been quiet around here. A little bit of a breather as I ease into the new job. Not going anywhere, I promise. And I am planning on a massive redesign this winter.

In the mail today: a book entitled FLORIDA SPRING TRAINING: YOUR GUIDE TO TOURING THE GRAPEFRUIT LEAGUE

——-

Saturday, November 04, 2006

random thoughts

One sure way you know the Mets have achieved critical mass in NYC: When the souvenir shops at the airports have identical displays for both the Mets and the Yankees. I would have included a photo but I was at LGA on business at 5:45am and not in a picture mood. Those airport stores have very little real estate and they only stock items that are in demand. In the past, there would be either nothing or maybe a hat from the blue and orange side; now there are both, and they are identical, and were present in both stores I walked by. Did my heart good. I did move the Yankees mugs that someone at the store clearly decided should be part of the Mets display back to their correct location.

Coming home last night from the airport, that gorgeous skyline view from the BQE, but my heart breaking just a little because the Empire State is blue and orange for the marathon tomorrow, and not for other reasons.

Running into the stand-up above in a Duane Reade in midtown. I have also been trying to buy the banners off the owners of our local 99 cent stores. I sent a letter to get Glaceau Vitamin Water offering to do a promotion/contest with metsgrrl.com but they clearly have reading comprehension issues because the email back to me explained in terms better suited to a three year old that the promotional materials were not for sale. Um, right. That’s why I wanted to do a contest. FREE ADVERTISING.

I have yet to watch this week’s Mets Weekly and that will rate a separate post later if I managed to make the cut.