why? seriously, why are they doing this to me?

did the makers of my 2010 mets daily calendar want me to chuck the thing out the window today? did they want to ruin my morning by drudging up one of the darkest days of my past? seriously, why would they do this for the second year in a row??

do they honestly think i don’t know the answer to this question?! do they think i don’t try to forget the transaction in question every day? there is no way that i was the only one who, after pulling half of my hair out and snapping this pic, shredded this page into tiny little pieces and then turned the calendar around in protest.

maybe they thought it wouldn’t be as painful as last year because kazmir is doing his best to get shut out of major-league rotations? but i still can’t think of an excuse that justifies this. “zambrano” is, and always will be, a dirty swear word. f@#$!

thanks for starting my morning off right, calendar makers.

on stark and rubin

the writings of jayson stark are now inextricably linked with my hatred of the phillies (which, in case you haven’t noticed, is perhaps the strongest emotion i have). every time those dirty scumbags win a game, i go over to espn dreading whatever sort of verbose love letter he will have penned to whichever starter or position player made his heart swell that day. whenever they lose (heh heh heh), i go over to espn to see how he will have minimized that loss. shockingly, those columns are nowhere near as lovely or dramatic.

case in point: roy oswalt wins game two of the nlcs with what is admittedly a great start – but it’s not the melodramatic lifetime story stark makes it out to be. his headline? “for moments just like this …” seriously.

what is this, a precious moments commercial? an all-4-one 90s love ballad? gag me.

it’s a complete reversal of the role adam rubin plays for the mets. i used to appreciate rubin’s writing, but it’s difficult to read at this point. he rants and uses sarcasm and those subtle bias words to make the amazins out to be a group of bumbling idiots. now, he’s not wrong. but it’s the personal prejudice behind his constant stream of vitriol that makes it impossible to take his criticisms at face value.

an sat-sanctioned word analogy.
stark: phillies :: (-1 x rubin): mets.

the entire world knows that former (yay!!) mets gm omar minaya unfairly blamed the tony bare-knuckle-boxing bernazard incident on rubin’s desire to get a position in the mets front office. i, like most of mets nation, sided firmly with rubin on that one – it was another example of the mets turning themselves into a farce. but the name of the journalism game is objectivity, and short of that, an ability to put those personal emotions aside to fairly cover one’s subject. if rubin can’t do that, he shouldn’t be the one covering the team.

while i think this mets administration deserved to be taken to task on oh so many issues this season, i was not able to separate the fair criticisms from the anger in rubin’s work. he ran an entire q&a with david wright flat out baiting the face of the team to say he wanted a trade. it was stunning work, actually. every single question was leading, and when wright didn’t bite, rubin’s followups tried to inch closer to making the third baseman bash the mets.

the questions, in succession:

1. How are you dealing with the losing at this point?

2. So much of your career when the team wasn’t doing particularly well, it was building toward something better. Does this feel the opposite — like it’s drifting aimlessly? Or you just tell yourself that when Jason Bay is healthy, Jose Reyes is playing, etc., things will be better?

3. When you’re in a game, do you have the same edge you always have? Or is the mediocrity making it difficult to have that killer instinct? [ vicmets comment: note rubin's statement of mediocrity as a fact, not an opinion. that i agree is irrelevant - i'm merely pointing out the subtle bias tactic he goes for first. ]

4. You’ve used the line that you’re not the GM so you can’t overly concern yourself with this type of stuff, but the payroll commitment next year is already $130 million or so before the offseason even starts. Do you worry that what you’re seeing now is what you get next year as well?

5. Do you really think your entire career is going to be spent as a Met? So few players these days because of finances that happens. And has anything in the past year or two given you pause about whether you really want to spend your whole career here?

[ vicmets comment: didn't get the response you wanted, adam? try, try again ... ]

6. But, for instance, say you played in Tampa Bay and Evan Longoria played in New York. Wouldn’t it be so much easier for you, and your performance would reflect that, whereas he might suffer from having the intense scrutiny?

[ vicmets comment: failing to get the response he wants from wright, rubin tries a different, though perhaps more obvious, tactic. ]

7. You don’t just get sick of it sometimes?

well done, rubin. top-notch work.

the two cents i added to the message boards at the end of the ambush:

“this is truly unbelievable, adam. sure, beat writers get to let their opinions come through, but your overwhelming bias against the mets is incredible, and i think it is affecting your work. as a lifelong suffering mets fan, i know what bitter fans sound like, and i am frustrated with quite a lot about the team’s season, but your leading questions here are straight-up baiting, and i question your professional judgment. was the sole goal of this q&a exercise to try to get wright to say he wants off the mets? that’ll really stick it to them!

“i’d prefer it if you put your rancor against the team and its ownership to better use. i certainly know better than to expect any features about positives that don’t have implied negatives (‘duda debuts on meaningless day’ yada yada yada), but i’d rather see something more productive or informative than snarky comments and ‘articles’ like this. each follow-up question here is just a second attempt to get wright riled up when he didn’t bash the team to your liking.

“if i’m writing a blog post about the mets, i’m free to vent all i want. but as someone who an entire fan base reads as a *source* of information and opinions, you need to make your criticisms a little less vindictive and a little more professional or productive. this article does nothing except expose your personal bias. i expect better.”

don’t misunderstand me. my biggest gripe is not that espn’s main philly columnist is pro-phillies and the main mets columnist is anti-mets. it’s that stark’s writing is as gushy as a teenage girl and rubin’s writing is as biased as msnbc covering republicans and fox news covering democrats.

i don’t want to read rubin’s repeated attempts at verbal revenge. i don’t want to read stark’s repeated love letters to the philthies. for moments like this, i’d love some balance.

boomshakalaka! hello again, scottie pippen

in honor of a certain video-game reboot out today that i’m not at all obsessed with, here are three quick shots that all add up to a night on fire:

a. new guster! lead single “do you love me” is super catchy, other tracks boast “wincing the night away”-era shins-like harmonies. my instant review, which i reserve the right to change and/or expand upon after further listening, is that the washes of instrumental color are excellent, the songs range the typical guster gamut of fun to pensive. the negatives? it looks like adam has officially relinquished lead vocals to ryan, whose singing voice definitely gets better with age but needs my boy gardner to achieve that classic guster sound. also, not enough bongos in that instrumental palate.
instant verdict on the court: a three-pointer that bounces in off the backboard.

2. billy on glee! puck covers “only the good die young” after finn finds religion in a grilled-cheese sandwich.
instant verdict on the court: when my favorite show works in my favorite musical god, it’s nothing but net.

d. nba jam is back! you’d think the game would lose style points for adding in new mariokart-like power-ups and different camera angles, but by playing in classic mode, you can be blissfully ignorant of these updates. i wish i could choose him right out of the box, but my sources tell me that i just need to string together five wins to unlock my boy scottie pippen. (i do find myself wishing for more pixellation, but we can’t have everything, even in this modern age.)
instant verdict on the court: like it’s even a question: a backboard-shattering slam dunk.

now if you’ll excuse me, scottie and i have a lebron james to destroy. boomshakalaka, indeed.

bonus video! in slightly grammatically incorrect fashion, with only one lost train of thought!

messy end is perversely perfect.

i'm getting real tired of seeing these signs at the end of a season.

in a perverse, ironic, massocistic kind of way, it was a fitting end to a horrific, embarrassing season.

ollie perez. one hit batsman, one wild pitch, three walks, one third of an inning. the last loss of a lost season deserved to go to the man who embodied the selfish, oafish, dispassionate aura that pervaded metdom this year.

the mets have routinely ripped my heart out of my body like the dude in indiana jones and the temple of doom. but i have rarely been this disgusted with this team. it’s like i didn’t have it in my heart to feel any pain this time.

why should i even bother to complain about omar? he should have been gone after the 2008 collapse, not rewarded with a multiyear contract extension. he should have been gone because of ollie perez. because of louis castillo. because of kelvim escobar. when you pick a bunch of retread pitchers off the scrap heap and give them non-guaranteed minor-league contracts, that’s fine. when you choose exactly one of those retread pitchers to give a guaranteed $1.25 million deal and give it to the one pitcher who you know is going to break down and require surgery before spring training is even two weeks old, you should be gone.

but it’s jerry who was the final straw for me this year. i kept waiting for a column that never came, a column chastising and berating him for tacitly excusing k-rod’s domestic violence. all the world is a joke for jerry, but when you stand there and give an interview saying that “as men,” anyone could have reacted like k-rod did when the grandfather of his children insulted his mother, you should be taken to task. you should be ripped apart. when you imply that the beating k-rod dished out, which was so severe it put his family member in the hospital, could be viewed in a less harsh light because of circumstance, you should be pummeled with objections. but he lived to joke another day.

jerry is a clown i can’t look at anymore. this team, and its ownership, is a joke that i can’t bear to live with right now.

i am as blue and orange as they come. i live and die with this team. but when this superfan is so numb she can disgustedly laugh at what must be jerry’s parting shot – sticking the ingrate ollie into a game in the most crucial spot, knowing that the man whose presence and inability to perform left the team with 24 functional members just because ownership wouldn’t do the right thing and eat the contract – the mets must take action.

jeff, fred – you need to fix this. you need to fix it tomorrow by firing the clowns who have let this mets culture become this pathetic joke. you need to fix it before you lose the ones who love this team like crazy. and then you need to let a new leadership lead without your messy fingerprints all over everything.

you need to do this now.