a good loss?

there are bad wins and good losses.

ideally, every day is a good win, but no one goes 162-0.

so tonight brings us back to 3-2 (still over .500!), and there was a lot of bad in this loss:

1. it was to the philthies.
2. big pelf was the opposite of an ace. in a really alarming way. he had no life on his pitches, he didn’t make adjustments, he was assaulted, he didn’t make it to the first out of the third inning.
3. blaine boyer – who definitely fell victim to some bad breaks – let the philthies open the game back up immediately after we fought all the way back.
4. we didn’t have a second comeback in us.

but what made this a good loss was the fact that we had a comeback in us at all. where a previous version of the mets may have gone through the motions for six innings worth of outs, the 2011 amazins actually clawed their way back from a 7-0 hole to even the score in the fifth. true, we left the bases loaded at the end of the big rally, and true, boyer proceeded to surrender the lead, but the progress still happened. the fight was there.

so while it’ll still show up as a tick in the loss column, as far as losses go, i’ll take it.

now if we can take the rubber game from the philthies, i’ll be on cloud nine by the time the boys roll into the citi for the home opener …

goodnight and good riddance, ollie

there’s a scene in the wizard of oz when the munchkin-land munchkins start sing-songing about the wicked witch’s demise. now, i wish no ill on anyone, but the level of giddiness i reached when i saw four beautiful words on my computer screen – “mets release oliver perez” – approached singsong altitude.

that selfish, erratic, oblivious bum is gone.

the pitcher whose era, walk rates, whip, velocity and control (ha. ha.) have been spiraling downward while his ego has been trending up (we can credit omar minaya for a lot of that) will no longer sully the name of the new york metropolitans. there are plenty of others who can take over there.

nothin' but headaches. at least he was reliable.

again, i’m going to go a little too grand-scale here, but the burden lifted from my chest feels like what i’d imagine frodo felt when the one ring melted in the fires of mount doom. a horrible weight is no more.

now sure, the weight actually still appears on the madoff mets’ balance sheet, but they’re the ones who once believed scott boras’ schpeel about how oliver perez is the new sandy koufax, so i really can’t help them there.

the guy’s only attractive baseball quality is the fact that he throws the ball with his left hand. true, there was once a potential pitcher in that self-absorbed head – the guy did win 15 games for us, and had it not been for yadier &*#@! molina, ollie may have been remembered for a tight 2006 nlcs game 7 appearance. although, if it hadn’t been for the catch, perez would have blown that game himself.

to say things deteriorated from there would be the understatement of the century.

i’ll say this for him – ollie perez is one of the most dependable pitchers in baseball. every time he takes the ball, you have complete confidence in his ability to throw it away from the plate or right into the path of a sweet spot of a bat. you know you’re going to get no more than four innings of solid, whip-killing soul-crushing trainwreck pitching, ideally with a few runs walked in. you never have to question what’s coming. so i’ll give him that.

this release should have been a forgone conclusion, and indeed most of the media painted it that way, but i actually harbored tremendous dread that #46 would still be with us on opening day.

the thing is, i don’t understand why it took this long. i mean, sure, the money is already lost, and i completely respect sandy and terry’s decision to evaluate ollie for themselves rather than simply going with the glowingly negative recommendations of everyone with eyes. but it was abundantly clear from the early days of pitchers and catchers that his velocity hadn’t come back but his erratic location was spot on (er, off?) he should have been gone to give someone else a real shot at making the team.

i’ve been trying to figure out why it took so long for perez to go, or why they’d release luis first. i have a few different theories, but the prevailing one is this: the front office knew that cutting luis and ollie were literally the only things that could energize the fan base right now. (i’d just like to point out that this does not bode well for the team this year.) so they waited until it got closer to should-we-buy-tickets? time and cut the underperforming overpaids one at a time so fans could savor these little moments. i wonder if they got the ticket spike they were hoping for. (i’ll save my thoughts on buying mets tickets for this season for another time.)

i know i quoted this already in a post about luis, but here’s an actual ollie quote from a spring training game: ”It was not what I wanted, but you just have to take it easy and try to get ready for the next day … walking three guys in a row is part of the game. It’s going to happen again, maybe next time.” ollie, i could see you walking a whole lineup in order.

i find oliver perez so odious that i hardly want to waste more words on him. in this case, i think photos do a pretty good job of telling the story.

ollie messes up.

~

ollie sits on the mound after he messes up.

~

ollie sits in the dugout after he *really* messes up.

~

 

good luck with that.

i wouldn’t want him back even if he did become the next sandy koufax.

one down, one more better go

the mets have finally dropped luis castillo like a fly ball at yankee stadium. and it’s about time.

now, it may be a bit unfair of me to allude to luis’ mind-numbing, soul-crushing dropped pop-up that let the yankees steal a win from us two years ago. to be sure, it was the defining play of his un-lustrious mets tenure, and yet i was never fully on board with making luis the poster child for the epic fail that has been the mets in recent years.

 

so long luis

luis’ biggest sin actually belonged to omar minaya. it was our fearless former leader who offered castillo a lucrative longterm deal when it was overwhelmingly evident to anyone with eyes that louie was entering his decline. omar set louis up for failure, because there was no way his aging body could live up to that deal.

and fail he did – he didn’t put up numbers, and he did indulge in the lax atmosphere jokester jerry allowed. but after a season of incredible slovenliness, i thought luis came back in ’09 with a commitment to improving. so while he continued to fail in the box scores, i didn’t think he deserved the hatred fans continued to heap.

i won’t forget the apathy and sluggishness, but i also won’t forget that one season when he came into camp humbled, slimmer and more focused and put up a solid season. to say he was our mvp of ’09 is both depressing and accurate – he hit .302, stole 20 bases and stayed on the field for 142 games, an accomplishment in itself in the mets’ triage season. i haven’t really seen any of the off-with-his-head articles bringing up ’09, but just because it was a lost season for the team doesn’t mean it didn’t soften my view of the guy.

the person who deserves 100% of the hate he’s been sharing with luis is still somehow in port st. lucie. ollie perez continues to wow me with his arrogance, entitlement (again, well done omar) and his steadfast refusal to accept that in reality, he sucks.

actual quote from an ollie postgame this spring! (emphasis mine) ”It was not what I wanted, but you just have to take it easy and try to get ready for the next day … walking three guys in a row is part of the game. It’s going to happen again, maybe next time.” with you on the mound, ollie, i have no doubts.

so why didn’t ollie get his walking papers too? i have to believe that collins and alderson are continuing the charade of letting him audition for a bullpen role, or i’ll flip. but there’s a very paranoid part of me that wonders if the madoff mets are actually considering the fact that we might not have another lefty for the pen. i’ll leave this train of thought for now, first because i gave up swearing for lent, and it’s already not going well, and second, because today is louis’ day, and i hate to sully it. but i’d feel a heck of a lot better if it were ollie whose locker was being mercifully emptied.

i wanted castillo off the team, as much for a spiritual cleansing of the horrors of the past as anything else. we’re a team that appears ticketed for a battle for fourth place with the nationals (hurts. my. soul. to. type. that.) but there is every reason to wipe the 2b slate clean and try to build a future with someone else.

releasing luis was the best move for both sides. we can look to the future, and castillo can start training to become a met-killer (you know it’s going to happen). UPDATE: philthies sign castillo to minor-league deal that’s essentially a 10-day tryout. here is the choose-your-own-adventure moment for luis – does he flame out or flip the right pages to wind up smacking a winning hr (his only one of the year, no doubt) against the metropolitans? i’m a mets fan, so you know which scenario i see coming to pass …

so long luis. i won’t miss you, but i won’t hate you either.

ollie? now that’s a different story.

really, mets calendar? really?

i meant to take a picture of today’s page-a-day mets calendar page like i did with this one, but in my anger i ripped it into tiny little pieces too soon.

what player’s home run in game seven of the 2006 nlcs kept the mets out of the world series? what player???

do you think i don’t know? do you think i don’t curse the name of yadier molina every time i think it? every time i think of the cardinals?

do you think i don’t harbor an only-slightly-irrational hatred of his brothers benji and jose just because of that one swing of the bat off of aaron heilman? do you think i don’t consider the name “molina” a dirty swear word?

if you do, you’re wrong.

good morning to you too, mets calendar.

ugh.

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.

farewell frenchy, or why i’ll never love a right fielder again

over the past 24 hours, i’ve been thinking about just how much i’ve grown up in the past 13 months. it’s not always easy to comb your past and identify specific days that changed you, that set you on a new path, but in this case, i can give you that day. july 10, 2009. a day i swore would come back to haunt that team which i hold dearest, a day i swore omar minaya would regret, a day i swore marked the absolute and final end of my tolerance of jerry life’s-a-comedy-club manuel, a day i know i scared my boyfriend because i would not stop swearing these three things (or swearing in general).

frenchy the met

july 10, 2009. the new york mets trade rf ryan church to the atlanta braves for rf jeff francoeur. the transaction that sent me into a tailspin. i was in the car on my way down to long beach island with my boyfriend, and, as he can attest (unless he’s blocked that car ride out of his mind), i flipped. fired off like eight different texts reading only “noooooooooooooooo.” cursed up a storm. called my brother to curse up a storm. cranked up the radio so i could yell at the broadcasters on wfan. turned off the radio ’cause i couldn’t take it. texted other people who may or may not have cared about this, or indeed about anything related to baseball at all. cursed some more.

explanation: churchie was one of my favorites, and he got a bum deal with the mets. the team egregiously mishandled the concussion he suffered sliding aggressively into second base trying to bust up the double play that ended a game we were going to lose anyway, back in may 2008. i’ll spare the details. then, when ryan finally returned to health last season, esteemed manager jerry manuel made his distaste for churchie abundantly clear, insinuating that he was a “soft” player, forgetting how ryan sustained the injury and ignoring the fact that he played with more grit than 90% of the team. i am gritting my teeth just remembering this, but again, i’ll spare the details.

i wanted jerry to get put in his place, to see he was wrong about my beloved right fielder. instead, they shipped churchie to atlanta for the former golden boy of the braves?! i hated jeff francoeur on principle for years. the dude was the face of my enemy, and i’d have to root for him? the guy’s numbers were terrible, and omar eloquently tried to explain francoeur’s value: “the thing we like about francoeur is the amount of games he plays.” &%#*$.

but over the next few weeks and months, my cold heart softened. and not only because frenchy started hitting really well, though that certainly helped. the guy was a breath of fresh air for a clubhouse of doom – he visibly lightened the mood of the players, he looked like he actually enjoyed the game, and all in spite of the fact that he had been traded from a pennant race to the titanic.

he made the mets watchable, i learned how to spell francoeur. and in spite of myself, i found that the guy whose name i cursed so loudly on july 10 (and 11 and 12 …) had become my favorite met.

now, in light of everything i’ve just said, i don’t mean to be melodramatic. but my blue-and-orange heart is broken. and i will never let myself fall in love with an under-performing right fielder again.

if only we saw this kind of swing more often

i knew frenchy was not long for this team, that 2/3 of the mets’ future outfield was set by virtue of very large contracts, and that angel pagan deserves every inch of that other 1/3. but i thought i had another month to say goodbye. yesterday, when i went to espn to see how bad the mets had lost, i was met with a blog post saying that clubhouse attendants had just cleaned out frenchy’s locker, and that his trade to the rangers (for a utility infielder who had been dropped from texas’ major-league team, natch) was all but complete.

i didn’t flip out like i thought i would. at first i thought it was a sign of maturity, but i think it’s more of a sign of resignation. it’s like the mets require that certain misery standards be met. how ironic that i’d come to love the guy i hated, only to lose him. it’s only right.

we dispense with the logical part first. frenchy’s 2010 line includes a .237 batting average and a .293 on-base percentage. i’m sure all the texas ranger fans (are there ranger fans?) are as baffled today as i was last july 10. well, they probably didn’t throw a huge tantrum and refuse to speak in words that wouldn’t need to be bleeped out for a two-hour car ride. but you get the point. his offensive numbers are atrocious.

and i’ve been worried about those numbers all season. after starting off with absolutely monster numbers over the season’s first 10 games or so, his numbers took a nosedive. at first, i chalked it up to the curse of vic’s fantasy teams, in which any mets player i pick up has either the worst start of his career or bats .000 until i drop him. (lest anyone think me a sentimental fantasy player, i must state that frenchy was not even on my radar screen on draft day, but after two weeks of .440 hitting, you wonder if there’s something there.) i have two fantasy rules, which i try my best to adhere to:

1. no mets, since every one i touch immediately loses it, and every mets starter i pass on has the most magnificent start of his life on the day i actively choose not to pick him up. (my exception to the starter rule is johan, because he is already the most unlucky pitcher in baseball, and i know beyond a shadow of a doubt that he will get exactly zero runs of support regardless of whether my fantasy team employs him. i broke my rule for jon niese yesterday, and a meltdown and a 9-run onslaught later, here we are.)
2. no phillies, since they are all dirty dirtbags and i would rather have my fantasy team lose every single matchup than look at a philthie player’s line and hope he did anything other than strike out and otherwise embarrass himself in every at-bat. (i have stated my feelings very, very mildly. there is a time for bashing philthies, but this is not it.)

but back to frenchy. i started getting very nervous for him, especially as he started to abandon the (relatively) patient approach he adopted after the trade last year.

if i were in the mood to gamble four times a night, i would bet my life savings that frenchy would swing at the first pitch of his at-bat, regardless of the location. you could tell me that the pitcher was going to throw the ball behind francoeur’s head, and i’d still make the bet. about a week ago, my brother and i were discussing frenchy’s tenuous position with the mets at the end of the season. wanting to come up with a solution that would help jeff get back on track so the mets would consider keeping him, i wondered for the umpteenth time why hojo wasn’t living up to his responsibilities as a hitting coach with him, or why jerry was doing nothing about this – on one hand, jerry was probably too busy scripting his stand-up monologue for his post-game press conference, but on the other, he loves calling out his players in the media.

we'll definitely miss your defense

no, i don’t realistically want to blame anyone other than francoeur himself for the hack hack hack approach. he’s the one with the bat in his hands. but i threw this idea out to my brother, and i really don’t see why no one would come up with something like this: fine him. fine him every time he swings at the first pitch. give him the take sign, and fine him if he ignores it. make him buy the whole team dinner. make him wear a dress on travel day. bench him immediately after the at-bat.

i just kept hoping that he would rise above his inability to keep the bat on his shoulder so that he could start to put up the numbers on the field that would make the mets resign him this off-season. but in the end, frenchy couldn’t fight his nature. and while i am a big believer in team chemistry, and anyone can see what he brings to it, you just can’t keep a guy around whose average is approaching the mendoza line. unless it’s carlos beltran.

and there’s where my argument lies. beltran is batting a robust .214, cannot move anymore and literally fell down in the outfield last night. angel pagan clearly is the one who should be patrolling center field, but it seems the mets haven’t even mentioned the idea of shifting beltran over, according to carlos. on one hand, that can’t be true. beltran will be a met next year because no one will take on his $17.5 million contract, but he just can’t play center anymore. on the other hand, this is the mets. they pander too much to aging stars, and i could very easily see them chickening out on a conversation that clearly needs to happen. beltran has never shown a propensity to rally his teammates, and going forward, he’ll either be a drain on our outfield defense or miserable. fantastic. it’s further proof that the mets make their lineup decisions by the numbers following a dollar sign, not the numbers on the back of a baseball card.

while francoeur’s baseball-card numbers won’t be pretty, the team was certainly clicking better with he and pagan in right and center than it has been since beltran trotted back to the outfield. i don’t know if that’s chemistry or better defense or better morale or the mets’ inevitable august decline or what, but it’s undeniable.

my stomped-on, shredded blue-and-orange heart is broken. i’ll miss you frenchy.

maybe you should read the lyrics before you blast that out of your p.a. system

a few days ago, i found myself in the unfortunate position of heading to the hospital at the start of another cvs episode. i then found myself in the doubly unfortunate position of having to use the mets game to distract myself from the growing pain. when i got to the er, i pulled up the mets audio on my phone … i suppose i’m a sucker for punishment.

it was getting harder to concentrate on the game, but before i lost focus, i heard one thing, one this-is-so-wrong-i-must-be-hearing-it-wrong-but-it’s-the-mets-so-it-must-actually-be-happening thing. it was “love the way you lie” blaring over the citifield p.a. system. you know. the eminem and rhianna collaboration. the song about domestic violence. the song with a video depicting domestic violence. this doesn’t ring a bell to you, mets?!

on a side note, i love the song. it’s a fearless look at a very real issue. and it’s catchy music. but it’s a little too ironic in light of k-rod’s domestic beatdown, don’t you think? then again, just give jerry a microphone and a laugh track and he’ll find a way to smooth it all over.

in other mets news, ex-reliever ambiorix burgos, previously arrested for assaulting his girlfriend, is now being charged with attempted murder. he tried to force his ex-wife to eat rat poison.

play it again, mets. or don’t. just don’t.