Room for improvement

How do you follow-up a season in which you reached the World Series for the first time in 15 years? Why, you win the World Series, of course. Hold on there, Mets fan. Well, the old saw Hope Springs Eternal was coined for baseball fans, was it not? Hover over any photo for a description.…

Mister Met, lost and found

I noticed it with a feeling. Mister Met was calling me from afar, the little guy from the front of my blue baseball cap, the one my dear wife Karen bought for me on our trip this season to watch our favorite team play at Citi Field. And sure enough, my latest favorite hat was…

I settle up my World Series wager at Mama Mick’s place

I put my life on the line with my New York Mets. My good friend Michelle went with her Kansas City Royals. Smart woman, she of the wildly entertaining Lipstick and Laundry blog. So as you probably know by now, her Royals squashed my Mets by the count of four games to one. My penance…

Hope is where you see it

I was driving to work an early morning of World Series week, still somewhat bleary-eyed from my beloved baseball squad’s defeat that ended not too many hours ago. Gray day. A little drizzly. Eight hours in store for me. Then ahead I spotted a rainbow. A big one, too, stretching toward me as I approached…

A big World Series for father-and-son Mets fans

The other kid from Long Island came up to Morrisville a year later than I did, but we hit it off pretty quickly that late August of 1978. Jimmy Johnson was a journalism major at the little two-year college in the State University of New York system tucked into the Cherry Valley of Central New…

A Mets fan can feel lonely in Syracuse even with the World Series ahead

My devotion to the New York Mets has been well-chronicled here this season. There was the trip to Citi Field in late June with my dear wife Karen and friends Steve and Kristen that spurred my multiple-part series about the team and stadium. And there was my discovery that Mets cable network SNY picked my…

Light it up for the Mets, Big Apple

Talking baseball with my bowling teammate Randy in the middle of the New York Mets’ game five tussle against the Los Angeles Dodgers on Thursday night, my astute fellow sports fan mentioned that all the teams left this postseason claim blue as their primary color. And the Mets add red, said the native Syracuse guy.…

Mets are happy they signed hometown kid Matz

If ever a man was born to play on a certain sports team, it is Steven Jakob Matz. When the New York Mets take the field tonight in Queens, N.Y., hosting game four of the National League Division Series against the Los Angeles Dodgers, the 24-year-old rookie left-hander will be on the pitching mound. Let’s…

Make them play it again, 2-2, with the Dodgers out in the seventh

As a Mets fan, I was livid from the moment Chase Utley knocked over Ruben Tejada somewhere around second base Saturday night. As a baseball fan, I was appalled how the umpires called the Dodgers’ runner safe on an appeal that the Mets’ shortstop’s toe came up a smidge short of touching the bag before…

The Baseball Project sounds perfect for this time of the season

Bring on the playoffs, say baseball fans all over today. Not just in New York, where the Mets and Yankees have both qualified for the first time since 2006. Can we get the second Subway Series, 15 years after the World Series matchup? (In retrospect, that was one I believed helped pave the way for…