The Mets are suddenly good. Well, not good exactly. Statistically speaking, they’re average. But in the vibes column — which you won’t find in your paper, on MLB.com or Baseball Reference, so don’t look for it — the Mets are killing it. They rose to average statistically and red hot vibe-istically by beating the Pirates in an odd affair on Jackie Robinson Night, with both Mets and Bucs wearing blue 42s on their backs and their meeting blessed by the regal presence of Rachel Robinson, now 101. She, of course, was very much a partner in Jackie Robinson’s drama, which is somehow both long ago and ..read more

I wish I had brought some string with me. An enormous spool of string. Had I, I could have offered some to each player I saw in the Shannon Forde Press Conference Room Sunday morning and asked him to align himself just so in order to form the most Amazin’ live-action Immaculate Grid you could ever hope to see. Mike Torrez of the Mets in 1983 and 1984, you also played for the Cardinals and the Expos and the A’s and the Orioles and the Red Sox and the Yankees. Please stand in the upper left. Gary Sheffield of the 2009 Mets, you came up with the Brewers and preceded to touch down with the Padres ..read more

Sometimes you stumble into something that catapults you toward something else. Shortly before the Mets, amid Sean Manaea’s off afternoon and a surfeit of Bobby Witt, stumbled Saturday into their 11-7 loss to the Royals, I stumbled into a nugget of information totally new to me. Sixty years ago, on April 13, 1964, the Mets held a season’s eve workout, itself nothing unusual. The club was about to travel to Philadelphia to begin its third year of existence, so they figured they’d get the last of their Spring Training in at home. Except home wasn’t ready. Shea Stadium would open on April 17, and ..read more

When your team’s bad you spend a lot of time fuming about how it should be made good. This guy who’s failed too often needs to lose his job to this guy who hasn’t failed yet, any fool can see the lineup should be revamped so it works like this, etc. I’m not generally one for half-measures, so my favorite proposed remedy is to declare that the Powers That Be should DFA everybody, which has never happen but would indeed sure show ’em. I have on occasion gone a step further and advocated that the Mets be contracted, though that usually requires them to have offended me by doing something truly dr ..read more

The season began with plenty of warning, yet I found myself scrambling in the hours before and after Opening Day to update all the things I keep track of once the season is underway. The files I maintain for my and occasionally your amusement/edification looked like the aftermath of a party nobody had bother cleaning up from before turning out the lights on 2023. Damn, I had all winter to get these ready, yet I haven’t touched them since early October. Some things I monitor are germane to the dawn of a new year, others specific to baseball’s daily nature, others kept in reserve for when a spec ..read more

It’s a tenet of our blog that there are no moral victories in baseball — the loss column comes without asterisks, parentheses or stuff in superscript. Moral victories are losses. Well, except when one of us declares that moral victories do too exist. Maybe I was just in a good mood: Monday night’s game found me and Emily in Buffalo, where we’d gone to visit an old friend and hopefully experience a total eclipse. The eclipse part was largely spoiled by a blanket of clouds, though even without a clear view of totality the experience was still pretty cool: three minutes of nighttime followed by t ..read more

By some stroke of coincidence, the Mets have visited Atlanta on the 30th, 40th and 50th anniversaries of Hank Aaron’s 715th career home run, which is swell, because what decent baseball fan doesn’t adore and revere the legacy of Hank Aaron? The Mets have to play the Braves at some point of every season. Might as well do it when one of the greatest players and achievements the sport has ever known is being commemorated. The Mets weren’t mere spectators for this particular celebration of Hammerin’ Hank. They paid their own tribute by recreating the final score of the final game in which Aaron hi ..read more

“I was very fortunate to win three-hundred and eleven games, and not many people in the wonderful history of baseball were able to go past three-hundred,” said the man in the suit at the podium. “And you wonder why it happened? All you have to do is look at the individuals that were sixty feet, six inches away from me through a twenty-year career. How very fortunate I was to have three people that were my basic catchers through a twenty-year career, starting with Jerry Grote, ten-and-a-half years with the New York Mets.” The man in the suit taking the time at the podium on a day that served as ..read more

As soon as you understand that a manager is going to try to “stay away” from using the relievers he relies on most, you also understand you’re going to need either a spit-ton of runs from your lineup or a comparable amount of innings from your starting pitcher. By the middle of the sixth inning on Saturday in Cincinnati, once it became clear the Mets’ starter was done, you understood the five runs the Mets had scored to that point, along with the three-run lead the Mets were holding, might be insufficient if your goal was victory. And it wasn’t. Luis Severino gave Carlos Mendoza five gutty inn ..read more

Baseball — perhaps you’ve heard — is a game of contrasts. Take Hunter Greene vs. Jose Quintana, the starters for Friday night’s game in chilly Cincinnati. Greene is young, enormous and all but dripping talent, in possession of a high-90s fastball he can throw past big-league hitters as well as an evil slider tailor-made for embarrassing them. He used both to great effect against the Mets, retiring 10 in a row at one stretch and looking borderline unhittable in doing so. I can think of one bad slider that Greene threw all night — the one he hung to Starling Marte in the middle of the plate in t ..read more