Misery Loves Company: Two Guys Watch Baseball

Game 34 - Mets
[roll] Three-eleven . . . HOME RUN, Danny Heep!

Mets 1, Diamondbacks 0
Record: 15-19

Whew. You folks were an Alex Cintron or Matt Kata game-winning HR away from reading the thrilling, dramatic saga of Rob Russell and I playing out the 1985 Boston Red Sox and New York Mets seasons via Strat-o-Matic 'twixt pizza deliveries in the summer of '90. Well, Cintron and Kata have just one dinger between them this year, so it wasn't that close. Still . . . whew.

Instead, the Mets won an impressive 1-0 game against Randy Johnson and the D-backs, and I get to talk about it. Impressive was not the meager three hits they scratched out against the Big Unit (by the way, I was tempted to edit the "scratched the big unit" reference, but since Russell tends to work blue, I'll leave it in). Impressive was Kazuo Matsui sending the second pitch of the ballgame over the left-field fence. More impressive was the shutout Tom Glavine and Braden Looper combined to pitch -- against a squad that had scored 21 runs in their previous 16 innings, no less. Glavine continued a first quarter of 2004 that has been spectacular, and Looper . . . uh, he's doing pretty well and I don't want to say anything more about how well.

Cliff Floyd is supposedly going to be activated today, and the Mets may well need him to be in mid-season form fast. All the talk is centered around the All-Star quintet New York will face in five consecutive days, starting yesterday with Randy Johnson. Tonight they close out the Arizona series against young star Brandon Webb, tomorrow they play in Houston versus Roy Oswalt, and Andy Pettitte and Roger Clemens follow him. A tough stretch, for sure, but the match-ups aren't horrible (if our guys play up to their ability), excepting the Pettitte-James Baldwin disaster-in-waiting Saturday. Minute Maid Park can be a house of horrors for pitchers, so the Mets will need even more pop than they showed in the first two games in Phoenix, and significantly more than last night.

Of course, if they drop the next three games and things aren't going well Sunday, all we'll ask of our boys is a Rocket beaning.