Misery Loves Company: Two Guys Watch Baseball

Game 51 - Mets
Life and How to Live It, New York Mets Style

Mets 4, Phillies 1
Record: 25-26

So I'm lying in my hospital bed last night hooked up with two dozen wires strapped to various parts of my head, chest, and legs, and tubes up my nostrils. [No, this isn't a random passage from Cliff Floyd's diary.] I'm watching ESPN over the doctor's shoulder, enduring one of the ugliest NBA games ever (and that, my friends, is saying something -- we're talking Gheorghe Muresan and Sandra Bernhard lovechild ugly). I'm really watching for the :28/:58 updates on the bottom of the screen, though. At one interval I see:

METS 0 PHILLIES 1 Bot 7th

Good to see Al Leiter has pitched well, assuming he made the start after all, but where's his run support? Millwood's on the mound for the Phils. Not good.

Anyway, approximately half an hour later, the doc comes in and asks me to close my eyes for 30 seconds while he goes in the other room to check some of the connections. As I consent to do so, and just before fading to black, I see the ticker pop up. I know this will surely be my last chance to get an update this night, and it's killing me that I agreed to keep my lids closed while it floats on by. Of course, upon his return and my re-entry into the land of the sighted, the bottom of the screen is just high-tops and sweat puddles.

And so I watch the remainder of what became a great NBA game, catch no updates, click off the tube, and the medical procedure begins. I suppose that's enough bated breath I've caused with my holdout of more info -- your plants are probably all collapsing from the lack of CO2. No, I wasn't having Tommy John surgery for my softball pitching arm, and no I wasn't having John Thomas surgery from a certain Dr. Svensson. And no, what with this unfunny posting, I wasn't having a frontal lobotomy, thanks for asking.

I was merely undergoing a sleep study for snoring and possible sleep apnea. Apparently I'm a snorer, according to family, friends, neighbors, and most of Gallaudet U. I never saw it as that big of a problem; so what if occasionally I have to sleep in the other room and/or re-hang the shutters. After one too many footprints in the small of my back, however, I am being studied for the first time since I enrolled in Deviant Behavior in college.

After having missed the update, the game could only exist in my brain, which was being closely monitored with electrodes. Once I was in REM sleep, they could begin the begin the process, and I believe their monitors showed my dreams of the Mets / Phillies game: a drive, a stumble, laughing, we walk a batter, it's 9-9, our Superman gets up and catapults one, the closer puts a perfect circle in the scorebook, and 1,000,000 people make the pilgrimage to the bandwagon. Talk about the passion these days. (I'm sorry.)

Anyway, of course my wild brain waves, dreams, and nightmares couldn't do justice to the real game. Down 1-0 in the top of the eighth, Todd Zeile welcomed new pitcher Rheal Cormier with a game-tying homer. Ricky Bottalico kept it at 1-1 through part of the eighth and all of the ninth, and in Top 10 the boys broke it open. Kaz Matsui singled and stole second (as 7 Japanese Brothers cheered), and Zeile once again saved the day by singling him home. Vance Wilson homered to right to plate a pair of insurance runs, making Braden Looper's subsequent save an easier task.

Just a game under Even Steven with Tommy Glavine throwing tonight. If hospital stays are what it takes to keep this team in victory lane (dugout), I guess I'll take one for the team in tonight's softball outing.