Back From Hell....To Watch A Coming Out Party

"Act like you've been there before..."

"I'm not saying we're worried about the wild card, we're trying to win a division, but four games with 70-something games left? I don't think that's that big a lead,...
"Four games, three games? That's a week. So I don't see why everyone's assuming the wild card's coming out of here, or that this team or that team is already in the playoffs." Derek Jeter, July 15

I don't who originated the first phrase, but the first person that I'd ever heard say that was Giants great Frank Gifford. It originally was applied to athletes grandstanding but I think it can apply to fans as well. More so even.

I've gotten a lot of questions and grief as to why I didn't let loose both cannons of material on Metstradamus' blog last week. I had two weeks to plan and all I had was a couple of posts and a guest post from someone who turned out to be a traitor sell-out Mets fan in Imperial clothing. Ironically, this mercenary pink hat wearing Bobba Fett wanna-be's post generated the most venom from the viper's nest. I wonder if the Shea snakes knew they were eating one of their own.

My answer to the query at hand....Karma is a bitch. Baseball karma especially.

Ask Metstra and his mutant brother Fredstra about Karma. In the year 2000, you'd have thought that the Empire and its fans were London, 1941, these two way these two were giving it to me because the Yankees were having problems. Metstra even decided to expand his horizons and become Celticsdamus and put together a weekly newsletter called "Boy, Do The Knicks Suck!" just to stick the knife even further in my gut. And why not? The Mets had a better record and it looked as if this was finally going to be their year to overtake the Braves. Then came July 8, 2000....



The rest as they say is history....although I doubt Mike Piazza remembers....

Metstra remembers. Yet and still, even after that painful lesson in baseball karma, he was still going to tempt the fates and attempt another baseball blitzkrieg on the Empire. He was going to in his words "do something really evil" that might destroy our friendship had the Mets won the Subway Series earlier this month.

My response? Dude, it's July. There's a lot of baseball to be played. Why blow my load now when there's three months left in the season? If this is the way he is with sports....Obviously, his life-partner is very frustrated with Metstra in other ways....

So while I didn't take completely the high road, I decided to only tweak the infidels a bit instead of completely tearing off their proverbial wings. I decided to hold back just a bit. Why run down the mountain and nail a couple of infidels...when I can walk down and nail them all?

Of course, this line of thinking completely went of their heads. You're lame, Darth! Is this the best that you can do? was the refrain of Hell's chorus. They didn't realize the symbolism of my little visit to their little corner of the blogosphere. How a certain someone went to hell for a minute....just let to cats know who was in charge and then went about his business. Not to compare myself to that someone...but I will say this, while he'll never admit this in public...Metstradamus knows full well what I'm capable of. What havoc I can wreak when I have the time, the target and the motivation.

My little visit to your little corner of the netherworld was just a courtesy call. A little hello of sorts. The real reckoning won't be as polite.

So all I'm going to say is this. You better hope you win the World Series, Mets fans. Because if you don't...then to quote another favorite badass of mine....Your suffering will be legendary...even in....well you know, because you're already there.

Now as to the second quote that began the post...it's a shame that sports fans don't have more of a sense of history. If they did, they would be able to ignore the columnist in the tabloids who have all but written the Yankees off and have annointed the Tigers, White Sox and Red Sox as three of the four AL playoff teams.

What this weekend in New York and Boston says is this....there's a lot of baseball to be played and before we do any friggin annointing....let's play some goddamn games.

Am I ecstatic that we swept the White Sox and that we're now a half game out thanks to Oakland pounding on Oakland? Absolutely. But what does it all mean if we lose two of three to Seattle, Boston sweeps KC and Chicago sweeps Detroit? We're back where we started Friday.

I don't want to focus on the negatives. But we still need another arm in the bullpen and the rotation. Jaret Wright still hasn't gotten through the seventh. Another bat wouldn't hurt either. As well as this team is playing right now, this team is still very flawed. What's helping us is that so is everyone else. The White Sox are a much better offensive team this year. But their pitching isn't nearly as consistent as it was last year as you saw in this series. What you had last year was a lot of above-average and good pitchers have career years last year. Now they're coming back to the rest of the pack a bit.

Freddy Garcia's pitching coach says that he's lost about five miles off his fastball. Javier Vasquez clearly isn't the same pitcher that he was in Montreal. These guys, despite their relatively young ages, have thrown a lot of innings over the last decade. Maybe it's catching up to them. Think about that before you burn Omar in effigy for not trading the farm away for one of these guys, Mets fans.

Momentum is tomorrow's starting pitcher as I said a million times. Sunday is over, people. Let's see what Wang does on Monday.

Sidney Ponson? I don't know what to think. He still has a great arm. Maybe Guidry and company will see something in his mechanics and makeup that will help him turn things around.

My point is this...as much pleasure as I got out of watching my Chi-Sox buddy Arnie suffer on Friday and Saturday at the stadium....this thing is far from over. Hopefully, what this was was a coming out party. A trumpet call to the rest of the league that things are about to get very bad for them.

For that to happen, we need the rotation to blow like Duke's orchestra, the defense to improv like Coltrane and the offense to thump like Mingus.

Kenny G need not apply....