Spring 2009
It’s spring. The first televised Mets game is on, and I’m excited. The team looks good, and cheery. They can forget last year and focus on this year, start working towards a better future. I opened a beer and started watching at 12:30 when Mets pregame started on SNY. I’m excited for the season, for the team, for the new park. This is the start of it. Pitchers and catchers is a nice milestone, but it doesn’t hit home the same way seeing the players live, and hearing Gary Keith and Ron does.
More than anything, I have something else to look forward to. I’m going down to Florida on March 11th, and actually seeing the games is making me antsy to get down there. 
Tags: Baseball, Mets, sny, Spring Training, tv
Shealogy
It’s over. Shea Stadium is officially demolished. We all want to equate the stadium to an old friend, maybe one that had seen better days, one that would be sorely missed. To me, the most chilling moment was that last game, that last walk out. All the pictures, all the drive-bys, all the reports since then have felt empty because without baseball Shea was just a building.
Shea Stadium died five months ago. That’s when it contracted that terminal illness that we all knew would take her life within months. Yesterday it finally happened; Shea Stadium took it’s last breath. To me, it was a relief. Finally she’d been put out of her misery, having her innards photographed and displayed for everyone to see, her illness discussed across the world.
I ask that you remember her as she was in her glory days, and not in her sickness. Don’t remember the final tumble of those ramps, or the demolition of the scoreboard. Remember the fans rushing the field after that first championship, even if you weren’t there. Remember Ventura’s Grand Single, Pratt’s home run, the glove that never came down, Seaver, Strawberry, That amazing June comeback against the Braves in the 8th, or whatever your favorite moments were.
She’s in a better place now, in our minds, on our blogs, on our highlight reels. Take a month, or 53 days, to mourn. A new friend waits on the horizon. One you don’t quite know yet, one you’ve only exchanged the briefest of words with. You may be skeptical you can ever get along, or that you’ll ever love again, but you will. It has tough foundations to fill, but rumor is it’s up to the task.
Tags: demolotion, eulogy, future, past, shea, shea goodbye
Still Cheating
The baseball players that decided to cheat, especially the ones that cheated this century, are unlikely to have stopped cheating because of testing. In past decades these things were almost universally, if secretly, accepted in baseball so It’s harder to be annoyed at any one guy. Everyone was cheating to get that edge. But as Balco happened, as we started to talk about making baseball clean, many people continued to cheat. The guys that have been caught, A-Rod among them, aren’t likely to have stopped because of the 2004 testing policy, especially considering how weak the original penalty was. More likely these guys, used to taking something undetectable that gave them a boost, simply switched to something else undetectable. Many of them are wealthy and have access to many trainers and resources that can provide these things. So even when A-Rod tries to tell us, as guys like Pettite have told us in the past, that it was a momentary mistake, they only did it once, they’re clean now, it’s hard for me to believe. I’m sure most of them switched to HGH or something else that is undetectable in today’s drug tests.
Tags: A-Rod, cheating, drug test, hgh, human growth hormone, New York Yankees, steroids