I realized yesterday that I'd completely forgotten to set up a WS entry — and regretted that even more while watching Pujols collect a record 14 total bases. I mean, not that I enjoyed watching the Texas pitching staff get a can of that size opened on them, but at the same time, sometimes it's just a privilege.

Think the Cards have it in them? Praying for the first Ranger world title? Over it at this point? Let's hear it.

The TN Fall Classic II still needs your help! As of this writing, we've done a good bit — $1,001 — but we've still got 4K to go. Japan really got put through it this year, and that nation loves baseball almost as much as this Nation does. Your donation, no matter how small, could help repair fields, put a catcher in shin guards, and bring hope to diamond-loving kids, in Japan and all over the globe. You can stock a team with baseballs for an entire season, for just $80!

Anyone donating before midnight tonight (that's Tuesday 25 October) could win a Pitch In For Baseball cap; a Save The Day shirt; or an Amy March shirt. (Sizes limited on those, but I should be able to make you happy.) No need to forward your receipts; the page will track you on my behalf. (In a good, non-information-shary kind of a way.) Meanwhile, let's hope Nelson Cruz keeps hitting, because I'll give $5 for every homer he hits across the whole postseason.

If you want to set aside a penny for every stupid/baffling thing McCarver says, that's a handful of dollars by the top of the third! But if you have no pennies to spare, do me a favor and Tweet/FB the donation link. Thanks!

Another Suds Series! The Rangers get another shot at a ring! And the shit-talk is already underway with Greinke's comments about Carpenter? Awwwwwesome.

The LCSes could get pretty crazy; discuss everything from CJ's unsuitable celebrity crush to the Busch Squirrel's Twitter feed, right here.

It's the moooooost wonderful tiiiiiiime of the…you know, I think I make that joke vis-a-vis baseball when pitchers and catchers report, too. And on Opening Day. Well, the hell with it. It's true.

Welcome to your Division Series celebration/wails of despair thread. Make predictions, complain about your bullpen, wonder why you didn't pick Shoppach for your postseason pool (I'll be doing a lot of that, I suspect), suggest braiding schemes for Maddon's hair or spitting schemes for Wilson's curveball — we're here for you.

I had Texas in 3, but now I guess I'll say 4; Brewers in 4; Tigers in 5; Phillies straight sweep. Good luck, everyone, and here we go…

Wow. WOW.

I feel bad for Braves and Sox fans, I do. God knows I understand what it's like to watch a team floundering (although, when you give up hope of contending in, like, the 1800s, it's not as painful when it all goes, or stays, wrong). But it's probably the most exciting night of baseball I've witnessed. My favorite moment is a little hard to explain, but MLB Tonight had film of Harold Reynolds and Dan Plesac reacting to the Baltimore win and the Longoria homer with sheer boyish disbelieving joy — like, Reynolds is out of his chair and jumping around at the back of the set, unable to contain himself, and they have to do it completely silently because, at that moment, the network is rolling other footage onscreen with Greg Amsinger narrating it, so they have to freak out to each other without a sound until the action onscreen catches up. Plesac is cursing and looking all around like DID I JUST SEE THAT and he looks about 11 years old, and there's Reynolds sproinging around like Yosemite Sam in the background while Plesac flaps his arms. Delightful. (Thanks to Deadspin, you can see for yourself.)

And Amsinger — what a pro. He kept all those plates in the air last night no problem, and then, after everything had ended, they rolled Longoria's HR once more and I sat on the couch and just…laughed, because…what the hell. Amsinger probably had a scripted VO, but instead of talking, he just…laughed, because…what the hell. When they cut back to him, he shrugged all, "Baseball: it rules. What can I say."

And it's over for another year, regular-season-wise. I'll get some postseason open threads going later on, but let's wrap up the 162, shall we?

The Mets. Going into the season, I expected a sub-.400 effort — without assuming injuries to the stars, or that Johan Santana's arm would continue the process of falling off. That they flirted with .500 for most of the year and didn't give up on things (mostly) is a credit to the team, and to Collins. We got to see a few kids come up and make a difference, which is exciting and promising, and if Alderson can get some pitching over the winter, the Mets might make some gains next year.

I liked the moves I saw Alderson making; he dealt smartly with K-Rod and Beltran. I didn't sense the interference of Jeff "It's Like The Sims, Right?" Wilpon, so apparently he and Collins found a way to keep Junior at bay.

As far as the Reyes/batting-title flapdoodle from yesterday: the "Ted Williams would NEVER have" bah bah yammering is irrelevant. Ted Williams "would never" do a lot of things, because Ted Williams is a dead guy, so leave him out of it. Players and managers have tried to game the batting-average crown since the dawn of time (see: Cobb v. Lajoie, 1910), but you always have people who consider a player acting in his own individual interests a violation of some sandlot code that is not necessarily going to pertain to a professional in the entertainment business. Fans have romantic notions about honor and fire in the belly; players have jobs to do. Get over it. I mean, yes, baseball has wonderful, thrilling hero arcs, and I like to get misty about the narrative better than anyone — but it's Reyes's career, and he's maneuvering himself into a position to get a big raise. He wants a batting title, and to not re-injure the hamstring. Should he have stayed in the game longer from a 162nd-game, fan-service standpoint? Probably. But the fans who boo him for leaving the game — and then boo Turner for coming in, like, they do need to field a complete nine out there, assholes — will boo him for everything, forever.

Reyes had an exciting year, he has superstar talent, and he is just not going to give you 150 games a year. Wherever he ends up, they'd better have their eyes open about that.

Overall, an encouraging season. I look forward to 2012. And not just to watch the Mets…

Guillen to the Marlins. Ozzie Guillen managing Logan Morrison and Hanley Ramirez. I just…I can't wait! It's like a human Pop-Rocks-and-Coke experiment! I may teach myself to lip-read Spanish over the winter, just to get more out of that soap opera.

Grading the SI predictions. Every year, I swear I'll save the Sports Illustrated baseball preview so I can check their work at the end of the season; this year, I actually prevented myself from recycling it on April 10th, although I almost threw the issue away about a hundred times after that because I resented the stupid Phillies staring up at me from the side table with their stupid smug awesome-pitcher-y faces. (I may have Sharpied a peen onto Oswalt. I'm not proud of it.) (The peen itself, I mean. It looks like a failed rocket prototype. I suck at drawing.)

SI made a lot of predictions that didn't work out, but most of them made total sense at the time, even if I didn't entirely agree (Bosox v. Giants in the World Series, for instance — thought Philly would probably get that gig, but had no real problem with the San Francisco guess). Almost everyone called the AL East for Boston; almost nobody thought Carl Crawford would suck as loudly as he did (SI had him for an MVP contender), or that Posey would go out for the season and nobody else would hit. SI had the Twins winning the AL Central, and I concurred at the time — you know that way the Twins have of puttering around in the far reaches of the standings for four months and then you turn around and they're right behind you. Even when Liriano went down, I didn't think it would get as bad as it got.

Still, the subhed biffed it pretty badly: "Remember the Comedy Central awash so long in mediocrity and midsized payrolls? It's now a high-rent district — and the Twins rule." Except it wasn't, and they didn't; after the Indians finally fell to earth, they were giving that lead away with a free toaster for like six weeks; nobody could pull it together and win. It's more like the Tigers sucked less.

Other understandable but incorrect guesses included King Felix repeating as Cy Young winner; "I don't expect a drop-off from [Ichiro!] at all"; the Mets dead last in the NL East and the Marlins not spitting every bit in the stable; Heyward as an MVP candidate (Braves fans: what's going on with that guy? I wanted that to come true. I like Heyward. Is he still hurt? What's with the .319 OBP? He looks lost out there); the Reds repeating as tops of the NL Central and Votto as an MVP contender; Berkman as a major mistake for St. Louis (totally cosigned that at the time; totally love that Pumes went on a diet, batted like 4.382 for springtime, and made us all eat it — good for that guy); the Rockies in the hunt; and of course the Diamondbacks in dead last. Arizona has looked better than their record to me for a couple of years, so I'd have called them to finish at .500, but first? No way. "Baseball Today" started mentioning Ian Kennedy in July, probably, and I just assumed that it was a different Ian Kennedy, and the one I'd seen with the Yankees died or went to business school or something. Nobody could have predicted that.

Or this: "Adam Dunn brings balance. He'll strike out, but he's a threat to make something happen every time he's up. He is going to get on base and score a lot of runs." Oh, dear.

But that's why they play the games, as they say, and SI got a lot of things right — the decline of Chase Utley; various RoY hopefuls. The only inexplicable prediction in retrospect is the Athletics winning the AL West, which I didn't get even then, since even SI didn't think they'd hit much and I saw no reason — save maybe the Angels — that Texas wouldn't dominate again in '11.

We'll see each other back here for cheering/sackcloth throughout the postseason; get those bets ready, because it's almost time to raise a little money for Pitch In For Baseball. In the meantime — how ya feelin'? Need to hate on Fredi or defend Francona? Worried about your team's postseason chances? Are you the Astros fan? (hee. I'm sorry! They were good not that long ago!) Let it out. Let it allllll out.

A few, hopefully quick, thoughts on the Mets and the trade deadline here…

As Bean aptly put it in a text last night about the K-Rod trade, "Alderson is ninja." I didn't have any opinions about Rodriguez as a trade option; I didn't think we'd get that lucky. Setting aside for a moment what the Brewers have in mind with that, I like the deal. It saves the Mets money, possibly leaving them a couple stock trades and a bake sale away from re-signing Reyes, and it rids the roster of an emotionally troubled player who is about to enter his decline years — and whom the Mets only signed based on a gaudy saves stat from 2008 that didn't tell anyone much of anything useful about Rodriguez as a pitcher. It told us a few things about Mike Scioscia as a manager, and how he uses his bullpen; it told us a few things about Angels starting pitching; and it told us that the Mets front office at that time would let itself get felt up by sweet-talking numbers that lie.

I hated that signing at that time, for that reason. Rodriguez isn't a bad pitcher, by any means. He's not a relaxing pitcher, God knows, but he's quite good; his similarity scores put him on a par with Joe Nathan and Bruce Sutter. But his Wins Above Replacement for 2011 is just over one, he's not getting any younger, and if he doesn't stay healthy, et cetera and so on. The rest of the Mets bullpen is…whatever the opposite of "lights-out" is? …Okay, that's unfair; it's gotten much better since the springtime, and the mercy DLing of Buchholz hasn't hurt. And I remember Doug Sisk, so, you know, this isn't all that bad. K-Rod's not so good this year that we can't get by without him (Gothamist's description of his '11 to date as "excellent" is overstating the case).

But Bean also worried that Rodriguez is "the first domino," and we can't give up yet. I see what she's saying — it's gratifying that a team I didn't expect to notch a .400 winning percentage even with all the stars healthy is clinging like an angry old monkey to break-even. Unfortunately, the Mets play in the NL East, and even if the Amazin's can climb over the Braves, a couple of teams in the Central will pose a problem. Teams like…the Brewers. And the Reds. And the Cardinals. And and and. I get not wanting to sell the team off for parts, but a major part of Alderson's mandate as the GM right now, in my opinion, is to signal to ownership and fans that he understands and accepts reality. And the reality is this: the Mets have no postseason shot in 2011. The Mets also have a handful of overrated position players that other teams maybe might have a use for, because going forward, the Mets really…won't. We need pitching — 95-mph, young starting pitching. We need an ace. Another sad reality to face: Santana is probably done. He's absolutely done as Johan Santana™. He's possibly done period. That acquisition made sense at the time and just didn't work out, but it's been not working out in operatic fashion for like two years now. Let's get some fireballing help in here.

With whom could the Mets make that happen? Let's see here.

Wright. Fred Wilpon shouldn't have made the comments he did, probably, but he had a point about Wright. He's not a superstar; I don't see "superstar" in his future. Could Wright move on to a team that plays in a hitter-friendlier ballpark and experience a return to previous power form? Sure, and I think gambling on that is the best outcome for the Mets and for Wright's career. He's not going to get it done that way at Citi, so let another team have a shot with it. Turner et al. have done just fine replacing him, and I don't think Turner has superstar makings either, but the Mets can go with him, or they can continue living in denial about Wright's long-term value to the team.

The complication there is that Wright has somehow become the face of the Mets. I don't understand that, honestly; I like the guy fine, but he doesn't seem to have enough personality for the fans to form such a profound attachment to him. And after the swoons and chokes of the last few years, maybe it's time for a different face anyway, so if Alderson can move him, I support that — but he would get killed for it.

Beltran. Apparently there's interest in him, which is surprising to me. He's having a good season, he's playing nearly every day, he made the All-Star team — I live in constant fear that one of his legs is going to fall off, but opposing scouts may not have that anxiety, and I suspect he wants to leave. I don't know that we can get enough in exchange unless we package him with another player, though.

Murphy/Davis. I would love to see Murphy go into a deal with an AL team that can park him at DH. The Mets can't afford that kind of Dr. Strangeglove "defense," and if Davis comes back 100 percent, Murphy's extraneous.

That injury raises a lot of questions, though; Ike has missed a lot of time. I can't predict how it's going to play out when he comes back, but prior to the injury he looked like a solid player both ways and didn't cost a lot of money. He's the one to hold, still, I think.

Reyes. I'm so torn about Reyes. He's having such an amazing year and I've had so much fun watching him…but then he got hurt again, and then K-Rod got traded, which frees up some ducats to keep Reyes. So, the "can the Mets keep him" question is back up for debate, along with "should they keep him," which seemed settled in favor of "yes, if possible" until he got hurt.

Here's how I see it. The kind of money Reyes is going to want, he can totally get. He "shouldn't" get it, but he will totally get it, and at the end of the day, he should probably get it from another team. What's behind his awesome '11 so far? A big part of it is his speed, which he's not going to retain — either injuries will slow him down, or throwing himself at triples will create more injuries. Another big part of it is the calendar. It's a contract year. A lot of people think the idea that players turn it on in a walk year is horseshit; I think there's something to it. Either way, let some other GM write checks on that.

Reyes is super-exciting. He's a great player. It's a bummer that he's going to leave. But: understanding reality; accepting reality. Reality: the Mets could try to put together a sweet deal for a seldom-injured version of Reyes. The actual version is a weakish return on investment, and that's the kind of contract the Mets need to avoid even the appearance of like the plague for the next few years.

Bay. Well, who would take him, is the question, and "no one" is the likely answer. I won't belabor points I've made in the past about the Bay deal, but if your team needs a gracious, forthright guy who handles a super-frustrating career downturn without making excuses or giving up, Bay is your guy. He's doing his damnedest out there, he's working with his manager, and I salute him, because he knows that signing bombed. Nobody knows it better than he does. But what he's not bringing in doubles, he's trying to make up for in effort, and I for one appreciate that. I don't appreciate it so much that I would cry if he went to, say, the Cubs (and got a nice little post-trade bounce out of it for himself), because accountability doesn't drive in runs, but still. The next time you hear someone banging on about how athletes make crappy role models, point 'em to that guy. Admirable isn't always about the long ball.

The Reyes injury has raised a lot of questions over the last few weeks, and I really know nothing about what's waiting in the farm system, so I don't know how any of it is going to turn out. It's going to get exciting, and possibly depressing, in Queens over the next two weeks.

Times scribe Jonathan Mahler freezes my distaste for Bill Simmons in carbonite — SEE WHAT I DID THERE?! — in just three grafs

The 31 May New York Times Magazine profile of Bill Simmons is standard for that genre: "behold the rise of a snarker from the AOL farm team to" blah blah blah "gol-lee, a Melrose reference in a piece about the AL West!" blah. I have had the pleasure of seeing my own everyday work taskery transformed by a Times Mag journalist into a cutting-edge undertaking; it's the nature of that publication to confer consequence on its subjects, so I don't blame Simmons himself for the damply admiring description of how he marries sports commentary with TV references.

But while the hype isn't on him, buying into it is, and I get the feeling — from this piece, from others I've read about him, and from his own work — that Simmons is content to let people believe he's the first writer ever to use pop-culture references in or adjacent to sportswriting. Hey, maybe he is. It's definitely part of his brand, as is the forthright homerism about the Red Sox, but it's a frattily self-congratulatory brand that, while I've occasionally admired the writing and totally acknowledge the work ethic, I don't care for.

Credit to profiler Jonathan Mahler, though; he crams everything I dislike about Simmons™ into three grafs on the sixth page, starting with Simmons's apparent sabremetrophobia:

Simmons doesn't write much about baseball anymore — he has been turned off by the fetishization of statistics that now dominates coverage of the sport — but he still likes going to games. In late April, I met him and a couple of other guys for a day game at Dodger Stadium. The ballpark was almost empty. "That Giant thing was not good," Simmons said, referring to the recent beating of a Giants fan in the stadium parking lot. "Also, the team being taken over by the commissioner — not good for fan support."

I assume that the "fetishization of statistics" line is a paraphrase of Simmons and not Mahler editorializing about baseball writing, but either way, it put me in mind of Lee Siegel whining about LOLcats. I suspect that Simmons wouldn't characterize it as "fetishization" if he understood — or, more to the point, tended to get credit for inventing — the statistics in question. Instead, it reads the way it inevitably did with Joe Morgan: he doesn't want to learn new stats or formulas, and he resents the fact that his failure to participate is not then the end of them, that they continue to exist and even, because he refuses to learn about them, seem to "dominate coverage."

I'd actually like to know if sports coverage now is stat-heavier than, say, 20 years ago, simply by volume…but I don't think it is. The stats themselves have changed, but it's not like Jerry Izenberg painted a portrait of Wally Backman's batting average during a Cubs series using only synonyms for "mediocre," back in the day. He wrote something like, "Backman hit .193 against Chicago pitching." That's a stat. Get over it. "But baseball is about the stories on th–" I know. I agree. Stats have stories in them; Bill James, who is the grandfather of many of these stats, and who works in the front office of the Red Sox, has said dozens of times that he created various equations because the existing formulae didn't tell him enough about the stories he saw or heard in the stands. He wanted to make shooting the breeze concrete. There is poetry in math, and it takes 14 seconds to learn what VORP is and how it's calculated, after which brief time you can bust on the likes of, say, Derek Jeter with more authority. Get over it.

And in the second place, even if we concede that arcane stats have choked the life out of baseball writing, that only explains why Simmons might not read about baseball much anymore, not why he doesn't write about it. If he really believes WAR and BABIP have swamped the boat of baseball coverage, wouldn't he want to get down on his knees and bail with regular columns of his own on the subject, to counteract all the mathy poindexter goings-on? Or does he just not feel like he can write credibly on baseball without using them himself — which perhaps is why he dislikes them to begin with?

Or is it that, now that the Red Sox have completed their transformation from official team of the Vale of Tears to perennial powerhouse, he doesn't care that much anymore? Is he a foul-weather fan? Hey, that's okay, if it's the case. Rooting for a crap team is really really fun in its way, especially if you do love baseball for the stories, because nothing has better, more plentiful punchlines than a team whose ace is a knuckler who's almost my age. (For example.) (Sigh.) I get it. But just say so. Don't make it about begrudging ideas whose time has come.

Speaking of crap teams, if Chavez Ravine is empty these days, it's likely because the Dodgers have not played good baseball to date. Or…because we've had a cold spring. Or…because it's still a tough economy, and a family trip to the park isn't doable for lots of people, or because the commute to Dodger Stadium is an ass-tear, or or or. The Wilponigans with Madoff and that New Yorker article and whatever else don't have thing one to do with whether I make it out to Citi Field, and it's a different situation, but if I'm a Dodger fan, I'm more psyched to follow the team now that MLB took it away from the McCourts, not less. I feel certain I heard Mike Schur say as much on Joe Posnanski's podcast (which is a great listen — loose, lo-fi, and fun) when the power transfer first went down. Any Dodger fans want to weigh in here? Simmons lives out there, so fine, but the remark didn't seem to proceed from that. It didn't seem to proceed from any actual information; it seemed like just something to say.

Simmons spoke with more apparent authority on the subject of Sox fans themselves, and while he's perhaps a foul-weather fan of the team, he's an all-weather fan of other Sox fans. Marvel at the hypocrisy (or don't; it's fairly typical of him) as Simmons — attired in a clothing item that, while it doesn't necessarily indicate fratbaggishness, is certainly strongly correlated with it — harshes on a Dodger fan's kit:

Simmons, who was wearing camouflage shorts and a T-shirt, got a hot dog with mustard and we found our seats behind home plate. "How do you feel about a guy with his own name on the back of his jersey?" Simmons asked, pointing out a man a few rows in front of us in a Dodgers shirt, the name "Scotty G" written across the back. "It's like a double violation. You'd never see that a Red Sox game. He's everything you'd want 'Scotty G' to look like, too, with the slicked-back hair and blue sunglasses."

How petty is Sarah? This petty: I actually checked baseball-reference.com to see if "Scotty G" might refer to a current or recent-past Dodger. It doesn't, and I agree that putting your own name on a team jersey is sort of smurfy. What it isn't is noteworthy. You see it on kids at Citi all the time. The guy probably got it as a gift. So what?

What bugs the most, though, is Simmons snotting that you "would never" see that at Fenway. What Simmons (and Mahler) fails to point out is that you'd never see that at Yankee Stadium, either — because New York and Boston do not put player names on their jerseys at all, only the numbers. You see names on t-shirts sometimes, but not on jerseys, so "never" seeing that at Fenway is not so much a point of comparison — and what you do see at Fenway, among other things, is a bunch of bandwagon-jumping Chi Psi twats and their Dane-Cook-fan girlfriends wearing the green or pink red-B ballcaps and bugging out unironically to Neil Diamond. I have nothing against the Red Sox (except Papelbon), Fenway, or the vast majority of Red Sox Nation, but acting like that fandom isn't the host organism for a super-strain of asshole at least as virulent as the L.A. variety is ridiculous.

Oh, look. Here's that asshole now.

A little later, Simmons spotted a trio of heavyset women in tank tops and cut-off jeans shorts, drinking what appeared to be frozen daiquiris out of plastic Dodger cups. "Look, it's 'Sex and the City'!" he said.

If he'd come right out and said, "NO FAT CHICKS!!!1!!", I miiiiight have a perverse respect for him, but no. He tried to sneak it in there, and the reference is limp in the first place.

Whatever I've thought about his writing in the past, Simmons is evidently hardening into that self-regarding, incurious, middle-aged well-in-my-day blowhard who mistakes endurance for relevance and decibels for insight. He's a talented writer, but he's coasting on shtick, and if he's not interested in letting any new information or opinions in, why should we give a shit about the ones that come out anymore?

It's not that Fred Wilpon aired out specific players on the Mets in his comments to The New Yorker that bothers me. Rather, it's all the things that the particulars of said airing-out say about his stewardship of the team, none of them complimentary, starting with the fact that Jeffrey Toobin's article really is not about the team on a baseball level. The article is about the team in a business context, about how the Wilpons' investments with Bernie Madoff boomeranged on the club and continue to do so thanks to the civil suit, and it might behoove the so-called businessman who owns the team to stay on task in his interactions with a reporter. (Toobin's doing a live chat tomorrow about the article; I'm interested to see if anyone asks him about that, although Toobin is defending Wilpon's comments about the team. …What?)

Instead, Wilpon shoots his mouth off about the money Jose Reyes will or will not get, snarks on Carlos Beltran for the 2006 NLCS, and dismisses David Wright as "not a superstar," and it's one thing to stray off-topic and let a few non-germane (and/or snarky) comments slip. That happens, although Wilpon apparently either didn't realize that Toobin had a Dictaphone, or he didn't care. What irritates me is the bitchy victimized tone Wilpon takes with regard to the team throughout the piece, as though it's the Easter bunny signing the checks and he's forced to suffer though a Santana-less summer with the rest of the fans — as though the team is something that is done to him.

That will not fly, not least because much of what Wilpon says is substantively not correct. Let's start with the remarks about Reyes: "'He thinks he's going to get Carl Crawford money,' Wilpon said, referring to the Red Sox' signing of the former Tampa Bay player to a seven-year, $142-million contract. 'He's had everything wrong with him,' Wilpon said of Reyes. 'He won't get it.'" Well, of course he won't get it; thanks to the sluggish (heh) start Crawford got off to, nobody's going to get it next year. After the worrying that bone has taken in the press, Crawford himself probably doesn't want it anymore, so Wilpon's statement is an uh-duh-er, but then at the same time, it's rich meat coming from a guy whose team has given mattresses full of money to players far less deserving. Oliver Perez: worthless head case. Bobby Bonilla: still getting paid although he hasn't gotten out of street clothes in a decade. Jason Bay: poorly served by Citi's dimensions at the plate, and concussed for much of last season. Francisco Rodriguez: that save stat from his time with the Angels is a gaudy bauble, but it told us nothing of real value about his value late and close, which everyone except the Wilpons apparently understood (ditto his mood disorder, not exactly the best-kept secret on earth, much less in MLB).

I could go on for about seven weeks, but here's the point: I very much doubt that Reyes thinks he can get Crawford money — but if he does, maybe it's because the Wilpons have given Crawford money to every other broken-down stooge in the fuckin' league! Maybe it's not Reyes's arrogance about his own talents, Fred! Maybe it's the bad business example you've set, repeatedly!

Not to mention that Reyes really has not had "everything" wrong with him. Reyes is not my favorite; Reyes has had the sort of injury that tends to recur, if not as itself than as an ancillary, "downstream" injury; Reyes is having a genuinely good year in 2011 that fun as hell to see, although he's clearly playing like it's a contract year, which it is, and which he has every right to do. Re-signing him at all is probably not a great idea, because he's at exactly that age where the decline starts, and it's wise to let another franchise deal with it, because Toobin's assessment — "pegged as a future star[,] [i]njuries have limited him to a more pedestrian career" — is more or less correct. I'd say he has one more brilliant year in him, and it's very likely this one, so let's not pay for six more. But he's not that frail.

Moving on to Beltran, about whom Wilpon is exceedingly bitter. I have long since tired of the whining, and not just from Wilpon, about Beltran looking at strike three in '06. First of all, correlation is not causation, and the team's choke jobs in subsequent seasons did not proceed from Beltran's alleged choke job at the plate, although it's convenient to blame him — especially for ownership, whose shit decision-making is responsible — after the fact. Second of all, I understand that it's bases loaded and two out in the postseason, but a) he'd had a decent series to that point, 3 HR, 1.054 slugging, so you could maybe give him some credit for helping the Mets get as far as a seventh game, or at least for knowing how and when to swing, and b) it's an 0-2 count. I only know what I read, but that's not generally when to swing. That's when to wait for the pitcher to waste a breaking ball in the dirt hoping you'll chase, or look for a mistake pitch you can jack. Unluckily, Beltran got neither. Wainwright Mozarted a curveball over the outside black. And that's the third thing: Wainwright. It was his second year in the league, so I wouldn't compare his craft to Greg Maddux at that point, but it wasn't some Schmuckly Carmichael floating an 84-mph fastball down the heart of the plate while Beltran quietly pissed himself. A good pitcher threw a good pitch, got lucky at the backdoor, and beat Beltran. That happens too.

The other hilarious (read: "infuriating") thing about Wilpon's Beltran comments is that Wilpon admits that he signed Beltran based on the 2004 postseason — that his crazy-good run with the Astros that year got him his Mets gig. Meanwhile, I believe Bill James had written at some point prior to the '04 season that Beltran, then a Royal, was due for a quantum leap forward in his abilities. I'll try to find a link to that piece, or you can post it in the comments; long story short, it was a smart enough signing — expensive, but so were Delgado and Martinez, and this one made more sense in terms of the player's age. The Mets just made it for bad reasons, and it still could have worked out (and did, for a while) if he'd stayed healthy, which nobody could have foreseen he wouldn't. I know that K haunts a lot of people, but C. Belts really isn't the problem here. Fred Wilpon giving his kid a George W. Bush job in the front office and not insisting that he make friends with relevant statistics or even conventional scouting wisdom before interfering in personnel decisions — that's the problem.

Wilpon's chilly appraisal of David Wright ("'A really good kid. A very good player. Not a superstar'") is in fact on point, but what possible purpose does it serve to speak that bluntly about the guy who, like it or not (and I don't, particularly), is considered your franchise player? No, he's not HoF material; most of us could have told you that two years ago. What on earth is the owner of the team doing saying so about the face of the team? Wright has since broken his back, so my planned series of "trade him and get some younguns who can pitch in two years" broadsides will now go in a dark drawer, but did Wilpon think that this would motivate his players somehow? That people think it's funny or refreshing when Ozzie Guillen speaks truth to power, so maybe he'll try it? He is the power to which truth is spoken. That equation doesn't add up. It makes no sense.

Sense is what's missing from the overall impression I got of Wilpon — common sense. It's that shortage, ironically, that I believe probably exonerates him from charges that he knowingly colluded with Madoff on the Ponzi scheme; this is someone who didn't question his financial statements, at all. (And I never understand that when it comes up in these celebrity money-manager scandal stories. I don't know much, but the same ten percent every month isn't "comforting," guys. It's suspicious, and you should look into it more closely, because it is your money.) This is someone who claims to know baseball — who was considered a pitching prospect; who was childhood friends with Sandy Koufax — but who sits idly by while the team pays big bucks for an outfielder based on half a season's hitting stats in Fenway Park. This is someone who categorizes a team he owns as a "[s]hitty team" and "snakebitten," when it's actually a mediocre team holding its own quite well under the circumstances — even though the Mets have half the infield on the DL and their putative knuckler ace has sucked so far in '11, half the AL Central teams have worse winning percentages — and is, if anything, owner-bitten. I don't get the sense that he's even that brilliant at his initial moneymaking enterprise, real estate. The article as much as says that he inadvertently bought up a bunch of property during a market low, but did it as a tax shelter, not to make a profit.

This is someone who thought he might do well to shit-talk players whose signings he approved when he's trying to sell part of the team.

Maybe he's frustrated and couldn't hold it in anymore; maybe he's past it a little bit mental-acuity-wise. Either way, the Wilpons should sell the whole team, not just a minority stake. That way, Fred can do what he really wanted to all along — build a shrine to Ebbets Field — and Jeff won't have anything to do with baseball operations, and thank God. Now that Fred has poisoned the well, just fill it in with dirt and dig a new one with a new ownership group, preferably one that occasionally asks questions of its financial statements, of shifty stats like ERA and SV, and of its own abilities.

Jed Jacobsohn / Getty

It didn't take long before I started fast-forwarding through the parts of Baseball Tonight that concerned the Bonds trial. The outcome wasn't entirely without interest for me, but until I heard an actual outcome, knowing about the ex-mistress's testimony, which Giambi took the stand today, on and on…by following the story before it ended, I felt complicit in a redundant proceeding that put me in mind of the Kenneth Starr era.

Craig Calcaterra's columns about the Bonds verdict crystallized the similarity between the two trials for me, particularly when he remarked that "the jury just punted here. They decided to 'do justice' rather than follow the evidence. I'm not OK with that. You shouldn't be either." I really like Calcaterra's coverage generally — HBT is definitely worth a follow on Twitter — but he's also an attorney (although I believe he's not currently practicing), so he's got insightful things to say about the case from that perspective as well, and Calcaterra's comments made me wonder what it's all about, in the end. What is it for? What are we doing here? It seems to me as though the entire point of bringing suit against Bonds for perjury and obstruction is to "do justice," and to do it because we don't have the evidence we want about Bonds and his actions — an admission of guilt; an assessment of exactly how steroids affected his numbers; what the information we do have really means.

A fool's errand, all of it. It is not possible to wring justice out of the Bonds situation — not the kind of justice I can see as the motivation for fans. Bonds won't tell what we've decided is the truth about his alleged steroid use, won't explain and apologize and crunch the numbers for us on precisely how many home runs it might have added to his total, so instead, there is the trial process, the ritual, a collective moving-on pageant during which dishonesty and theft is punished, an important lesson is learned, and we all rededicate ourselves to blah blah blah cue "The Stonecutters' Song." Again, I can't speak to the prosecutorial requirements as far as bringing and pursuing a case against Bonds. Citizens should not lie to a grand jury. But this isn't just a citizen. This is a grouchy superstar who farted in the church of baseball, repeatedly, and he's simply got to take a punishment! It's only right! It's what he deserves! "Who pollutes the Hall of Fame? / Cheapens this, our sacred game? / HE do, HE do!"

Fine. He's an ass. And? What are we doing here?

Look, I wish as much as any other baseball fan that the Steroid Era had never existed. I feel like I have to add a qualifying phrase about it to every fackin' sentence I utter on the topic. I don't particularly think that I would enjoy hanging out with Bonds on an interpersonal level, either; he seems like a twat. If he lied to a grand jury, he should take whatever the punishment is for that. That, not for what eighty-odd other guys did, or for being a nozzle, or for forcing us to confront the fact that the game isn't played by saints, because Bonds's punishment needs to be about what it's actually about. As it is, we're in stained-dress territory.

It's likely impossible for Bonds to get a fair trial, in either direction, unless you move said trial to a neutral venue like, say, the Czech Republic — but there is no emotional point in pursuing it any further, because if it's about an unfairness done to the game or the fans, it's done, and nothing in the criminal code can undo it. We have to account for it, and just learn to live with it, because continuing to prosecute Bonds, to make this point, to see to it he doesn't get away with it…I mean, what "it" do we mean? The game is alive. It's fine. I've got it on now; Giambi's playing first base for the Rockies, and a few feet away from him, Mookie Wilson is manning the coaching box, same as it ever was. And if it weren't, would convicting Bonds of lying fix it?

I don't not care; I don't think anyone else should not care; I don't feel especially sorry for Bonds. But if it's about what he stands for and not what he did, Calcaterra's right — I'm not okay with it, and whatever is genuinely wanted or needed from this process, legally or emotionally, is, I think, not available. Sit down with his legal team, get him to agree to a giant fine and a few hundred hours at the local Boys' Club, acknowledge that the scales of justice will not line up exactly this time. Sometimes it's like that. Usually it's way way worse.

Next. Please.

("…Poot!")

As much as I love spring baseball, because it's baseball and thank God and can we all please stop talking about stupid college basketball please?, it does rain a lot in the spring, so I get all excited to park it in front of a day game and then it gets rained out. The Mets are underway today as scheduled, but then, it's…the Mets. Heh.

That said, I've seen a few reasons for hope. (Hope for the Mets fan in 2011 is something along the lines of "hey, we might win 70 whole games," so: hunk of salt here.) Last night's game against the Phillies did not fill me with optimism about Mike Pelfrey, but I have found when it comes to Pelfrey that a "happier living through lowered expectations" approach works best, and between Pelf and Ollie, obviously I will take Pelf. (And have to, now, hallelujah Jesus.) And yeah, it's "only" Joe Blanton. But the team didn't roll over; they stayed in it and kept fighting. That isn't an attitude I've gotten used to seeing in the last couple of years — in that situation, Mets teams of '09 and '10 would have looked beleaguered and overmatched, and once a seven-run lead opened up, not much else would have happened. I didn't get that already-beaten sense last night.

But…you know. The team isn't good. The long-overdue punts of Perez and Castillo please me, and on that same tip, I would really like to see Reyes play his ass off in his walk year and get rewarded with a trade out of town. Reyes is a very good player — but he is not a great player; I think he still has head-case qualities; he's not getting any younger, and I worry about recurring problems with his legs; and the team is best served by moving him to a team with pennant hopes in exchange for a barrel of middle-infield and pitching prospects. (Note: he just led off against Halladay with a sharp single, making me an asshole. Thanks, guy!) Previous regimes would have let him overperform, and then overpaid him accordingly for his aging process; let someone else make that mistake this time around. It's not entirely his fault that he's never going to live up to expectations — mostly, it's the expectations. But if another team still cherishes those expectations, let them retire his number. We've got work to do.

A few other thoughts from various sources…

Reader FloridaErin complained recently about the FOX broadcast:

I told my husband I was basically listening to them make verbal love to the Yankees. Which is how I feel anytime I watch a national broadcast of Anyone vs. Yankees, really. They mentioned about 10 times that the Yankees were "underdogs" this year but we shouldn't count them out, yet not a single mention that the Tigers are favored to win the AL Central. Or anything about the race in that division, really. ::twitch::

I don't enjoy defending Buck and McCarver, but I haven't heard a single mention that the Tigers are favored to win the AL Central anywhere else, either. Everyone I read or listen to picked the Twins. I can't say that makes sense to me, mind you; the Twins always do more with less, but I would want to see a few more weeks of Morneau before I call that return complete, and their defense doesn't look so great. That division is a crapshoot, where one team isn't going to do anything because the front office can't find its ass with both hands (Cleveland), another has to wait a couple of years for its prospects to get ready (KC), and then the others could all win 90…or 70. I don't see a clear winner there, so I would have no problem picking Los Tigres — but the fact is, I haven't heard it done anywhere.

I will also say that "Yankees, AL East underdogs" storyline is baffling; I kind of don't get it, and I didn't get it before the season, either, the conventional wisdom that the Red Sox have the best team in baseball. Not that they don't, but maybe it's because a lot of the other teams look like shit? I'm…just saying, and I know it's easy to type that when they've just gone 0-5, but they didn't look that imposing to me before that, either, or not to a degree the Yankees couldn't handle if they hit. And they're hitting well right now. The Posada-at-DH thing does not seem destined to succeed, to me, but the rest of the line-up looks pretty on point so far, the bullpen is doing reasonably well, and nobody is fat and out of shape who isn't usually fat and out of shape, Beckett. I'd like to hear from Boston fans about that presumptive-heir narrative is hitting them, because…okay, but where's the pitching, exactly? Seriously, I'm asking. I'm not putting money on that bullpen.

And on that same note, I hope Phillies fans will forgive me, but I do not find that team as fearsome as I think the press would like me to, either. I don't hate the Phillies like a Mets fan is supposed to, and in fact it's a privilege to get to see that legendary rotation a bunch of times in a year. But unless the "plan" is to CG the rest of the division into submission — and while I could get behind such a plan, Grandpa Charlie better hope nobody gets a blister — I don't think they've got the bullpen to stick it, and Rollins looks old to me. It's not a bad team, but I would not clear my October schedule if I were a Phillies fan, because I think that month will belong to the Braves.

All right, fans of all teams: how ya feelin'? Still full of hope? Already freaking out over a statistically meaningless 5 or 6 games? Think the Mets should get on their knees and beg Maine to come back? (I don't, and the kind of numbers he'll likely put up with the Rockies won't change my mind. Cute; not worth it.) Want to help me and Bean build the Keith Hernandez Booth Drinking Game? Complain about Joe Buck?

It's spring baseball, folks. Everything is either possible, or horrible. Or both! Discuss.