Ankle Deep Puddle Near My Car on September 29, 2023
Hey:
Another weekend, another washout. This one was even worse than last week.
Driving home from work on Friday was, to put it mildly, an adventure. First of all there were puddles that resembles lakes in the parking lot. Then once I got on the road, there was more of the same. At one point there was a car going back and forth blocking the way I usually go home. I went down one block and came back up another and then I saw why they were blocking the road…. an entire intersection was under water. I mean it had to have been 3 or 4 feet deep. Unbelievable.
A trip that usually takes 15 minutes tool close to an hour. And the pictures on the news showed places around the city that were even worse.
And unfortunately, the rain and the floods led to a whole bunch of cancelations. Tara and I were supposed to do the brain tumor walk at Jones Beach on Saturday morning, but that got cancelled. Oceanside high school was supposed to have a ton of activities for their homecoming on Saturday, but most of them were canceled too. (They did play the football game though).
And for the first time I can remember in my lifetime, a hockey game got “rained out” The DePuy’s had gotten me tickets to the Ranger/Islander preseason game at UBS Arena on Friday night, but at about 1:30 Friday afternoon, the Islanders announced that because of the state of emergency called by Governor Hochul, they were moving the game to Saturday night. Thankfully I had taken off from the Post or else I would have missed it.
Cancelling and postponing these events was definitely the right call, it was still raining on Saturday morning and the streets were still in pretty bad shape. But still I felt bad because Tara had planned a fun day for the tumor walk and homecoming is always a fun day for a high school kid. You just hate to not have these things.
And hopefully we can get back to just having manageable rain and not these biblical storms we keep seeming to have. Laugh at me all you want, but this is why we need to come up with a solution for climate change.
Onto the rest of the news, such as it is….
BASEBALL RIP Yanks and Mets:
The Yankees finished the 2023 season at 82-80 and in 4th place. So the best thing you can say about them is that they finished above .500 and out of the AL East cellar. I know that for the World Series or bust Yankee fan those aren’t even considered consolations, even small ones.
But the last time the Yankees finished under .500 was in 1992. That’s 31 years of having a winning record which to me is very impressive. And it was looking for a while there that the streak was going to end, as the Yanks floundered for most of the summer.
I know. There is a ton the team has to do to get back onto contention, and right now the way they are built doesn’t offer much hope they can turn it around quickly either.
It’s probably time (or even past time) to make a change at the top, but it seems like Brian Cashman isn’t going anywhere. Again, 31 years in a row of above .500 ball is something any GM would want on their resume, but Cashman’s job isn’t to build .500 ballclubs, it’s to win championships, and he hasn’t done that in a long time.
As for the Mets, well, when you finish 12 games under .500, lose the division by almost 30 games, essentially wave the white flag with two months to go, and do all of this with the highest payroll in the sport, it’s hard to defend anyone keeping their jobs. I also understand that having a new guy running baseball operations means bringing in new people. I get all that.
Still, it was hard for me to watch Buck Showalter taking the fall on Sunday for this disastrous Mets season. Even though Steve Cohen took pains to say he didn’t blame Buck, his actions spoke louder than his words did.
With Buck, for the first time since Terry Collins, I felt the Mets had an adult running the show. I felt we had a guy who could handle NY, and who knew the ins and outs of the game as well as anyone.
Also, I’m not sure how you can get rid of Buck and give Billy Eppler a pass as GM, to me this mess was a lot of his doing. He’s the one who left the bullpen short handed after Edwin Diaz injury and also was the one who insisted on sticking with Daniel Vogelbach as DH when it was obvious that he wasn’t coming through nearly enough. I’m not advocating firing Eppler either, I think a GM needs more than a couple of seasons to build a team, I’m saying if Buck has to go, why does Eppler get to stay? That just doesn’t sit well with me.
The Mets season started with Diaz going down while celebrating the WBC. I thought that hurt their spirit more than it would affect their bullpen, but it actually affected both even worse than I had imagined. I also should have known this season was going to go sideways when they called the home opener due to rain that never came, only to play the next day in much worse conditions. It just never really got better from there.
We had two future hall of fame pitchers, one was inconsistent and the other started the season on the injured list and needed some time to find his groove. By the time they both seemed to be hitting their stride, they were dealt away. Pete Alonso while putting up impressive power numbers, disappeared too often and ended up with Dave Kingman/Rob Deer type stats. Jeff McNeil slumped most of the first half, and Francisco Lindor while ending up having a good year, also went missing for about a month with his bat.
A few years back, I declared that year’s Mets team the worst I had ever seen. I immediately got some blowback on that one, being reminded that there were teams in the 1960’s that lost over 110 games, and teams in the late 70’s that were unwatchable. I get all that, and I’m not about to say that this team was worse than any of those. But the combination of the high payroll, high expectations and star power on this team, only to see us not only throw in the towel for the rest of 2023, but quite possibly 2024 as well, I can make a fairly strong case for this being the most disappointing season in Mets history.
FOOTBALL: Jets just miss a miracle…
Last week was a tough one for Zach Wilson.
He was clobbered in the press even more than usual, he had Joe Namath of all people demanding the Jets trade him away (that reminded me of the time Keith Hernandez was being overly critical of the Mets in the broadcast booth and Mike Piazza referred to him as “a voice from the grave). Even I, who had been as patient with him as anybody, thought maybe the big bad city was too much for the kid from Utah.
Something kept nagging at me though… Tony Romo sometimes drives me crazy because he often drones on too much about something while missing something obvious right in front of him. But he can still predict things before they happen, and he kept saying during last week’s game against the Pats that Wilson should just go for broke and throw the ball downfield.
Well he did that Sunday night against Patrick Mahomes, Taylor Swift and the rest of the KC Chiefs, and damned if he didn’t almost pull off the biggest upset in the first month of the season right there. Only a fumble on the snap (which Wilson owned up to) and a couple of $hitty calls by the refs prevented the Jets from winning Sunday night.
So I'm still going to be a glass half-full sort of guy and say that maybe Wilson has found his groove. I know, I know he has teased us before only to let us down, but a game like this can turn a team around. They need to go into Denver next week and beat a bad Bronco team or we'll be back to square one.
And not that I want to make too big a deal out of all this crap, but news sites were reporting that people were buying tickets to the Jets-Chiefs game because of Taylor Swift. This was from CBSNEWS.com on Friday...
In an attempt to be in the presence of the pop star at Met Life Stadium, fans have apparently been scooping up tickets, with several ticket sales sites reporting a boost.
Can you imagine? People buying tickets to watch somebody else watching a football game? And did these folks think Swift was going to be sitting with Fireman Ed, or up in the nosebleeds? She was going to be in a luxury box, far away from the Swiftes in the cheap seats.
And I mean I get it, she is a beautiful woman who can sing country, hip hop and rock and roll, and she has a relatively skeleton free closet. She's the best of what this country has to offer, I'm not taking any of that away from her.
But the idea that you were on the fence about going to the game, but that Taylor Swift was going to be in the same arena, not performing mind you, just watching the game, and that made you decide to get tickets? That's one of the dopiest ideas I've ever heard of.
The Giants are playing the Seahawks as we go to press tonight. As far as I know, Taylor Swift was not planning on going.
That's all I have for now folks.
Stay Safe
and Have a Great Week
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