Weekly Mail December 14, 2024

 

Hi Folks:

Was supposed to publish this last Sunday or Monday, but with the late breaking news from Queens, and a couple of other things happening, I didn't get to finish this till Saturday afternoon. So you get two WM's this week. 

Hope you all had a Happy Thanksgiving and that your holiday season has gotten off to a good start. 

We are going to have our Fall Finale tomorrow night. Then somehow, someway, I'll put together a Christmas Eve Special, which once again,  I have not a clue of what it will entail. I have a week and a half to figure it out, so at least there is that. 

I actually had a fairly enjoyable Thanksgiving with my in-laws. Great company, great food, and as always, lousy football.

We'll get to that shortly. For now, we have some late Sunday night news..

BASEBALL: We got 'em!

Sunday night as I was about to turn in the news started to break that the long Juan Soto chase had come to an end with the Mets hauling him in to the tune of a 15 year $765 million contract that has all sorts of clauses and opt-outs and clauses to the opt-outs that you need a whole section of the Law Review to properly explain in full. 

Most of us Mets fans don't care, we got the guy we wanted. 

I'm not here to rub it in the face of the Yankee fan here either. As I've written on these pages many many times before, I have been in the position of watching a player I liked leave via free agency many many times before. I felt for my Giants fans friends when Saquon Barkley left over the last NFL off season.  I know the feeling, and it sux. 

But now, I'm in the somewhat unusual position of seeing the Mets pull off a big free agent score. I know about Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander, but those were short term deals that quite frankly were risky due to the age of the players involved. Soto is in his prime.

Which is good because doing the quick math in my head, my son will be 31 years old when this contract expires. I can't even bring myself to say how old I will be, but let's just say if Medicare is still around by them, I might be eligible for it. 

When the rumors first started 6 or so years ago that the Wilpon's were looking to sell the Mets to Steve Cohen, it was a day like Monday that I could only imagine. I remember back to after the 2000 season, when Alex Rodriguez was a free agent, and it sounded like he really wanted to come to the Mets, and GM Steve Phillips came out and said the team wasn't even going to make an offer. Something about creating a 24+1 scenario or something like that. I never believed that A-Rod or more importantly his agent Scott Boras was willing to leave one red cent on the table, and if the Mets had offered $240 million and the Rangers offered their $252 million, A-Rod was still heading to Texas. 

But the Mets didn't even offer anything. And it made it easier for A-Rod and Boras to play the bleeding heart card. I only really bring that up because one of the things I read on Tuesday was that while the Yankees offer was similar to the Mets, the dealbreaker for the Yanks was that Soto wanted his own Yankee Stadium suite and Hal Steinbrenner wasn't willing to give him one. 

Back when Tara and I first met, her father asked me if I was upset that the Mets didn't sign A-Rod. I said I was upset we didn't even try, but I also felt A-Rod was taking the most money no matter who offered it. My future father in law remembered that one of the hold ups was that A-Rod wanted his own office at Shea Stadium. "They lost him because they wouldn't give him an office!"  I didn't quite remember that, but he was pretty insistent. I thought about him on Tuesday morning, and wondering how he would have felt if he lost a player (to the Mets of all teams) because Cohen gave him a suite and Hal didn't. 

One thing is for sure, I think a lot of that "Mets-Yankee fans getting along better" stuff is now going to be severely tested. I have no doubt the Yanks are going to make some moves, they may even swipe Pete Alonzo from us. The four games we play each other in 2025 are going to be a zoo. And if we both make it to the show next year? 

I can't wait to see both teams try! 

FOOTBALL: Good news New Yorkers! There is a team in the NFL that is more poorly coached than the Jets and the Giants. (A FB post I made on Thanksgiving afternoon. 

And that team is a little organization that has been around for over 100 years known to us as..

So next year, I'm going to give you all a gift on Thanksgiving. It could be worth a ton of money actually. 

I'll let you know next Thanksgiving morning who I am picking in that day's Lions game. Doesn't matter who they are playing. I will tell you who I am picking, and then you can go to fan Duel or Draft Kings or whichever Legal Gambling app that you choose to donate what former Post Sports editor Hondo referred to as DDP's (disposable dead presidents) to, and bet all your DDP's on the opposite team I bet.

Every Thanksgiving the last few years, it's has become as much of a tradition as Santa Claus bringing up the rear of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, the Detroit Lions screw me 9 ways to Sunday. If I pick against them, they win. If I pick them to win, either they lose or worse they win and don't cover the spread. That last scenario has happened the last 3 or four years, including once agaisnt the Bears, the same two teams who cooked my goose while I was eating my turkey this year. 

And I wouldn't even be ranting on about this crap except for the fact that it wasn't so much the result of the game as it was how we got there. 

I was watching the game with Timmy, my nephews Connor and Brendan and my brother in law Brian. When it became obvious that the heavily favored Lions would not cover the 10.5 point spread, I started pulling for Chicago to pull off the upset. 

And they had a really good chance to do just that.

With 36 seconds left, the Bears had the ball at midfield, trailing 23-20. QB Caleb Williams was sacked, and the Bears were trying to line up to get a play off. Brian kept saying "Why don't they call a time out?" and I was like "I don't think they have one." I mean why would you not call a time out there?

I honestly thought they had used all their time outs as I watched the Bears struggle to line up and get another play off before the clock ran out.

Alas, they did not, and the Lions stole a win, sending their fans home to a happy dinner.

Meanwhile I was arguing with some friends on-line about who was at fault. I think blaming the rookie QB was cheap, the operative word there being rookie. To me this was on the coaching staff, and I'll be gosh-darned if the Jets didn't make a similar (though not nearly as bad) miscue in their game against Seattle the following Sunday. 

The Bears relieved coach Matt Eberflus of his duties the next day. Black Friday indeed. 

I'm not here to kick someone where they are down. Really. I really hope the Bears management didn't send this guy packing over one bad play, as bad as that play was. Nobody deserves that. 

And I also think that these franchises, including and especially the two we call our own here in NY, might want to reconsider this idea of drafting a big shot college QB and expecting them to become Tom Brady overnight. 

The Jets have spent most of the 21st century burning out high drafted QB's. Chad Pennington, Mark Sanchez, Geno Smith, Sam Darnold and Zach Wilson. Pennington and Sanchez won them a few playoff games, Smith and Darnold have gone on to find some success with other franchises. Meanwhile we haven't played a post season game since the middle of the first Obama administration. 

But what do I know? 

HOCKEY- Rangers changes

It appears Ranger president/GM Chris Drury not only read the blog I posed in the aftermath of the Rangers choke job against the Panthers last June, but also took the ramblings of a angry, not all there fan, to heart. 

For Drury took one of my many suggestions, trading defenseman Jacob Trouba. After not being able to deal the captain over the summer when Trouba invoked his no trade clause, Drury, apparently having told Trouba that he would place him on waivers if he didn't accept the trade, was able to deal him to the Ducks for a player I've never heard of and a 4th round draft pick. By getting Trouba's contract off the books, the Blueshirts were able to sign Igor Shesterkin to a long-term contract extension. 

In our Friday night production meeting, Karl (the Ace) Ludwig said he had heard someone say that Trouba was "the worst captain in Ranger history." I don't know about that, like I said, in the 21-22 season, Trouba did his job, which was to play solid defense and hit. The last two years he did neither, and took a bunch of lazy-ass penalties to boot. 

As far as captains go, Barry Beck was the captain when I was first into hockey, and he was either injured, holding out for a contract, or fighting with the coach throughout most of his captaincy. I'd put him up there as far as lousy captains go. 

And I may have to turn in my Ranger fan membership card for saying this, but Brian Leetch was named captain after Mark Messier hi-tailed it to Vancouver, and while he is on the short list of best players in team history, he wasn't a very good captain. Wayne Gretzky was on that team, so was Adam Graves. One of those guys would have been better choices. Again, no disrespect to Leetch, he was an awesome player, but maybe not quite captain material. No sin in that.  Especially following in the footsteps of one of the greatest captains in the history of the sport. 

Back to the future for a minute, the Rangers usually play an afternoon game on Black Friday and that's when I generally first take stock of them. It's like in baseball, Memorial Day is usually considered one of the season's first benchmarks. The team has been sputtering lately, so hopefully this trade kicks them back into gear. 

So far, it hasn't

We here in NYC were in a situation last Saturday afternoon we don't usually find ourselves in. Amazingly it was the third time in 2024 we found ourselves in said position.

The chance to bring home a World Championship. 

The NY Red Bulls of Major League Soccer had a chance to join the WNBA's New York Liberty and hoist a championship trophy, in this case, the MLS Cup. They played for the trophy in Los Angeles against the LA Galaxy on Saturday afternoon. 

Alas they came up short. The final was LA 2 NY 1, but the game was a lot closer than the score indicated. (I really need to retire that joke, that I admittedly stole from NBA play by play extraordinaire Mike Breen) 

The aforementioned Liberty, the Yankees and the Red Bulls all made it to the championship rounds of their respective sports. Only the Liberty were able to bring home the bacon. The Mets and Rangers made it to the final four, the Knicks to the 2nd round, the Islanders to the first round. The Devils and Nets missed the playoffs. 

The Jets and Giants should be relegated. 

All right, I'm going there..

POLITICS-Biden Pardon's his son.

There was a time where President Biden pardoning his son after promising he wouldn't, would have bothered me a great deal. In ordinary times, I would shake my head at a politician breaking another promise. 

But these aren't ordinary times.

These are the times in which we just re-elected a convicted felon to office. A convicted felon who as President, pardoned a traitor like Michael Flynn. Who is supposedly going to pardon the people who carried out a terrorist attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Who not only pardoned his son-in-law's father, but he also just made him Ambassador to France. 

Yeah, if you voted for Captain Orange and you are upset that Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter, well, not that you care, but you are most definitely a hypocrite. But that kind of goes with the territory, doesn't it? Like I said in previously that's an awful lot of lying to yourself.

There was a time I would have had an issue with Joe pardoning Hunter. Not anymore. Again, these aren't ordinary times. 

I would have been upset if he hadn't.

AVIATION: They ought to give this lady a job in the State Department-

Svetlana Dali, a 57 year old woman, somehow managed to sneak onto a Paris bound Delta flight out of JFK on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. She did this without a US Passport or a boarding pass. 

I'm not sure if I should be angry, frightened or impressed. 

Angry that after all the money spent on beefing up airline security, all the hand wringing and finger pointing going all the way back to the days following the 9/11 attacks, that someone who quite frankly didn't seem all that intelligent was able to get all the way to Paris before someone figured out she didn't belong on the plane. In my Disney blogpost (which I now realize I never wrote the second part of) I told of having to take my iPad out of my carry-on, in addition to taking off my shoes and my belt. Again, I understand why and I'm not (really) complaining, but if we mere mortals have to do all that, and this gal got to fly free and not have to strip? Yeah that's aggravating. 

And of course, if this lady was able to pull this off, a woman who, thankfully seemingly had no worse intention than getting a free flight across the pond, what would happen if one of the bad guys was able to breach security? Knock on wood, we have had very few attempts since 9/11 of airplane terror, and the few that have happened have been quelled. Having something like this happen is a not so gentle reminder of how hard a job it can be to protect our people in the skies. 

According to the NY Times...

Dali exploited weaknesses in the security system at Kennedy International Airport during the busiest period of the year for air travel by blending in with crowds of boarding travelers, prosecutors said.

First, she infiltrated a flight crew and passed through a checkpoint with them. Then, she slipped past Delta Air Lines employees, who failed to ask for a boarding pass, and onto a fully booked plane, they said. While on the plane Ms. Dali attempted to avoid detection during the seven-hour flight to Charles de Gaulle Airport near Paris by

She has been charged with "secreting aboard a vessel", which to me sounds more like the title of a Gerry and the Pacemakers song rather than a federal crime. 

And yet there's a part of me that looks at this and sees a combination of guts, guile and smarts. Again, if she was really up to no good, this would be a whole other blogpost. There are few things more nerve wracking than making sure you have your boarding pass and passport, putting all your crap in the bins lest you set off the alarms, then pulling yourself together after you miraculously make it through. Thankfully you usually have some time between all that and the time you have to board your flight to take a breath. 

From the same Times article...

Prosecutors wanted to ensure she had a stable residence, said Brooke Theodora, an assistant United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York. “We’re concerned for a risk of flight here rather than the nature of the offense.”

She might be a flight risk? ya don't say? 

Not to sound like a broken record but thank the Lord she wasn't looking to hijack the plane in the name of another country, religion or whatever. I'm not going to call it a happy ending, but I will call it a it could have been a whole lot bleeping worse ending. 

Fall Finale Tomorrow.

Till then

Have a Great Night.