Mike's Mets

I saw an article in the New York Post today that cites Brodie Van Wagenen as still being confident about the Mets' rotation despite the loss of Noah Syndergaard for the season. That's pretty much what you would expect any GM to say, but it got me to thinking about pitching in general if baseball does come back in 2020.

Assuming that what we've been reading about a potential 2020 season is true, MLB and the Players Union will work together to attempt to play as many games as possible even if a season doesn't start until June or July.  They talk about playing doubleheaders as a way of doing this with a compressed schedule, along with fewer off days and playing later into the year at warm weather sites.

If you're close to as ancient as I am you can remember back to a time when there were a fair amount of doubleheaders on the schedule, primarily on holidays and Sundays during the summer months, but also some makeups for rainouts.  You had to have guys on your pitching …

One of the important aspects of being a blogger is figuring out how to promote your own work.  Unless you're blogging as part of some sort of a larger affiliated group that will draw in some eyeballs, or you're contributing to an established site, you're pretty much on your own in trying to draw in readers.

When I started the original blog in 2005 most of the existing blogs were solo efforts by independent writers who were doing it as a labor of love.  They were generally very generous in responding to a request to add you to their blogrolls, and that in turn allowed a decent amount of readers to find your work.  Then it was up to you to provide interesting content to bring them back.

That worked out very well for me.  When my blog was at it's peak I had a few thousand regular readers and I tried to pay it forward by promoting the work of others.  If I thought someone was doing really good work it was my great and genuine pleasure to give them a boost.  One things I ne…

I was reading yesterday that the fallout from the Coronavirus outbreak down the road might lead to unemployment rates that we haven't seen in the United States since the Great Depression from the last century.  You wonder when Major League Baseball finally opens the parks for business as usual how people who are unemployed or underemployed are going to be able to afford those pricey seats.  I would assume that clubs would start lowering prices at least for the nosebleed sections.

There's a great divide in this country between the wealthy and the rest of us, but for all of that you couldn't imagine a scenario a month or two ago where attending a big league game could be out of reach for a lot of middle class folks.  If we have unemployment of 20 percent or even higher that could easily happen.

Back not all that many years ago you could still watch a significant portion of your team's games for free, but now in most places you have to subscribe to fairly expensive cable …

Blogger provides a decent stats section in the Administrative interface.  I'm not getting many hits after a decade long absence from blogging, but it's still interesting to see where the few I am getting are coming from.

I was somewhat surprised to see the single hit that came in from a link on metsfanbook.com.  The Mets Fan book site was the web site for the late, great Dana Brand's first book.  Dana, who tragically passed away in 2011, was a truly great guy. Smart, friendly, generous, truly one of the good guys.  Getting to know him as a fellow blogger friend was one of the great perks of all that time I spent in the heyday of my blog.
Dana's blog site isn't up any more, but it awesome to see that the site for both of his books is still up there.  Both books are still for sale in some form last time I checked and are well worth your read even today.
When Mets Fan was released Dana generously invited some bloggers, including myself, to a book party at Mo Pitkin'…

A few years ago I tried to watch the season premiere episode of The Bachelor in a futile attempt to try to understand what all of the fuss was about.  I don't think I made it through 10 minutes, it just wasn't for me. It's all good, the show has managed to do just fine without me.

The cultural impact of The Bachelor is such that I have an understanding of the mechanism of the show that goes beyond what I could have learned in those few brief minutes spent watching.  I learned more about the show through conversations and the memes and parodies that proliferate across the internet.

I've been following all of the drama over the Wilpons' efforts to sell the team over the winter and into this spring.  While Steve Cohen is obviously no angel I was rooting for that one to go through.  At least he had plenty of money. and it clearly is time for Fred and Jeff to give up the pretense that they could operate a MLB franchise in the largest market in the country.  My hopes wer…

If it weren't for the uwanted arrival of Coronavirus, we would be watching Mets games that counted by now. We're not only not watching games now, but there's a real chance that 2020 might come and go without a single regular season game being played at all.

I managed to make it through the first 10 years of my life without baseball having much more of an impact on my life than an occasional game of catch. But that year the magical 1969 Mets stole my heart, and baseball has been an integral part of my existence ever since.
For those old enough to remember, the years 1972 through 1995 seemed to feature endless lockouts and strikes that threatened various seasons, with 1972 and 1981 actually resulting in chunks of the regular season being lost, and the 1994 strike that saw the baseball season cut short in August, including the entire playoffs.
That one in particular, and the cumulative effect of constant threatened lockouts, really hurt baseball's popularity in a way from…

Writing every day on a blog in the first time in more than a decade brings back memories of starting the original blog 15 years ago. Despite being much older and at a very different place in my life there are some similarities, too. This time around it is a virus outbreak that has given me a little too much time on my hands, back then it was my own personal struggles with Lyme Disease.

I've always enjoyed writing. It grew out of a love for reading, which grew out of the realities of entertainment options in my youth. There was one tv in the house, dominated by my grandfather who paid all of the bills. His idea of entertainment was getting drunk on cheap beer or wine while watching the Merv Griffin show for 2 prime time hours so he could swear at the "celebrities" being interviewed who he decided he didn't like.
Even when Grandpa wasn't dominating the television there were few choices in those pre-cable days. We lived in Hamden, Connecticut, just outside of New Ha…

Joel Sherman has a good piece up on the New York Post's site about the new agreement between the players and owners and the questions over how any potential salvaged 2020 season might play out.

I'm still personally quite skeptical that we're going to get to a point in the next few months where thousands of people are going to be allowed to congregate in the packed, sweaty confines of a baseball stadium to watch a game.  That thought depresses me greatly, and I hope that I'm wrong.  It would mean the world to me to watch some real live baseball this year.

While Sherman reports that the agreement leaves open the possibility of playing with no fans in the park or at neutral sites, he asks what I think is the most important question: "The sides will have to determine if it makes sense financially to return without fans or to relocate teams to areas in which they might not draw."

I guess I find it hard to believe that baseball will be played in any manner that doe…

I'm taking baby steps right now with this blog.  On Monday I cancelled my old blog hosting  and did some research on what it would take to move the blog here.  Tuesday I set up the blog, spent quite a bit of time to get my domain name to point here, and made my first post.  I'm learning this platform and making some tweaks to stuff as I go along.  Frankly, if I knew that Blogger had become this good I would have made the change years ago.

Right now I'm committed to posting as close to daily as I can.  When the world gets back to normal I still want to keep this going, but the amount of time I can put into it will be dictated by how much time I need to put into work.  I was scrambling hard to make a living going into this crisis, and once the ability to work and make money comes back I will be certainly doing that.  I also have a couple of furry friends that get a long walk in the woods every day that the weather allows.

When I stopped writing on the blog those many years a…

I'll be back with a regular post a bit later, but I wanted to take a minute to thank both Greg Prince of Faith and Fear in Flushing and Mack's Mets for the shout outs yesterday.  Greg linked to me on Twitter and John From Albany linked on the Mets Breakfast Link page.

I'll probably work on things to build up the readership at some point.  It's just more fun to write when a few people are actually reading it. For the time being I'm still figuring stuff out.  I appreciate (and am honored by) any links or promotion anyone chooses to give me, and when I find out about it I will always try to reciprocate.  I've added a Blogs We Like page to the site for that purpose.  If you want to exchange links let me know and I will happily do so as long as the site doesn't contain adult content or hate speech.

Be back in a bit.


Follow me on Twitter @MikeSteffanos

After moving this blog and bringing it back to life yesterday I'm faced with the task of what to do now.  This blog is still going to be a New York Mets fan blog going forward. For now, however, with the baseball season a casualty of the virus that put me out of work I don't want to be just another voice rehashing the few pieces of Mets news that are floating around out there, Others, frankly, do it much better anyway.

I will admit that the news of Noah Syndergaard needing Tommy John surgery was a downer, but it follows in the footsteps of other downers, including the possibility that we don't see any baseball at all this season.  Even if things go really well combating this virus, will there really be a time this year when many thousands of people are allowed to crowd together in ballpark to cheer their teams on?

As for Syndergaard himself, he's always been quite the enigma - possessing tremendous potential but, for the most part, continuously falling short of realizi…