Mets Fan Has Second Thoughts About a New Season -8

2/6/2014

Byrd, above. Hawkins, right. Both gone.

This Met fan I know, up north, thought he was ready for pitchers and catchers and all the rest of it.

Then, even while slipping and sliding on the ice, he began to think about the alleged warming powers of spring training.

That implies preparation for another season.

He can’t remember the last time the Mets had hope. His two favorite players last season were Marlon Byrd and LaTroy Hawkins, grownups, gamers. The Mets didn’t keep them.

Instead, in the Age of Madoff, the Mets have signed Kyle Farnsworth and Daisuke Matsuzaka and they are bringing back Duda and Tejada.

My man would like to be warmed by the prospect of another season. But now he’s not sure. Should he actually obsess about a 2014 season?

Mendel

2/6/2014 01:05:57 am

Destination-obessesed fans tend to miss the drama of the journey. Mets fans would rather be obsessed with hope than with winning.

George Vecsey

2/6/2014 02:47:07 am

Mendel, very nice. Mets fans need to be reminded of that in these troubled times.
Then again, the Mets were 40-120 in 1962.
best,
GV

Craig Oren

2/6/2014 04:53:12 am

Philly fans are very unhappy with the acquisition of Marlon Byrd. They seem him as just one more geezer to go with Rollins, Utley, etc. You will recall also that Byrd started out as a Phillie, and didn't make the grade at a time when there was plenty of opportunity for good players. And was last year a fluke?

Charlie Accetta

2/6/2014 11:17:17 am

I'm with Mendel. The whole point of it (unless you're a Yankees fan or a pathetic front-runner or, in the case of most Yankees fans, both) in the expectation. I remember Opening Day 1969. The newly-minted Les Expos de Montréal beat Tom Seaver in their first game ever. What? Who the hell is Coco Laboy? And why isn't Donn Clendenon on our team? You just never know. That's what makes it fun.

Brian Savin

2/6/2014 12:14:11 pm

A couple of weeks ago we saw Seinfeld in Hartford. The crowd wouldn't let him off the stage and so he came back and said he would answer any questions. The first question was, What do you think of the Mets? He thought for a split second and then said: I think they are a baseball team. I took that as unbridled optimism.

Brian Savin

2/6/2014 12:34:59 pm

Ralph Kiner. Kiner's Korner. WOR when Clark Bars were advertised with a camel. Rheingold. Miss Rheingold. My pubescent conscious life began with that man. Funny, I never thought anything of his alleged odd turn of phrase. He was too dignified to notice.

George Vecsey

2/7/2014 12:38:33 am

Brian, dignified is the exact word. He did not need attention., Did not drop names. I asked him about Elizabeth Taylor once. He said it was "a studio deal" -- a photo op. I think the suggestion was, in a nice way, that it was for her publicity.
The Sandomir piece in the NYT today has a classic Jamie Lee Curtis story I had never heard...
GV

Ed Martin

2/8/2014 02:00:09 pm

"Oh give me the moon over Brooklyn,
When the long, long day is through,
I'll be walking with Mazie on Flatbush Aven-ue ..".

"Wait 'til next year..."

What do Mets fans know?

Brian Savin

2/10/2014 01:37:12 am

Different subject....Michael Sam....and a "contrarian's" view: In this day and age being gay gets you lead articles in the NYT, WSJ and a story covered in the first 60 seconds of every morning TV news show???? This is 2014 (albeit with a little 1964 Ed Sullivan thrown in yesterday). And they claim this Defensive Player of the Year is "projected" to be drafted in mid-third round?????!! You know what I think? (I'll tell you anyway.) I think this kid has latched onto the greatest sports agent who ever lived. He just somehow, some way moved the kid up to high second round, or maybe even first, and several million dollars. I'd like to hire this guy to be my agent for my retirement portfolio. Good hunting, Mr. Sam.

Gene Palumbo

2/12/2014 07:56:37 pm

George has a column in today’s (Tuesday, Feb. 12) Times: “Jeter’s retirement announcement hits the right note.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/13/sports/baseball/jeters-retirement-announcement-hits-the-right-note.html

Gene Palumbo

2/12/2014 08:06:40 pm

Sorry, got the date wrong. It's Wednesday, Feb. 13. But the link is right.

Alan D. Levine

2/16/2014 07:53:21 am

Hey, it's baseball. Warm nights, a scorecard on my lap, a pastrami sandwich from Loeser's on 231st Street in Marble Hill and a Brooklyn Lager from Rich, the beer man in my section. You'd rather be watching re-runs of something or other from a couch? Not I.

Comments are closed.

QUOTES

Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

Mets Fan Has Second Thoughts About a New Season -8

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