So it begins...

Drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, listening to nimrods on the am radio go on and on about hockey, waiting and hoping that they say something about if El Duque is healthy enough to pitch. An add for the star-registry follows someone whose system will eliminate your credit card debt. Jose Valentin might also be headed for the DL- the Dailey News makes a brief reference to calling up Anderson Hernandez or Ruben Gotay…Gotay, I think I remember him getting a hit or two in Spring Training, that’s nice.

Well, it is a team of old men, and we all knew it would get here sooner or latter. [someone says that the Yankees would be justified in firing Joe Torre, someone else thinks they’d be crazy- they talk about this for a while… Torre won’t be fired] I kind of hoped that we could make it for another month or so, before dipping into the minor leagues and seeing things like a Chan Ho Park start… Tiger Woods wants me to get laser surgery on my eyes, a perky woman asks if I want to be a millionaire she offers to teach me how to sell things on the internet…

With El Duque we definitely knew it was coming, sooner or latter, and if the offense does what it’s supposed to (hit far, far better than they have for the last week) they could weather a month of Park. But an extended absence of Valentin might screw them completely. I really wish they had went and got a second baseman in the off-season. The good performances form Valentin were like finding a twenty that you didn’t know you had in your pants… it’s pretty cool, but shouldn’t really be the backbone of a long-term financial strategy. Valentin was just so freakishly and unexpectedly good- both at fielding his position and getting some hits. Particularly with all the ground-ball pitchers and the double play being such an important aspect of the Met's game so far this season, you dread going back to being defensively weak at second.

If Chan Ho Park knows what’s good for him he’ll pitch us a good one tonight: with Pelfery the way he has been, there are clearly starts on this club for a guy who steps up, and Park is getting the first shot at being that guy.

One factor in the tension between Mets and Yankee fans is stuff like this: I want to hear about Jose Valentin’s knee, but ‘Boomer’ just keeps on talking about weather or not Jeter should defend Torre to the press, and so why didn’t he defend A-Rod.

There was an interesting and slightly poignant moment during Saturday’s broadcast. Shawn Greene, along with Sele, Schoenwise, and Newhan had been to see the Holocaust museum (presumably while Reyes and Wright hit up the Air and Space Museum for freeze dried ice-cream), which led Ron Darling and Gary Cohen to discuss the different edifying sights in Washington. Darling praised the Vietnam memorial and spoke about the mass of names. He alluded to having lost two cousins in the war, and was starting to describe the experience of finding their names on the memorial, when Beltran got the Mets first hit of the game. Darling acknowledged the hit and said another sentence or so about the memorial while Beltran was running the bases, but then the baseball took over and he and Cohen began discussing Beltran’s hit, and he never brought up the Vietnam Memorial again.