It’s that delightful time of the year where we get to plan our baseball ticket purchases based on the free swag we get at the stadium.
The Mets have posted a preliminary list of its promotional dates in the old dump lovingly known as Shea Stadium. There will be many more promotions added later. After all, we didn’t know about Keith Hernandez Fake Mustache Night until earlier that week, but this gives us at least a good idea where the Mets will be going with their free giveaways this season.
Right off the bat, there’s nothing nearly as cool as the Endy Chavez bobblehead from last season that commemorated “The Catch” in the 2006 NLCS. And there’s not even anything as cool as “The Running Presidents” bobbleheads that the Nationals gave out last season. But that’s not to say there isn’t some nice stuff being handed out this season.
A few dates stand out, including a pair of Sunday games that offer both a Johan Santana bobblehead (Sun. Sept. 7 vs. Phils) that’s unfortunately only for the rugrats and a designer Mets T-shirt (Sun. June 13 vs. Rockies), presented by Southpole. I want an Affliction-style Mets tee. I hope Southpole comes up with something good. Come to think of it, they’re giving away foam fingers (Sun. April 27 vs. Braves) on a Sunday too. Who doesn’t want a free foam finger? So clearly those Sunday plan season-ticket holders made out best. You can’t get Chick-fil-A on Sundays, but you can get some cool swag at Shea.
Aside from that, there’s the normal collection of caps, T-shirts and collector cups, with one exception. There’s a Shea Stadium replica (Sat. June 14 vs. Rangers) from Nathans. I hope it’s a Shea-shaped corndog.
I’ve taken to summing up the Mets season with four injury risks. It’s Moises Alou in the outfield, Carlos Delgado in the infield, Pedro Martinez in the rotation and Duaner Sanchez in the bullpen. The season will hinge on their health.
Let me say something nice about the Mets organization. The sale of the premium games (Opening Day, Subway Series, Shea Finale) went rather smooth Sunday morning. It seemed like the site was capable of handling the onslaught of ticket requests and orders were processed quickly. Of course, if you weren’t one of the few lucky lottery winners you wouldn’t know this, but those are the realities of a larger fan base. No sense complaining about it now. Just wait until next year when there probably won’t even be one of these lotteries for the premium games at Citi Field.
Seriously, it’s like they didn’t even try. Does anything there evoke baseball? As 
If you think this edition of the Academy Awards is dragging, just think about the next month-plus of spring training for the Mets. After all, for spring training to be exciting you need one of a short list of storylines. A position battle… the Mets don’t have one. A hot young prospect competing for a roster spot… the Mets don’t have one. A fight for a slot in the rotation… the Mets don’t have one.
So Oliver Perez is 1-0 and we’re still five weeks from Opening Day.
There’s this great scene in Sean Connery/Nicolas Cage vehicle “The Rock” where the Ed Harris character loses his edge and redirects the rocket he’s launched at San Francisco so that it crashes into the bay. His underlings then question how they’ll get their ransom now that the government knows they don’t have the guts to follow through on their threats. Harris’ character responds that the government doesn’t know they missed on purpose. The henchman quickly retorts, “Great, now they just think we’re incompetent.” It’s a great example of how you can try to sell something you know is not true and actually end up with an even less-desirable scenario.
It worked so well for Jason Giambi, why not try it?
There’s nothing quite like four-and-a-half hours of televised perjury.
Clemens can probably survive the Brian McNamee testimony, if for no other reason than McNamee is not the least bit likeable. He came off very poorly under the bright lights of Congress — much more so than most probably expected. He seemed to be someone willing to do seedy things in the seedy underbelly of the national pastime. The details of his threats of lawsuits, worthless PhD, requests for merchandise, willingness to use his star clients’ likenesses to sell himself all painted him in a very unfavorable light. And that doesn’t even take into account his history to lies, whether it be to police investigators, the media or feds. If this were a film, McNamee would have been played by a Steve Buscemi-type. Shifty, weasely and always in question. This is not a star witness and that probably will be the only thing that keeps Clemens out of jail.
Because as bad of a witness as McNamee is, the Pettitte testimony does lend credence to the idea that he is finally telling the truth. Chuck Knoblauch backed up his claims. Pettitte backed up his claims. Hell, even Debbie Clemens backed up his claims. The only one disputing them is Clemens, and not so conviently for the Rocket, he’s also the one with the most to lose. Why would McNamee tell the truth about Pettitte, tell the truth about Knoblauch and then lie about Clemens? It doesn’t make any sense. It took several hours but finally Elijah Cummings posed that very question to Clemens and not surprisingly, Clemens had no answer. It wasn’t the only time the Rocket dodged a question. Early in the proceedings, John Tierney repeatedly called Clemens out on inconsistencies within his own testimony, such as claiming to never have talked about HGH to McNamee despite his own heroic story of his outraged call to McNamee about his wife’s use. Clemens answered as if Tierney was asking him an entirely different question. I wonder if B-12 can be used to cure listening comprehension problems.
And now seems to be as good a time as any to discuss the deplorable display by so many of our Congressmen and women in that room today. I try not to bring politics into a baseball blog, so if you’re easily offended by partisan chatter, you should probably skip the rest of this paragraph. If you’re still here, that can only mean that you know in your heart that the majority of the Republicans on this committee were an absolute disgrace today. From Christopher Shays making McNamee go step-by-step through a line of questioning that resulted in him being labeled a “drug dealer” to John Mica testing if Clemens or McNamee were color-blind as it pertained to the hues of B-12, Winstrol and HGH to Virginia Foxx asking Clemens if he noticed any difference in her Kinkos photo presentation, it was a bad afternoon for the GOP. Even more disgraceful, Foxx was the first person to go greet Clemens after the hearing. She should have been waiting backstage with a bouquet of flowers the way she glowed over his performance. However, the Democrats were far from perfect. I think it added a lot to the proceedings that Eleanor Holmes Norton thinks Clemens will go to heaven. Thanks for coming. And it’s a real shame that Clemens didn’t answer William Lacy Clay’s question about what hat Clemens would wear in the Hall of Fame. After today, that might have been our only chance to find out.
They were few and far between, but a few of these guys and girls did their homework and looked like respectable public servants. No one looked better than Elijah Cummings. He was a freakin’ rock star. He stuck to simple, clear facts from the testimony and pressed Clemens every step of the way. When time ran out on his 10 minutes at the beginning of the hearing, it was like Clemens had been saved by the bell. It was one of those bloodbath, first rounds where the only chance the fighter has is to regroup in his corner and hope his opponent punched himself out. To Clemens’ benefit, no one else had the punching power of Cummings. He was Mike Tyson in his prime. Everyone else was Glass Joe. When Cummings got a second shot at Clemens, he didn’t miss. This exchange was without a doubt the most powerful of the hearing.
But of course you only had to go to his fellow Republican from Indiana to find another Congressman using childlike judgments. Dan Burton came off rather naive during his five-minute grandstanding questioning of McNamee’s prior lies. At one point, he didn’t even know what he asking McNamee to confirm. So McNamee lied to reporters about steroids? I’m shocked. McNamee worked for someone he didn’t completely trust? Unbelievable. And Burton can be as insulted as he wants about McNamee’s previous lies when Clemens’ reputation is at stake, but forgive me if I’m wrong, but weren’t all those offensive lies to protect Clemens’ reputation? Pollyana has a new name and it’s Dan Burton.
You may have caught this headline circulating around the Web the last few hours: “Home run apple will follow Mets to new Citi Field ballpark.”
The circus is coming to town.
Of course, Pettitte won’t be there himself to do it, as he was excused from testifying late Monday night along with Kirk Radomski and Chuck Knoblauch. But Pettitte’s sworn deposition will likely be center stage Wednesday nonetheless. It’s already the source of much discussion as Newsday reported late Monday that Rep. Tom Davis said Pettitte’s testimony supported McNamee’s account. One source said Pettitte once asked McNamee why he didn’t give him the same stuff that he gave Clemens and McNamee responded because its illegal. Rep. Davis has since backed away from that depiction, telling 