Whine Of The Mariners' Victim

What with the literary reference, and the fact that it's just not a very good pun, we'll never get a job on the sports page of the Post. Not, when it comes down to it, that we want to. And if we're linking to the write-ups in the New York Times, we should probably keep the commenting on sports to a minimum.

Really, we're just linking to the Times because they manage to concoct and fluff a narrative out of a team's recent travails in a way that illuminates the subject for a casual well-wisher like ourselves. And the narrative is that the Mets stink. Of course, we've been here before. In fact, we've been here before this season.

What is most interesting is not that this happens every year, although summer collapses by the Mets are to be expected, but that it happens at the exact same time every year. To whit, whenever we leave New York City. And we leave every summmer at about the same time, for day-job related reasons to tedious to recount.

Indeed, we even sense a neat twist on this truism. We left for Hawaii on the 3rd May, and for the next week they performed relatively abysmally, and since we have been in the UK, they have been getting served by some of the worst teams in the American League. This is disheartening to those of us with a misplaced and residual loyalty towards the NL (get out a face a pitch, you craven popinjays!).

But in the annals of Mets-dom, it is frighteningly familiar. God, or at least his cohorts at the State Department, willing, we will be back for the weekend of the fourth, and will be hoping for an improvement, should be grace the doomed Shea stadium for a laast time.