Truly, your talents are wasted.

By the way, doesn’t it seem like this team plays better when certain starters get the day off? (I’m looking at you Delgado.)

Steve, didn’t Paul Lo Duca say on many occasions that he loved the fans and never wanted to leave the Mets?

First, that’s the line of the year so far. The next funniest line was on the radio this morning when Carton said, “Pelfrey stinks so bad his starts should be sponsored by the department of sanitation”.

All great stuff today, guys. Steve, our leader, hit the nail on the head in terms of what we want. The posts above are dead on as well. Show us you give a shit, guys. We’re Mets fans, we don’t expect a WS title every year (though that would be nice). The people in the Bronx have that expectation. We want a lunch pail team, a team that always plays hard and gets pissed when it throws a stinker out there. We don’t want a manager who covers for them. We want the manager to say, “I’m not happy with the effort today. I’m going to speak to the guys about it and it’ll change”. Say that and I will happily spend my money on your tickets and shirts, because I know you care as much as I do.

It’s like when your kid gets a 70 on a test. You know they can do better, and you get pissed. You may take away a priviledge. But, you still love them more than anything.

That’s how we feel.

However, if you were to ask me which players give me that sense, I’d have only a few names: Reyes, Beltran & Delgado. And, I’m not really sure that they don’t care, especially Beltran, but I do think that they care too much about how they’re playing and not necessarily about the team. What I mean is that those three seem to really get down when they’re not playing well – especially Reyes and Beltran. All fans know that players slump, but you keep working hard, going the extra mile on defense, running hard when on the bases, doing whatever to help the team. The mopey faces help nobody and really annoy the fans. Too often Reyes seems to go to sleep on defense when he’s not hitting.

The pitchers who have been failing – Sosa, Heilman especially – don’t give me that feeling. I just think that Sosa’s simply not that good and Heilman is out of sorts, mentally more than physically.

I do think the Mets could use a Dykstra type player. Not that Dykstra cared more, but he’d do something truly aggressive, almost reckless that would get the crowd going and, often I think, get the team going. I thought we were going to get that from Reyes, but he’s been pretty spark-less for the past year and a half.

Maybe it is all Willie’s fault. He’s too defensive and too repressed. He needs to explode / the team needs to explode.

Hard to remember how seven years ago the Mets players were rightly praised for being an integral part of their city when without pause they lent out their time and celebrity in the wake of that September’s tragedy. It was Rey Ordonez, for crissake, who refused to take off the uniformed services cap when MLB told the Mets to get with the program and go back to their usual gear. Rey Ordonez, not the most empathetic character in Mets history led the charge to continue honoring the fallen heroes…Rey Ordonez! Even no-longer-Mets like Roger Cedeno and Rick Reed volunteered a day’s pay to the cause of the widows and families, as if they’d never stopped being Mets. I’ll never forget Reed, after being traded, lamenting “I thought I’d be a Met for life.” You live to hear a player say something like that. You’d be shocked if you heard anybody say anything like that today.

Those were extraordinary circumstances, but those were also, in retrospect, extraordinary Mets teams and Mets players. Or maybe those guys only seem extraordinary versus 2008.

You’re right about the Mets universe concept and how much we adore the blue and orange. We bitch and we moan endlessly but you only bitch and moan the ones you love…or something like that.