What would you do?

Tell me I'm not the only one who remembers that show. I don't even remember the content, so much as the advertisements for it and the "wha- wha- what would you do?!?" theme music. Is that show still on? I wouldn't know. It's probably been replaced by Hannah Montana.

The title, however, is ever relevant to the current state of the Mets. I don't mean to sound like a broken record, but this Mets team has been playing like one for just about a year now, and there truthfully is not a whole lot else to talk about besides the Mets' inconsistency, gutlessness, and what should done about it. Everyone's talking about Willie Randolph, and there's only so many times you can say the same thing in slightly different ways.

And everyone should be talking about Willie Randolph. If we want to get philosophical about this, we can note the many ways that it's not entirely his fault. It would certainly not be fair to blame him entirely for the Mets' ugly level of underachievement.

Omar Minaya flew to Denver last night to reiterate his support for Willie:

"Willie Randolph is our manager," Minaya said when asked if Randolph's job was in imminent danger. "He has my support. He has our ownership's support. I am here to support Willie. I'm here to let him know my support, to encourage him and to let him know we believe he can get this team on track. Willie's totally dedicated to doing that, and I believe he can do that."

Not sure what this gesture on Omar's part is about, but he's giving every public indication that the Mets are going to stick with Willie. Part of what he said later, though, sort of ticked me:

"You'd like to be better than 22-23. I think we have a team that's better than 22-23. That being said, I am one to look at the big season, the big picture. It's about playing 162 games, and the goal is to win at the end of the season. The goal is to get to the playoffs. The goal is to win the division first. You have to look at seasons not in a 20- or 40-game window. On Sunday, we beat a very good Yankee team, and then we went to Atlanta and lost to a very good Atlanta team. As a general manager, I try not to look at things only in the smaller window. I try to look at the bigger window." (Mets.com)

This attitude epitomizes everything that's wrong with the Mets right now. If Omar Minaya is really looking at the big picture, he sees the Mets' 74-79 record since last June 1. I just don't know how after the four game sweep in Atlanta Omar can even get off bringing up the nice Yankee wins last weekend. If we're going to follow that logic, we can point to several of the Mets 74 wins during this period and say we played well, so you can't always look at things in a smaller window. The problem is the always predictable following up of the good games with, say, a four game sweep in Atlanta (or Philadelphia).

Fact is, there's something fundamentally wrong with this Mets' team, most people know it, and it's been that way for quite a while now, longer and longer every day. Omar comes off sounding slightly delusional with the suggestion that we can continue to stay the course and things will naturally straighten themselves out. You'd think he spent some time crafting the Bush Administration's post-war plans for Iraq.

Let's not get too political, but to use another analogy, the theme for these Mets is the same as the one that's propelled a young Illinois Senator to the brink of the Democratic Presidential Nomination. We need change!




Whoever's at fault, it's just not working for the Mets. If the definitition of insanity is indeed doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, then the Mets are absolutely clinical right now. I think June 1, 2007, to June 1, 2008 is a pretty decent sample size, and the results, as I mentioned, have not been pretty for the Metropolitains. Something needs to change, because this team, as presently constituted, is going to ride out this season doing exactly what they've been doing for the last calendar year.

And the Manager, fairly or unfairly, is often the first to go. It's not necessarily about the degree to which Willie deserves to be fired - for the record, however, I do think he's earned it. Most importantly, though, when evaluating the status of Willie Randolph's job, we have to ask whether he's contributing anything legitimately positive to the Mets right now that might help reverse the flow of water into a ship that's clearly sinking.

So there's my question, I suppose, to anyone who thinks the Mets shouldn't fire Willie. What do we gain by keeping him around? How does he help us save 2008? Because as dire as things seem right now, 66% of the season is yet to be played. Mets fans more than anyone else should know right now that the trajectory of an entire season can change in two weeks. There's no reason that such a dramatic turn of events can't happen in the Mets' favor this season if we make the right moves, as we Met fans tend to forget in the current toxic orange and blue climate that we root for a team that came roaring back in '69, '73, '99, and '01 - even if we did ultimately fall short in a couple of those years, all was not lost.

But it's going to take something. For a historically cautious franchise, the only way to save 2008 might be to bite the bullet and make an uncommonly bold move. Because it's painfully clear that there needs to be something significantly different about this Mets team, and soon.

(Images courtesy rugratonline.com, obamamedia.files.wordpress.com)

No Good

Sometimes, a picture really is worth a thousand words.

(Image: nydailynews.com)

Johan Santana, Mets lose 4-2, swept by Braves in Atlanta (Daily News)
Santana, Mets swept by Braves, fall below .500 (Newsday)
Mets undone by Braves' late rally (Mets.com)

Sunday Night Special

Maybe I'm in such a good mood on this Monday morning because I had the fortune to be pleasantly surprised last night. Who doesn't like a good surprise?

I'm a naturally optimistic person, but when your favorite baseball team underachieves to a chronic .500 record for the better part of a year, makes you look silly every time you try to figure them out, and constantly loses the Sunday night game after you thought they showed you something on Saturday afternoon, you learn to be cynical. Just a little bit, as Willie Randolph might say.

So I was a little bit surprised last night. And while nothing that the Mets did over the weekend makes a lick of a difference until they can, say, win 8 of their next 10 or something like that, they definitely did look good. They hit in the clutch. Oliver Perez pitched well. They responded to adversity: first "f---ing shocker," then the nonsense in the fourth inning last night.

Everyone loves Derek Jeter and it makes me sick. I mean, it's all a little ridiculous. Like when Carlos Delgado rips a shot down the left field line in the fourth inning last night, where it bounces off the foul pole and richochets into the stands (on the foul side) for a three-run homer. Anyone who has ever umpired a little league game knows that that's still a home run.

Where's his Edge? I'm talking about his car, of course

Mike Reilly, the third base umpire and the only guy on the field with had both a good look and the authority to make a decision on the matter, hesitates for a second and then signals fair ball, home run. Derek Jeter argues. Everyone loves Derek Jeter. Mike Reilly begins to doubt himself becaues Derek Jeter said it wasn't a home run, then lets Bob Davidson, the home plate ump with a decidedly worse view of the play, overrule him, and the ball is called foul.

The replays clearly showed a home run. But we don't have instant replay in baseball: only Derek Jeter, whose word is clearly more valuable than an umpire's initial judgment. Willie Randolph argues a little bit, Jerry Manuel argues a little bit more and gets ejected, but ultimately the home run is nullified, and the Mets are still only up 3-0 instead of 6-0.

So what happens next? Does Chein-Ming Wang find his stuff and manage to strikeout Delgado with the reprieve he's been granted? Will Oliver Perez find a way to blow a 3-0 lead, where things might have been a little bit more secure if he had been given six?

Delgado makes us all feel a little bit better and gives a bit of an f-you to everyone by ripping a single through the right side. Ryan Church scores and the Mets are ahead 4-0.

It looks like things could still take a turn for the worse when Perez immediately gives two of thoes runs back in the bottom of the inning on a Jeter single and a towering home run by Hideki Matsui. Perez is pitching okay, but he looks erratic. What else is new, I guess.

But Perez gets out of the fourth, then puts up three and 2/3 more scoreless frames while the Mets put up seven more runs. Church, who also prevented the Yankees from taking an early lead with a nice sliding catch in right in the second, hits a shot out to center field in the sixth. 9 home runs for Church in the early going, 5-2 Mets. Two innings later, David Wright leads off with a double, scores on a shallow sac fly, and the Mets mount a two-out rally to score five more runs in the 8th and put the game out of reach. Jose Reyes caps it off with a three-run shot, then goes Fred Astaire all over the Yankee Stadium field.

Reyes was in a good mood after hitting a three-run homer in the eighth

So there you have it. We did look good this weekend. But we really can't infer anything more until the Mets come back from Atlanta and Colorado next week. With the help of a double header tomorrow, they'll play four games in Atlanta between Tuesday and Thursday, then go out to Coors Field for the weekend. I'd like to see the Mets win both of these series. Is that too much to ask? In any case, the next week is the difference between this Yankee series being another chapter in the Mets' adventures around the .500 mark, or a potential launch point.

Over the past year, I've learned to temper any expectations with this team, but the weekend showed once again how good they can be.

(Images courtesy orbitcast.com, mets.com)

Statement Game?

The Mets responded convincingly to clubhouse-gate yesterday afternoon, beating the Yankees 7-4 in the kind of crisp, well-played game we've gotten used to seeing about every other day or so. I mean, seriously. The Mets have now won 21 games. After at least 15 of those games there have been encouraging signs that the Mets are finally prepared to break out of this up-down nonsense.

Johan Santana was also pitching. The Mets have now won seven of Santana's nine starts. That's good: you have to win when your ace pitches. Unfortunately, the fact that that the Mets are 7-2 in Santana starts means they're just 14-17 when Johan's not on the mound. The Mets .500 hovering act is only thrown further into relief by the fact that they can only ever seem to look more-than-mediocre when their best pitcher goes.

Still, yesterday's win did have the air of a statement game. Billy Wagner's "f---ing shocker" comments after Thursday's game created the first real controversy surrounding the 2008 Mets. For all the listless play, part of why the Mets have been painful to watch is because it's all been kind of boring. Win, loss, loss, win; they can't seem to get anything going but the overall narrative hasn't changed much.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is that maybe these Mets needed some real trouble. Because Rocky taught us that its not how hard you hit, but how hard you get hit, and keep moving forward. I've been saying that the Mets need something to happen, something to rally around, and while I'm still not sure if the firing of Willie Randolph will be necessary to achieve this, "f---ing shocker" at least carries with it the potential to wake this team up.

And they did respond in kind yesterday. Along with Santana, who despite giving up three home runs pitched into the 8th inning and handed the ball directly to Billy Wagner, which is always a formula for success. Jose Reyes (2-5, HR) and David Wright (3-5, HR) carried the offense, and the third inning Church to Castillo to Schneider-with-the-foot-block relay was a huge play, after the Yankees had already taken a 2-0 lead and the game showed potentially dangerous signs of getting out of hand really fast. Carlos Delgado even turned on a Joba Chamberlain fastball for a key RBI in the 8th inning.

So, once again, we have some encouraging signs. But the trouble with trying to analyze these Mets is that you just don't know what anything is going to lead to. Was yesterday a turning point? That will depend on what the Mets can do against Chien-Ming Wang tonight, and how Oliver Perez does or does not step up in what I hope the Mets consider to be another very important game.

(Image courtesy cinematicwallpaper.com)

Willie Harris, Met Killer

Apparently Willie Harris is pretty good at defense. The former Brave and current Nat, who went Endy Chavez over the center field fence at Shea last season and robbed Carlos Delgado of a potential game-winning homer in the rubber game of a big mid-summer series, was at it again yesterday, laying out on the left field line to rob Ryan Church of what would have been likely been a game-tying bloop double. Harris also contributed a leaping catch Wednesday night and a key sacrifice in the eighth inning of yesterday's game to set up the game's only run and help the Nats take three of four from the Mets, who ended up turning in a 3-4 record on a seven game homestand against two of the National League's three last place teams.

Last season's play against Delgado

So here's to you, Willie Harris. It's always the little guys, who come in late in the game for defense and somehow end up screwing you in the end. I miss Joe McEwing.

****

So the Mets waste the best start of Mike Pelfrey's young career, fail to do squat offensively off the Washington Nationals' pitching staff, and lose 1-0. I feel particularly bad for Pelfrey; that's two good starts in a row for big Pelf, and he's got two hard-luck losses to show for it.

In the 8th inning, Jose Reyes tried to go first to third on a bunt, and got thrown out. At least he was hustling - unlike David Wright and Luis Castillo, who dogged it on Wright's fly ball in the third inning and could only many it to first and third, respectively, when Austin Kearns couldn't make the play. There were two outs, so Castillo really should have scored from first, and he probably would have if he had been running hard.

The Mets, after yesterday's debacle, are now 20-19. If we're looking for some silver lining here, starting the season at a .500 clip at least manages to better illuminate this team's shortcomings. We played the exact same way for two-thirds of last season, but the hot start enabled Willie and the rest of the team to sell us that false, "class of the NL" bag of goods. Now, after playing under the same malaise for the first forty games of this season despite the addition of the best pitcher in baseball, there's no escaping the fact that the formerly upstart Mets have become a lazy, stagnant bunch under their ineffectual manager.

The thing is, I don't even know how this happened. I really don't. Willie, quite honestly, did an excellent job with this team in '05, and especially '06. The Mets, in an early warning sign, had a hard time completing sweeps in the beginning of last season, but they still played .600 ball through the end of May. We all knew they were good enough, and how they descended into seemingly inescapable .500 listlessness is as far beyond me as how they managed to blow a 7 game lead with 17 to play after posting a 9-2 record to begin the month of September.

But they are the Mets, and things don't always make sense. They also looked pretty good in those first few games in Florida. I really thought they were back. Think really hard back to the beginning of April. Did you ever think that, six weeks later, the Marlins would be the ones holding a stubborn two game lead in the division?

As the spring ended and the season got off to fast start those first few games, we really thought that Johan Santana had turned the page. But clearly the Mets remain stuck in the mud, wheels spinning but going nowhere, unable to move on to the new day that the acquisition of the stud left-hander was supposed to dawn.

Interviewed on WFAN yesterday morning with Boomer Esiason and Craig Carton (great show, by the way), Gary Cohen was asked, generally, what he thought of Willie Randolph's job security. In a statement that I thought was pretty frank for a broadcaster, particularly Cohen, he responded: "They better start winning some games or no one on this team is safe."

The tide is turning, and in 2008 no one within the Mets' organization has been lulled into last year's false sense of security.

Is there change in the air? The first subway series this weekend, between two underachieving New York teams, should be interesting.


(Image courtesy graphics.nytimes.com)

Up, Down

At its most basic level, yesterday's doubleheader was a perfect microcosm of the Mets' yearlong toil in mediocrity. They won the first game, lost the second. They went from 71-71 since last June 1 to 72-72. Nothing too exciting there. Just the same old, same old.

Mike Pelfrey (6 IP, 2 ER, 8 H, 3 BB) actually pitched a little bit better in game 2 than Johan Santana (6 IP, 3 ER, 10 H, 1 BB) did in game one. Pelfrey took a loss, Santana got the victory. So it goes sometimes. Life's not fair.

The Mets' offense, which looked inspired in the first game, once again fell flat against a horrible pitcher in the second. The Mets let Bronson Arroyo, who came into the nightcap having given up 50 hits in 32 innings - that's really bad - drop eight frames on them, and were left looking like they couldn't quite figure out Arroyo's 87 mile-an-hour fastball and token curveball. Arroyo, who lowered his ERA to 7.14 with last night's performance, gave up just one run on four hits and struck out nine, turning in an outing that was arguably better than anything we've seen from a Met pitcher so far this year.

The best hope for our season might be to root for another month or so of .500 ball while also - stay with me here - hoping that the Phillies can rip a few off and open up a nice lead in the East. Nothing unovercomeable, just 4 or 5 games. A lead that can be obliterated by a nice hot streak, but that there's no prayer more of the same can possibly erase.

Because that might just further illuminate the sad truth that Willie really doesn't seem to be capable of getting anything more than a win and a loss out of this Mets team. And that's just not acceptable. The only player hitting .300 in a reasonably stacked Mets lineup right now is Ryan Church.

The Wilpons, faced with the ugly prospect of Citi Field boo-birds, will squirm. The pressure will mount for Omar Minaya, faced with the prospect of a sullied reputation despite putting a team on the field that should currently be well on its way to a third consecutive division title, to cut ties with his boy Randolph.

Said Willie after last night's letdown, "I guess we got all our work done in the first game." This isn't going to work for that much longer. It's not working right now.

The Mets will probably win today. Will that mean anything tomorrow?

Unlikely.

(Picture courtesy mlb.com)

Rain Delay

What's in your iPod?

Pedro Martinez says he likes to keep it romantic.

Ryan Church likes Linkin Park.

Aaron Heilman's into Pearl Jam.

When he's not cursing out Cubs fans, Joe Smith is all about the country music. It's okay, he's from Cincinnati.

I was a little disappointed to find out that David Wright also likes country music. I've just, never seen the appeal. Wright also likes Jay-Z, who I personally think is overrated, though he did also say he likes hip-hop in general. I wonder who else he's into. Touching on another genre, he did drop Frank Sinatra's name, which I thought was pretty sweet.

Jose Reyes, unsurprisingly, says he almost always listens to reggaeton.


Carlos Delgado also likes the reggaeton, and Latin American music in general.

Mike Pelfrey says he doesn't have an iPod.

The Mets and Reds will play tonight, but SNY's Kid's Clubhouse is holding down the fort until the tarp comes off the field at Shea. The iPodless Pelfrey will pitch for the Mets whenever things get going; it's a big start for big Pelf, who's out to rebound from three tough outings and prove that his first two solid starts were no fluke.

It's still raining pretty hard at Shea, but I guess they're pretty committed to getting this game in. But welp, there it is. Looks like we're rained out tonight - the Mets and Reds will go for a day-nighter tomorrow, throwing Johan Santana in the day game and Pelf in the nightcap.

Tomorrow's double dip will represent the first two of seven upcoming games against two last place teams, so here's hoping we can get this stretch off to a good start.

(Image courtesy nytimes.com)

Another Day

Another failure by the Mets to build any sort of meaningful momentum. Confounded for six innings by Chad Billingsley, who improved to 2-4 on the year last night, the Mets' offense turned in another listless performance against a mediocre pitcher.

A .500 team never fails to play .500 baseball. The Mets are 2-2 in their last four games, 3-3 in their last six, 5-5 in their last ten games, 7-7 in their last fourteen.

You get the feeling that, after winning 15 games last season, if Oliver Perez can't finally put it all together consistently in a contract year then he probably never will.

OP was roughed up again last night

I feel bad for Omar Minaya. I really do. People question whether the Mets have hit their ceiling; sports pundits who are bad at their jobs and Mets fans who don't know what they're talking about suggest that Minaya should be fired along with Willie Randolph if the Mets fail to make the postseason, or don't get it together.

But it's his fault? The guy's made three mistakes since he took over the Mets. Their names are Heath Bell, Henry Owens, and Matt Lindstrom. Two career minor leaguers and a so-so young pitcher on the New York/Triple-A shuttle, all traded away in the '06 off-season in deals that haven't really yielded anything for the Mets. Ben Johnson, acquired in the Bell deal, was, in fact, released yesterday. From AAA.

Since the big moves early in his tenure, in New York's what-have-you-done-for-me-lately environment Omar's only acquired the best pitcher in baseball for an extremely light package of might-miss prospects, built the Mets a solid bench, and brought in Ryan Church and Brian Schneider in a move that, while criticized at the time (I was a critic), so far looks like a winner for the Mets.

Omar Minaya has put a team on the field that should win 95 games. Disagree? The Mets won 96 in 2006 win Tom Glavine at the top of the rotation for most of the year. And Steve Trachsel as the no. 2 starter. In '08, the .500 Mets look like the '05 team without the energy. Braden Looper was our closer that year.

Willie Randolph keeps saying everything's going to be alright. Dude, you're not Bob Marley. Shut up and manage a major league baseball team. Of 2007's dark shadow, Randolph says:

“In spring training we were past that. Obviously the fans are having a tough time moving past that. So we just hope that they eventually get behind this team, because we’re going to make them real proud before the year is over.

“We live in an environment where they want it when they want it. Believe me, my team is really solid and together, how we look at ourselves. I don’t think that we define who we are by the reaction we get. We know mentally where we want to go, who we want to be, and we can’t get there until September. In the meantime, you’re going to go through your ups and downs, your scuttlebutt or whatever it is. I think we understand in this town that’s the way it’s going to be.”

It wasn't "alright" last September, and it's not alright now. For almost a full calendar year the Mets have been a .500 team. For the same amount of time they've played as if nothing will allow them to take a step forward without also taking one back. It's great that our manager is calm and optimistic, but that plus whatever else he's doing is obviously not getting his team to play up to its potential. And what in the lord's name is "scuttlebutt." I'm so sick of this guy.

At the beginning of last season I thought that the circular, Senatorial sentences that Randolph always speaks in were strategic, a coy front while the General rallied his troops in the clubhouse before every game to go out and kick ass. Last September taught us that, truth is, that's the only thing Willie really knows to say. And when some adjustment seems required? Oh we're relaxed, we're gonna be fine, we know what we have to do, we play hard, we play to win, says Willie. Everything's gonna be alright...

The Mets, quite obviously, need to elevate their level of play right now, and Willie Randolph, for nearly a year, hasn't seemed capable of getting them to do that. For every series win against Arizona or Philadelphia there's a decisive loss the next night. The Dodgers have now won 11 of 14 , after last night's victory. Think really hard for a second. Can you even imagine the Mets pulling that off right now? Sad, right?

You can't blame the manager for everything. Steve Phillips really did do a crappy job assembling the Mets teams of the early 2000s, when Bobby Valentine got the ax. But sometimes the blame can't possibly fall any place else, and it's beginning to seem pretty obvious that Willie Randolph's sunshine and lollipops demeanor isn't doing anything for the Mets right now. The Mets remain in need of a jolt, a kick-start, and if the ultimate leader of this team, Willie Randolph, is incapable of providing that, then a change has got to be in order.

I'll give it to Memorial Day. Julio Franco just retired...

(Image courtesy ap.google.com)

I'll be!

Another team makes a late-inning error against the Mets, sparking a three run ninth and handing the Mets a 5-2 victory.

The Mets take two out of three in the desert from the "class of the National League."

After losing 13-1 to the class of the NL, circa 1991.

If Barry Bonds and vintage Bobby Bonilla combined to hit 13 home runs against the Mets in one game, and the year was indeed 1991, then it might be okay to lose that badly to the Pirates

I love roller coasters!

Which reminds me, Oliver Perez pitches tonight against Chad Billingsley and the Dodgers.

One in the same

(Images courtesy southernledger.com, usatoday.com, nysun.com, dailygalaxy.com)

13-1 (ouch!), Inconsistency, Blogging

Yeah, the Mets lost 13-1 yesterday. I watched the first inning and a half, left before Oliver Perez's meltdown, went out to a job interview, came back, and the score was 8-0 in the top of the sixth. Before I could watch the Mets hit again, I saw David Wright muff a routine grounder, Angel Pagan misplay two deep fly balls, and Pirates' lead grow to 13-0. Perhaps if I were watching a basketball or football game there still would have been a chance. Baseball? Not so much.

Pagan took a bad route to a ball in the left-center field gap and let it fall; Perez just pitched badly

I'm actually kind of relieved that the Mets lost the way they did yesterday. It was ugly, turn the page. The bullpen didn't blow it, the offense can't really be blamed, it was just a terrible day. And maybe it was one of those wake-up call blowouts, just what the Mets needed to finish a month where, quite frankly, they're lucky that .500 ball has kept them within a game of first place.

So I'm not too concerned about yesterday, in particular. Are the Mets lucky that despite the ongoing inconsistency, the Florida Marlins are still the only thing between them and the top of the NL East? Yes. Do I continue to be disturbed that we're still seeing a lot of the same things that sealed our fate last year? Yes. Will our upcoming road trip to Arizona and LA tell me a lot more about where we're at right now? Absolutely. Micah Owings, Brandon Webb, Dan Haren. We match up okay, with Maine, Pelfrey, and Santana, but if we win two games this weekend I'll still be shocked. The D Backs are 20-8 for a reason.

But I want to touch briefly on something else that's drawn my attention. Metsblog, basically my primary source for everything else going on in the sports blogosphere, had an interesting post last night about a roundtable discussion on Bob Costas' HBO television show, Costas Now.

Here's a video clip of the discussion, if you're interested.

The upshot, essentially, is that Costas hosted a discussion on his TV show about internet media with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Buzz Bissinger, along with the founder of the popular sports blog Deadspin.com, Will Leitch, and Cleveland Browns Wide Receiver Braylon Edwards.

Bissinger was angry, and clearly determined to seize his chance to call out Leitch, as the representative of everything unholy in new media, modern journalism, whatever you want to call it - blogs, basically. Leitch spent the majority of the segment defending himself, Edwards just kind of sat there, and Costas seemed to side with Bissinger.

“I just think that blogs are dedicated to cruelty, they’re dedicated to journalistic dishonesty, they’re dedicated to speed…it is the complete dumbing down of our society,” offered Bissinger. (metsblog)

The animosity goes both ways. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry behind the keyboard thinks they can do a better job than the people with actual press credentials, and the people with credentials (Bissinger, Costas), who have worked hard to establish themselves as journalists, written books, won Pulitzers...those guys feel threatened by decreased newspaper readership and a seismic shift in the way people around the world get their information, and they see blogs and other forms of new media as inferior to the good old days, when if you wanted to be a sports reporter you had to work your way into the press box.

Either blanket opinion totally oversimplifies the meaning of new media - which isn't going anywhere - and perpetuates an acrimonious relationship between some bloggers and credentialed journalists that probably shouldn't exist in the first place.

Sports bloggers like Leitch, or myself for that matter, aren't trying to steal Buzz Bissinger's thunder. We're simply taking advantage of a new tool that allows us to communicate the experience of being a fan, or a sports observer, or whatever. And, despite what Bissinger and Costas might suggest, blogs aren't dedicated to bringing people down.

Says Costas, in the brief segment on Leitch before the roundtable talk, "if you're an athlete, you don't want to end up on Deadspin" - he's referring, here, to Deadspin's propensity to link stories depicting athletes partying; I linked to a Deadspin story last December, when it was reported that John Maine caused a bit of a stir at a New York City nightclub. Bissinger and Costas see this as trash. I don't. I could care less what John Maine does on his spare time, and I think I like him a little bit more when I get to glimpse him as more of a real person.

Deadspin is a fan site, not a news outlet. And as fans, we've always been interested in who are sports heroes are outside of their uniforms. Even if they're not our sports heroes, and just random athletes, there's still a certain curiosity there.

Putting this dispute aside, that's also not the only thing that gets on Deadspin. Deadspin, or even my blog for that matter, certainly most of the other blogs that I link to (save metsblog) are not report-and-recap sites, they're really exercises in creativity, more than anything else. Creativity in communicating a fan's perspective. That's something I would think two esteemed journalists should welcome, certainly not frown upon.

Some bloggers might have visions of journalistic grandeur, but most of us aren't really thinking like that. We just do what we do - we're fans and we write about being fans. We might be a bit more blunt - I called Aaron Heilman a pouty little sissy recently - but there's always a line between what goes through a fan's head and what gets written in the newspaper. Aaron Heilman just had a bad outing if I'm writing for the wire. And most of us, despite a different take on the whole thing, still can write pretty well, thanks.

Still, Bissinger doesn't like the tone of a lot of these blogs. He's referring more to the comments section, I think. If that's his problem, he might want to cruise over to the New York Times' politics page, where updates on recent campaign trail developments certainly attract some harsh rhetoric, if not inappropriate language. It's not just confined to impolitic sports blogs; this is what happens when everyone gets a voice, through the comments' section, or their local town meeting, or whatever. Some people are crazy. They can say whatever they want, but they're crazy. We have free speech in this country. We've been walking this line for 230 years. The internet, really, is just the supreme manifestation of one of our founding principles.

And it's not like credentials are going anywhere. If you want to write for a real news outlet, you still have to know what you're doing - you're just more likely to be posting to a website in addition to having your work printed. "Real" journalists - in sports, politics, the entertainment business, everywhere - use blogs as a more effective way of communicating to a changing audience. A revolutionary tool, to provide up-to-the-minute insights and analysis, thoughts and observations in the middle of a game, a debate, an election night. Check out this one, this one, this one, and this other one as a few examples.

And there still is a line between Mets beat writer John Delcos' blog for the Journal News, and Ted's Fansite. That's not to say that Ted's Fansite is illegitimate; it's just a different mode of communication. The balance is part of the wider internet medium and, ultimately, the future of sports, politics, everything really.

Besides, Buzz Bissinger should watch himself. I haven't read any of his stuff, but I hear he's pretty good. Still, for every blogger using harsh language, there's a guy with credentials who doesn't know his head from his left foot and uses good grammar to still sound like an idiot. Marty Noble was the biggest homer in the world last season until the tide started turning for the Mets; many bloggers pinpointed some of the threatening issues with last year's team long before Noble caught up to the curve.

Bissinger's eruption the other night was clearly the past. He might want to have a few revelations, or the future is sure to keep smacking him in the face.

(Pictures courtesy nytimes.com, signonsandiego.com)