All posts by Matthew Callan

1999 Project

1999 Project: Atlanta, Round 4

Click here for an intro/manifesto on The 1999 Project.

chipper2.jpgOn Monday, the Mets got a much needed off day and some more bad news. The surging Reds won yet again, which put them 1.5 games ahead of the Mets in the wild card lead. It also tied Cincinnati with idle Houston for the lead in the NL Central, thus throwing another wrinkle into the Mets’ playoff hopes.

The Mets now had not one, but two rivals for the wild card, which created a myriad of ways they could make the playoffs–or miss them entirely. No one needed to be reminded of the three-way wild card race of 1998 (a race that wouldn’t have happened if the Mets had managed to win two games down the stretch).

To begin their last homestand of the year, the Mets welcomed the same Braves team that had demolished them in Atlanta a week before. But it was also a Braves team that had already clinched the NL East (thanks to their sweep of Montreal while the Mets were being swept in Philly). The Mets could always hope the Braves’ sense of urgency had waned. Then again, they’d be throwing Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux, and Kevin Millwood, pitchers the Mets had scored a grand total of seven runs against all season.

Bobby Valentine hoped the off day would rejuvenate his team. “When I’m on the slopes, I say that fatigue makes cowards of all of us,” Valentine told The New York Times. “That’s what mental fatigue is. You can’t concentrate enough because you’re physically tired.”

Another manager agreed. Valentine spent his off-day shooting an airline commercial with Joe Torre at Newark Airport. In between takes, Torre cautioned Bobby V, noting that “My cancer was stress-related.”
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1999 Project

1999 Project: Games 154-156

Click here for an intro/manifesto on The 1999 Project.

Thumbnail image for vetstadiumseat.jpgSeptember 24, 1999: Phillies 3, Mets 2

After a damaging and occasionally embarrassing sweep in Atlanta, the Mets headed to Philadelphia. The Phillies had a miserable end to their year, going 4-24 in the month prior to this series. Just before the Mets took on the Braves, they’d taken two out of three from the Phillies at Shea. Curt Schilling and Scott Rolen were both shut down for the year, and the team had almost no other stars to speak of.

In other words, the Phillies should have been just what the doctor ordered.The Mets should have been able to right their ship with a series win against a lowly team and stop the whispers that they were doomed to choke away a playoff spot, just like last year’s team.

But that, they say, is why they play the games.

Despite venturing north, the Mets still seemed to have their heads in Atlanta. Several unnamed players suspected that Chipper Jones was tipped off to their pitch selection, thus explaining his four home runs in three games against the Mets. The fact that he was having a monster year, and hitting home runs against everyone, was not mentioned.

Bobby Valentine called Chipper’s ability to hit home runs off of his team “uncanny”, but neither he nor anyone else would go on record with the pitch-tipping accusations. It indicated the disturbing extent to which the Braves in general (and Chipper in particular) were in the Mets’ heads.

Continue reading 1999 Project: Games 154-156 →

Videocracy

YouTubery Friday: Danzig Meets Shakira and Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace

It’s Friday! Procrastinate and countdown to happy hour with these lovely bits!

Call this edition “Late to the Party”, since it focuses on two things I should have watched/discovered much sooner. No matter! The important thing is, I know about them now, and soon, so shall you (if you didn’t already).

The first reinforces a comedic principle that I believe in sincerely: Danzig is funny. On rare occasions, he is funny on purpose, as in his guest appearance on Aqua Teen Hunger Force. But he’s even more funny when being mocked, as in the video where someone compiled a Danzig grocery list. Or in the video where he gets knocked the eff out on one punch.

But I think my favorite Danzig video has to be this one, wherein he and Shakira duet on a Misfits-esque version of “Hips Don’t Lie”. This video has been around for quite a while–like, two years, apparently, but I only recently stumbled on it. Better late than never, I says.

Speaking of better late then never, earlier this week I finally saw a show whose entire conceit is “better late than never”, called Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace. I’d heard of it, and heard it was good, but hadn’t seen it until The Onion AV Club featured it in a story on TV shows about TV shows. After watching the clip the featured, I spent a good hour watching all the Darkplace stuff I could find (because, of course, I have nothing better to do).

The premise of the show: famous author Garth Marenghi wrote, produced, and starred in the titular show in the 1980s, a supernatural-y hospital drama that was “so radical, so risky, so dangerous, so god damn crazy that the so-called powers that be became to scared to show it!”

So it languished in his basement, until “the worst artistic drought in British television history” brought Darkplace back to the airwaves. The show-within-a-show is a pitch-perfect send-up of every 80s drama you’ve ever seen, with production values and acting talent that make the average SyFy channel movie look like Citizen Kane. Plus a creator/star with a massive ego and no sense of his many limitations.

And like most 80s shows, the Darkplace characters would occasionally bust out a Miami Vice-type musical montage, like this one.