Subway Series. Hurrah. Fun time.

I have a feeling fans of both teams are greeting this annual Media Splooge-Fest with the same amount of (non)enthusiasm that Willy Wonka displayed when Augustus Gloop fell in the river of chocolate. (“Help. Police. Murder.”) Blame it on whatever you like–injury, malaise, bad weather, allergies, the bossa nova–but neither the Mets nor the Yankees are bringing their A-game on a daily basis. Hell, at this point I’d settle for somewhere between M and Q.

I’ll say this for the Yankees, though: they actually look like they might care about the game of baseball. They’re just not very good at it right now. And though they just lost 3 out of 4, they did so on the road to the amazingly hot Tampa Bay Rays.

Contrast that with the Mets, who just lost 3 out of 4 at home to a Washington Nationals team that, against every other team in the majors, looks like the Keystone Kops via the Special Olympics. And while dropping these games, the Mets looked as if they’d rather be doing anything else than be paid millions of dollars to play a kids’ game.

Witness the series finale, in which they made Jason Bergmann–fresh off the disabled list, owner of an ugly double-digit ERA–look like Walter effin’ Johnson. Mike Pelfrey had a surprisingly strong start, giving up just one run in 7+ innings of work–and lost. The Mets put the tying run into scoring position in the eighth and ninth innings, only to see it erased both times on boneheaded running plays that had to be seen to be believed. And even if you’d witnessed these Crimes Against Baseball as they happened, you wouldn’t be able to fathom how an adult who plays baseball for a living could do something so profoundly moronic.

And just to make sure that the team would go into their most scrutinized series of the year with the maximum amount of turmoil, Billy Wagner blew up over the ninja-like qualities of some of his teammates. Country Time can always be counted on to rush to the scene of a raging fire just in time to pour gasoline on it.

To try and distract myself from this state of affairs last night, I watched a documentary I’d DVR’ed: The Zen of Bobby V, wherein three NYU film students followed ex-Mets skipper Bobby Valentine over the 2007 season, his fourth managing the Chiba Lotte Marines in the Japanese major leagues (the NPB). This didn’t really help my mood, because the movie made me nostalgic for the late 1990s/early 2000s Mets, teams that were not as talented as the current crop but certainly played with more passion.
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