This Just In, National Televion, The Mets Suck

For Mets fans there is reason to at least be hopeful. Mike Pelfrey seems to be in the midst of recovering from his terrible, horrible, no good, very bad 2009 season. Johan has been good and so have, amazingly, John Niese and Oliver Perez (but he's just so day to day, I'll believe in his consistency in about 2 years). John Maine was not awful in his last start (if that's the barometer, then you know it's going bad, but still) and he says that he discovered a mechanical flaw that is residual compensation from his arm injury that he's in the process of working on. So long as the pitchers stay somewhat consistent and they can lean on Johan and the Prelf, the offense should be good enough to win them some games (not that it has, but it should).

They finally gave up on Mike "Fucking" Jacobs and brought up Ike Davis. (And frankly, if he hits even a little bit, I'm all for quitting this Daniel Murphy positioning experiment. Murphy is clearly only suited to play third base, just trade him for something, anything.) Jeff Franceoeuoeur has quadrupled his career walk total in these 15 games so far, and Jason Bay actually had an RBI the other day. Angel Pagan has finally started to play every day and he'll probably be good long enough for Beltran to come back.

The question, though, is who on Earth would want to watch the Mets play other than Mets fans? The Mets played three consecutive games on national television last weekend. They were on the Fox national broadcast (which turned out to be a great game in fairness), then the next day they were on Sunday night baseball, and then the next day after that they were on Monday night baseball. I wonder when was the last time Gary Cohen had two whole days off during the season? (The Monday game was on both ESPN and SNY.) And then they are scheduled for a second week in a row to be on Sunday night baseball this coming week. There is no reason to believe that they are going to compete in any given game unless Johan is pitching. Unless they can get a guarantee that Johan is gonna pitch, there's no reason for these guys to schedule Mets games on national TV.

Maybe the argument is that even if they just draw regional viewership, the Mets audience is bigger than they would get for some other team. But at this point I would think the nation as a whole would be more inclined to watch the Phillies (an actual exciting team), Angels, Cardinals (the Mets opponent on both Saturday and Sunday, probably those two teams together equal pretty big ratings), Twins, (Devil) Rays, or Red Sox. I'll leave the Yankees out of it, I guess. And since I get to watch all the Mets and Yankee games anyway, I'd personally like to watch the occasional Twins game or even the Phillies (who I clearly dislike, but who also put on a pretty good baseball game).

PS - I was tempted to put this picture up in the corner there, even though it has nothing to do with anything.