Being a Mets fan blows

Argh.

Did you read this?

So Paul LoDuca just signed with the Nationals. In case you don't remember, the Mets just traded Lastings Milledge for Ryan Church and Brian Schneider.

"Hey Omar, I've got an idea for next year's slogan!"

2007 Nationals Right Fielder: Ryan Church
2007 Nationals Catcher: Brian Schneider

2007 Mets Right Fielder (sometimes): Lastings Milledge
2007 Mets Catcher: Paul LoDuca

Of these four players, one just plain sucks (Schneider, now on the Mets); one had his best year last year, which was still mediocre at best (Church, now with the Mets); one had a so-so year, probably on the down side of his career (LoDuca, now with the Nats); and one did pretty well in limited use but is only 22 years old (Milledge, Nats now).

It's hard to say who did better in the exchange of these four players, except that it isn't hard at all. The Nationals did. And, using the Ablative sense of the Commutative Property (Chuck, help), therefore the Mets did worse.

Omar Minaya, to his undying credit, did do one good thing this off-season -- trading away Guillermo Mota, though we had to accept Johnny Estrada. Johnny Estrada sucks at baseball. But at least the cheater is gone.

Oh, and Tom Glavine -- our opening-day starter last year -- now pitches for the Braves. Almost forgot.

And that about wraps it up for the Mets off-season moves so far.

Here is the Mets 5-man rotation at this point (in no particular order, because I dare you to try):

John Maine
Oliver Perez
Pedro Martinez
Orlando Hernandez
Ron Weasley

(I'm not sure about the last one, but hey, Quidditch skills might help.)

That pitching staff flat-out sucks. How can the Mets possibly hope to improve upon 88 wins? In what way have we gotten better?

You could say that Maine and Perez are one year older and one year better. But then you'd have to say that Pedro and El Duque are one year older and one year closer to death.

Pelfrey? Humber? Aaron Heilman maybe? Those names don't exactly jump out as "sure things" or even "likely to be really good things."

Argh.

Yes, Jose Reyes and David Wright are a beautiful foundation around which to build a team. Carlos Beltran also stands out. But beyond that, the Mets' position players are:

1B: Carlos Delgado -- old, probably won't return to his prior numbers
2B: Luis Castillo -- oldish, bad knee, can't hit, but hey, fuck it -- let's sign him for four more years, right Omar? You idiot.
LF: Moises Alou -- old. Very old. Old to the point of needing a time machine. The odds of this guy playing a full season are equal to the odds of a lion nursing a wounded wildebeest back to health then investing smartly in certain Roth IRAs, thus allowing said lion to put the wildebeest through school (preferably Wisconsin, a good state school; big cats instinctively dislike the Ivy League, or so I saw on Animal Planet)
RF: Ryan Church -- a mediocre baseball player. Please refer to my earlier comments, which further explicate this particular baseball player's utter mediocrity. Which does not mean "good."
C: Ramon Castro/Johnny Estrada/Brian Schneider: Castro can hit, but will likely get hurt, again/Estrada sucks/Schneider sucks as much or worse.

The 2008 New York Mets look like a pretty average team at best. Achieving 88 wins with this roster again is highly unlikely. They are definitely a worse team than they were last year, significantly worse than the 2006 team, and Omar Minaya and Fred Wilpon don't seem to be doing a friggin' thing about it. (Aside from actively making it worse by giving Luis Castillo a 4-year contract and trading for mediocre and/or terrible players.)

Meanwhile, across town, the yanks have re-signed the best player in baseball, as well as Posada, Rivera, and Pettitte, all of whom will help them be better next year. Not as good as the Red Sox, perhaps, but at least Brian Cashman hasn't actively made his team worse.

I loved Paulie, but I could understand not re-signing him. But not if that means replacing him with shitty players. I could also understand trading Milledge, but not if all we get back are shitty players. God! Is this difficult to understand? How about getting us a fucking pitcher?

The Mets have a lot of money to spend. In 2009, Citi Field will open. Citi paid $20 million for naming rights. Can we please use that extra money to make our team better? Am I wrong, or is that a completely reasonable question? Why is this organization making it so hard to root for them?

Argh.

Like Magic

Together with what was apparently a decent percentage of the population, I finished the Harry Potter series yesterday, staying up until almost 3:00 in the morning to complete the seventh book in the series of seven (owing in equal parts to an inability to put it down and assurances to my wife that she could have it first thing Monday morning).

I don't have much to write about the book itself, since you've either read it, and already know, plan to read it, and don't want to know, or won't read it, and don't care to know.

(side note: I don't think I've given away anything at all here, but if you are super paranoid, stop reading now just in case).

Instead, I wanted to post the summation with which a reviewer for Time concluded her review of the book. A few people who have never read any of the books in the series have recently asked me if the books are really that good . . . I think the following is a start in answering that question:

It's impossible to finish Deathly Hallows without mixed emotions: satisfaction, but also sadness. Not really because the series is finally over — if anything, turning the last page of Deathly Hallows made me look forward to rereading the first book. Maybe Sorcerer's Stone [-- the first book in the series of seven --] will never be surprising again, the way it was the first time, but now that I know how the series ends, that knowledge propagates its way back through the series, casting everything that came before it in a different light and giving it a fresh new meaning.

The sadness is more an instant nostalgia for the unironic, whole-hearted unanimity with which readers embraced the story of Harry. We did something very rare for Harry Potter: we lost our cool. There is nothing particularly hip about loving Harry. He's not sexy or dangerous the way, say, Tony Soprano was. He's not an anti-hero, he's just a hero, but we fell for him anyway. It's a small sacrifice to the one that Harry makes, of course, but it's what we, as self-conscious, status-conscious modern readers, have to give, and we gave it. We did and do love Harry. We couldn't help ourselves.

"We lost our cool." That is a spot on statement. For most people, at least growing up if not also as adults, the "fantasy" or even "sci-fi" genre was something to make fun of (side note: remember "Magic: the Gathering?"), and only cross over to delicately, when everyone else did it (Star Wars was cool, but people who played Dungeons and Dragond were weird). Yet somehow the Harry Potter stories transcended the typical scorn -- or at least mild amusment -- that most people cast upon witches, wizards and the like. It's a credit to the author, and maybe to our culture as well, that she was able to produce something that was so enveloping, so riveting, and just so much fun, that we put aside "cool" for a few years, especially towards the end, and just enthusiastically enjoyed the story she had created.

I'm headed back to mystery novels and history books on the civil war; but crossing over for a little while was, well . . . cool.