Met Mutterings
"If he was anybody else, like Port St. Lucie people, they just talk out the mouth and they go."
Eric Vidal, 20, pizza deliverer, disrespected and pummeled by Met players.

If you search the Keep Port St. Lucie Beautiful Guiding Principles outline you will be disappointed to find how little talking out the mouth and going is mentioned. However, if you were to momentarily believe the stories of parking lot urination and pissaboy delivery beatings, you might, as Port St. Lucie detective in charge of the investigation, Mike Beath, did, find the pissaboy's story "vague and somewhat improbable." Don King ridiculous, I might have added. But good enough to find himself awarded the Sports Amnesia's Idiot of the Week.

With impassioned cauterwaling about ruinous scandals of steroid Super Men sullying the optimism of Spring Training, it is refreshing to see the return of the harmless and humorous story of another episode of professional athletes behaving badly. Better still was Vidal's sudden thrust into the national psyche, trivializing important international and baseball issues in exchange for a woeful tale of drunken Mets urinating in public parking lots, scuffling with the local white trash and of course, getting away with it.

Not that they shouldn't have. Yeah, Karim Garcia acknowledged to cops that he was so drunk he couldn't remember some of the incident, and that he started the whole affair by urinating in front of the Big Apple Pizza. And yes, we all know what a hot-tempered hooligan Garcia, already faces criminal and civil trials in Boston for an incident
with a Fenway Park groundskeeper during the ALCS last October, is Yet, as the yarn unraveled, it became clearer that the pissaboy bit off more than he could chew and was having a hard time swallowing his pride.

It just goes to show you that playing the cynical grifter cast as a self-righteous public citizen in a small Florida community that reaps loads of cash from the influx of these millionaires every Spring, just isn't the lucrative business you might expect it to be. "My pride's hurt and there's nothing they can do to replace that. They're going to pay one way or another," Vidal said in an interview with WPTV, the NBC affiliate in West Palm Beach. Surely the personal injury lawyers lining up to represent him see it the same way. The big Payola in the sky.

Was Vidal truly offended by a drunk pissing in a parking lot? Would he have invoked his "outraged citizen" persona had the parking lot pisser been just another drunk in what must surely be a long stream of drunks hanging around a parking lot pizzeria looking for a place to piss?

"The dude in the passenger side was hanging out the window saying some real nasty stuff to me," Vidal said, referring to Garcia and underscoring the hopeless injustice of it all. "So I gave it right back to him. I wasn't going to let him walk all over me. (Not without compensation, in any case...)

And so a nonstory becomes a big issue because some loser who works as a pizza delivery boy contracts a dose of pride like the clap from a ten dollar hooker and decides he's been disrespected.

"I don't want to sound like a girl or anything," Vidal continued, whining like a girl, "but my pride was taken from me, especially now that I know it was the Mets and it's all over everywhere - New York, here, people I don't know."

That's right, Vidal. We all know you're a pizza delivery boy now. And we all know you're an idiot. Congratulations. But please, next time pick a more appropriate Met. I'd derive much more entertainment from a headline like
Pissing Piazza Pounds Pizza Boy than "White Trash Wimp Fabricates Wild Tale of Pride Beating"

*****

Perhaps far more interesting this week was the revelation that the World's Most Reluctant First Baseman, Mike Piazza, has a yoga instructor/nutritionist, 6-foot-4 aberrant with unkempt hair and an unshaven face carrying jugs of juice and bags of seeds around training camp, by the name of Anderson Bourell.

Bourell, 31, has no specific title and no permanent residence, but he is living with Piazza at his house during spring training. He is working as his yoga instructor, nutritionist, herbalist, masseur, healer, guru and frankly, I don't want to know what else. Piazza, starry-eyed yet essentially still position-less as a whopping defensive liability behind the plate and at first base, calls Bourell "my yogi."

Tell me this little ditty doesn't sound as though Piazza has either begun the deceleration towards permanent eccentricity or is indulging in some kind of decadent behaviour that makes one wonder why Piazza just doesn't get himself a devoted wife: (seriously though, substitute the term "Piazza's wife" for "Burrell" in the passage below and see where it gets you)

"Before Piazza takes the field, Bourell offers him seeds and juice, reminds him to use mental checkpoints when he's stretching and tells him to breathe through his nose so he doesn't strain his lungs. After practice, Bourell stretches Piazza near a batting cage, allowing him to relax his body and clear his mind from fan and news media demands.

At night, Bourell often visits a local health food store to buy more fruit and seeds.

Then he leads Piazza in a yoga session, gives him a massage and fixes a dinner consisting only of uncooked food: a spinach salad with raw portobello mushrooms, alfalfa sprouts, a clove of raw garlic, sunflower seeds and olive oil."

*****

The best kept secret on the Met piching staff has got to be Steve Trachsel. Last year he was the Mets' best pitcher, topping the rotation in wins (16) and ERA (3.78). But go back a little further - in fact, to the 2001 All-Star break - and it's clear that his excellence is no fluke. Since that year's Midsummer Classic, Trachsel's compiled a 36-24 record with a 3.42 ERA in 477 innings.

By comparison, the alleged "ace" of the staff, Tom Glavine, has a 5.22 ERA at Shea Stadium.

On the other hand, an ominous development and sure to be a burr in the saddle of the Mets all season, Brandon Looper, the alleged saving stopper out of the 9th inning bullpen, has accumulated a 6.75 ERA in four Spring Training appearances thus far.

Looper has a devotional webpage of his love for Jesus but so far, no visible guru.