Redefining The Parameters of Mediocrity
"Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless." - Thomas Edison

It's clear that Thomas Edison never had the pleasure of rooting for the New York Mets.

Oh we were allowed our fun, no doubt. We were allotted our three game sweep of the Yankees, our redoubtable moments in the sun (all 10 hours and 3 minutes of them - the total time played in that three game sweep) and grabbed at them greedily like skinny-elbowed refugees grabbing handfuls of grain from the back of a UN pickup truck in some dustbowl Sub-Saharan hamlet.

But that was it. Since then, it's been like watching the same car crash over and over again in slow motion, frame by excruciating frame, for the last two months.

Just for auld lang syne, I've been listening, five time zones away and via the magic of the internet, to the Mets play the Marlins at Shea Stadium this late afternoon as the sun sets down here over the fields of Warwickshire. It's a kick listening to WFAN again, especially to note the fatigued sarcasm and the resignation in the voices of the broadcasters echoing the print of the local sportswriters and the hair-pulling frustration of the fans on sports talk radio.

Whilst listening to the broadcast you experience the elucidation of the nuances of the Mets season as it dwindles away gratefully like a sharp pain gradually becoming a general numbness. In fact, by now, after eight grueling innings, you get the feeling that the Mets are a collective of sad sacks, losers, quitters and youth far too far over its head to ever see the surface again. Only the young third baseman, David Wright, who had a three run blast earlier in the game to make the score respectable even if the outcome seemed predestined to fate's cruel laughter, (and then later, a second blast) seems capable of escaping this incessantly grueling noise of clumsy disablement of the Mets as a 5-0 Marlin lead blossums into a 9-4 Marlin lead.

Surprisingly, as I flinched through chance after squandered chance listening, as I had spare time to stare out the window or doodle tiny exclamations points of Met malaise, I discovered, through patient calculation, that the Mets, despite their disasterous second half, are not even the worst collapsing second half team in baseball!

Indeed, if you calculate pre-Allstar game winning percentages against post-Allstar game winning percentages, the team which has plummeted the fastest and furthest since the break has been the Milwaukee Brewers.

It's admittedly a bit surprising given that one expects the Brewers to have been hovering around the same magical sub-.500 mark for oh, the last several decades or so, but not true. At the break, the Brewers were sitting at an unprecedented and heady 45-41 mark, better even than the Mets who had just come off their Yankee sweep.

But since then, the news has all been bad as the Brewers have gone 11-34 which gave them a lesser winning percentage of .273 since the break, far surpassing anything else the other teams could muster. Mediocrity is usually steady, as the Brewers have demonstrated over the years and such pendulum swings of momentum are usually reserved for teams who begin the season with more than a song and a prayer for a winning streak.

The Mets, to my surprise, were not even the second-worst team since the break. That award goes to the Cincinnati Reds, another team which carried a surprising winning record into the All Star game. They've dropped .193 percentage points since the break and even the Chicago White Sox have out-collapsed the Mets (well, equalled them anyway as both sit at .143 percentage points lower after the break.)

Then again, none of these teams are saddled with injury-prone misfits and chancrous, quitting personalities. Few of them are managed with the sort of ineptitude that Artless Howe embodies with great relish and fewer still were able to cobble together two of the dumbest and most desperate trades of the season simply to give the apperition of movement, even if that movement was irrevocably downward.

I could recite the litany of miscues, gaffes, hideous miscalculations and singular twists of apathy and irony working in tandem like a tag-team duo of doom and evil scowling at the shrieking ringside fans, but there is little point. Others have taken up that cry, others have begun pointing accusatory fingers and others have pilloried these collective anti-heroes with more and more vigor of late.

The Mets appear to need some sort of scrubbing and shower and delousing. And then, perhaps an entire rethinking of the philosophy that goes on behind the baffoonery that is Fred Wilpon and his incorrigible family's controlling interest in the team.

*****

I've not heard enough about how the Mariners seemingly last remaining star, Ichiro Suzuki (and boy how I love the ESPN website's phonetic explanation of his name as ee-chee-row suh-ZOO-key as though we are trying to tape together tiny shreds of an incomprehensible fortune cookie), with 214 hits and 30 games remaining so far this season, is fast closing in on George Sisler's MLB record of 257 hits in a season, set in 1920.

Sisler was no one trick pony, by the way. He hit .407 that year with a .447 OBP. More surprisingly, he hit 19 homers and drove in 122 runs and played in every one of the St Louis Browns' 154 games, 78 of which were losses. Not ONLY that, but during the course of his career, he pitched in 24 games and had a lifetime 2.35 ERA as a starter and a reliever. Let's see Ee-Chee-Row do that!

If he does indeed break Sisler's record, he would be breaking an 84 year old record which, as far as I can tell, must be one of the oldest single season batting records remaining. Well, not entirely. Good ole Sherry Magee has held the National League record for fewest hits by a batting champion since 1914. But then again, I don't think anyone's ee-chee-rowing to break that record.

*****

Nota Bene to the Red Sox Nation:

Instead of developing a rash contemplating the delectable possibility of overtaking the Evil Empire for first place and homefield advantage in the American League postseason, (admittedly, something that might begin to assuage the old scars of 1978 but only if someone like Mark Bellhorn hits a homer in the last game of the regular season to knock the Yankees from the playoffs)--they should be focused on winning the wild card since the last two World Champions have been wild cards.

And here's a crazy thought from the waaaaay back machine. Back in 1978, when Bucky Dent was busy plucking the heartstrings of the Red Sox Nation, the Baltimore Orioles selected a young eighteen-year old from Aberdeen Maryland named Cal Ripken, Jr. The high school senior played both pitcher and outfielder while hitting .492 and posting a 7-2 record on the mound with an astounding 0.70 ERA. (nicked from the archives of Baseball Almanac)

*****

Oh, and just in case the mystery of the outcome was going to gut you once and for all, the Mets lost today's game to the Marlins, 9-6, their 6th loss in a row and their 11th loss in their last 12 games. Ho hum.