Après Shreve, le déluge

Or as they used to say back in l'ancien régime, Spahn, Sain, and a day of rain.  ("German, Gray, and let the heavens spray"?)

I am ready to do a rain dance for tonight if Duque calls for it.  I have zero problem with taking a day off before we head to the Bastille in Tampa, rather than facing the Mets' hottest pitcher in over thirty years.  Who knows if he'll even be with the Mets, when it comes time for the off-day make-up game?

I suspect he will, though, despite all the rumors about him going somewhere, even the Yankees.  Never gonna happen, because this is the Wilpons' prevailing model for running their team:  keep it functioning just well enough to keep the money pouring in.

And who's to say it ain't working?  Even in this rancid dog of a year for Mets fans, almost 1.5 mill have already passed through the Piazza Metropolitana out in Flushing, or more than 29,000 a game.  Hope springs as eternal as an oil-streaked lottery ticket bought at a grubby desert gas station out in Queens, and the Wilponi will do nothing to quash it.

But also, who is to say the Mets SHOULD trade Legroom and Cinderella to the Yankees, or anyone else?

Hasn't this Yankees season proven that acquiring good young starting pitchers is the hardest thing to do?  If you've already got them, why get rid of them in order to "rebuild"?

The Yankees and Mets don't need to trade.  They need to merge.

Beyond that, the Metsies are, as usual, an object lesson in why depth matters.

Yes, the team has epic bad luck.  Probably the worst luck in baseball, over the years.  But as a great man once said, "Luck is the residue of design."

The Mets' season was all set up to go really well...if everybody played up to their potential, and no one got hurt.  That's been known to happen in baseball, once in a blue moon or so.

The Yankees, meanwhile, have seen their brilliant young catcher completely implode, their starting first baseman go do down with a devastating injury, their stud outfield slugger hit .205 on the road, their number five pitcher go down for the season, their number three pitcher's head explode, and assorted other migraines, concussions, and under-achievements.  And we're not even talking about whatever the hell's going on with Ellsbury.

The result?  They still have one of the best records in baseball, due to built-in redundancy.  The Mets never do, mostly because they are a front for a real-estate racket.