A year is a long time in baseball. A year ago PECOTA projected the Royals to win 72 games. Clayton Kershaw was the best pitcher in baseball. Mike Trout was the best player in baseball. Okay, so maybe it’s not that long. At first glance, Noah Syndergaard, the young Met pitcher nicknamed “Thor,” didn’t change […]
Day: March 29, 2016
The Unbearable, Irrepressible Hope of Opening Day
If coming out to Opening Day is the purest and most exhilarating form of unsullied optimism, then I’ve mainlined raw, uncut Mets hope exactly twice in my life. The first was in 1993, when my father and I drove the two-plus hours from northeastern Pennsylvania into Queens … and I remember this day well because […]