Monday, March 16, 2015

March Madness 2015

The best time of the year is here! College basketball may be suffering from a few seasons of a much less interesting product and also from an incredibly entertaining NBA that is enjoying a heyday like they did in the eighties, but that's a topic for a later post (hopefully as part of a tournament wrap-up). Today, we're not here to nitpick the college game's many obvious flaws or their possible solutions; we're here to revel in the release yesterday of this year's 68-team bracket and spend the better part of the next two days poring over matchups or mascots (if that's your style) for the office pools that involve roughly $9 BILLION of people's money. Before we dive into the various regions, let's ask a few more general questions, starting with the most obvious.

Friday, March 6, 2015

Spring Training Preview: New York Mets

Being a Mets fan is rough. I've been suffering since I was almost six years old, when my dad's good friend from college, Rob Karin, took me with his daughters to what I recall as this game at Shea Stadium (I distinctly recall Gooden pitching and Strawberry hitting one of of multiple Mets home runs, and I'm pretty sure it was against the Dodgers). I had always liked baseball, but that was the moment that I became a rabid fan of any team. This became difficult growing up in Alaska, because the Mets were rarely good enough for national television in the nineties, which meant that I subsisted on rigorous reading of the daily box scores in the Anchorage Daily News (which I delivered for two years) and whatever games were televised against the Braves and Cubs on TBS and WGN. Since my conversion, the Mets have rewarded me with...three playoff appearances in twenty-six years? And those three appearances ended with Kenny Rogers walking in the series-winning run against the hated Braves, an excruciating World Series loss to the crosstown Yankees in which three of the five games were decided by one run (and the other two by two runs)*, and Carlos Beltran getting frozen by an Adam Wainwright curve over the middle of the plate in the exact situation that literally every baseball-loving child dreams about (Game Seven, bottom of the ninth, bases loaded, full count)? Hold on while I pour myself a stiff drink.