Not That I Want To Jinx It But...

If you haven't noticed, the Mets are actually playing pretty good baseball these days. I know, I'm shocked, too, but the numbers don't lie. New York has won six straight games and jumped to a high-water mark of nine games over .500 for the season, leaving them just a half-game behind Atlanta and three ahead of the suddenly listless Phillies, whose offense seems to have come back to Earth after two outrageously productive seasons. Meanwhilst, New York, which had an offense that decided to take the day off every time its ace was on the mound, has suddenly been pounding the ball, including last night when the Amazins strung together four straight doubles in a five-run third inning of their 8-4 win over Cleveland, the first time they had turned that trick since matching the feat against the Dodgers on July 21, 1991.

Of course, while it is obviously exciting for Mets fans -- after all, the team is a Major-League best 17-5 since May 21st -- it has to be kept in at least some perspective. In this case, five straight wins, albeit on the road, against the Orioles (one of which I attended in Baltimore) and Indians, two of the worst teams in baseball, should be seen as less of an achievement than taking care of business. You can't blame the teams on your schedule, but at the same time, to be a contender you have to beat the teams you're supposed to beat. Right now, the Mets are doing just that, and with the bats and the rotation flourishing -- the starters are 16-3 with a 2.61 ERA in the last 27 games -- they are making quite a charge at contention.

The only question now is staying there, and while manager Jerry Manuel might be ludicrously putting his faith in Hisanori Takahashi and R.A. Dickey, Buster Olney is reporting that upper management isn't quite so optimistic. And thank goodness for that. After frustrating fans with their refusal to go after a potential big fish at the trading deadline, the Mets, as one of the few buyers on the market, are poised to bolster their starting rotation with some huge addition along the lines of Roy Oswalt, Ben Sheets or Cliff Lee. And all signs seem to imply that the Mets are going to get one of them.

And at that point, who knows what could happen.

It's foolish to start fitting the players for rings just yet, obviously, and this has been a notoriously streaky team for most of this year, but if the offense can keep the Mets hot into September, well, a top three of Johan Santana, Mike Pelfrey and, say, Roy Oswalt, in that stadium, would be awfully nasty to go up against in a short series. Now, many sources are reporting that with concerns about the cost of his contract, Oswalt would be a less likely target than Lee or Sheets, but the Mets can handle the cost and taking all those dollars off Drayton McLane's books might mean surrendering less in the way of prospects, whereas Seattle might require John Niese's future to make the pieces fit for Lee, who is more than likely to test the free agent market this winter. Oswalt could be guaranteed to pitch at Citi through 2012.

Ben Sheets is a solid option, also, but either way, the Mets are at an exciting juncture of the season, and after last year's nightmare 70-92 campaign, you'll have to excuse us if we're getting bold enough to dream.

And here I thought the most outlandish dreams I was having these days was a deep run for the U.S. in South Africa. After Saturday's 1-1 tie against the Brits in the opening round, which I attempted to watch among the monstrous hordes at Dupont Circle this weekend, a win tomorrow against Slovenia could nearly assure the Yanks of getting through to the knockout stage.

Of course, Slovenia can't be underrated. After the Swiss turned the tournament upside down yesterday with an upset of Spain, it's clear any team can win any game, but the U.S. should be considered the favorite, and amidst signs that soccer fever just might be catching on around here, the buzz generated by a second-round berth could be pretty fun to see for football fans like myself.

It should also be noted that the with Argentina's 4-1 win this morning over South Korea, the scoring may finally be opening up in South Africa. While South Korea may be stinging from a brutal loss that could all but end its hopes of advancing to the knockout stage, at least the Taeguk Warriors can take solace in the fact that unlike some less fortuitous sabre-rattling neighbors, they can actually send their own fans to the tournament. It's not over and stranger things have happened in the World Cup, but South Korea seems unlikely to recover either in points or in goal differential. Then again, it's still early in the group stage. Who knows how it will all wind up.

As far as that other football is concerned, I've spent the last week sifting through the implications of what was nearly the destruction of the college football landscape as we know it, but instead is just a few moves that still leaves the shaky Big XII in tact with 10 teams while the Big Ten added Nebraska to give them 12.

Yep. Strange.

I don't know that I've gotten used to considering Nebraska a Big Ten team just yet, but I'm awfully curious to see if the schedules for the next three seasons that will now be thrown out put a wrinkle into my plans to see Northwestern visit BC in September of 2011. An impact on non-conference games seems unlikely, but the implementation of divisions will turn the typical Big Ten schedule unrecognizably upside down. I'm awfully curious to see how it all winds up.

Lastly, I've made note of how bizarre it is to see Giants Stadium disappearing piece by piece before, but as it stands -- or doesn't stand -- this morning, the final part of the building is ready to collapse, and the Giants and Jets have already begun practicing in their brand-spankin' new facilities, with disastrous results in some cases. Either way, while the new stadium is no doubt going to be beautiful, it will still seem eerie the first time I'm back in East Rutherford. Of course if they win, I won't really mind.

And now, back to the most exciting sport there is. Open wide, people.

Defecating Publicly On Persistence Of Memory

Yeah, I know. That's a pretty vulgar title, and certainly a number of you are displeased and perhaps confused as to why I'm making that the title to this entry. I rather enjoy the work of Salvador Dali and spent most of college with a poster of "Soft Watch At The Moment of First Explosion" over my desk, but ruining an artistic masterpiece in such a foul manner is pretty much the only way I can accurately describe what the NCAA is apparently planning to do. Reports came out yesterday that Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delaney believes an expansion of the NCAA Tournament to 96 teams is "probable".

The issue will not be determined until the NCAA board gathers to vote on the matter on April 29th, but the thought of altering what, to this point, has been possibly the most intrinsically perfect of American sporting events is wholly unpalatable to just about everyone who watches college basketball, with the exception of coaches and college presidents. And why would they bother expanding the tournament field from 65 to 96 teams? Well, you don't have to be an Ivy Leaguer to figure that one out.

Money. Duh.

This summer the NCAA has the option to opt out and renegotiate its television contract with CBS, and with 30 more games potentially on the docket, that contract becomes a whole lot more valuable. For the coaches perspective, being the skip for a lower-level college team that can now make the dance allows you to burnish your laurels a little more than an NIT berth would, and as for the big program coaches, soft first-round matchups lend the prestige of saying you've made it to the second or third round more often than you used to.

Of course, if these seem like particularly material or vain reasons to expand what is, theoretically, a purely scholastic event about the love of sport, that's because, well, it is. Now I'm not naive. I know this event stopped being about pure competition long ago. Now fortunately, the NCAA is unlikely to pull an Avery Brundage and continue to insist that Division I college sports are all about the love of the game when they clearly aren't. It acknowledges that the bottom line rules here.

And while money is clearly the governing factor, and the likely reason that this will almost certainly happen, it's not ridiculous to express frustration over what will change the greatest weekend in sports. And I'm not the only one who's doing it. The first two rounds of March Madness are a phenomenal show, and every sports fan is so well versed that they can reel off the automatic seed pairings -- 12 vs. 5, 11 vs. 6, 14 vs. 3 -- out of second nature. Two proposals I've read have either the first round expanding to four brackets of 24 teams each or, even worse, the top 32 teams in the country getting a bye to the second round.

The top thirty-two teams!

Hell, we only rank the top 25 during the course of the season. Why should an unranked team with eight losses get a day off? Moreover, if a 16 seed has never beaten a 1 and a 15 has only knocked off a 2 a handful of times, what chance does a 24 seed have of taking out a 1 seed in the opening round? All this does is create dozens of games that will be uncompetitive blowouts or give a day of rest to a team that didn't deserve it. The only upside I could see to this would be if the NCAA decided to share some of the profits with the players of those sacrificial lambs of mid-major schools that are being put out to slaughter, and I'm not the only person to think the idea of paying the athletes has merit. But if you think the NCAA would ever pool money to be distributed among the athletes of its revenue sports, you probably also think expanding this tournament is a good idea in the first place.


What's more, expanding the bracket to 96 teams would cheapen the accomplishment of dancing for smaller schools or throw in bigger programs on off years. I don't need to see this year's UNC freshman-palooza in the tournament, and as an alum of a school that has never made the NCAA Tournament -- and breaks my heart in its failure to reach it year after year -- seeing Northwestern finally break the field because the tourney became more inclusive would feel less like an achievement and more like condescension. I don't want my school's first berth to be gift-wrapped. I want the Wildcats to earn it.

Remarkably enough, Northwestern coach Bill Carmody, who could become a hero in Evanston if the Cats finally get an invite to the ball, is also against expansion.

In the end, fighting the inevitable is pointless, particularly since we will continue watching next year and filling out our brackets like the slaves we are. But perhaps just once, it might be nice if the NCAA listened.

As for the tournament still going on, Saturday's Final Four could be wholly uninteresting if Duke makes its way to a championship, which Vegas has them pegged to do, but I'm still holding out hope that West Virginia can save us from the most reviled school in college basketball winning its first title in nine years.

In other news, another team that went nine years without a championship has officially lost a major part of its history, as the demolition of the original Yankee Stadium is nearly complete. The last parts of the upper deck were torn down yesterday as you can see in pictures here and in the video below.



Color me sentimental, particularly considering I'm a Mets fan, but even I think its odd to see those walls come down. And the one show of the hollowed out old Yankee Stadium next to the new one is just a bizarre site to behold. It still makes me feel strange to know that in just six months, Shea Stadium, Yankee Stadium (I) and Giants Stadium will all be figments of my imagination rather than physical structures (On a side note, the NFL announced yesterday that the new Meadowlands Stadium will be opened by a preseason Giants-Jets game on August 16th. The Jets will be home.).

Yankee Stadium is expected to be replaced by parkland that was lost when the new stadium was built, but the idea of taking your kids to use the swings where Babe Ruth honed his craft is at times awesome and at times, well, strange. At least for me. My kids will never understand it.

On a final note, one that is happier than the rest of this post, I'm pleased to announce that Team No. 32 is officially on the docket, and that lucky team is going to be the Atlanta Braves. I've never been to Atlanta and not gone outside of the airport, so I think a stop at the Coca-Cola factory might be necessary, but the big occasion will of course be seeing the Mets visit their division rivals on May 17th and 18th at Turner Field. I don't have tickets yet, but I'm not anticipating that being a problem and my flight is booked.

My college roommate Sam, an Atlanta native, is likely to be among my companions to the ballpark, and upon hearing that I was a Mets fan, his father thanked me for paying for Tom Glavine's retirement. Sam repeated this mantra throughout college.

I wholly expect to hear it again. And I'm awfully excited about it.

In Which The Devils Shock Just About Everybody

I was planning on spending most of this entry talking about a number of different things, including the preview I wrote for tonight's Blackhawks-Coyotes game. But last night that became only the second-most important item of hockey news this week.

Yeah. I know.

Most of you don't watch or care about hockey, which, frankly, you should. But whether or not you watch it doesn't change the fact that the Devils acquired Ilya Kovalchuk for the stretch run last night. Any way you want to cut it, New Jersey, rather uncharacteristically, threw the power structure of the Eastern Conference completely out of whack last night. Washington and Pittsburgh still have to be considered the elite teams that a trip to the Stanley Cup Finals runs through, but the Devils have thrust themselves into that discussion.

Kovalchuk, who has scored 50 goals in a season twice, something no Devil has ever done, adds a dynamic force the likes of which New Jersey has never had on offense, and with him and Zach Parise winging on the top line, and the Devils featuring the eternal Martin Broduer in net, suddenly this team is a balanced force to be reckoned with.

And personally, this excites me tremendously because I will be seeing Kovalchuk's third game with New Jersey on Monday in Philadelphia, and lo and behold, the tickets to Team No. 31 have arrived.

I know, going to the most evil sports city in America wearing the other team's colors in a sport typified by bruising play and violence may seem even dumber than completely ruining one of America's most historically cherished and popular boardgames. And no one would be stupid enough to do that. But I hardly think I'll be putting my life in my hands, and now that the Devils have made a move to truly throw them into the Stanley Cup discussion, I'm even more excited to make the trip.

After all, the Devils may not draw as well as some teams, but unlike a certain baseball team I follow, at least the Devils don't unnecessarily remind you of past heartache for no reason whatsoever.

In other news, the NFL released the logo for Super Bowl XLV, to be held next year in North Texas. It's a little too monolithic for my taste, but I ought to get used to it because rumor has it every Super Bowl logo will look like this going forward, with the only changes being the number and the stadium in the background.

The Super Bowl will never be held in Green Bay, so they won't have to worry about putting Lambeau Field in the background, but you all might want to take a second glance at my story on the Packers, which I updated earlier this week after coming across photos I completely forgot I had taken. The words are all the same, but new pictures abound so go take a look.

Finally, on a personal note -- and not the kind of personal note that involves sending a giant talking sausage to show your love on Valentine's Day -- the destruction of Giants Stadium has begun, and while I don't have the same emotional connection to this building that I do for Shea Stadium, it is still a place I have made countless memories. The building will certainly be an upgrade, but seeing pictures of the Giants' home torn down is still another reminder that my childhood is now long gone.

It's a maudlin thing to watch, but we all move on. And on the plus side, I now have a new stadium to see this fall that won't require a particularly long trip. I only wish the Giants could have given it a more proper sendoff.

Super Bowl XLIV is but two days away. My incorrect prediction is coming. Until then, enjoy your Friday, everyone.