Back in the winter, when the Mets announced Nas would do a postgame concert after a game in July, I decided that if I went to Citi Field just once this year, a distinct possibility, it would be that one.
David Wright
Look closer: Images from Mets Kids Shop, disastrous doubleheader
They seem to have specialty shops of every kind at the shopping mall surrounding the diamond at Citi Field. For example, I’ll bet you never knew there was a Mets Kids Store at Citi. Or maybe you did, but I sure didn’t — at least until my good friend Mike, a devoted Mets fan, had his first daughter three days before my first trip of the year to Citi Field.
It’s the pitching, stupid: Nathan’s injury reiterates no hurler is safe
There’s always this stunned feeling when you hear about a solid performer like Joe Nathan going down with a terrible injury, but it’s just one more reminder that there is no pitcher not constantly at risk of injury.
New helmet to protect players from pitches thrown at ‘ludicrous speed’
After taking a Matt Cain fastball to the head that put him on the disabled list for the first time in his career, David Wright returned to action against the Rockies on Tuesday with a new helmet that supposedly would protect his head better from fastballs.
And which made him look like Dark Helmet from Spaceballs.
I noticed it immediately, and then the Mets announcers echoed the observation a few innings later. This thing is enormous! Wright joked that everyone on both teams were laughing at him, but I mean, they were. Has David Wright’s helmet truly gone from suck to blow?
Listen, we’re all about safety here. A 97-mph fastball to the head could have killed Wright, and players need all the protection they can get.
But here’s the thing, to perform well in sports, you have to feel cool. And to feel cool, you have to look cool. Don’t believe me? Ask Redskins running back Clinton Portis, when he was fined by the NFL for wearing, of all things, red socks:
If you’re not looking sweet, you really can’t play too sweet.
Thank you, Clinton. So I would implore the good people at Rawlings to get their act together here. Surely you can make an effective helmet that doesn’t look like my dude is wearing a VW Bug on his head. I mean, this is going to be mandatory in the Minors next year. We can’t have all these prospects falling over because their heads are suddenly too big for their bodies.
Until then though, we need Wright to keep using this monstrosity. His head’s just too valuable to have goons like Cain scrambling his brains. In other words…
We can’t stop! It’s too dangerous!
Final Destination? Fate – with assist from WBC — has it in for the Mets
Never have I seen a team as cursed as this year’s Mets. Don’t get me wrong, they’ve brought it on themselves in certain ways, and GM Omar Minaya’s press conference where he called out a reporter will go down as one of the most notorious moments in New York sports history.
But it’s simply incredible to see a team completely decimated this way by injuries. It’s sad to see during the first season at a new stadium. They’re resembling the early-90’s version of this team in terms of the product they put on the field, but those teams weren’t ravaged by injuries as much as what we see here.
It’s almost like the movie Final Destination, where some sort of bad karma is picking off the Mets one by one. I’m not quite sure what they did to deserve this – Minaya’s conference came after the majority of these injuries – but God help me if I ever do the same.
To recap the grim details, here are the various appendages that have malfunctioned: