Heir Jordan is here, my kingdom for a bat & Happy birthday, Pete ....
I keep asking this question, now that Mr. Spieth is halfway to the Grand Slam:
Who said there’d never be another great Jordan in sports?
I always love the NBA draft because there isn’t a bigger celebration for big losers anywhere in American sports.
Pete Rose doesn’t just make you angry now, he makes you sad.
The only thing that makes you mad is the notion that baseball should just let bygones be bygones about his gambling, or that there should officially be a separate annex to the National Baseball Hall of Fame for liars like him. Nobody is saying that the Mets should trade big young pitching to go get a bat.
Or make a deal that would compromise the team’s immediate future.
But in the eyes of their fans, the ones who want the summer to mean something at Citi Field, the future happens to be this summer.
The Mets came into Saturday’s game with the second-lowest team batting average in all of baseball.
Only two teams — the Phillies and the White Sox — have scored fewer runs than Terry Collins’ team.
They seem to play as many 2-1 games as the Rangers did during the NHL playoffs and have those gifted young pitchers working on the margin game after game after game. This isn’t coming from the place
Sandy Alderson called “Panic City” on Friday, it is coming from someone who wants the Mets to honor their pitching by making a playoff run in the month of September, because everything is better in baseball New York when both of our teams are in play.
This is a season when the Mets ought to be as good as the Yankees, or even better.
I can’t tell Alderson to go get this hitter or that hitter, because he knows who is really available, and what it will cost to get somebody, and I don’t.
He’s right when he says that things looked a lot differently before the seven-game losing streak that finally ended in Milwaukee.
But he also knows what his team’s record is, despite all the injuries, since the 11-game winning streak in April. The Okafor kid from Duke certainly looked giddy to be putting on that 76ers cap the other night.
Somebody joked the other day that apparently the Sixers plan to start five centers next season, on their way back to the lottery.
I’m already counting the days until home run No. 700 for our Alex. Finally today:
A happy 80th birthday to the great Pete Hamill, a giant of this city and of this business, and certainly of my own life, one that has been honored by his friendship since I first came to the city myself; and even started at this newspaper the same day Pete did.
If you know Pete Hamill only by his amazing body of work, his columns and his magazine pieces and wonderful books like “The Drinking Life” and “Snow in August” and “North River” and “Forever,” the mystery novels he wrote once about a character named Sam Briscoe, you are lucky enough.
But those of us who have been blessed with not only his friendship but his wisdom and generosity as well know that his work is just a part of who he is and what he has meant to us.
Pete has gotten knocked around some lately, because everybody who lives as long as Pete has, and even as well, gets knocked around eventually.
Somehow, though, he keeps coming, and keeps writing, with all the fight of the great fighters about whom he once wrote so beautifully.
He once began a column (one I have carried around for a long time), during the time of Vietnam, in an October a long time ago, that began this way:
“If this were another time, in another year, the column would be about the people I truly care for: “firemen….and bartenders and heavyweights, gamblers and cab drivers and night-hurt women in bad bars, all those bust-out poets I know, and streetwalkers and old lags with blue guitars…..”
The end of this column, today, is for Pete Hamill, about whom I truly care. Not a bust-out poet. Just a poet. I will sign off as he so often does, in notes and emails and in inscriptions to those amazing books:
Abrazos, Brother Pedro.
“Lupica” can be heard Monday through Friday at 1 p.m. and Sunday at 9 a.m. on ESPN 98.7.