The Final Indignity

The 2006 season ended in a blink. An instant that was beautifully depressing and sad, and at the same time filled all of us with a great sense of pride and hope for the future.

The 2007 season ended with a sputtering flameout, that was neither prideful nor hopeful, nor gave us any sort of sense that this team was going anywhere in the near future. I showed up to a rollicking House Party at noon, and by 4:45pm, I was leaving a Morgue.

Last month, I listed the 5 worst games I had ever attended. Well, bump them all down, there's a new king.

Perhaps, coming into today's game, we could have some sort of a sense of optimism, following the thrashing on Saturday, and the Phillies going down quietly to Washington. And it certainly seemed optimistic at the outset. But let's face it. This game was over by the National Anthem. Tom Glavine did an outstanding job today. He did an outstanding job of undoing every ounce of Good Will he had built up in his 5 seasons with the Mets by coming out and completely shitting the bed in a fashion that was beyond humiliating. How a Hall of Fame pitcher can come out and completely yak like he did is simply baffling. It was a perfectly miserable bookend to his Mets career, where he successfully managed to get totally blasted in front of a full house in both his first and last Mets starts.

Why, it's a microcosm of this entire season. Simply baffling. It defies belief, description or explanation, which is what none of us have right now, and which this organization certainly has quite a lot to do. It was as if yesterday was the anomaly, and the rest of the past two weeks were the reality of this team. And I said it a few days ago. Lifeless, heartless, and now going home for the winter, where I hope they sit for a long time and think about what they've done. We are now hung with this scarlet letter over our heads for the rest of our lives; this horrible indignity that we have suffered. Not to take anything away from the Phillies. They earned it and they deserve it. They did absolutely everything they needed to do in order to win this thing, and we didn't. We stood there and handed it to them. Congratulations to them.

Whatever anyone has to say, any players, Willie, Omar, Freddie or his idiot manchild Boy-King have to say, I'm not interested. I want my playoff refund as soon as possible, and I am taking the tickets, putting them with today's scorecard and putting them away, in the back of my closet, so that someday I can find them and remember this day, and how we must never be embarrassed like this again.