Welcome Back!

Sometime during this afternoon's Mets Victory on Opening Day, El Guapo turned to me and said:

"Any interest in bringing back The Ballclub? I'm in if you are."

Truth be told, I'd been thinking about it a lot for the past few months.

Truth be told, there was no particularly good reason why I stopped in the first place.

I'd never really lost the itch to write about the Mets, or write in general. There wasn't any one reason why I'd stopped, unannounced. I had sort of felt that if I was ever going to close up shop here, I would have said so. Perhaps that's why I never said anything.

I guess at some point I'd felt I was getting away from what writing The Ballclub really was, at least for me, an avenue to vent some things, share some viewpoints, talk about history, spew some general BS and put Baseball in its absurd place in a generally absurd world. And if I couldn't do it to a degree I was happy with, then I'd stop.

When the Mets were going well, or at least contending, this was pretty easy. It got pretty depressing when they weren't.

Of course, that didn't mean I'd stopped watching, or going to games. I just stopped writing.

But at some point I started kicking around the idea of getting this thing started again. I don't remember exactly when it was, but it was this past offseason. The Mets aren't a good team. We know this. It's not a secret. And everything that's gone on off the field has been hashed and rehashed more than the corned beef at Dinty Moore's. But it boils down to the fact that it's just a game. We love this game. We love watching this game, and going to this game and rooting for a bunch of sweaty guys in uniforms. And many of us love writing about this game.

So, today I went to Opening Day, my 8th consecutive Opener. Oddly enough, I've been to every Opening Day at Citi Field, which sounds impressive until you remember, oh yeah, it's only the 4th Opening Day there. It was chilly, as Opening Day tends to be, and the game was pretty far from what I'd consider memorable, but anytime the Mets win, I'm satisfied. And El Guapo and I had our discussion about getting things going around here once again, and I was all for it. It seems a good time to do so. It's Opening Day. Johan Santana is back on the mound, for the first time since, more or less, I stopped writing here. It's not going to be a winning season around here, but at least we can have some fun with it.

Welcome Back to The Ballclub.