All That and Chile Miners Too!

It’s getting more difficult to focus. Definitely. There are a lot of things happening worthy of some commentary, that’s for sure, Brett Favre’s, um, sticky situation, the Mets hiring a GM, the Yankees looking a little vulnerable (though the Twins folded nicely, bent, folded and mutilated even). My favorite team (and God only knows why), the Mets, are starting over, hiring a GM who’ll run the show. The football Giants have been looking good lately and the baseball Giants are, like the Yankees, looking vulnerable, for totally different reasons. My adopted team this year, the Texas Rangers (they’re easy to like if you forget about George Bush and who’s more eminently forgettable), finally put away the Rays in a ridiculous series that featured great performances by the “away” team in the home park. Even the Knicks and Nets are beginning to become print-worthy.

I’m so tempted to just come out and say that Brett Favre is a pig, evil incarnate, one hell of a quarterback, if you don’t count all those turnovers. And then, what a surprise, a 41 year old guy has tendinitis! Bummer. The Vikings would be a pretty good team otherwise. But I can’t really come down on him until it’s clear whether he really took a picture of his privates and sent it out as a text message to his latest, um, amour? Anyway, I never liked Favre so anything I said would be just piling on.

As for the Mets, one burning question keeps coming to me. And that is, “Where did it all go wrong, Omar?” We were looking so good for a while back in ’06 and then we folded in ’07 and ’08, and then we really fixed all the problems in ’09 only to have the most ridiculously horrible streak of bad luck and injuries ever to befall a major league club. Things were never the same after that. The Wilpons closed the checkbook after Jason Bay and Oliver Perez. 2010 was a little interesting early before the team just folded up its tent right before the mid-season and right through the mid-term break.

To my mind, Omar is just unlucky. They say you make your own breaks, and there’s some truth to that, but really, he’s got that Mr Mxtplyk (from Superman) hanging over his head. I mean, could anyone have figured Ollie Perez would so utterly fail? Well, maybe. But still, he was Pavano-bad and worse, if just because he kept showing up, like a bad apple, a really rotten one, to the core, as they say. And then there was Jason Bay. If Bay hadn’t run into that wall, he would have been boo-ed out of the stadium when the Mets returned to CitiField. He was that bad.

It was right around then, I figure, that the Wilpons decided not to send good money after bad and let Minaya play out the season with what he already had, which was, sadly, not nearly enough. It’ll be a different GM and manager who reap the benefits of R.A. Dickey and Ike Davis, Josh Thole and that nifty second baseman. And that’s a shame, because there was a lot to like about the Mets before their tailspin. An acquisition then would have made a big difference. But it is what it is, or was what it was, I guess.

Jerry Manuel will be missed for sure. That he couldn’t make a third or fourth place team finish first is no reflection on him. He was funny, wise, ironic, and totally in the game mentally, almost too much at times. But you can’t hold that against him. He won as many games as he lost. And managers do win and lose games for sure, just as much as bad umpires if not more, although that’s hard to imagine. To me, 2010 was the year of the bad umpires, even more than it was the year of pitching.

Omar will be missed too, by me at least. Omar was a very personable guy, and if not for his road-rage-like tirade against a New York reporter, you could say the guy never made a mistake in that respect. Omar’s clubs played exciting ball almost all the time. Too often, that excitement kind of petered out in the really big games. That will ultimately be his legacy but not to this guy. As I said, the man was just unlucky. I’ll look forward to the new administration. I can’t imagine that they’ll be more likeable though than what we had.

The Twins stink in the post-season. ‘Nuff said. That the Yankees beat them means nothing. The Twins never had a post-season game they couldn’t lose. Without getting into cases, the Twins never faced a Yankee they could look in the eye. Every Yankee pitcher and every player in pin-stripes became a superhero. It was disgusting to watch.

But let’s review. There is Sabathia looking a little worn, a Pettite who pitched one good game, a young guy in Hughes who may get rattled in a big one, and a psycho-Burnette who’ll maybe be bad and maybe be good. If pitching wins post-season games, if that’s true, then the Yankees are in big trouble. They might finish off the Rangers, who were a little too happy after their win over the Rays to suit me, but even that’s pretty questionable. The Rangers match up pretty well with the Yankees position for position. They have pitching too, and not just Cliff Lee. C.J. Wilson, Tommy Hunter, Colby Lewis, they’re not too shabby. If you match 1-2-3-4 vs 1-2-3-4, closer vs. closer, setup guy vs. setup guy, the Rangers should be more than competitive.

We’ll see if the Yanks are the best team money can buy. The Phils and Rangers spent some too.

The Giants and Jets…..what can you say? Both teams are playing great football. The Giants do have an offensive line, even without Sean O’Hara. The Jets do have a secondary, even without Darrelle Revis.

All of that and Chilean miners too, life is good.