"It's Mother's Day today at Shea, so to all you mothers out there, Happy Birthday."

There is no better way to start something, a post, a sermon, a suicide note, whathaveyou, then with a quote or paraphrase from Ralph Kiner.

Not Ralph Kiner but also, nobody's mother.

In honor of mothers everywhere, I present the "Mother of all game recaps."
First game. It was all about the Carlos. The Mets pitching was nothing to write home about. They won handily.

Second game. Keith was very vocal, expressing his love for Metsblog and Xavier Nady. Most interestingly, as revealed in the SNY broadcast's Ask the Booth feature, Keith says as a player he never read a book during the downtime between double headers, because it would ruin his focus, presumably on the baseball. Unlike Budweiser and cigarettes.

The Muncher started the second game in typical fashion (high pitches, no ability to put hitters away) except he HAD NO MOUTHPIECE!! Why did no one notice he had no 'piece? He just doesn't seem to know how to pitch yet. We should ease up on Pelf since it is only his third season in professional ball, and by the third inning, he had settled down enough to record a 1-2-3 inning. By the fourth, of course, Pelf had thrown 400 pitches, though throughout the game he was a victim of dinks dropping in between the infield and outfield.

Although they've scored 24 runs in their last two outings, the Mets awfulfense is still not picking up runs when it can which, I'm told, is the key to winning at the baseball game. With bases loaded in the second inning after a gift error from the Reds, newly activated HEAD! struck out embarrassingly. Third inning, Wright comes up with Reyes on third and 1 out against human joke Bronson Arroyo and ex-Met hero Keppenger can't handle the ball at short. Kep must've been livid after that bobble, since he probably hates the Mets franchise as much as some Met fan boys love him; of course he was in the middle of a 5 for 5 night. Then Wright was inexplicably gunned down at the plate on a Beltran double to the wall, after bearing down on the Reds plate-blocking catcher with all the grit of a princess on the way to the ball.

Later after the game got out of hand, and long after I had turned my attentions to the NBA playoffs/napping, Willie trots out Billy "I don't do non-save situations" Wagner for some walking, dueling Wright and Delgado errors, followed by some gatorade cooler abuse. If the guy doesn't want to come in in non-save situations at this point in his tenure with the Mets, then I really don't see the point of "getting him some work" since he almost always sucks in these situations, added to the new possibility that he'll hurt himself punching a cooler.

One step forward, one step back. How they gonna catch the Marlins (in terms of world series, the most successful franchise in the NL East by the way) by treading a couple games over .500?