Confusing Dreams With Reality

He looked good for an inning anyway.

Three batters, two strikeouts.

The following inning, a pair of doubles and a single made it 2-0 before he'd even gotten his first out. But he wriggled out with a K and a fortuitous double play.

By the third inning, which again started like the baseball version of a motorcycle ride through Chernobyl; walk the pitcher, surrender a double, walk Renteria, bases are juiced no outs, you may have begun worrying.

After all, many of us already knew it was all just a matter of time.

This game was being played in Atlanta, of course. And whilst last season it appeared the Mets franchise had put the long and painful history of humiliations to rest once and for all, it now appears the Pandora's Box of losing has been sprung open.

Ok, this isn't theatrics or hysterics class. It's one loss with two games to play. Yes, it's the 5th loss in 7 meetings, a discernable pattern, but it is not necessarily fate and hey, even if it is, who's to say the Mets can't win the NL East without beating the Braves?

And out came the coaching visit to the mound as we watched or listen to the indestructible myth of Jorge "Kaiser" Sosa eroding like the Mars ice caps.



What do you think they discussed?

The decentralisation of social systems in the post-Roman era? The writings of transcendentalist philosopher William Godwin? The haze and smell of wildfires in the dreadful Atlanta air?


Evidence of the lengths Atlanta will go to for a homefield advantage.

What they discussed, whilst they were having their little pow wow on the mound was how the hell Jorge Sosa was going to get out of this little mess and how Sosa shouldn't feel bad if he pitches like crap against his former teammates. After all, Rick Peterson seemed to mouth: Look at what Tom Glavine did after he left Atlanta for the first two or three years...

With that, Sosa could relax. Gracias a Dios, he seemed to think to himself. If Tom Glavine couldn't pitch his way out of a wet paperbag the first half dozen or dozen times he faced his former teammates, what hope did little Jorge Sosa have?!

So Sosa let Chipper get his RBI sac fly to Endy Chavez in left.

He let Brian McCann single another run in to make it a nice and comfortable 4-0 margin and then he walked Jeff Francoeur to load the bases with one out.

Maybe he was lonely and wanted another visit to the mound.

Or not. Andruw Jones was seduced into an inning-ending double play grounder; Reyes to Easley to Delgado and the inning was over far less disasterously than one might have imagined. A 4-0 was a hole but it was not an insurmountable hole.

That insurmountable hole was dug by Aaron Sele.

It was the bottom of the 6th and hell, the Mets were down 5-1 anyway and seemingly certain to go nowhere when Sele, who like Sosa, had a 1-2-3 first inning debut, started to what, I dunno, get lost in reflections of how he was a co-winner of the Tony Latham Memorial Award for player with the "most enthusiasm" in the Florida Instructional League in 1991?



In any event, any vestige of hope for a Mets victory quickly burnt up faster than the Cutty Sark after Sele surrendered a 3-run homer to Braves starting pitcher Kyle Davies.

And so this first game of the series ends, after the euphoria of the near-sweep of the Yankees, with a typical, perhaps even predictable, 8-1 loss to the Braves in Atlanta.

But not to worry.

Even the miserable Yankees, much like these Braves, were capable of beating the Almighty Red Sox in the first game of this most recent series between two bitter ribals.

The next day the universe returned to normal and they were pounded by the Saux, 7-3.

The question is whether a sign of the universe returning to normal is yet another Braves victory over the Mets or will it be the moment the Mets take the last two games of this series and shush up the NL East race for the season?

"It depends upon what the meaning of the word 'is' is. If 'is' means 'is and never has been' that's one thing - if it means 'there is none', that was a completely true statement,"