Go time for the Mets

In many ways this year’s Mets team has overacheived more than last season’s pennant winners. In the middle of August, when they lost the first two games of a series in San Francisco, they were buried in the divisional standings and had four teams ahead of them in the wild card standings.

Then the improbably happened.  With 3/5 of their vaunted pitching staff injured and a lineup with as much punch as the 1969 Seattle Pilots they turned it around, playing .600 baseball for the remaining six weeks and clinching the top wild card spot the day before the season ended.

Tonight they will face the even-year, fru-fru, techie-infused San Francisco Giants in a one game do or die contest. This is baseball’s answer to the tedium that is perpetual pitching changes, interminable booth review delays, and batters that take 5 minutes to adjust their sanitary cups. This is the wildcard game, or as I refer to it, The Gimmick Game.

You can’t even brag about winning it, crapshoot that it is, and at least in the Mets case, I can’t feel too bad about losing it.  Let’s face it folks, this team can only go so far with this rag tag bunch.

But how sweet it would be to beat the hated Giants with redneck Bumgarner on the mound and send all of their front-running fans home crying.  Is that too negative?  Who cares?

GO METS