Thursday mishmash

Sometime in the past couple of days, I realized my last entry here was after the first game of the winning streak.  It's not that I have nothing to say when things are going well (really!).  It's just that the whole black uni thing--which I'll get to more later--has kept me busy commenting on other sites, I kinda make it a point to not add posts over the weekend just because, and the Mrs. fell ill (she's fine now).  All that said, let me play some catch-up.

TOPIC #1:  The winning streak.  It certainly beats a losing streak, and maybe this season will get back to where I expected from the start, but I'm just not jazzed as I would expect to be when the Mets go on a tear like this.

The biggest problem is that in case anyone's forgotten, we're still only a half-game out of last place with the victory last night, only "up to" a record of11-13, and 5 games out of first with a few days left to go in April.  Shoot, even solely on the matter of 2011 streaks, they have to win tonight just to make it even.

It'll be a little while before I'm convinced this isn't just an anomaly rooted in the combination of inconsistency and chance and the team won't turn around and lose 5 in a row all the same.  Yeah, it's great that the starting pitching is showing something and the bullpen appears to be settling in.  I'm glad Murph is making the most of his time and Bay is back and looking like the guy we signed two offseasons ago.  The recent talk about this team manning up and saying "Enough is enough" warms my heart.  However, one good week on the heels of an equally bad week just isn't enough to sell me just yet.  Win 3 out of every 5 during the first couple of weeks of May, and then maybe I'll let my guard down.

TOPIC #2: The damned black.  If you're reading this, it's probably a safe bet you've already read everything I've had to say about this elsewhere.  I'm a firm supporter of the "Ditch The Black" movement which implores the team to go back to the color scheme it had from the franchise's inception up until it leaped into the late 1990s fad known to us uniform geeks as the Black Plague.  The Butt-Ugly Hybrid Look (tm), seen in my last entry and comprised of the home whites, two-tone caps, and--for some reason known only to God and Charlie Samuels--black sleeves, belts, and socks is just a train wreck.  A jumbled mess.  Or, to borrow LI Phil's word (scroll up a little on the earlier UniWatchBlog link), a "clusterf@*%."  It looks like they got dressed in the dark.  They should've never even tried that look once, much less made it a standard.

The black jerseys, I've always begrudgingly been able to live with after my initial reaction of "WTF?" 13 years ago.  For the same reasons I own a couple of Celine Dion CDs, I own a couple of black Mets jerseys: it seemed like a good idea at the time.  That said, the team wearing the blasted things EVERY SINGLE DAY has just been annoying.  It's as if the team has gone out of its way to prove that even amid a 6-game winning streak, they've simply GOT to give me SOMETHING about which to grumble.  The Celine Dion CDs now sit in the entertainment center collecting dust (only one song comes to mind as standing the test of time; probably because it was already a decade old when Ms. Dion got her hands on it).  So should the Mets black-tainted wardrobe.

A cloudier issue is the mere concept of "riding the hot uniform."  For one thing, that's not what the Mets did.  The win streak started with the Butt-Ugly Hybrid Look (tm), then they switched to the black tops the next night.  Somehow, that ended up making the black jerseys the lucky ones (I'm somewhat thankful given the choice), and we haven't seen another one since.  The whole thing raises questions, like "After 6 wins in a row, do the black alts get a mulligan?"  If they lose tonight, will it just be considered a hiccup and we'll end up seeing the Men In Black again on Friday?  And if they do switch to greys on Friday, do they then go back to black on Saturday if they lose?  And what happens on the home stand next week?  I really, REEEAAAALLLY hope that this streak will be the end of it and they don't adopt a "wear it 'till it loses" policy the rest of the season (well, unless they go on a 138-game winning streak in pinstripes and blue caps, which of course would be totally cool).