Robbed of my usual Zeile

Lately I’ve been rather lax in my duty to poke fun at millionaires. After inconsiderable reflection (you know, like what the Wilpons engaged in before thumbing their noses at the second best young player in the game), I’ve determined two reasons for my recent lassitude. The first is that we’ve undoubtedly entered the lean winter of the offseason, as signaled each year by some poor sap offering Rey Ordonez money to do whatever it is he does now that he can’t hit or play defense. Like the groundhog seeing his shadow, Ordonez getting paid presages a long spell of tedium for baseball fans in which only bit part players will get signed to minor league deals. I’d rather have the six more weeks of winter, personally, but since I don’t have the influence with baseball executives that I deserve, we all have to take what we’re getting and act like we like it. That said, pardon me for not devoting a thousand words or so to Todd Zeile’s heroic homecoming. Maybe someone else can dig a story out of it; I don’t really care.

Even in this time of uncommon monotony, the Mets have provided me with something to write about. As you’ve likely read, we apparently either snuck a peek at Guerrero’s medical records without a note from the nurse’s office, or Duquette completely fabricated any knowledge about Vlad’s back so as to provide his bosses with a legitimate reason to do a very stupid thing.

And that brings me to my other reason for not writing. I enjoy cracking wise about idiot players as much as the next guy (in fact, probably a lot more than the next guy, because it takes a certain combination of obsession, passion, and lameness to write a blog which thankfully most people don’t have), but I’d rather not be compelled to frequently malign ownership and management. Not only are they easy targets as rich, old, and (importantly) slack-muscled men who presumably have more to do with their time than type “roger clemens overweight” into Google and somehow get to this site, but I’ve really been trying to suspend cynicism and trust that they know what they’re doing. That’s just plain difficult to do when they get caught looking like amateurs.

So I’m going to pass on the commentary for a little bit unless something interesting or at least not depressing comes up. The five of you who aren’t Kyle’s relatives (what’s up, Cousin Clyde? How’s the tooth?) might want to check out the Mets blogs on our sidebar if you haven’t already, as well as Pinto’s wonderful Baseball Musings blog. They always seem to have something to say, and even if they use a lot of numbers and acronyms that you don’t understand, take comfort in the fact that I couldn’t calculate a DIPS if the fate of the world and Sidney Ponson rested on my shoulders, and the only way I could get them off would be to calculate a DIPS. It is DIPS, right? I didn’t just make that up, did I?