Last month I turned 50 years old.  (December 14 to be precise – exactly 10 years after Bill Buckner and exactly 10 years before Craig Biggio.)    I suspect that unless somebody wants to own up to it, I am probably the oldest person commenting on AA.  (Myrick4gm would have to be about 40 by my calculations; so far, no one else has admitted to be in sniffing distance.) 

Sorry if you’re expecting a whiny middle aged guy, but that’s not me – at least the whiny part.  From my point of view, I was born and raised at the right time.  (the one exception:  my older sister and brother once went to see a game at Ebbetts Field when they were young; by the time I came around, the Dodgers had already been in LA for two years.) 

I have had the privilege to watch and remember the Mets for almost all of their existence except for the Stengel era through 1968, although I suspect I saw some games that were not in my conscious memory.  I have seen players from Seaver to Santana, prospects and suspects, world champions and cellar dwellers.  I heard the calls form Nelson, Murphy, Kiner, McCarver, Cohen and Rose.  (Actually, I was at Columbia for a year and a half in the 70s and heard Gary Cohen call Columbia basketball games on WKCR.) 

I joined AA last summer through the Yahoo! link and have stayed with it.  Admittedly, I don’t comment as much as a lot of you, mainly because I actually do have a life, in the form of a wife and twins.  The sabermetrics I got in general; I had read the Bill James Abstracts in the 80s.  Of course, that was crude compared to current methods, and I am the first to admit I have catching up to do.  For example, he was still using Runs Created (when did that go out of style?), and a revolutionary pitching stat was simply calculating how much run support each starter got.  But I also enjoyed the commentary on AA, whether from posts, articles or just the game threads.  Congrats all around.

I guess the there are two main points to this post, both of which are centered around perspective.  First, while I hope to post more in the future (as time allows), don’t expect me to be saying anything about WAR, UZR, OPS+ or any of that.  I suspect anything I write will be about my memories of times past which will hopefully help in understanding the present.  Second, I’d like to offer the concept of perspective in general to you, my fellow Mets fans.  There are lots of things worse than being a Mets fans; you could be a Cubs fan.  We are not jinxed; in fact, I have seen miracles first hand.  (I still remember the neighborhood bar I passed on my school bus route in 1973; the marquee simply read “God is a Mets fan.”)  While I can’t guarantee success, there is no reason to believe you will not see another World Championship in Flushing.  Until then, keep the faith, and still enjoy it even when things aren’t going well.  It’s never as bas as you think it is.  Oh, and one last thing:  YOU KIDS GET THE HELL OFF MY LAWN!!!