A pleasant good afternoon, everyone! The Mets are back and so is This Week in SNY. Our buddies in the booth give us plenty of material to work with throughout the season and TWISNY is ready to recap all of it. It looks like it should be a great season for the Mets but even if everything doesn’t go exactly to plan for the team, we know Gary, Keith, Ronnie, and Steve will be on top of their game.

Before we begin with the opening week action, TWISNY would not be doing its duty without sharing that Gary, Keith, and Ron now have an official Instagram account! It’s incredible and it went live five weeks ago with this absolute gem of a Keith photo:

The GKR Instagram account has already posted 25 times in a little over a month and there is plenty of great material to pull from. There’s a picture of Keith working out with a giant tire, Ronnie’s grandson RDIII, and Gare touching up his makeup before a broadcast. We could probably feature five separate Keith photos in this one edition. With this in mind, TWISNY will devote a spot to the GKR Instagram with a weekly feature that we’re going to call “TWISNY Social Media Fundies.”

For now, please enjoy Keith and his cat Hadji before they fly to New York.

Without further ado, let’s get to the action!

Monday, April 3

It only took two innings for things to get a little heated in the booth, as Ronnie took exception to Keith describing Julio Teheran’s pitches to Lucas Duda as “garbage.” Because these guys are great buddies, though, Ronnie quickly proposed a little barter.

Keith: “So you see Duda, they just throw garbage at him. That’s a terrible word but they just love to – as a hitter you say garbage because you’re fighting this pitcher out there! But Lucas is a fastball hitter and he gets a lot of secondary pitches.”

Gare: “And there’s another one. And it’s 2-1.”

Ronnie: “If you don’t say garbage, I won’t laugh when a guy gets jammed this year. Alright? Is that a deal?”

Gare: “That’s one of my favorite things when a guy gets jammed and hits about a 10-footer, Ronnie just starts laughing and guffawing.”

Keith then tried to haggle with Ronnie on the acceptable terms but Ronnie wasn’t buying it at all.

We’ll be sure to keep an ear on this one throughout the season.

At the start of the fifth inning, Gare went into an ad for Metsblog, presented by Citi, and something he said caught Ronnie’s ear (and ours too).

Gare (reading ad): “Get a recap of today’s Mets-Braves opener, play-by-play breakdowns, and postgame reactions with Metsblog, presented by Citi and featured on SNY.tv!”

Ronnie: “They’re breaking down your play-by-play? That’s what they’re doing?

Gare: “Is that what it said?”

Ronnie: “It said play-by-play breakdowns, so they’re gonna break down your play-by-play.”

Gare: “That’s a little scary thought! Are they gonna parse the grammar?”

Whoa, whoa, whoa Metsblog. Get that crap outta here. It is OUR niche to break down the play-by-play in the booth. OURS! Don’t even think about infringing on the This Week in SNY turf, we cover the booth’s minutiae and not you, and we will take you downtown.

Meanwhile, Keith was more worried about the state of Gare’s voice over the next 162 games.

Keith: “Is your voice gonna hold up this year? That’s a lot of copy you’ve gotta read!”

Gare: “Keith...I have to read the copy so you can get paid.”

With one out in the bottom of the 7th inning, SNY had a little technical difficulty:

You know, I think I know who’s responsible for the yellowout:

Wednesday, April 5

SNY debuted a brand new graphic called “The Road Ahead” and it really is brilliant.

Not only do you get the schedule, time, and channel of every game but they’ve also drawn in little cartoons of Keith and Ron to denote which of them is on the broadcast. TWISNY is 100% behind this development and loves the drawings, though Keith looks a bit like the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld. He wasn’t too enamored with his depiction either.

Ronnie: “That’s hilarious!”

Keith: “I look TERRIBLE!”

Gare: “You’re looking a little jowly, I will say that.”

Thursday, April 6

Hey look, it’s time for TWISNY Social Media Fundies! Here’s Ronnie hanging out with world famous violinist Itzhak Perlman. Is he actually a Mets fan or did Ronnie happen to have a hat and jersey with him and force him to wear it?

We have the answer: apparently he is and even played the National Anthem before the Subway Series last year. Neat!

Friday, April 7

One of our favorite occurrences here at TWISNY is when Keith says something off-color or generally hilarious and the booth goes silent, where presumably the guys are holding their cough buttons for dear life and laughing off air. With this in mind, we present a new TWISNY feature called “Enjoy The Silence.”

Here’s Keith in the first inning talking about extra tall girls wearing Danskin tights in the cold and be sure to count the seconds of silence.

We counted 20 seconds of silence, which is pretty solid for the opening week of the season. Hopefully we’ll get a few more of these moments throughout the season.

This was a very bad baseball game overall but we did learn something about Keith in the fifth inning when he saw this lady in the stands holding a Simba puppet:

Gare: “Simba’s in attendance.”

Keith: “That’s a talking lion. I’m looking for Lambchops. A lot of people aren’t going to remember Lambchops.”

Gare: “Lambchop with Shari Lewis?

Keith: “Shari Lewis, yes! I liked that show when I was a kid. When I was a kid, I watched.”

Gary, Keith, and Ron had one of their best moments of the young season during Friday night’s blowout when they pulled out a giant box of baseball cards and started rifling through them! Here’s Gare grabbing a handful.

The guys started pulling out a bunch of cards on air and found players from a number of bygone eras. Gare’s first card was former Met and current Pirates manager Clint Hurdle, then pictured with the Royals. Gare also proceeded to unwittingly flip us all off but it’s okay, TWISNY doesn’t get mad online.

Keith was next and he pulled an old-timer named Don Liddle, who played for the New York Giants. Keith had no idea who he was and was mostly enamored with the old Giants logo, which he remembered as a kid growing up.

For his first card, Ronnie pulled former Oakland A’s shortstop and ex-Rockies manager Walt Weiss. The two were teammates in Oakland and Ronnie said Weiss was his best friend after he got traded there because Weiss was on the disabled list at the time and thus on the bench and around to talk. How sweet! Also, Weiss apparently knows all the verses to Bob Dylan’s “Tangled Up In Blue” and would sing them on the bench.

The guys eventually just started pulling out stacks of cards and litterbug Gare tossed a bunch of them out of the booth. Sorry, Paul Hartzell and Hipolito Pena.

Saturday, April 8

Let’s check in with Steve Gelbs! Steve had some huge breaking news to tell us about Robert Gsellman in the top of the fourth inning.

That’s an amazing Freudian slip. Now I missed most of this game, so I have a lot of questions. In what inning was Robert Gsellman having sex with the lefties? Was it on the mound? On live tv? Did they blur portions of it out? Was there mood music? And why didn’t he do it with the righties, are they a turnoff to him?

To his credit, Gelbs was a great sport about his mishap on Twitter later that night but the moment will live on forever in internet and TWISNY infamy. It’s okay, Steve. We all know where your head was at that inning.

In the bottom of the seventh inning, the guys started talking college basketball, which led to the following exchange:

Ronnie: “So in your days as a basketball player when you got that rock was it being passed around or were you hoisting that thing up?”

Keith: “Oh let me tell ya something, I was like Magic out there. I was dishing and scoring.

So Keith is basically admitting here that he’s a chucker? We got to see Keith chuck some baskets into the garbage can and it was accompanied by some A+ Curb Your Enthusiasm scene change music. We could watch this forever.

Sunday, April 9

Alright, it’s Sunday night. Time to settle down for a nice Mets and Marlins matchup with Noah Syndergaard on the hill and...

Booooooooo ESPN, gross! Who are you people? Mel? Shorty? Girl?

That wraps up the 2017 maiden voyage of TWISNY! Remember, if you're watching Mets games on SNY and you witness a moment that should be featured in This Week in SNY, send us an email to TWISNY@grission.com or tweet it to us @AmazinAvenue or @sschreiber13 with the inning (bottom or top), the number of outs, the count (if possible), and the hashtag #TWISNY!

This Week In SNY was created by former Amazin' Avenue contributor James Kannengieser. You can read all of his entries here. We hope you enjoy this reboot!