MIND WANDERINGS

A Sunday on which the Jets don't play allows my mind to wander. This is either a good thing for you because my mind touches on lots of topics and maybe one or two will catch your interest, or a bad thing for you because you have to read them all. Here we go:

*I didn't really think the Angels would sweep and when they trailed late I actually thought, "Here we go again with the Angels unable to close out the Sox." I hope they win it all.

*The bad thing about an Angels sweep is Don Orsillo is probably done calling games. I hope the nation got a taste of what New England has been able to hear for almost a decade now - just how good of a play-by-play man he is. He has also improved as the years have gone on to get to where he is now - he had a rough first year (replacing a local favorite in Sean McDonough), and I remember his second game in the bigs was a no-hitter (I can't remember if it was Nomo or Lowe...I think Nomo in Baltimore) and he was so nervous it affected his call of the game. I also need to make clear that my liking of Orsillo is heavily influenced by how nice he was to me when we met a couple of times in 2003, when I was working in TV news, and he was showing up for our morning show to be an analyst. He could have been a jerk like 90% of the TV people I know...and I wouldn't really have blamed him because things did not go his way that post-season...but he was awesome. I have a soft spot for him ever since.

*I also think Ron Darling has grown by leaps and bounds as an analyst. I thought he was very dry in his year with Washington (I think his first year in the booth), but he's come a long way since joining the Mets. The nation is getting a taste of him in the Yankees-Twins series (and in the one-game playoff, too - he must have wanted to slap Chip Caray in the head after his blown call of the lineout to left-double play which Caray called a base hit). Anyway, I can't say the same for Darling about him as a person as I did about Orsillo. I don't get the feeling he's as great a person. I read Darling's book, and he really comes off as not very nice, and unapologetic about it. If you're not coming across nicely in your own book, you're probably not very nice. Second time in recent years I've been entirely turned off of someone by their own book - Mike Greenberg was the other.

*I guess we have to start believing the Broncos are for real now, huh?

*I want Rex Ryan to celebrate on the field after wins like Josh McDaniels did on Sunday.

*Boy, did the Dodgers look like a different team this post-season. Well, not really a different team, but they looked like the team that started the season, not the one that ended it.

*I think the New York Giants are going to get a heavy dose of reality next week against the Saints - the first legit team they've played all season (and I'm including the Cowboys in that...what a joke they are). Should be a good game though.

*I know I've been talking a lot lately about Hall of Famer Gary Carter and his managing prospects, but I haven't mentioned a huge player in the upcoming managerial openings - Bobby Valentine. First of all, I don't really know who's looking for a manager at this point...but Bobby V.'ll bring some excitement to wherever that is.

*Just like I feel tonight's game with Miami is a game the Jets can't lose...there are others coming up on the 2009 schedule. Among them is the Raiders. The Giants made the Raiders look silly, but the Jets have had their struggles against Oakland...and they have to play out west. The old Jets would lose that game, or win by a field goal. I'm curious how these Jets will play.

*I'm ready for some football.

SUNDAY PAPER

This happens to me every October.

I start to get real day-dreamy as I watch the playoffs, wondering what it would be like if my team was in the playoffs every year, battling it out for a chance at a world championship.

There's just so much mediocrity in my teams it's hard to wrap your head around it. The Phillies, thanks to the Mets' collapses, have won three straight division titles. In my lifetime (I'm 31) the Mets have won three division titles.

There's no such thing as "get 'em next year" in my sports life. Only once (once!) have the Mets made the post-season in back-to-back years. (1999-2000) There were plenty of 'should haves' (1987, 2007, 2008, close calls in 1998 and 2001), but that doesn't mean anything.

It sometime boggles my mind to think about teams like the Red Sox and Yankees and the decades they have had. What would I do in that situation? Would I appreciate just how awesome that is? Or would I take it for granted?

Of course, this extends to football too. The Jets have done nothing in my lifetime. Sure, there's the occasional foray deep into the playoffs, and the occasional back-to-back playoff seasons (and at least lately there have been playoff appearances - for a while during my childhood I didn't think I'd see even that)...but there still hasn't been a sniff of a Super Bowl. (Or at least, those sniffs are few and far between - 1998, 2004...that's about it.)

I'm hopelessly optimistic though. I still dream, and every season's beginning to me is a chance for my team to win it all. It only feeds this (dis)illusion when the Jets get off to 3-1 starts and look good doing it.

So as October marches on and I watch teams that aren't the Mets carry out other people's dreams, I think about what may be some day for the Mets....some day that will challenge 1986 as the highlight of my sports life.

And all the while I'll be thinking about what could be this year for the Jets...and how I'd react if it ever actually happened.

**As a sidebar, in case you're wondering, I do root for the New York Rangers, and I did root for the Rangers in 1994, but hockey just isn't the same for me as baseball and football. And my college (Boston University) is the defending national champion in hockey, but I don't see that the same way, I guess because my affiliation with them only goes back to 1996...it still feels too new. The way they won, though, was super exciting for me...so again, it only makes me think how happy I would feel if the Mets or Jets ever won another championship.

**This is one of the times during the year when living in the greater Boston area is ultra-frustrating. Because of their provincial sports view, there is no real local outlet for national radio. So come playoff time, you can't catch a baseball game on the radio (except, of course, the local Red Sox broadcast). So Wednesday and Thursday I drove home from school without being able to listen to the playoff games. Drives me nuts. Am I wrong to say this only happens in Boston? Do you get the playoffs on the radio in your area? (Update...I did get the Saturday night game on the local station. So that means people around here would rather listen to the afternoon and weeknight blather instead of a playoff game during the week.)

**Some good stuff to come out of New York and Miami this week - I guess Rex Ryan and Channing Crowder made their peace after an off-season trading barbs. Crowder is right when he says people can let their emotions get the best of them and run their mouths off, but it shouldn't happen with a coach. Ryan is right when he says everything that comes out of his mouth is just excitement because he really does believe he has a good team. The other part of it was that Crowder said he curses out everyone on the field....especially Leon Washington. I guess the players hate each other from as far back as their college days when Washington was at Florida State and Crowder was at Florida. That'll be an interesting part of the game to watch tomorrow night.

**While we're on the subject of Monday Night Football, I'll make my Jets pick. This is such an important game for the Jets, because it's a game they have no business losing. If they lose, they're nothing more than the Buffalo Bills, who played teams like the Patriots and Saints tough before getting smoked last week by Miami. If the Jets are for real, they'll beat Miami Monday night. If they lose, they're no different than Jets teams of the past that have gotten off to fast starts. Of course, I've seen only evidence that makes me believe the former over the latter, so I say Jets 31, Dolphins 10. Please let them prove me right.

**My worst week of picking games so far this season came last week. I hit on only a couple of underdogs (Cleveland and Tampa), and lost the rest. So this week, at the risk of you actually reading this and thinking I know what I'm doing, I'll just observe some of the spreads, and reason out loud why I'm picking what I'm picking. I feel like, even though the Giants have been whooping these poorer teams, 15-and-a-half is a lot of points for Oakland. Especially with Manning not 100%. Maybe like a 13-0 Giants win this week. I don't know. They'll probably prove me wrong to the tune of 70-3. I like Atlanta in San Francisco a lot, with the Falcons getting 2-and-a-half - I feel like they'll take out their aggression over losing in New England on the 49ers. And I'm going with Washington getting 3-and-a-half in Carolina, with the idea that they have looked less bad than the Panthers...though don't get me wrong - both have looked pretty bad.

SUNDAY PAPER

This is not a live blog.

At first glance, that may not seem like news. To understand why it's notable, you would have had to have been reading my work for at least the past couple of years. (You can catch up here and here, if you're so inclined.)

Those past couple of years have featured some marathon days of baseball and football watching, requiring some fancy television maneuvering on my part and some luck in the television schedule (the Jets on network television for my rabbit-eared TV, with the Mets on the baseball package on the cable TV).

The days with the above set-up have ended in utter disappointment, making me wonder which is worse - that one day of disappointment, capping half a month of terrible play by the Mets where they miss the playoffs on the last day of the season (not much worse the second year than the first, to be quite honest), or elimination from any chance at contention by June. I would say each leaves a bad taste in your mouth, with the latter bringing back bad memories of my high school years to go along with the disappointment. The only good news here is that early on I knew this Mets season wouldn't come down to missing the playoffs on the last day of the season.

So much, though, conspired against me having my usual "Last Sunday of the Baseball Season" set-up. To wit:

1) The Mets are terrible.

2) The Mets are early, the Jets are a 4 o'clock start. So I don't have to worry about the two teams going opposite one another.

3) I wouldn't be able to put the Jets on network TV anyway because the Patriots are the 1 o'clock CBS game and CBS wouldn't have the 4 o'clock game on local TV.

4) My rabbit-eared TV doesn't work anymore thanks to the government's move back in June to digitalize it all. (Was that what happened? I don't even remember how that all worked.)

5) I now have two mobile children, as opposed to the one mobile and one infant a year ago.

And so I prepare for another October of watching teams other than the Mets play in the post-season with just a regular Sunday blog. Let's just hope there's not a rematch in the World Series.

**So far having no DirecTV is not having a tremendous impact on my enjoyment of the football season. The first two weeks of the season were on local TV (though I went to the Meadowlands for the week 2 game), and last week I had a great time with Dave in Brighton at a local establishment watching the Jets. I should have no trouble finding Jets-Saints somewhere this afternoon, and my wife has been wonderful about helping me get out to see these games. She rescheduled her afternoon tutoring so that I could go out at 4.

**I can't start picking against the Jets now...why should I? Defense gets the nod over offense - and this should be a really entertaining game. I'll say Jets 21, Saints 20

**My underdogs were pretty terrible last week. I missed picking against the Lions and Bengals, and picking Tampa and Buffalo (no points for the Bills keeping it close late). In addition to the Jets this week, I'm liking a lot of other road teams - Baltimore in New England is getting 2-and-a-half (the Ravens have played so much better than the Patriots this season), Tampa Bay getting six-and-a-half in Washington (the Redskins have looked that bad), San Diego getting six-and-a-half in Pittsburgh (just seems like a lot, considering the Steelers have yet to look that good), and Green Bay getting three-and-a-half in Minnesota (and Favre getting a big target on his back). Seems to me like I'm picking too many road teams this week (I have quite a few road favorites as well), but there are a lot of bad teams playing at home, I guess.

**I think I'm rooting for the Twins to overtake the Tigers, just to see what happens with the Metrodome being occupied Monday night by football when there might have to be a playoff game there. I have no reason to hate Minnesota...I don't love the Tigers, although there's a feel-good story in there with the state of things in Detroit. But the larger issue here is that Detroit is in the midst of a pretty significant collapse when they had a chance to wrap things up. Watching the Mets go through that the past couple of years, all you can think about is how difficult it is to blow a late-season lead like that - not only does everything have to go wrong for the team in the lead, but everything has to go right for the chasing team. Same thing with what's going on out west in the NL, even though both the Dodgers and Rockies have clinched playoff spots. The Rockies were fifteen-and-a-half games out at one point! That's an incredible turnaround. It just seems so hard to blow a lead like that...yet, the Dodgers watched their lead evaporate until they had to fight for the division in the final weekend. Too bad neither of these races will erase the Mets of 2007 and 2008 from their ignominious standing.

**Oh, ignominious and the Mets reminds me of Omar Minaya. Not to beat a dead horse, but with the Blue Jays firing J. P. Ricciardi, it makes me think there's now someone available for the Mets who actually knows a thing or two about baseball. I know Ricciardi pretty much botched any deal for Roy Halladay, but I bet he'd work well with the Mets. Too bad we'll never find out just how well.

**Stay with me this week. After a Jets recap on Monday I'll have baseball playoff picks for Tuesday.

SUNDAY PAPER

And today it begins. Yes, the full slate of games that begins the NFL season, but on a personal level, for me it's life after DirecTV.


When we bought and moved into our house five years ago, it represented a freedom of choice for us - if we wanted a dish, we could get a dish. (As opposed to our apartment, which had a restriction on satellite dishes.) Thus, we fulfilled my dream of watching the Jets when I wanted, without having to leave the comfort of my own home (and allowing me to let fly whatever I needed to say during a game in the company of family rather than complete strangers).

Well, after last year's debacle of a season, I succumbed to my wife's request to go to a cheaper cable option, thinking I would never care to schedule my Sundays around the Jets again.

Then this weekend hit. And I still care.

It's not easy being a Jets fan in New England for a number of reasons...but primarily it's because the Jets are often televised opposite the Patriots. With the increase in the number of prime-time Patriots games, I've lucked into some TV windows where the Jets are the local TV option - but that hasn't had an effect on me recently because of the Sunday Ticket.

This year, though, I'm going to have to heavily rely on those days. And today happens to be one of them. With the Patriots playing Monday Night Football, the Jets-Texans is the nationally televised CBS game. And next week I'm going to the home opener (although it's a game I would have been able to see at home, since it's against New England). So two games down, 14 to worry about.

A small part of me misses the old days when I'd get to a bar that had the Sunday Ticket at around 11:30am, reserve myself a booth with a TV, and then eat lots of appetizers. I'm kind of excited to see who would be up for recapturing that element of our lives from five years ago.

But I'm realizing now that I'm a little worried about the days when the Jets face a must-win situation and I'm stuck in enemey territory, and I can't yell at the TV. I just hope I don't cry if they lose.

*I hope my head doesn't explode today. First full weekend of NFL, a few baseball doubleheaders, and a golf final round to boot.

*I've mentioned this before, but I'm not really buying the Houston Texans. I'll go with Jets 24, Houston 20. And if I'm smelling big upset anywhere, I look no further than Foxboro, Massachusetts. Now, this does come with a caveat - I did pick the Patriots in a survivor pool, so I feel pretty strongly that they're going to win. But if any team can stretch their defensive weaknesses, it's the Bills, with Lee Evans and Terrell Owens. Plus, there's the Richard Seymour trade. There are shades of the Lawyer Milloy deal here, when the Pats got plastered by the Bills in the game after that trade. But I don't get the impression Seymour had the same relationship with his teammates that Milloy had...I have it in my mind that Seymour was kind of a loner. That's how I imagine it at least. Anyway, maybe there are repercussions. But, again, I picked the Patriots, so this is just a thought I'm throwing out there. Of course, the fact that I picked the Patriots makes me feel strongly that they might lose, too, because that's the way things go for me.

*I forgot that Sports Illustrated had picked the Mets to win the World Series this year. I should have listened to my Red Sox fan friends who were quick to point out after that prediction that SI had also picked the Red Sox to win it all in a year they would rather forget. (I think it was 2003.) It's sad that the only teams below the Mets in the standings are the likes of Kansas City, Washington, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore. Not the company a team with that kind of payroll should be keeping. I'll add that it was nice to see David Wright come through in a clutch situation and carry the Mets to a big win over the Phillies on Saturday...if a meaningless game in mid-September for the Mets counts as a big win.

*Your weekly update on Hall of Famer Gary Carter and the Long Island Ducks - the Ducks are at .500, and have a 2 game lead in the wild card chase with 8 games remaining, all against last place teams. Seems like the Ducks are right where they want to be.