Feb. 22: Fifth starter Tim Redding goes down with a sore shoulder in Spring Training and begins the season on the disabled list.
Mar. 8: Mike Pelfrey suffers a strained leg. Also, the sinkerballer complains about tenderness in a phantom limb from an imagined Viet Nam injury.
Mar. 13: Angel Pagan faints while attempting to catch a routine fly ball. When he comes to, the outfielder says, “I do declare!” in a Southern, feminine voice while fanning himself with his glove.
Mar. 27: Third starter John Maine lands on the 60-day DL with a bout of the bubonic plague.
Apr. 5: On Opening Day, Carlos Beltran walks off the field and formally announces his candidacy for mayor of Lubbock, Texas.
Apr. 14: All-Star third baseman David Wright says he’s “really gotten into the 17th-century Metaphysicals” lately and is leaving baseball to focus on the English Literature GRE.
Apr. 23: Second-year outfielder Daniel Murphy, at the age of 24, posts on his blog that he’s having a “quarterlife crisis” and retires.
Apr. 30: While resting his sore hip, Carlos Delgado has his faith shaken in God as he watches an episode of “Saving Grace” on TNT. The slugger allegedly heads to a mountaintop in Peru and is never heard from again.
May 6: Gary Sheffield simply cannot put down Jodi Picoult’s latest novel.
May 11: Right fielder Ryan Church sustains his third concussion in the past two years and decides to stop playing–not for health reasons, but because the mental jolt only now makes him realize how utterly dull baseball is.
May 19: Jose Reyes is sent down for extended Spring Training games in Port St. Lucie to rehab and gain easier access to Floridian oranges and the sun to remedy his scurvy and rickets.
May 22: J.J. Putz is DL’d for incessant hiccups.
May 28: Francisco “K-Rod” Rodriguez decides he hates his derivative, illogical nickname and quits the game in tears.
June 9: Ace Johan Santana pulls his left hamstring while playing a game of zero-gravity pickup basketball on board the space shuttle Endeavor. Rather than confess his foolish injury and return millions of dollars, as per his contractual stipulations, he enters a capsule and casts himself off into space.
June 18: When no one is looking, reliever Pedro Feliciano slips away from the team’s hotel in the middle of the night to join his New Zealand lover he met in a manga enthusiast chat room.
June 25: Catcher Brian Schneider suddenly and inexplicably loses the ability to squat.
July 6: Utility infielder Alex Cora leaves the team to pursue his lifelong dream of singing in an Ivy League men’s a capella group he renames “The Jazz Swingers.”
July 12: Beleaguered manager Jerry Manuel, on the cusp of forfeiting a game due to lack of players, pens himself into the lineup. He fights through a slipped disc, rotator cuff, torn ACL, and swine flu, has on-field Tommy John surgery and undergoes intensive rehab during the 7th-inning stretch, and, with the Mets one out from victory, removes
himself for dehydration to force a Mets loss.
Early October: Somehow two games ahead of the Phillies going into the final series of the season, the Mets are promptly swept and finish in second place after all remaining members of the team choke to death, making the jobs of sports headline writers very easy.
Photo by ajagendorf25
