A note in the latest UniWatch column by Paul Lukas suggests inside knowledge that the Mets willdial back the black this season and noted evidence of such exists already in some of the team’s marketing materials (pocket schedules and the mets.com homepage banner; not to mention Subway and bus-mounted advertisements I happened to notice something different about myself). This is certainly a welcome piece of news and portends, we suspect, to a return to more traditional jersey to coincide with the 2009 Citifield opening. For reasons we’re not entirely sure of, baseball authorities require especially early advance notice of plans to change the official uniform so if a change is in the offing we should be able to smell it now.

Speaking of new looks, a “soft” opening for this here new mbtn page was met with yawns from some of its intended audience. Ideally, the finished product would retain the distinct look and feel of the old site, just with additional functionality and ease of use. Work in progress.

Just like the Mets, we’re replacing a gigantic orange monstrosity from another era with sleek new digs, only we’re not getting the city to pay us for it.

This is the “new” mbtn.net, only, it’s not at that address but at metsbythenumbers.com. This new addy will allow us to stay in touch and up to date while we rebuild the old numbers database and other parts of the site to be more user friendly and engaging. The new logo to the right is the work of Scott Turner and Superba Graphics. His firm did more cool stuff we will reveal in time.

The “old” mbtn.net still works; over the coming months, this platform (or a similar successor) will settle back in at that address, while all the stuff currently at that address will eventually move to this platform. Things will likely be in transition for a time, but there’s no need to change bookmarks is what I’m saying. Oh, but if you rip off photos and other graphics from mbtn, move them to your own host soon because they’re eventually going to be moved.

I published Mets by the Numbers for the first time more than eight years ago. Sometime in the early going, I developed an irritating habit of referring to the site as “we.” I’m going to try and do less of that now. While I operate one of the oldest Met-related sites out there (the brilliant Ultimate Mets Database is just a few weeks older) I’m probably the last Met fan alive without a blog. While this new format ought to make updates easier and more frequent, I’m still going to try to keep focused on my niche: Chronicling and illuminating the history of the team, its fortunes and its players through an examination of the uniform. There is an awful lot more to be said and be discovered on that topic still.

The real “we” are the reader/participants whose interest delivered one email at a time helped this site evolve from a goofy experiment many years ago to a reputable research project capable of withstanding some scrutiny, and who put up with spelling errors and infrequent updates, and at times, an indifferent host along the way. I hope “we” will use the comment field here frequently and learn from one another.

You may also reach me privately at a new address: mbtn01 /at/ gmail / dot / com .