Long time, no see!
There’s been a confluence of events that’s kept me away, and laziness/real job is only part of it. Like the Mets I sort of petered out at the end of last season. I was never expecting anything along the lines of 2024 but that was a rotten season for the Mets who somehow both sucked and underachieved simultaneously. They gave up when I did.
Then there was the drudgery of keeping the data fresh. At some point, the work here became less about the Mets and more about chronicling whichever 13th reliever the Mets had up for the day. By the time he’s entered in, he’s gone, and I’m like anyone else looking up what number the next one is wearing on Mets.com. In a few days or weeks I’ve forgotten these guys even existed much less their predecessor in No. 68 or 82. Seems like, there was a time when obscure Mets had a story behind their obscurity. Now they’re too damn ephemeral, and even where the job is writing it down, my memory cannot fit any more Richard Loveladys or Jonathan Pintaros.
I’m also fatigued with uni-number retirements if you want to know the truth. There’s definitely some dissonance associated with chronicling numbers for a team with fundamental differences in the purpose of them. Please reissue 8 today.
My friend and counterpart at the Ultimate Mets Database is encountering the same exhaustion I have and as a result he’s in the process of transferring that site after 25 years in business. The new owner intends to refashion it, which is nice, but it leaves the uni-number data in some uncertainty. In case you don’t know I moved that info from here to UMDB several years ago and I still manually maintain that part of it. It’s not clear if that be the case in the future.
I’ve considered retiring my own number, so to speak, but not quite yet. New year, new look for the website, hope springs eternal, etc. I’ll address this massive Met overhaul in a separate post. For now, goodbye and hello.
