A message to the front runner

Mets manage to win as one

Best in N.Y. follow Willie's way

The Mets aren't just the best team in New York right now, they are the best team in baseball. The Tigers have a better record, but nobody believes they could beat Willie Randolph's team straight up. The Mets, coming off that four-game sweep of the Diamondbacks, 6-1 on a road trip that finishes this week in Philadelphia, are the best team going, the most exciting, the one with the most personality, the one with the most fascinating blend of old and new.

It doesn't mean they are going to pound the Phillies this week and end up with one of the best 10-game road trips they've ever had. It doesn't mean they are going to run away with everything the way the '86 Mets did. It doesn't mean they are going to stay healthy. No guarantees on that, ever. Ask the Yankees.

We are just talking about the here and now of Willie's Mets. And right now, here they are.

There are still 100 games to go. No one has to tell the manager, a noted winner in New York for a long time, how much season there is left, how much can happen. But Willie likes his team. He likes the fight in it, he likes all the personality, he likes how it fits together, he sees how much these Mets hate to lose a single game.

"They play the way Willie played," Joe Torre said a couple of weeks ago.

If you know Randolph at all, and I have known him for 30 years, you know one of the first questions he ever asks about a player is this: Is the guy willing to give it up? Willie Randolph has always believed the true measure of a team is how much its players are willing to give it up to win.

"Guys talk all the time about wanting to win," Randolph was saying yesterday. "It's easy to talk about winning. But I've always been, like, okay, but how much? How much are they willing, every single day, to do whatever needs to be done that day to win the game? That's what sets winning teams apart. That's what I've learned, what I'm trying to share with them, my knowledge of what it takes to win. But these guys know something else and so do I: In the end, it ain't just about me, it's about all of us believing we can get to where we want to go.

Anyone who now wants to join the Met bandwagon:




If you weren't here in the shitty time, don't show up now. Go back to Yankee Stadium frontrunner, with your Jeter shirts and Yankee caps. Fuck you. Be a fucking Yankee fan, ok.
Don't come around now, after we've suffered with years and years of disappointment.

If you weren't here for the struggle, don't come around for the glory.

Fucking New York, filed with front running fans, fucking hate them all.