Pelfrey and the Sloth

Mike Pelfrey strutted through the Houston Mammilarium, head held high, giving his "danger point" to lemurs, sloths and red pandas. To do the danger point, Pelfrey would lean back on one knee, then launch forward, pointing at his target with both arms. Omar had tried to limit it to certain specified occasions in his contract, due to the injury risk, but Pelfrey replied as such:

"The danger point and I are one. You restrict it, you restrict me. You cage it, you squash my me-ness as assuredly as if my own corpus had been placed in an unleavable box. Are you all in? Or are you not in at all?"

And so the danger point was allowed to be free, and at the moment it was frightening monkeys, worrying capibaras, and having zero effect on the peculiar smile of the sloth.

"You feel it too, dontcha slothy. You feel the arteries and veins pulsing with pale life fire, the orange and blue heat of madness that infects us all. I sense your sensing of it in the lazy grip of your claws on the top of the cage, the way your fur bristles in the breeze."

The sloth seemed to nod. It moved so slowly it was difficult to determine.

"Can I help you?" a Mammilarium monitor asked Pelfrey. This is the modern use of "can I help you," meaning, "you're going to need to do less of what you're doing right now."

"It's not I who need help," Pelfrey replied. "Not slothy either. See, we get it. We are the albatross of existence, the wing of the universe-sparrow, the br of the breeze that lets the rest of you just take it easy."

"I don't follow," said the Mm.

"I guess I'm just jazzed is all," said Pelf. "Jazzed and feeling it. It pops my rocks. Pretty classic really. Makes me feel like a country."

The sloth, in its long life, had moved on its own strength, a total of 12 feet. At that moment, it doubled this total by leaning back on one knee, then launching itself to the front of its cage, extending both arms toward Pelfrey.

"By gum, it knows the danger point! How much for the sloth?"

Pelfrey's game that led to aforementioned jazzedness: 8IP, 6 hits, 0 runs, 4Ks, 2 walks

Salmo vs. Finches- Wandering Thole Linkorama

Josh Thole looked out his window, reading Emerson out loud. He would read a sentence than say it to the outdoors. A collection of pigeons had assembled by his window to listen. A fire blazed in the fireplace and the discarded shells of coconuts were strewn across his floor.

"Pigeons, sometimes I feel you're the only ones listening," he said.

He took a walk down Clinton St, stopping in at Ted and Honey's.

"All of the sandwiches," he ordered.

"You must be a Met," said the human behind the counter.

"Is it in my eyes?" asked Thole.

"Getting there," said the human. In truth, the Met in Thole's eyes still needed some work, but the human liked to be encouraging.

He meandered over to Cobble Hill Park, tossing bits of bread to the pigeons.

"In Los Angelos alone, falling palm fronds kill five people every year!" a man was standing on soap box, saying things. The soap box was not the traditional kind, but rather the small cardboard ones that individual bars of soap often come in these days. It elevated the man's height, almost not at all.

"Cooking brings bears into your home. Bears can wreck a marriage!"

Thole consumed a sandwich while watching the man, but he was only worth a sandwich of his time. He proceeded up to Montague and turned left to go to the Promenade. He sat on a bench and looked at the skyline. A large group of people walked by, saying nothing. Thole followed them, conspicuous due to his young age, his many sandwiches and that he was wearing his full Met jersey. The people he walked with paid him little mind.

They arrived at a building and entered single file. A doorman tapped his foot each time one of them crossed the threshold. Thole was last in line, and as he approached, not one but three doormen converged to block his path.

"Be thee salmon or be thee not?"

"Salmon? That's not a baseball team."

The doormen laughed deep, frightening laughs."

"No," said one, "but some baseball teams are salmon."

"Are the Mets salmon?"

"Mets?! We can have no Mets in here!" They charged toward him and Thole scampered away. He ran ran ran to the Turkish bath house where he knew Jerry Manuel could often be found.

"Skip, what's a salmon?"

"Kid, there's salmon and there's finches. We aspire to be finches. Salmon don't drink coconuts. They get high, but they don't fly, so when they get there they die. We can't lay eggs at that rate, so we take a more measured approach."

Thole took in these words. They were so confusing.

"Are we talking about baseball?"

"And more."

"Is baseball talking about us?"

"Always."

Manuel sipped a coconut. "Stick with the team," he said. "I'll probably be gone soon, and they'll erase my memory, but you, kid, you've got promise."

"Erase your memory? Why?"

"When I leave the team. Before it was just a non-disclosure agreement, but the Twins have telepaths on their staff, so it just wouldn't do."

"This baseball stuff is so much more complicated than I ever imagined," said Thole.

"You're telling me," said Jerry.

K-Rod's Press Conference

Francisco Rodriguez glumly faced the reporters, those desperate hounds of text and story. They looked at him hungrily, knowing that it was time for him to give up the goods. Just say your piece, and don't give them more than you need to, he told himself. Just keep it simple. He turned to face the slobbering beasts, and delivered this statement.

"First of all, I'm extremely sorry. I want to apologize to Fred Wilpon, Jeff Wilpon and Mr. Katz for the incident that happened Wednesday night. I want to apologize also to the Mets fans, to my teammates. I want to apologize, of course, to the front office for the embarrassing moment that I caused. I'm looking forward to being a better person.

"Right now the plan is I'm going to be going to anger management program. And I cannot speak no farther about the legal stuff that we're going through right now. I want to apologize. Sorry.

"There are things I have seen that I cannot describe with your human words. There are things I have felt that make me unique on this planet. No one will know about my quest for the perfect virus, and the depth of misunderstanding visited upon me by my girlfriend's father.

"See, what we need is to get infected. Not bad-style. Not like you have to stay home and watch Blues Clues and Dr. Philandery. No, we need something undetectable and awesome. Something that will make everyone look up and see the cascading butterflies defying the lumbering caterpillars. Something to make raindrops violate their standard spectrum. Something to make people advanced in age as we believe in Santa Claus."

K-Rod was standing now, making wild gestures, occasionally breaking into a voice more suited to opera than a press conference.

"It will challenge toads! The toads within us all! It will fillet philistines! It will make strangers break into song in unison! It will be the conqueror of cream pies!"

He seemed to awake from his trance. He looked at the reporters, disoriented, confused.

"So..." said Joe Budd. "How does this relate to, y'know, that thing you got in a lot of trouble for?"

"I have answered all questions! I will not answer any more!" And with that, K-Rod mounted his travel camel and rode to the bullpen.

Mets on a Plane! (wright Wright)

Iron Man 2 was playing on the Mets plane back to New York. Barajas laid back with an eye pillow shading his pupils. Castillo hummed an obscure tune. Francouer stood in the aisle of the plane, despite the wishes of the plane staff.

“We are soaring through the air people!” He imitated the plane’s motion with its arms.

“I used to be upset by turbulence,” Reyes chimed in. “But then I said to myself, be reasonable, we are in a metal machine flying through the air high above the Earth. It’s okay if it’s not completely smooth.”

“Mickey Rourke isn’t so much swarthy as sunburned,” Wright observed. “I was worried when I saw this big swarthy guy approaching with ominous music, about the potential arise of moral ambiguities over the only prominent Hispanic being a bad guy, but then I realized it was just Mickey Rourke. That was a relief. Wright on.”

“Guys,” said Perez, standing up awkwardly in his window seat, clamboring over Feliciano, his neighbor in the aisle. “I already know what I’m going to do this offseason. I’m going to start somewhere in Kansas, and just start walking, and see where I end up.”

“I just awoke from the strangest dream,” said Jon Niese. I was aware of the entire ocean. It was like we grew up together.”

“Some say it’s all a dream,” shined Razor. “This is the one we hang out in cause it’s mellow.”

“Oh, dang, he is a minority, but he’s really thoughtful too. I just don’t know what to think about this. I was already barely holding the plot together and now we got this whole mess. Stay back. Wait for the wright Wright. Wright?”

“I’m like that other guy in the movie, the one with the hair” said Beltran. “Like me, he is a sphinx.”

“What do you mean by that?” asked Fitzgeraldo, the captain of the bat boys who sometimes travelled with the team. Beltran shrugged.

“Hey guys, what would you think about a team painting?” Manuel asked the lot of them.*

“NICE!” said the entire team in unison.

“Wow! That’s a much larger reaction than I anticipated!” What Manuel did not realize was that Iron Man had just had a crucial revelation, and the team, all of them wearing headphones on ear, had been reacting to that. They quickly forgot Manuel had asked the question.

“Geez, he’s a Russian. Call me old fashioned, but I feel that Russian bad guys in movies that have nothing to do about the Cold War, is just the country’s attempt to cover for its odd sense of embarrassment over that rather long happenstance. Whoa, but wait, now the Russian who tricked the American weapons contractor into building droids for him is using those droids for a terrorist attack! My word! My word is Wright! That’s Wright. Sometimes I think a thing, and then I think another thing, and it’s like I dropped a ball of yarn, but the yarn is my thoughts, and it takes a while to put it all back together, but then I think ‘Wright on!’ and after that, usually ‘Wright stuff!’ and then maybe ‘Wright time!’ and then I’m just rocking the awesome. Wright? Wright! Wright Wright!!

New Jersey went from sight to memory, and then the Mets began their initial descent. They were always happy to come home, but it also made them a little sad to leave the air.

*If someone actually wants to make a Mets team painting, drawing, or medium of your choice, send it to metsfanfiction@gmail.com and I’ll post it.

Baseball Moonthly's Exclusive Interview with Omar Minaya

As the trade deadline came and went with barely a whisper in the entire borough of Queens, Walter Elbow of Baseball Moonthly caught up with Omar Minaya in this month's edition of Waxing Gibbous.

WE: Omar, thank you for joining me in the Baseball Moonthly helicopter.

OM: It's my pleasure Walter. My pleasure, and perhaps someday my helicopter.

WE: Unlikely. Omar, the trade deadline came and went with no action from the Mets. With literally every Phillie injured and the rest of the league plagued by maladies too horrid to mention, did you not feel that the proverbial iron was proverbially hot?

OM: I have more scouts out there than anyone knows, including the IRS. They examine players from the soul on out. When they return, I ask them a simple pregunta, "Is this guy a Met or not." There were shockingly few Mets out there this time around.

WE: But presumably, by acquiring them, they would become Mets.

OM: It's not so simple. If my team was the Cats, and I acquired a dog, would that make him a cat?

WE: Any players you were outbid for or otherwise missed out on?

OM: Like I said, our scope was narrow, but we did attempt to trade for 44 different catchers. The value of catchers is cumulative.

WE: With the deadline passed, attention now turns to the waiver wire. What's the story evening primrose?

OM: Let me tell you something. On July 31st, I stayed up watching television. You would simply not believe what's on there these days.

WE: Like what?

OM: People sit around on an object and make sounds at each other for an entire program. Also, lots of cleavage.

WE: This seems unlikely.

OM: Toldja. Anyway, I'm watching this stuff, and then it's 11:45, 11:52, 11:56... see where I'm going with this?

WE: To midnight?

OM: Exactly. The clock strikes and I immediately put my self on waivers.

WE: Yourself? Who does that?

OM: I do. Because I'm a Met. No leader should ever ask someone to do something that he himself is unwilling to do.

WE: What will you do if claimed?

OM: As with any other Met, I will evaluate my history, my reasonable projections for the future, who might replace me, and then I will do what is best for the organization.

WE: Any truth to the rumor that the Yankees had claimed the entire organization?

OM: They were going to, but Boston blocked them by claiming Mr. Met, several bat boys and Oliver Perez.

WE: Really? They took Ollie?

OM: No I was joking. They did claim Mr. Met though. We pulled him back of course. We'd be lost without that guy.