Exclusive Interview with Jose Reyes

Recently, Jose Reyes was interviewed by Baseball Moonthly's longest tenured reporter, Walter Elbow. Here is the unedited transcript, made available to Mets Fan Fiction. The interview, edited down to tight nuggets of wisdom, will appear in the BM's next issue.

Jose Reyes: The seagulls, they are so important, but you sit there, examining your recording device, not noticing them.

Walter Elbow: Okay, I think we're rolling. Check, check.

JR: They are made of the same stuff as we, yet they fly. I am trapped within the basepaths, but these birds that prey on life, who knock on the door of eternity, and while they wait for the answer, swallow fish raw.

WE: Wait, sorry, now I'm not sure. I don't see any reading on the thing, but it could still... hang on.

JR: The waves as well, they are solitary, unendingly lapping. Lapping each other in a race. They are the lap dogs of the moon. They lap at us, because to them, we are fuppy.

WE: Hank? Can you come over here? I am having uncertainties about my recording device.

JR: Against the overwhelming sky hang imperturable clouds. Docile. Silent. Until! Until! Rain! Thunder! Lightning! They offer no guarantees. They could turn into a bunny, or just fade into nothing. I knew someone like that once.

WE: See, all the correct buttons are pressed, but the desired result has not necessarily occured.

Hank: Have you considered these buttons?

WE: Yeah. Not sure what to think about those.

JR: And then there's us. Three homo sapien sapiens. Triple homo illuminatis. Walking, peaceful, beachside, absorbing it all, like the universal sponge, ignoring it all like the blind rhinoceros. rhino   ceros. I think about that word sometimes. It wants to be broken down, but I don't know why.

WE: Sorry Jose, we might have to do this another time.

JR: We already are. It's already the future. We are already talking about my offseason regimen in a cafe full of self-stuffing meaning, full of forms swallowing each other because they are each other's favorite alligator. The answers to the questions you will ask me are: blue, we are already in negotiations, buck 65, I already have and I'll show it to you once it's edited, Serge King, Pablo Picasso, Bill McKibben and of course, Razor Shines, mangoes, she's doing fine, thank you.

WE: Sacks on College and Derby okay?

JR: I'm already on my way.

Lion, Phoenix, Tree

"Robots!" Jeff Wilpon's wife, Nasturtium Wilpon, thought he was speaking in his sleep, as he often does (just the other night, he sat up suddenly and announced "Here's my statue. I thought it was real fuckin original until I realized it looks exactly like those things on Easter Island. What is UP with those. Fuckhorse.")

This time, Jeff was fast awake.  It was his latest scheme to improve the offense. Nasturtium asked how that would work in practice to which Wilpon yelled "Crag norbit!" and looked despondently out the window for the balance of the afternoon. Nasturtium resumed her calligraphy, wondering which of her lovers she would send it to. She spoke about these lovers openly (just this morning, she joined her husband on the balcony, saying "the quality of the light, it reminds me so delicately of another morning when I woke up in the arms of Evo Morales."), yet Jeff Wilpon was entirely unaware of them. In fact, the specific actions of his wife had fallen off his radar years ago.


Howard Johnson picked a nasturtium and cheerfully gobbled it up, as he walked alongside Ruben Tejada and Ike Davis.

"Hitting's like this," he said, picking another one and examining it.

"Like what coach?" asked Ruben, pulling a spin move on a pigeon.

"Orange, peppery, surprising, edible," mused Johnson.

"Guys," asked Ike, "do you think I could overthrow the military industr- I mean, do you think that's a normal pigeon?"

As omniscient narrator, I'll field that question. No it wasn't. It looked like this.

"What are you?" gasped Tejada.

"I'm like hitting!" it screeched. "ORANGE! SURPRISING! PEPPERY! EDIBLE! You made me Howard Johnson! You made me!"

"You really did it this time HoJo," said Lenny the local hotdog vendor. "You guys hungry or what?"

"You bet!" said Ike. "Got any coconuts?"

"What do I look like, a banyan tree? Of course I got coconuts!" The four of them consumed the cocos, both water and meat, while sitting on the street in silence. It was a nice day to do that. It was a nice day to. It was a nice. It was.   .





"I didn't used to be in this type of music, but it is rapidly becoming my favorite variety," said Hisnori Takahashi.

"Toldja," said Toby Stoner.

The End of Francouer

The wind rushed through Pagan's hair. It tousled Beltran's. Even Bay, confused, concussed, felt its gentle comb. Not Francouer though. As he prepared with the other outfielders to hang glide to Hamlet Field (that's what it's called, right?), he felt no wind at all. No gushes, gusts, gales, streams, rivulets... he was even surprised he had air to breathe.

"Something's amiss," he said.

"You'll try again," said Pagan, but Beltran wasn't so sure. He had felt something was off with Frenchy by a sensation in his nose, that could loosely, but 48% incorrectly be called smell.

"Do you think it's the demon?" asked Bay.

"Could be. It's not his style though. He mocks me on the phone, but he's never removed the wind from my sterling hair."

The others took off, but Francouer, due to intense perplexion and a mild fear of death, did not. He went down to his room. He picked up his phone, though it had not rang.

"Demon?" he asked.

"I'm gone. So are you. Pack your bags Frenchy."

"Enough of your taunts!"

"Not taunts!" protested the demon. "I'm a mythic troublemaker of disproportionate proportions and don't you forget it! But at the moment I'm just trying to be straight with you. Real as applesauce. I'm headed southwest. You might want to see if you can beat me there. Get some good hacks in before I clobber your competency."

Francouer hung there like a three piece suit hung out to dry on a balmy Sunday that had suddenly lost its clothesline, its clothespins, its clothesconcept. In that moment, though he had never had in his many years, and before long it would be long forgotten, he knew the name of the demon that had taunted him from the moment he had graced the cover of Sports Illustrated.

"Thanks Satchel," he said.

"No prob French. By the way, my tormenting of you for your entire career, it's just a bet I made with Nancy. He said I couldn't get you out."

"Gosh."

Francouer went to the top floor of the building, where management oversaw.

"Jeff!" said Omar. "Shouldn't you be on your way to um... the field, you know..."

"Village field?" Francouer offered.

"Yes, that sounds right."

"No, I shouldn't. I've been traded."

"I thought I made the trades around here." Francouer shrugged. The phone rang. It was Texas. Texas spoke. Omar said, "Really? Sure! Hey he's right here, do you want to say hi?"

But Francouer was on longer there. He had disappeared, demonlike, possessions in his satchel, on the roof, finding the wind suddenly, absurdly, of-coursely, but not coarsely, blowing his hair, shaking his mop, moving his skin cells and bones, whispering jokes from faraway lands...

... and blowing toward Texas.

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.