Full Circle

So, here we are, just a bit more than seven months after pitchers and catchers reported to spring training, and just less than a year after I founded this site, and, incredibly, not that much has changed.

Life is funny that way.

Tonight Pedro makes what is perhaps the most important start of the year for this team, and Mets fans will be watching with optimistic apprehension as our ace tries to figure out whether his old body can rally again. Seven months ago we were worried sick about his toe, now it's his calf. As they say, the toe bone's connected to the calf bone, and all that. The ability of the team to run the postseason table, after a surprising, sometimes euphoric, season in Queens, may very well ride on Petey's health, and his start tonight will likely dictate the general day-to-day mood of Mets fans everywhere for the next week or so.

Can the team win with a half-assed Pedro? Yes, they've been doing it all year long, really, but as I wrote here a few weeks ago, their chances are much greater with a kick-ass Pedro than a half-assed Pedro.

Without a healthy Pedro, the staff has no ace - and, it's hard to win in October without an ace.

And, nearly a year after I started writing here, and five months after I stopped writing here regularly, I'll be posting here more often now as my other venture, The Baseball Report, has gone the way of the dodo, as they say. I'll only, for the time being, disclose that "creative differences" led to the demise of the site. While I put a lot of work into it, and I'm disappointed that it didn't evolve into the smashing success that I envisioned it would eventually become, I'm not one to spend much time looking back in regret.

I'm proud of the work we did over there, and I'll be laboring intently to create another general baseball site in the next few months that, hopefully, will be bigger, faster and stronger than The Baseball Report - I'm shooting for a functional site by the time the hot stove machinations kick off in earnest in December. That which doesn't kill you, yeah yeah, and everything like that.

Meanwhile, speaking of the hot stove, Joel Sherman of the Post provided Mets fans, yesterday, with an interesting possibility: Carl Crawford roaming the outfield grass at Shea next season, and forming a dynamic duo, with Jose Reyes, atop the Met lineup. Sherman also calls 2B Julio Lugo, who will be a free agent after the season, Omar Minaya's "main target" in the offseason.

I wonder how Jose Valentin feels about that as he tries to get his head together for the postseason.

In other Mets-centric news, it looks like we finally have an answer to the question: what's wrong with Chris Woodward? Turns out Woody has played the season with a torn labrum in his left shoulder, for which he will need surgery in the offseason, Adam Rubin reports in the Daily News today.

So, as we settle down on our couches and recliners tonight to check in on Pedro, and as we recalibrate the team's postseason chances with every pitch he throws, it's funny to think that we were doing that very thing seven months ago.

Much has changed and, yet, not. Full circle.