Ever heard a Stadium PA guy play the charge call in the bottom of the first inning? It is a neat summary of the Mets 2009 season, and it sounded out tonight here at CitiField not long after Jerry Manuel confirmed Carlos Delgado had suffered new setbacks and now would not make a late-season cameo after hip surgery in June. It had been assumed that if Delgado did not reappear it would augur poorly for his chances of 2010 employment here or elsewhere. But Manuel seemed to recognize an awful truth few others did not in saying Delgado might be back after all. That truth is this: he is earnest and he has flashes both of an instinctive ability to play the position, and even an occasional flash of brilliance. But Daniel Murphy is not now a major league first baseman. After a game-losing, panicky, assumption-driven fiasco in Atlanta Wednesday, Murphy tonight failed to make what would admittedly have been a special pick-up on a tough hop off the bat of Christian Guzman in the top of the first. And a first baseman needs to be special defensively if he has no real history of power, and has produced only 10-56-.262-.414 on his first big league season. Consider Delgado, in a power-starved lineup and in only 26 games, ended at 4-23-.298-.521. The Mets cannot assume his viability for 2010 but he is no more of a risk than Murphy appears to be now.
Off-point, talk in the press box here tonight of the NFL fiasco in which Jerry Jones spent – what was it? Eleventy Billion? – to install a video screen that is within easy reach of the leagues punters. Not that any of us was here for it, but the last confirmed new stadium screw-up on that level came in Brooklyn in 1913 when Charlie Ebbets opened his new home for the Dodgers. Reporters followed Ebbets to centerfield for the ceremonial raising of the flag, everybody applauded, and then some scribe asked So, Charlie, where do we sit? It was only then that the Dodger owner realized that Ebbets Field had been built without a press box.