He’s too big and burly to resemble a ghost, but the man in the National League uniform at Yankee Stadium last week was a strange sight, probably the strangest sight at the All-Star game. Don Baylor was wearing a baseball uniform.
Baylor, who had played, coached and managed for nearly four decades, had not worn a baseball uniform in two and a half years. Since he served as the Seattle Mariners hitting coach in 2005, Baylor has been unemployed.
Several weeks ago, when the Mets were playing at their enigmatic, underachieving best, I had a conversation with the team’s general manager, Omar Minaya. He couldn’t explain the Mets’ problems any better than anyone else. He was as mystified as anyone.
Before the season, I picked the Mets to win the National League pennant. The way they played in the first two and a half months of the season there was no way they were going to win even the division championship.
Once upon a time there was a television commercial for a brand of tuna fish that featured a talking fish. The punch line was “sorry, Charlie.”
But updating the line for these purposes, it’s “sorry, Harvey,” because Harvey Araton, a Sports of the Times columnist for The New York Times, wrote a fishy column. Well, the entire column wasn’t fishy, but one part of it was. In fact, it was fictional.
