Two little opinions jumping on a bed, one fell off and bumped his head, mama called the dr. and the dr. said, no more opinions jumping on the bed.

Johan throws 29 pitches in Spring Training.

The ever-effervescent Mike Lupica's glass is half-full:

"Thanks to Johan Santana's superb spring debut, the NY Mets have hope for 2012," reads the headline.

"Hope" to finish within 20 games of Philly? Perhaps. Lupica is kind of vague with the numbers, so it's hard to tell:

"If Santana can come all the way back and be the Mets’ Opening Day starter, be something close to what he was before he tore up his shoulder, then maybe the Mets can be a team to watch again. And maybe, with everything stacked against them the way it is, they can be a team in which Mets fans can invest not just their money, but the belief that maybe things can get better, after 5½ years of what feels like a Biblical plague since Molina hit that Game 7 home run and Carlos Beltran took a called strike three with the season on the bases at old Shea Stadium."

Look, man, Mets fans follow the Mets and Yankee fans follow the Yankees.

I don't know what Carlos Beltran has to do with anything in 2012 Mets Spring Training, but I can guarantee that I can find one million Lupica articles in the past 5 1/2 years where Lupica has implored the NY metro audience to ignore the Yankees and follow the Amazin's.

The whole time it was a Biblical plague. Rooting for the Fightin' Terrys of 2011 was analogous with the death of your firstborn son.

Was Lupica lying then or is Lupica lying now?


"So Rakoff basically says that he and the jury get to decide this thing now and, oh by the way, good luck to Picard. Only in the New York Times, of course, out of all the papers who gave Rakoff’s ruling big coverage, was this somehow viewed as a rousing triumph for the trustee, mostly because it fit the Picard-driven narrative of this story presented in that paper from the start.

So Rakoff and jury will decide, once and for all, if they believe Wilpon and Katz were 'willfully blind' to what Madoff was doing with their money and everybody else’s. Then once the trial is over, we finally begin to find out how — and if — the Mets move forward from every bad thing that has happened to them since Game 7 of 2006, and that includes Johan Santana’s left shoulder.

So Mike Lupica, Esquire, thinks a tort is a dessert you eat at Sunday brunch.

So Mike Lupica wants to give legal analysis. Based on Lupica's track record, this article is the one place on the entire planet where I can guarantee the information regarding the Madoff trial is incorrect and the conclusions are misguided.

So Mike Lupica.


"He came back and pitched two innings Tuesday. Twenty-nine pitches. Couple of sweet changeups, some fastballs he put where he wanted them. You can understand why it felt like more in Port St. Lucie."

No, I was hoping you could explain why these two Spring Training innings felt like more.

Then I read your article. However , you did not explain this in a way that I could understand. It just sounded like a weird Mets Fan Boy unwilling to admit the likelihood of his team's last-place finish in 2012.


Jeff Passan's glass of Santana is half-empty:

"There is quite literally a hidden beauty in baseball, one nobody has seen live or ever will because it takes place beneath the skin. The shoulder is a fascinating beast, untamed, undefeated. Players receive injections with stem cells made of their own fat and steal a tendon from their wrist to fix their elbow and still, no one has solved the shoulder, at least not with any level of certainty. It is baseball’s Moby Dick."

Moby Dick is a great white whale ... but I don't see why you had to bring Joba Chamberlain into it.

"At the moment, Johan Santana looks like little more than another iffy candidate. Tuesday in Port St. Lucie, Fla., he threw 29 pitches over two shutout innings against the St. Louis Cardinals in his first action against major-league hitters since Sept. 2, 2010. Less than two weeks after that start, Santana underwent surgery on his left shoulder for an anterior capsule tear. He tried returning in August 2011. After five Class A innings, his shoulder barked no.

That the New York Mets still have him penciled in for an opening-day start this season is either a reflexive response to the painful salaries they owe him for the next two years – $54.5 million, assuming they turn down a 2014 club option – or extreme faith in something with little history to warrant it. The list of pitchers who returned from capsule-tear surgery to anything near their previous level reads like this:

It killed Mark Prior’s career, slowed down Chien-Ming Wang’s, halted Pedro Feliciano’s and derailed dozens more before doctors could identify the exact problem. It’s why when pitchers go in for MRIs, they beg for the doctor to say: 'Elbow.' "

Dang, the Mets owe Santana $54.5 million over the next two years?

Just how many games is he going to win to give the Mets hope?