Ohmigod, there's a guy named Hinckley pitching for Washington. Who came up with that one -- Mark Russell?

C'mon boys, the game's at hand
We don't wanna say we lost her
Please tell our pitcher to concentrate
On the batter and not Jodie Foster

Topical, too.

Yes, pretend games are on the air. ESPN is covering this with three announcers and a sideline reporter, in the middle of the day, no less. And ya know why? Respect. Every exhibition should be covered to death.

Speaking of which, the Washington Nationals, with Hinckley on the mound, Booth behind the plate and three lone gunmen in the outfield, are, like the Junior League, in existence. Nineteen times a year they will be a federal pain in the ass.

Every time I think about the Expos in the abstract, I feel terrible that they're no longer among the living. Then I look at the team they've become, which is still very much the Murderer's Row from Montreal, plus a couple of hired guns, and I shudder. The Mets could never handle the Expos particularly well. The rest of the world saw a ragtag franchise that made one post-season trip in 36 years. We saw a team full of anonymous killers and we needed the 597th and final game of our all-time series with them to emerge victorious. Final score: Mets 299 Expos 298.

That's just silly.

Now imagine having to take them on without them being jetlagged. On the other hand, we won't have to go through customs to face them. Remember when Jeff Kent got nabbed for attempting to carry a firearm through the Montreal airport? He said he forgot he had it on him. Montreal was also where the vets nabbed Kent's street clothes and left him a clown suit that he refused to wear when he was a rookie, thus establishing himself as a Major League malcontent in record time. When is Bush appointing him ambassador to Quebec?

Phillips just drove in Beltran with Mientkiewicz moving up to second. Good for Jason Phillips, particularly that dynamic. Bought the Sporting News baseball yearbook the other day and he was listed as the projected first baseman for us. For the umpteenth year in a row, preseason baseball magazines are woefully out of date by the time they hit the stands. In this age of instantaneous information, they are almost useless. But buying a few every spring is yet another of those rituals I enjoy. So what if Jason Phillips is now a scrub hanging on by his slow fingertips and Mientkiewicz is our first baseman? Baseball magazines now litter the living room. Like they oughta be.

Who's the quintessential Expo-cum-National vis-à-vis the Mets? Endy Chavez. Endy Chavez was a Mets minor leaguer mindlessly dispatched by Steve Phillips while he was presumably eyeing Sheila in accounting. Endy Chavez is a lifetime .264 hitter against everybody, a lifetime .330 hitter against the Mets. Endy Chavez is my own private Vladimir.

Even on an afternoon when I want to look ahead, there's Steve Phillips yammering away on ESPN, pulling me back toward a half-decade's worth of resentments. I don't wanna talk about Steve Phillips, destroyer of worlds, today, but what a disingenuous bastard now posing as a sage. Earlier he was going on about how the Nationals won't beat themselves the way the Expos did because of an infusion of veteran leadership. Who? Jose Guillen? The guy bounced by the Angels for cause in the middle of a pennant race? Were the Expos beating themselves the last few years? Or were they just undermanned? And did Steve Phillips ever watch the team he general-managed into the ground get their heads handed to them by the allegedly In-Eptspos at least half the time?

Talk about your sinecures. I hope they give Steve Phillips his own show on ESPN. I hope they give him an office in Bristol. I hope they find him putting the moves on some poor administrative assistant who in reality is an undercover detective and she reports him for his favorite play, sexual harassment. And I hope she kicks him square in the nuts when nobody's looking.

But this is a day to look ahead. Who's pitching for us now? Aaron Heilman. So much for looking ahead. Aaron Heilman went to Notre Dame, you know. He reminds me of the legacy in Rudy, the guy who they have to keep on the Fighting Irish because his father went there but he really hates football after all his failures these last few years. Aaron Heilman is 26. He's gotta be older by now.

Ah, maybe he's a late bloomer.

Guillen has just shown some veteran leadership off of Heilman with a two-run homer. Bloom, Aaron -- bloom already yet.

Endy Chavez fell down in center, allowing Kaz to double. Brad Wilkerson couldn't catch up to a ball hit by Jason Phillips. Maybe spring really is a season of renewal.

Either way, we're oh and oh when this thing is over.

Victor Zambrano (19 strikes out of 30 pitches) is the papers' subject du jour, which of course means Scott Kazmir's riding shotgun. Zambrano said he doesn't concern himself with Kazmir, but our local scribes won't give him that choice. You just know some paper or other will run a graphic comparing every start of Zambrano's with every start of Kazmir's. Can you imagine having to answer questions about some 21-year-old you probably never met before and after every start? I'd go completely insane, and not in an obsessed-about-a-baseball-team way.

My objection to That Trade isn't so much that the timing was so poor, or that we traded a prospect with so much upside for a pitcher with serious question marks. It was and we did, but both of those points have achieved dead-horse status for now and the jury will be out for some time. Rather, what bugs me is the trade seems to have been made for two Dysfunctional Met reasons: Too much clubhouse/coach interference in front-office decisions (Al Leiter, but also Rick Peterson) and a late-80s-ish desire to punish players who are unapologetic about liking the other side of midnight.  

In my mind, those will be valid objections no matter what stats Zambrano and Kazmir put up. I'd be thrilled if writers kept asking Jeff Wilpon, Peterson or Leiter to explain how Dysfunction Metdom influenced the trade and what's been done to keep D.M. away from future transactions. But what does poor Zambrano have to do with it? Give him some peace, even if it means hiding him in the Jets' training room.

But on to more important things: The boys are on TV today, and I'm giddy. It's one of those days you keep looking at the clock and wondering how it can only be two minutes after you last looked after the clock. C'mon, ESPN, show long-tossing. Show stretching exercises. Show Port St. Lucie's best realtor in the infield accepting the keys to a new Taurus. It's March 2 and there's snow on the ground, so I'm easy.

Of course, spring training being spring training, I know my anticipation will soon give way to somewhat-lackadaisical interest, and then to occasional glances. And that's OK. Beyond the inability to get too worked up about whether or not John Pachot can work the count full, this is baseball, the ultimate marathon-not-a-sprint sport. (Besides marathons, of course.)

In every game I've ever watched, there's been a point when I've thought, "Jeez, this is taking forever." (When Trachsel's pitching there are about 350 of them.) I understand why some people see that as incontrovertible evidence that baseball is boring, but I don't -- to me, baseball is profoundly beautiful and wonderfully exciting, but it's also comfortable. It's around every day, in one way or the other, for eight-odd months of the year, and on most of those days it's around for three-odd hours of the afternoon or evening. Which is plenty of time to tell tales, take a phone call (if you're not at the park), or even flip through the paper if everyone's standing around on the mound talking behind their gloves about the need to throw strikes here, babe. You don't have to white-knuckle it all the time, and if you have any semblance of a normal life, you can't.