the Mets the Mets the Mets

The NYT can be rather harsh on the Mets. Perhaps that's an understatement. Some clips from this season:

-"On a night when the Pirates wore the uniforms of the Pittsburgh Crawfords and the Mets dressed as the New York Cubans, fashioning a nod to their Negro League forefathers, the Mets discovered that no costume was capable of masking reality."
-"The lines on Bell and his fellow reliever Danny Graves read like the stuff of a beer league".
-"He had to feel like a voodoo doll stuffed with pins."
-"On this trip, the Mets are disproving Coors Field and Minute Maid Park as hitting havens."

But does the Times really have it out for the Mets, or is the reporting really just an accurate portrayal of the team's sometimes dissapointing performance? In other words, is this just a situation akin to right-wing critiques of American media coverage of the Middle East? (the pro-Israel die-hards: "Oh my gosh, the US media is so unfair, they say Israel does bad things; they are so biased against Israel!". Clearer minds: "Um, Israel does do many bad things; the US media is just reporting on it, and not even that much).

There have been many spectacularly dissapointing moments for the Mets, but overall, when everything is said and done, they are a winning team.

One way to think about the coverage is to look at what Ben Shpigel and Lee Jenkins write about the opposing teams. And it's not always friendly, such as in last Thursday's paper: "...the Diamondbacks, who might be more competitive playing in the Arizona Fall League that begins here in October..."

So, this is just sports journalism, after all, in all its wonderfully low-key gloriousness.

I don't remember what the point of all this was.