Fall is in the air -- you can tell, even out here in the middle of the Mojave Desert, because the Mets have just completed their annual Autumn collapse. After dominating their division for almost the whole season, with what looked like the best team in baseball, they decided in the end to just dry up and blow away, like leaves in the wind.
It was one of the worst late-season collapses in the history of baseball, and the Mets didn't go down fighting -- the whole team just seemed to stand around, staring blankly into space, waiting for the nightmare to consume them.
The Mets have been my last real connection to the city of New York. I have a lot of friends who still live there but they visit Vegas regularly, so I think of them as Vegas friends now. But the Mets seem to have taken on the qualities of the new New York I couldn't live in anymore -- rich, bland, complacent, without grit, without character.
I think the time has come to let them go -- let them fade into the old ghost city that exists now only in my memory. In that city, they will always be champions.
When Willie Mays, playing for the Mets at the end of his career, decided to retire, he said, "There always come a time when somebody have to say goodbye."
Goodbye.