National League Town (a Mets podcast)

It was a great day at Clover Park as the Mets won... other than my chicken tender and fries.

The Mets win, Max Kranick and Trayce Thompson stand out, and Jeff hugs it out with Screech.

Jeff is in Florida for a month for various reasons but let's face it, the Mets are the biggest reason. This is the "Trailer" for this show and Jeff explains what you will hear as he watches the Mets during Spring Training. Music: The Royal Arctic Institute Cover Art: John Newcomer

“Baseball is back!” says it all, and what it doesn’t say, National League Town’s first episode of 2024 will. Greg and Jeff are ready to turn their attention toward Port St. Lucie, cheering the players who show up early, figuring out who might play where, and wondering whether a Polar Bear can be kept in captivity beyond this year. We also preview a special Spring Training podcast series we think y...

Having passed the 100-episode milestone, National League Town pauses to reflect on two years of podcasting and how these seasons have intertwined with two lifetimes of Mets fandom. Mostly, Greg and Jeff say thank you to all who have accompanied this program on its trip around the bases...and, as always, Let’s Go Mets.

’Twas the week before Christmas, and all through the pod, hosts Greg and Jeff craved Yamamoto’s nod; free agents, alas, decide on their own time, not paying heed to our recording deadline. All this is our merry way of saying that when National League Town put together this episode, the Mets had yet to sign their main free agent target. Thus, rather than dwelling on the uncertain, we devote the bul...

Superstars are landing elsewhere or have yet to decide their destinations. A top prospect is injured. No player acquired to date is what you’d call a “get”. What kind of Mets offseason is this? It’s one that requires a little more waiting and a lot more hoping. In the meantime, Greg and Jeff salute the legacy of Mrs. Joan Payson, without whom there wouldn’t be Mets seasons (17:00), and remember Jo...

National League Town returns this week to some of Jeff’s Brilliant Ideas, thoughtful concepts and suggestions guaranteed to make baseball better. More doubleheaders and day games? Adjustments to the ghost runner rule and the WBC? Breathing new life into the All-Star Game? Jeff’s mulled these and more over and shares the thinking behind his always intriguing notions.

Our provincial take on the 2024 Hall of Fame election is Vote for David Wright...and maybe some or all of the other nine Mets on the writers’ ballot. The Captain is eligible for consideration for the first time after his fourteen-season career as a Met and only a Met, a span when he earned multiple honors, made multiple All-Star teams and created myriad memories. As far as National League Town is...

Greg and Jeff are happy this Thanksgiving over the presence of a mascot and the absence of a narrative. They’re perfectly fine with the return of a few coaches while they sort out their feelings over the comings and goings of several players. When it comes to the prospective Las Vegas A’s, they have a hard time imagining that team succeeding as a box office attraction in an event-driven market. An...

Did you have any idea what Carlos Mendoza sounded like before his introductory press conference? Neither did we, but now we do. That was the primary National League Town takeaway from the introduction of the Mets’ latest manager at the Mets’ latest press conference as he sat alongside the Mets’ latest general manager and told us the Mets’ latest plan is to be competitive. Now that we’ve acquainted...

Long Island’s Own Jeff Hysen blows out a few candles and shares his birthday with Ed Kranepool and Edgardo Alfonzo, but the real November celebration could be for the hiring of Carlos Mendoza as new Mets manager. If his tenure turns into a ticker-tape party, Mets fans may be talking about him someday like Greg and Jeff are talking about Davey Johnson this week, as a Hall of Fame candidate on the l...

We know we couldn’t get from the 2023 Mets season what we wanted most, yet we carry away from this baseball year gone by a few moments that really resonated with us. Greg and Jeff each single out five games when they found being a Mets fan took on a little extra special meaning — win, lose or draw.

The National League Town monthly series “It Happens in Threes” pulls into the garage after zooming ahead one more decade, to remember 2023 (75-87) in a segment short on long-term perspective, but no doubt fortified by recency bias. As could be said of 1963 (51-11), 1983 (68-94), 1993 (59-103), 2003 (66-95) and 2013 (74-88), these were not the best the best of times, but they’re the only times we g...

BONUS EPISODE! National League Town pauses from its stare out the window/wait for spring to revel briefly in the ouster of the hated Atlanta Braves from the 2023 postseason, even if it took the hated Philadelphia Phillies to do the ousting. October hat tips are issued as well to the Diamondbacks, Astros and Rangers because, honestly, what else do we have to do other than stare out the window and w...

One week after they framed Billy Eppler’s forthcoming role in the Mets’ decision-making hierarchy; railed against Major League Baseball for endless indecisiveness regarding the outcome of a suspended game; and wished the Miami Marlins ill in their postseason endeavors, Greg and Jeff return to square some circles (Eppler’s out; the suspended game was resolved; and the Marlins swam off to sea with n...

The Mets showed their manager the door and welcomed aboard a new president of baseball operations. National League Town therefore wishes Buck Showalter a fond (if ultimately necessary) adieu while hoping their fellow Mets fan David Stearns will know what he’s doing for a long time to come. Greg and Jeff also try to figure out how a person could have snuck into Shea Stadium and wonder whatever beca...

The 2023 Mets did it their way, and ain’t that a shame? Greg and Jeff pull up a mic and discuss not so much what went wrong, but what it was like to live through all of it going wrong. You know what they say, though: whatever lousy Mets season doesn’t kill you makes you strongly aggravated you just sat through so much dismal baseball. On the other hand, what else were we gonna do?

Expectations were raised, expectations were dashed. In a nutshell, that’s been 2023 for the Mets. Still, hope springs eternal, even in the last days of a season about to end with no sign our most recent spasm of hope transformed into the success we dared expect. We can’t control what the players accomplish, yet we’ll be back to look forward to a collection of them next year doing better than they...

In 2023, everybody played everybody in the major leagues, which meant the Mets spent 46 games involved with opponents from the American League. Greg and Jeff delve into what it was like for National League fans like them to divert their focus more than ever from what they were used to. And what do the hosts of National League Town think about when they think about American League teams? We relive...

Darryl Strawberry’s 18 and Dwight Gooden’s 16 will rise to Citi Field’s rafters in 2024, rafters being one of those terms we can’t necessarily define, yet we know what it means. It means two of the players whose pictures you see in the proverbial dictionary when you look up the greatest era in New York Mets history are getting the recognition they’ve long deserved, and National League Town couldn’...

Jeff is solo this week and he explains how he is dealing with this season, looks at the schedule for next season, gives his opinion of Rob Manfred’s job status, tells everybody to stop clapping their hands, and brings back one of Greg’s finest moments.

Of every angle that tends to entangle a team that has fallen short of great expectations, you can usually count on the future of the manager to generate a din of discourse. Yet since the trade deadline clarified that the Mets were not going to make a playoff run, all’s been quiet on the Showalter front. National League Town attempts to penetrate the silence while withstanding the stiff breeze gene...

Ever have your team sign an accomplished quarterback, a pedigreed coach, a dazzling shooter or a reliable lefty reliever and you weren’t thrilled because, quite frankly, you didn’t like the idea of rooting for that particular person? Funny we should ask, as Greg and Jeff are talking about the kind of adjustment a fan sometimes makes in the name of hoping your team wins more games. In 2003, the Met...

The Mets have played dead, and National League Town can’t bring them back to life, but Greg and Jeff are more than happy to talk each other (and their siblings) through the dog days of this most brutal summer. Are we having any seller’s remorse? Are we rewriting history on the fly to suggest that if only we’d stood pat, we’d be coming on strong in the Wild Card scramble? Are we still going to the...