Beyond Merle the Pearl: Mets in Popular Culture in 2025

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In the final episodes of Cobra Kai, the relaunch of The Sekai Taikai is underway with coverage from none other than Kevin Burkhardt.

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In the final episodes of Cobra Kai, the relaunch of The Sekai Taikai is underway with coverage from none other than Kevin Burkhardt.

Two of the showrunners and Ralph Macchio love the Mets. In case you didn't know, Cobra Kai never dies.

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Kevin Burkhardt covered last season's 49ers-Chiefs game. Also, one of last season's 49ers-Rams games.

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On Where Have You Eaten, Joe DiMaggio?, (S23E11) the show that tracks the eating habits of famous baseball players, none other than Kevin Burkhardt follows the culinary adventures of one-time Met farmhand, Eddie Rosario. None other than Eddie Rosario! Segments include Eddie eating an avocado taco in some Washington Heights bodega and Russian food in a Brighton Beach dive. Sturgeon with Chechikhov and cocktails with Molotov!

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Good ol' Charley Pierce earns a spot in our Met Pop Culture thread by channeling the hapless original incarnation of Casey's Polo Grounds Mets.. And a damn good speech by Maine's Governor Mills. Personally, they should be doing much more than simply telling President Combover to essentially go fuck himself, but it's a start:

The Maine Governor Knew Exactly What to Say to Trump: "See You In Court"

For a number of years in the early days of this shebeen, we were plagued by the antics of Human Bowling Jacket Paul LePage, who kept getting elected governor of Maine because the state's Democrats could never get their shi...act together. In 2022, however, the skies cleared and the angels wept. After the term-limited LePage had had to sit out for four years, he returned to challenge incumbent Democratic governor Janet Mills, who beat LePage like a tin drum, winning more votes than any gubernatorial candidate in the state's history, and probably ridding the political terrarium of one of its more noxious weeds. (Why the state's Republicans decided to nominate the Human Bowling Jacket again is an indication that the prion disease has established itself within the Republican population of Maine. I suggest a quarantine until we find out what the hell is going on.) That victory is a sufficient political mitzvah for an entire political career. But, the other day, Mills did the republic another great, good service.

President Krasnov dropped by a National Governor's Association meeting and spent an hour mumbling and maundering in the usual manner about a couple of dozen issues about which he has less of a clue than a lamp post does. But, at the end, he decided to pick on Janet Mills. The subject was his idiotic campaign against trans citizens, the one that keeps getting turned into sticks and splinters every time a judge gets to rule on part of it. Under Mills, Maine has maintained its enlightened attitude toward its trans citizens. And awaaaaaaay we go!

“Two weeks ago I signed an executive order banning men from playing in women’s sports. Many Democrats are fighting me on that. I hope you continue because you’ll never win another race. And it’s just crazy—if you look at what happened with the boxing, if you look at what happened with the weightlifting numbers, where a record that hadn’t been broken for 19 years got shattered, but you know they put up an eighth of an ounce here, and eighth of an ounce there, and it’s 218 pounds or whatever, a lot, and it hadn’t been broken in 19 years, and then guy walks up, he transitioned, he transitioned, and he knocked out that record by about 100 pounds. That will be a record that's not going to be broken again. So we put a ban on it—to protect women, I mean the women, if you watch the Olympics, you had two transitioned people that were fighting in the women’s boxing, they have women’s boxing category, and if you saw that, it was brutal. What happened to the Italian woman was a really good boxer, after one punch she said ‘No, no, no more, no more,’ it was a left, it was not even a—it was just a left jab and she got hit so hard she said ‘I can’t do it,’ they forced her to go out, No, go out, go out again, you'll do it, goes out again, gets hit again. ‘No no, that’s it,’ she didn’t want to die, and it’s crazy, but the NCAA has complied immediately by the way, that’s good, but I understand Maine, is the governor of Maine here?”

I'm here, Mills replied.

Trump: “Are you not going to comply with it?”

Mills: “I will comply with the state and federal law.”

Trump: “Well, I’m, we are the federal law.

[I needed to pause for a moment because common sense got caught in my throat. We continue.]

Trump: Well, you’d better do it. You’d better do it. Because you’re not going to get any federal funding at all if you don’t. And by the way your population, even though it’s somewhat liberal, although I did very well there, your population doesn’t want men playing in women’s sports. So you better comply. Because otherwise you’re not getting any federal funding.”

Mills: “I’ll see you in court.”


[You can almost feel the feral energy from behind that podium. Who was this...woman to be challenging the father of the new Golden Age of America? Why do they laugh at his mighty sword?]

Trump: “Good, I’ll see you in court, good. I look forward to that, that should be a real easy one. And enjoy your life after governor, because I don’t think you’ll be in elected politics. Every state has a responsibility to comply with Title IX, they have an obligation, a legal obligation, and we will be enforcing aggressively, and we’re going to be protecting our citizens, we’re going to protect.”

Here is where we remind everyone that this guy is the 1962 Mets of federal litigation. As soon as he got back to the Diet Coke room in the White House, however, he put the wheels of the crazy machinery in full motion. First, the Department of Education announced a Title IX investigation of Maine's state DOE. In quick succession, the Department of Agriculture announced an investigation into the University of Maine's Title IX compliance. The USDA has some alleged standing because UMaine, as a land-grant university, gets USDA money. The problem, of course, is that this money is already appropriated and approved, and impoundment by the Executive is still unconstitutional, a point that Mills made in response to the investigation.

No President–Republican or Democrat–can withhold Federal funding authorized and appropriated by Congress and paid for by Maine taxpayers in an attempt to coerce someone into compliance with his will. It is a violation of our Constitution and of our laws, which I took an oath to uphold. Maine may be one of the first states to undergo an investigation by his Administration, but we won’t be the last. Today, the President of the United States has targeted one particular group on one particular issue which Maine law has addressed. But you must ask yourself: who and what will he target next, and what will he do? Will it be you? Will it be because of your race or your religion? Will it be because you look different or think differently? Where does it end? In America, the President is neither a King nor a dictator, as much as this one tries to act like it – and it is the rule of law that prevents him from being so.I imagine that the outcome of this politically directed investigation is all but predetermined. My Administration will begin work with the Attorney General to defend the interests of Maine people in the court of law. But do not be misled: this is not just about who can compete on the athletic field, this is about whether a President can force compliance with his will, without regard for the rule of law that governs our nation. I believe he cannot.


Why does she laugh at his mighty sword?

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/p ... -governor/

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Good ol' Charley is suddenly a reservoir of Polo Grounds Casey references:

The Secretary of Defense TEXTED Top-Secret War Plans to the Editor of ‘The Atlantic’?!

The gob, it is smacked.
By Charles P. Pierce
Published: Mar 24, 2025 5:24 PM EDT

Attributed to the late Casey Stengel, and in reference to the 1962 New York Mets, who reached heretofore unprecedented depth in their mediocrity, this not only gave the late Jimmy Breslin a great title for a book on the team but also blessed the English language with a glorious idiom for abject incompetence.

“Can’t anybody here play this game?” Casey lamented.

Casey died in 1975, but I’m sure that, wherever he’s sitting in heaven’s Malaprop Cafe, he wouldn’t mind if we applied his existential musings to the current presidential administration—specifically, in this case, to the Department of Defense and its current jefe, Pete Hegseth, who swears he’s doing all this stuff while sober. From The Atlantic:

The world found out shortly before 2 p.m. eastern time on March 15 that the United States was bombing Houthi targets across Yemen. I, however, knew two hours before the first bombs exploded that the attack might be coming. The reason I knew this is that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, had texted me the war plan at 11:44 a.m. The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing. This is going to require some explaining.

I would think so.

On Tuesday, March 11, I received a connection request on Signal from a user identified as Michael Waltz. Signal is an open-source encrypted messaging service popular with journalists and others who seek more privacy than other text-messaging services are capable of delivering. I assumed that the Michael Waltz in question was President Donald Trump’s national security adviser. I did not assume, however, that the request was from the actual Michael Waltz. I have met him in the past, and though I didn’t find it particularly strange that he might be reaching out to me, I did think it somewhat unusual, given the Trump administration’s contentious relationship with journalists—and Trump’s periodic fixation on me specifically. It immediately crossed my mind that someone could be masquerading as Waltz in order to somehow entrap me. It is not at all uncommon these days for nefarious actors to try to induce journalists to share information that could be used against them.

Whew. Paranoia strikes deep. Sufficient to our current moment, of course. But one thing we can be sure of is that, if the administration did set up a Veritas-style ratfck, they were better-than-even money to screw it up. And one of the ways we know that is that the actual facts of this particular situation are a spectacular example of utter incompetence.

Two days later—Thursday—at 4:28 p.m., I received a notice that I was to be included in a Signal chat group. It was called the “Houthi PC small group.” A message to the group, from “Michael Waltz,” read as follows: “Team – establishing a principles [sic] group for coordination on Houthis, particularly for over the next 72 hours. My deputy Alex Wong is pulling together a tiger team at deputies/agency Chief of Staff level following up from the meeting in the Sit Room this morning for action items and will be sending that out later this evening.” ...

... The term principals committee generally refers to a group of the senior-most national-security officials, including the secretaries of defense, state, and the treasury, as well as the director of the CIA. It should go without saying—but I’ll say it anyway—that I have never been invited to a White House principals-committee meeting, and that, in my many years of reporting on national-security matters, I had never heard of one being convened over a commercial messaging app.

The gob, it is smacked.

These guys organized a meeting to discuss a military strike and nobody thought to ask, “Gee, fellas, isn’t it kind of weird that we invited the editor of The Atlantic to this top-secret strategy conference?” Or nobody bothered to check the call list, and I guess we’re lucky they didn’t invite Oprah or Jim Cantore.

It was the next morning, Saturday, March 15, when this story became truly bizarre.

Don’t just take his word for it.

All along, members of the Signal group were aware of the need for secrecy and operations security. In his text detailing aspects of the forthcoming attack on Houthi targets, Hegseth wrote to the group—which, at the time, included me—“We are currently clean on OPSEC.”


The answer to the Stengel Question is, in this case, nobody.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/p ... war-plans/

[Marshmallowmilkshake]

In the final episodes of Cobra Kai, the relaunch of The Sekai Taikai is underway with coverage from none other than Kevin Burkhardt.

Cobra Kai co-creator Jon Hurwitz was on the "Meet at the Apple" podcast last week, and he's a huge Mets fan!