Strawberry on The Celebrity Apprentice: Will you watch?

Darryl Strawberry will be on “The Celebrity Apprentice” this coming season.  I’ve never been a fan of the show, but I might tune in just to see Strawberry “at work.”

But I’m wondering, will you watch this show purely for Strawberry?

Mets to add Strawberry, Gooden, Davey Johnson and Frank Cashen to HoF

I like it.

A look at Citi Field’s new additions [Photos]

I was at Friday night’s Mets game at Citi Field and snapped a few grainy photos of the new additions around Citi Field.  Take a look…

The new video board in the RF corner…

The new banners on the LF wall…

The new photos viewed from the Field Level…That was all I saw as I walked around.  I didn’t get a chance to look at the improved sightlines, but I’m going back Monday, so I will see if I can spot any changes.

Opening Night nuggets

Here are some nuggets of info from the gameday press pass for tonight’s game…

• Tom Seaver will throw the first pitch to Mike Piazza.
• On hand for tonight’s game: Rusty Staub, Dwight Gooden, Darryl Strawberry and John Franco.
• The Broadway cast of West Side Story will perform the National Anthem.
• 200 veterans will be on the field in a pre-game ceremony to unveil a football-field size American flag.
• Four F-18 Hornets will fly over as the National Anthem comes to a close.
• Sgt. Felix Perez, the wounded solider who was in the clubhouse after the Team USA WBC win over Puerto Rico, will be in attendance tonight as a guest of the Mets ownership.
• The Empire State Building will be lit up in orange and blue.
• The game will be broadcast in front of SNY’s studios and will also be carried on the ABC SuperSign  above the Good Morning America studios in Times Square.
• The Mets are 30-17 all time in home openers. (0-2 at the Polo Grounds, 30-15 at Shea Stadium.)

Chris Carlin and Bob Ojeda: Your new pre- and post-game hosts on SNY

In the seemingly ever-revolving door that is SNY hosts, the Mets have two new ones this year for their pre-game and post-game shows. Chris Carlin, who is most likely known from WFAN and Loud Mouths on SNY, and Bob Ojeda, who spent five years with the Mets from 1986 to 1990.

From Bob Raissman:

When SportsNet New York executive producer Curt Gowdy Jr. tore the cover off Carlin, he liked what he saw inside. Liked what Carlin, often self-deprecating, had to say, too. First he hired him to co-host "Loud Mouths" with bug-eyed Adam Schein.

Gowdy is now really rolling the dice. Carlin, with no experience in a baseball studio, will be under the nightly microscope anchoring SNY's Mets pre and postgame shows. Bob Ojeda, who proudly admits to being a total TV novice, will sit next to him. The openings were man-made after SNY jettisoned the team of Lee Mazzilli and Matt Yallof.

It's not up to me to judge them -- I'll leave that to Raissman and Neil Best -- but to put an extremely abrasive Carlin with no baseball experience and a novice like Ojeda in front of millions of fans on the team's own network just doesn't make sense to me.

I've never been a fan of Carlin's, so that's where some of this stems from. He just irks me. I'm willing to see what Ojeda has to offer, though. Lee Mazzilli was great last year, as was Harold Reynolds and Darryl Strawberry.

All the best to these two hosts, because I know I'll be seeing a lot of them in 2009. And maybe, just maybe, Gowdy will tear the cover off me one day and like what he sees.

Gary Carter and Darryl Strawberry nearly come to blows on team bus (in 1986)

Back in July, I had a post entitled "Jose Reyes and Keith Hernandez nearly come to blows on team plane."

Via The Final Score, we now know that Gary "Camera" Carter and Darryl Strawberry almost tussled on the bus in St. Louis, and if it wasn't for Ray Knight standing up and calming them down, who knows what would have happened.

Knight:

"So anyway, we were sitting there, oh, it couldn’t have been more than two or three minutes waiting for Gary. Straw yells out of the bus, 'Let’s go Camera Carter. You're holding everything up! Get the blank on the bus!

"And so when Gary got on the bus he started heading to the back of the bus for Straw. They' exchanged words. I stood up between them and they calmed down. There were things like that that happened all the time. The next night if Darryl hit a big home run, or Gary did, they would be high-fiving, hugging, like it never happened."

Ah, chemistry.

This is something I wish the Mets had more of. More attitude, more brash, more character.