On Saturday night I was flipping between another Rangers loss and the Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life. Of course you can’t help but wonder, “What if George Bailey’s situation happened to me?” What if I were able to see the consequences of never being born? That thought lasted about a minute and a half, because everybody’s life would surely be better. My wife would have been able to marry a more successful, rich, interesting, well-rounded man instead of someone who has nothing but a monkey shooting a slap shot, a couple of empty beer cans and some old Rusty Staub highlights filling up his head. My daughter would have a normal father, one who doesn’t constantly quiz her on the proper French Canadian–accented way of saying the names Guy Lafleur and Gilbert Perrault. And nobody else’s life would be affected one way or the other.

But on that subject, what if, more importantly, James Dolan had never been born? The Isiah Thomas era would never have happened. …

I’ve come out of the woodwork for a brand new blog, because I’ve come across some interesting data, and I think it’d be just plain selfish of me not to share it with my Mets brethren.

While the media is busy debating whether or not the Mets less-than-aggressive move for Jason Bay is purely a PR ploy, of greater interest to me personally is the assertion that Mets brass might actually prefer Bay over free agent Matt Holliday.  It seems that the Mets are – gasp – using statistics to evaluate how each hitter might fair in their cavernous ballpark.  This, meanwhile, from a team that has apparently made upgrading the defense and signal-calling from the catchers position their number one offseason priority, despite, as ESPN’s Keith Law pointed out, the fact that statistical analysis largely debunks the notion that a pitcher’s battery mate impacts his ERA on any detectable level.  So imagine my surprise to hear various reports that the Mets …

Here are some of the highlights, lowlights, scandals, trades and car accidents of the past week in the New York sports world.

Nate-Gate: The surging Knicks have won three games in a row, they’re spreading the ball around on offense and playing solid team defense – yes, defense (somewhere Dave DeBusschere is smiling). They’re moving up in the standings, but Nate-Gate is in full bloom, with chants of “We want Nate” raining down from the Garden faithful while Nate Robinson is tethered to the bench. Whenever he doesn’t play, the Knicks win, so the erratic guard may never see action again. Shooting at the wrong basket, too much goofing around and breezily fraternizing with the enemy have done him in. After realizing that he’s getting paid $4 million to watch NBA games a few times a week and is getting front row seats to boot, he’s not complaining, and is settling into his role as the Knicks’ Little Bit o’ Luck guy. He’s starting to make …

Daniel Day-Lewis has a new movie coming out that’s a sequel of sorts to There Will Be Blood. It’s based on my experiences as a parent, and is called There Will Be Yelling. In honor of that soon-to-be-released film, we’ll look back at the New York week in sports with an Oscar-like Best Performance slant. This week we saw a record being broken, a coach getting fired, upsets, disappointments, a baseball manager coaching a football player, hot stove rumors galore, a middle linebacker put on season-ending IR, a Yankee legend dying, two Jet wins, no Giants game, a kaleidoscopic, injured quarterback and Meredith Baxter announcing to the world that she’s a lesbian, which pretty much changes my whole world view. I’m going to have to reevaluate everything that’s happened in my life to date. I don’t even know who I am anymore.

Record-Breaking Performance of the Week: The Nets – It’s official, they’ve broken the record for worst start in NBA history. Who knew clearing …

Thanksgiving is the best of all holidays. There’s football all day long, eating all day long and drinking all day long (actually that sounds like most Sundays during football season). I think there’s something in there about Pilgrims and Indians, too, but I can’t remember what it is. A Chiefs-Patriots game maybe? Did they have muskets and kill turkeys in the old AFL? Or was it Redskins-Cowboys? The Knicks won a game this week, but it was against the Nets so I’m not sure if that really counts (those teams are a combined 3-27 so far this season), the hockey teams all won some and lost some, the Jets were trounced by the hated Patriots, the Giants went 1-1, and the Mets and Yankees started looking at possible free agents and trades, but they all have something to be thankful for during the holiday season. So here we go:

The Knicks are thankful that the Nets are worse than they are.

The Knicks are also thankful for 1970 and 1973 because that may be it for another 30 years or …

In 2006, the Mets were one game away from the World Series. And that’s been their biggest problem the last three years. They still think they’re one game away from the World Series. But they’re not. And they’re not even close. 2006 was their year. It was their chance. Their opportunity. And they blew it. And they’ve been a step behind, plugging holes, sticking their finger in the dike, fixing last year’s problems, or even the problems from the year before that, ever since. Unfortunately, the big problems who go by the names of Omar Minaya and Jerry Manuel (is Wally Backman waiting in the wings now that he’s been hired to manage Brooklyn? God, I hope so) are still here, so we’ll have to live with them at least through the beginning of the 2010 season.
The Mets’ failings are more than the bullpen issues of ’07 and ’08, and more than the power outage and injuries of ’09. The team needs more than Matt Holliday and John Lackey (though they definitely need …

The Yankees win the World Series and as soon as you can say the words “Johnny Damon wants a four-year contract” the rest of the New York–area teams go down the tubes. They went a combined 5-11 this past week. It must be a hangover. Are all the local teams riding on the Yankees’ coattails and going to all of their parties? It’s also possible that many of the area teams just stink. The Knicks and Nets went a combined 0-7 this week, and are 1-16 for the year, for instance. It was only the always-good Devils that skewed the combined record by going 4-0, and they barely count as a local team.

Here’s a day-by-day look at the past seven days.

Friday: The injury-riddled Nets lost to Philly, which kept them winless for the season, and the Devils beat the Islanders in a continuation of the New Jersey–Long Island War of 1801, in which it was so cold and icey out during the Battle of Massapequa that both sides just gave up …

Finally! The waiting is over! After nine long years without a World Series victory, the Yankees are champs once again. Nobody suffers like a Yankees fan. Think of the toll all those championship-less years have taken on an eight-year-old Yankee fan who’s never seen his favorite team win. After overcoming the Curse of Danny Cater by winning it all in ’77 and the Curse of Hiring a Manager Named Stump with the team’s ’96 Series win, the Bombers have now wiped out the Curse of Giving Us the Image of Jason Giambi in a Thong. This year’s Yankees were a heartwarming story of pies to the face and walk-off wins, and they were, of course, built the old-fashioned way: By buying up every free agent star on the market and paying hundreds of millions of dollars to them. The World Series celebration was more subdued this year because the only people who can afford to go to a Yankee game are the players and their Hollywood girlfriends. …

Congratulations, New York Yankees.

In Major League Baseball, the MVP award goes out at the end of the regulated season. It goes to the athlete who has stood out as being the most valuable, above all the rest. To an individual player, it is a huge accomplishment and honor considered being the elite in your field.

Within baseball, two players one from the American League and the one from the National League respectively, receive this prize each year.

The awards terms incorporate the obvious, which are stats and production for the season. Baseball has more stats than any other sport but this at least provides an idea of who is in contention.

However, for me, a fan, the MVP means so much more than just that.

A player selflessly plays the game by the game as part of the team not for his own personal goals. This is by no means a wimp, nor a loud mouth. His personal goals are for the team and to help the team win.

It is …

All anybody’s talking about in the New York area is the Islanders’ first regulation win over the Rangers (though Jimmy Rollins predicted it on Monday). You can’t walk down the street without somebody stopping you and asking all about the hockey team from Long Island. Will they get on a roll? Is John Tavares the real deal? Islanders, Islanders, Islanders! Everybody’s forgetting all about the bad start of the two local basketball teams, and does anybody even know that the Yankees are in the World Series this year? All the Islanders-all-the-time talk is really taking the pressure off the other local teams.

Here at Hot Stove, we know that the Yankees are in the World Series again, as you can’t get anything by us. The Bronx Bombers paid their $200 million entry fee into the Series, setting up a rematch of the 1950 Fall Classic. And with so many off-days, it seems like there are about 59 years between games in this postseason. In the Series we’ve already seen Cliff Lee nonchalantly put the Bombers’ bats to sleep, …

It was a brutal week for the New York football teams, as the Giants got killed and the Jets fell to lowly Buffalo and lost Kris Jenkins for the rest of the season. Even the hockey teams mixed in some debacles with a few wins. And something bad probably happened to the Mets even though their season is long over.

But even after last night’s loss, the Yankees are sitting pretty, with a 3-2 lead in the series and heading back home. With a budget as high as our country’s deficit, the Yanks had two options this offseason: Use their money to cure the U.S. economy or buy a whole bunch of free agents. They chose the latter, and it’s working out just fine (well, for them). Unfortunately, the one aspect of the playoffs that has stood out the most is the atrocious umpiring. The horrible umpiring in this year’s postseason is unprecedented, but there are things out there that are actually worse, if you can believe it. …