Daniel Shank Cruz

A baseball card with a painting of Dwight Gooden on the pitching mound in his windup wearing a blue Mets jersey with the number 16 in orange on the back, and the traditional blue Mets cap. The rest of the field is in the background. The card has a plain white border and there is no writing on it other than the artist’s unreadable signature at the bottom right hand of the card.

Another Dwight Gooden from the Bowman pack. 4/4 #MetsSky #CardSky

Jimmy Key, Tom Henke, and Dwight Gooden 1988 Topps all-star cards.

1988 Topps Ozzie Guillen and Mike Davis. Both have a photo of them batting left handed showing the back of the catcher crouched and the front of the batter poised to swing.

1988 Topps Chris Brown wearing a brown Padres jersey and with his name in white letters on a brown banner crossing the bottom right hand corner of the card.

Two Blue Jays all-stars plus the Doctor from the rack pack, plus also two cards with almost the exact same pose and a card of Chris Brown wearing brown with his name printed on a brown background that makes my neurospicyness so happy! 3/? #MetsSky #CardSky

1988 Topps cards of Tim Raines (all-star), Phil and Joe Niekro (record breakers), and White Sox leaders showing Harold Baines and Carlton Fisk, plus the red wrapper and stick of bubble gum.

Four Hall of Famers in the 1988 wax pack! Plus an intact piece of gum (the one in the Bowman pack had started molding) 2/? #CardSky

A photo of five baseball card packs: 1988 Topps red wax pack, 1988 Topps rack pack, 1989 Topps blue wax pack, 1990 blue Bowman wax pack, 1991 red Topps wax pack.

I’m really missing baseball, so I impulse bought a package of random packs from the 1980s/1990s. 1/? #CardSky

Actually, I just looked it up and it was '86 Donruss, not O-Pee-Chee.

I used to have an O-Pee-Chee card from the ‘80s (I forget which year) that had his nickname, “Mr. Clutch,” printed on the front, and I thought to myself, “why doesn’t Topps do cool graphics like that?”

Here's Weird Al's parody "Living with a Hernia" www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8Ow...

A great Met!

People just don't get how good Francisco Lindor is. I feel for the Mets (maybe Guards too) fans that have to justify him.

Ranked by post-integration fWAR all-time:

Absolutely not. It’s way too much for someone who still might leave in free agency.

Agreed, I collect based on whether I find a card enjoyable in some way rather than worrying about value.

A few weeks later and I'm still mad about this Hall of Fame ballot 😆😭 Here's one more head-to-head of a more-deserving player getting left off: Dwight Gooden (let's go, Mets!) had a better career than Fernando Valenzuela. Neither is a HOFer in my book, but still. #LGM #MetsSky

I guess that makes sense consistency-wise for the abbreviations. They could fit Mets there but not Cardinals.

David Peterson’s 2025 Topps baseball card with a horizontal orientation and the letters NYM along the left margin with his name at bottom left. Juan Soto’s card is next to it with a vertical orientation and Mets along the left margin instead of NYM.

I’m not a fan of the 2025 Topps design so I hadn’t bought any, but after a lot of hemming and hawing I decided to buy a Mets team set, and it’s fascinating that Topps chose to use the NYM abbreviation (blech) for the horizontal cards and Mets for the vertical ones. #CardSky #MetsSky

IIRC before he made the horrible blunder in the World Series that others have mentioned he caught the last out of the NLCS, and I remember him (or whoever caught it, but I'm 99% sure it was him) jumping up and down with joy while he waited for the ball to land in his glove.

It feels like the baseball gods recognized he belonged to New York even though the Mets let him go twice. His 300th win happened in New York (wrong stadium), and his last appearance in uniform (albeit while on the DL [sic]) was sitting in the visitor's dugout at Shea during game 7 in '86.

I believe “player of the game” is correct. Barrett hit over .400 for the series.

This post has ended up being one of the most polarizing posts I've ever seen on BlueSky 😆

Tatis was suspended for half a season for PED use in 2022.

Absolutely not. I don’t want cheaters on my team.

Cal Raleigh had the best season for a catcher in MLB history. He deserved to be AL MVP over Aaron Judge. But Judge plays for the Yankees, so tough shit for the rest of us

An exchange on twitter. controlla.xyz: If you hate Al you probably just hate art and expression It's an infinite mashup of all the best art ever made by humans lesliejandersonwriter: If you hate the juice at the bottom of a restaurant dumpster you just hate food and cooking. It's an infinite mashup of all the best food made by humans!

I love this.

I don’t really follow hockey anymore, but when I did I was a huge Rangers fan.

A poem by Daniel Shank Cruz, “fireflies outside the window the ravioli overcook”

A poem by Daniel Shank Cruz, “constitutional crisis my depillomania”

The cover of Kingfisher 12, October 2025, with a cartoon-style blue and white kingfisher standing in front of a brick wall. The bird has a rainbow mohawk and is wearing a dark blue leather jacket.

I have two poems in the new issue of Kingfisher, which has a lovely cover.

one time pitcher john denny knocked reggie jackson down with a brushback pitch. next time up reggie blasted a moonshot home run off him. denny kept chirping at him as he rounded the bases and wouldn't stop, so reggie stepped on home, charged the mound and beat his ass. andrew cuomo is john denny

He is! He was at a Mets game this season wearing a cap that was given away at a game in 2024, so he legit goes to games as a fan.

I hope that all the people who said they were going to leave NYC if Mamdani was elected actually do! The city will be a better place for the rest of us. 💙🧡

Note that the Mets also made back-to-back appearances in 2015-16.

YouTube video by Belle & Sebastian - Topic Piazza, New York Catcher

Also, this is an enjoyable song that is mostly not about him even though he is in the title: youtu.be/QXiRbf-4RXc?...

He admits in his autobiography that he should have charged Roger Clemens when Clemens threw a bat fragment at him during the 2000 World Series. I completely agree—it would have given the Mets a shot in the arm they badly needed.