By JOHN JAMES MARSHALL/Designated Writers

Three sports, three issues I have:

BASEBALL: The New York Mets have won 12 out of 13 and “have made their way back in the race.” It’s phenomenal … never seen anything like it … what an amazing resurrection! Yada, yada. I’d just like to point out a few things: (1) They are still in fourth place in the five-team National League East; (2) Do you think anybody notices/cares if the Mariners won 12 of 13?; and (3) — my favorite — here’s a list of the teams they have bean in the “amazing” streak — Padres, Pirates, White Sox, Pirates (again) and the Marlins. I’ll go ahead and save you the trouble of looking up which of those teams that is within nine games of .500. Answer, none. So let’s do some serious roll-slowing about the New York Baseball Mets. Just because they’ve reached .500 doesn’t mean they’ve turned into the 1986 Mets.

FOOTBALL: We are weeks away from the NFL opening the 2019 and I think I already hate the Cleveland Browns. And I have no great dislike for the team, at least up until now. Every day it’s something new with this team that we must be told about. It has a lot to do with Baker Mayfield and Odell Beckham, two of the biggest personalities in the league, but Cleveland is definitely the team that is being shoved down our throats this pre-season. The Browns won five of the last seven to close the season, but it was against the Bengals (twice), Falcons, Broncos and Panthers. All had losing records. Maybe they will be good, but can’t we just wait and find out?

GOLF: Speaking of being shoved down out throats, the FedEx Cup playoffs starts Thursday. All year long we’ve heard about how some golfer “picked up valuable FedEx points” by finishing fifth in some no-name tournament. The PGA keeps trying to make this a big deal and the latest solution is to move it to August to get out of the way of football season. Still not going to work. It’s forced golf fun and America doesn’t buy into it. What’s worse is that we should be having one of the four majors this weekend, but instead they moved the PGA to May for reasons that still don’t make sense. Maybe it was so that some rookie could pick up valuable FedEx points.

By JOHN JAMES MARSHALL/Designated Writers

At this time of year, there are two kinds of people in this (sports) world — (1) those whose team are in a pennant race and (2) everybody else.

I count myself fortunate to be in the first category. As an Atlanta Braves fan, every game is like Game 7 of the World Series. I’ll remind you that it’s early August and the Braves have a semi-comfortable lead in the National League East, but that makes no difference.

The Braves are in the midst of a three-game series with another first-place team (Minnesota, AL Central) and I’m grinding every pitch. There’s nothing like the final two months of the year when your team is in the race. This year, there really aren’t that many good races, but until the magic number goes to zero, you learn not to count any chickens but the actual hatching. (see: 1978 Red Sox).

You check the standings every morning and then look at scores four or five times a night. Are the Phillies about to rally? Are the Mets going to win every game? Somebody needs to beat the Nationals! 

But what it makes you appreciate are all those years in which you fall into category (2) and your team can’t get a sniff of the post-season. No matter how big of a fan you are, you just lose interest come early August. You might check a boxscore every now and then, but mentally, you’ve packed it in.

Now with the extra wild card spot into the playoffs — which I wasn’t all that wild about at first but now I love — it has kept even more teams alive than ever before. Maybe not the Marlins and Tigers, who were out of it in April, but if your team gets hot for two weeks, you never know.

Football and basketball don’t have pennant races. This is the exclusive property of baseball and there’s nothing to compare it to. You can be cruising along and one bad homestand can change everything.

The first 100 or so games of a 162-game season are all great and fun and all that. But when you have a team in the hunt, there’s nothing like that final third. Did the Phillies just score again?