(above, Boy Gary, hopefully ruled ineligible from future ceremonial first pitch considerations, via Twitter or any other medium)

Rather than blast the New York Mets for their annual support of the North Shore Animal League’s questionable practices, I’ll instead focus a rare bit of p.r. ingenuity on the part of the 3rd place Amazins, who dropped both games of a doubleheader yesterday to Atlanta in front of 40,000 or so empty seats.  “If you were at Thursday’s doubleheader, you deserve to not only have guaranteed tickets to the first World Series game at Citi Field, but you deserve to be in the front row,” writes Metsradamus of Thursday’s degenerate few hardy souls, while paying rare tribute to the persons working that most thankless of jobs, manning the Mets marketing department.

I’d like to think I’m good at blasting the organization when they do something dumb. So under the premise that puppies and babies need positive reinforcement just as they need to be told “no”, I’m going to give the Mets credit for something: Before the first game the team had a tweet contest, where the first person in the park to tweet back got to throw out the ceremonial first pitch of the ball game (and no, the winner wasn’t Chris Schwinden.) Think about it: a fan in the stands got to go onto the field and throw a ceremonial first pitch to Ronny Paulino (amazingly, he caught it.) That’s pretty freakin’ sweet if you ask me. If there’s one thing I can impart onto the Mets new ownership, whoever they may be and whenever they may get here, it would be this: the Twitter first pitch thing? More of that.

The Twitter first pitch contest was really cool. It strikes me different than all the rest. The next step is to do it on a day that was actually on the schedule, and not a day that was scheduled at the last minute and no corporate sponsor made themselves available to throw out the first pitch at the last second. In fact, let’s take that a step further: You should do it before every home date for the rest of the season. You want to give the fans something to make them feel like they’re something more than an attendance figure? That’s a great place to start.