Welcome to the Phillies Nation Podcast!
Today, I talked with Matt Cerrone of MetsBlog.com and SNY.tv about the stars of the New York Mets as we get you ready for the start of the season. It’s part of our NL East Preview (read the Mets preview here) and our overall MLB preview as the season is just a few days away.
Matt was good enough to take some time to talk about Jose Reyes, Carlos Beltran, having Jason Bay in the order, and the shaky pitching staff, as he put it. When talking about Reyes, he said the decision to keep him on the bench for the first week of the season is certainly a head scratcher. He’s been cleared to play, but the Mets want to take it slow with him. However, there’s no taking it slow this year for a team that won just 70 games last year.
He said the real concern is Carlos Beltran’s knee injury. Beltran has gone downhill the last few seasons and will be sidelined until May. Matt says the concern lies in his defense of centerfield, which is a large piece of grass to graze.
In 2003, Matt Cerrone moved to Washington, DC, and started MetsBlog.com as a project in college, because, as an out-of-market fan, he could not watch the games on TV, he missed listening to WFAN, and had no Mets fans to talk with about the team. He continued to write the blog as a hobby; and made it his full-time job in 2006.
In six years of blogging, he turned MetsBlog.com from five page views per month to five million page views per month, which it logged in December 2009.
In 2007, MetsBlog.com partnered with SNY, the TV home of the Mets, to help develop more in-depth content while working to create team-specific blogs and digital projects for their website, SNY.TV, with whom Matt was nominated for two New York Emmy Awards in 2008.
During his time writing MetsBlog.com, he’s have been interviewed about the Mets and my work in digital media on radio, including WFAN, ESPN, and on countless other stations across the country; and on television, including SNY, ESPN News, WNBC and WPIX, among others; while being quoted in several print publications, including The New York Times, New York Daily News, Newsday, Sports Illustrated and on ESPN.com.
