THE MAILBAG

For the first time in a very long time, we'll dig into the e-mail-bag.

I've been sitting on this one from Steve from Queens for a while, and it's sort of newsy right now, so there's really no better time to address it.

This was a forward, and the subject line had to do with the fact that the Mets are having a....less than manly, I guess....vote for some songs to play in the 8th inning of their games. (I've written before how embarrassing it is that the Mets ripped off the Red Sox with "Sweet Caroline" - see the fifth bullet here.)

Here's the content of the e-mail:

"[Following a derogatory subject line] But we have to do it.

The Mets are having the fans vote on the 8th inning song.

We need to ensure that ******* song from Friends is not the winner.

Send to every Met fan you know."

The choices were (I might be missing some here): "Waitin' on a Sunny Day" by Bruce Springsteen, "Brown-Eyed Girl" by Van Morrison, the aforementioned Neil Diamond song, "Living on a Prayer" by Bon Jovi, "I'll Be There For You", by the people who sang the 'Friends' theme song - Rembrandts, I believe, "I'm a Believer" by the Monkees, and my choice, had I voted, "Movin' Out" by Billy Joel. (I had my own Billy Joel list, you may remember, but that was obviously a waste of time.) Although I would choose Billy Joel, obviously, the Monkees are also a strong candidate, based on the "Ya Gotta Believe" theme through Mets history.

Anyway, apparently some Phillies fans stormed the voting site, and voted in Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up", which actually played during the home opener...and which is actually kind of funny and intelligent, for Phillies fans. So now this song vote isn't over - the Mets will apparently play a bunch of the songs, and pick a winner based on fan reaction. So help me if they end up keeping "Sweet Caroline".

A RESPONSE FROM JUSTIN IN NYC: Justin in NYC, always helpful in all things music-or-media-related (and a great idea guy), weighed in on yesterday's ESPNEWS crawl saga:

"in defense of espnews.. The reason the crawl gets dropped during certain commercials and not other is that different commercial time is sold by different companies. They keep the crawl up during their ad time, but have no control of the signal during ad time sold by your local cable company, or in your case, directv."

I guess that makes sense...but in that case, people advertising on ESPN on any cable system should not have any sort of phone number at the bottom of their ads. They should all be crawl-friendly.