If you’re playing at home — and I know you are — that’s Pascucci’s third in six games for the Bisons.

I meant to have more happening here this afternoon, but I had some meetings this morning and some video responsibilities to take care of, and now I’m heading to Citi Field. More once I’m set up and rolling there.

At the age of 29, and as he is left out of the industry trend of teams locking up franchise players, New York Mets third baseman David Wright has begun already a third act to his career. It is the comeback phase. After a career-worst season in 2011, when it appeared that a canyon of a ballpark was extracting the greatness from his career, Wright went back to his roots. He hit last winter at a high school batting cage with Nick Boothe, the baseball coach at Virginia Wesleyan who had worked with Wright as a teenager.

“He was like, ‘What is this?'” Wright said. “He said, ‘You’ve gotten away from what made you successful.’ I had tinkered with things so much over the last few years that I got further and further away from what worked for me.”

– Tom Verducci, SI.com.

Click through and read the whole thing. Nothing mind-blowing, but a good and fair summation of David Wright’s struggles the last few years and his pending contract situation. It even notes Wright’s option situation and calls the possibility of a trade “remote,” which a) is true, and b) seems like a solid litmus test for accuracy and thoroughness in sports reporting. If you’re propagating David Wright trade rumors without noting that his 2013 option only belongs to the Mets, you’re either not paying attention, misunderstanding the situation, or misleading the reader.

Of all the weird and awesome things that transpired in last night’s Mets walk-off win over Washington, perhaps nothing was stranger than Mike Pelfrey’s 5 2/3 inning performance. Big Pelf, he of the fastballs and the stubborn 1.62 K:BB ratio, struck out eight Nationals and walked only one.

What’s more, after relying mostly on his sinker in the early innings, he threw tons of sliders late, and induced an atypical amount of swinging strikes with it.

This is almost certainly an odd Pelfrey blip isolated because it’s his first start of the season, classic small sample size stuff. But the differences in his PitchFX pages from this year and last year on the great TexasLeaguers.com are hilariously stark. FF is for four-seam fastballs, SI is sinkers, SL is sliders, FS is split-fingers, CU is curveballs and CH is changeups.

Here’s Pelfrey last year:

And last night:

But wait, it gets stranger!

I was surprised to learn that Pelfrey threw 35.3% offspeed stuff in 2011, given what I had in my head about Pelfrey and his fastballs. So I checked back through the archive there. Look at this:

In 2008, Mike Pelfrey threw 18.6% offspeed pitches. In 2009, he threw 22.2% offspeed pitches. In 2010, he threw 30.9% offspeed stuff. In 2011, he threw 35.3% offspeed stuff. Then last night, he threw 39.4% offspeed stuff.

Last night’s swinging strikes may be atypical, but the increase in pitches that aren’t fastballs (or sinkers) could just reflect the continuation of a remarkably steady career trend. And even more remarkably, the results for Pelfrey — at least the defense-independent ones — have stayed pretty consistent. The pitcher has evolved and the results have not.

Which is to say: Pelf be Pelfing.

Johan Santana still warms up to the Santana/Rob Thomas collaboration “Smooth,” which I thought was kind of a cool song even despite its ubiquity when it came out, then grew to absolutely hate, and now find palatable only when Johan Santana is warming up to it.

R.A. Dickey warms up to the Imperial March, obviously in loving tribute to Ramon Castro.

Daniel Murphy still uses “Shipping up to Boston,” Ike Davis still uses “Start Me Up,” Justin Turner still uses “The Show Goes On,” and Lucas Duda still uses “All Along the Watchtower.” I believe hitters are allowed up to four choices, so they all might have some others as well.

David Wright definitely uses House of Pain’s “Jump Around” for one of his, possibly his third at-bat. It works.

Jon Rauch warms up to Rage Against the Machine’s “Wake Up,” which has always been on my short list for bullpen songs. The way the massive wall of guitar comes in at the beginning is awesome and monumental and exactly the type of sound I’d want associated with my entrance into a baseball game, especially if I were any good at baseball.

Frank Francisco came out to “Crazy in Love” on Saturday, though Twitter reports he used something else Thursday. If that’s true it could mean he hasn’t settled on anything yet or that he hasn’t provided anything to the Mets’ PA staff yet. But the Jay-Z/Beyonce song works pretty well as a closer song, since the strong beat and triumphant horns give the stadium the party atmosphere a good save situation merits.

But if he’s still thinking about it, might I suggest (not sure even the censored version would suit Citi’s family-friendliness atmosphere, but whatever):

I came in this morning meaning to crap on your hearts. I intended to plunder baseball-reference to look up all the times the 2011 Mets won three straight games, and maybe even some more woeful Mets teams from the past, because I’m a troll like that and the first week of the baseball season is all about reminding everyone how little the first week of the baseball season means.

But you’re not that stupid, and three straight wins to start the season are fun. Plus, though they might mean very little in the big-picture sense, a hot start for these Mets probably would have some real value to fans in its ability to stave off and/or extinguish some of the negative nonsense surrounding the team that’s grown so frustrating in recent years.

So I’ll enjoy this, and hope it continues. If the Mets start 13-5 instead of 5-13 this year — even if they then go on to play exactly how we expected them to — it should be enough to keep them looking like contenders for way longer than we hoped, and keep a lot of the trolling at bay.

Probably the Mets’ pitching staff won’t maintain its 203 ERA+ all season and David Wright won’t hit .667. But then probably Ike Davis will get a hit at some point too. Lucas Duda’s 108 home run pace is legit though. Guy can mash.