The games are over. The hot stove hasn't lit yet. This is the part of the year when a Mets fan's mind wanders — to the shoebox in the closet. Last week we opened 1965, the farewell summer of Casey Stengel, Yogi Berra and Warren Spahn. This week it's 1966 — the first year of the rest of the franchise's life. Casey is gone. Wes Westrum is running the club. And if you read the checklist the way you'd read a box score, you can see 1969 starting to assemble itself, one solo card a

The games are over. The hot stove hasn't lit yet. This is the part of the year when a Mets fan's mind wanders — to the shoebox in the closet. There's no box score to argue about this week, and that's exactly the point. With no games going on, we've got time to dive into the other stuff that made us Mets fans in the first place. And for a lot of us, before there were blogs and highlight clips and seven different streaming packages, there were baseball cards. The crack of the w