[Amazin69]

LOL.

(Not a figure of speech.)

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I'm slightly twitchy about the mascot race, since I think it's fine local color for Washington (which was essentially an expansion team when they thought it up) and Milwaukee, where sausage is a religion. (As I wrote last season, you never need to wonder if you're watching a Brewers telecast.) But my instinctive reaction was "we're big time! We're NEW YORK!! We don't need that bush-league stuff!"

However, one of the signal features of NY is its quintuplicity: the fact that it consists of a pentad of boroughs, now unified into a political whole. It may not have been laid out in a deliberate quincunx, one borough to the north/south/east/west of the central city, but it is indeed a five-fold structure and the race is a clever way to honor that.

(And yes, I needed Google Gemini to give me "quintuplicity","pentad", and "quincunx". I did have "five-fold" on my own, however.)

I'd feel a bit miffed on behalf of Queens, only getting a subway car instead of the World's Fair, the Tennis Centre, or JFK and LaGuardia Airports…but the majority of Mets fans from outside the borough experience it via the justly-famous 7-line, so…