Maine On His Home Run

Marty Noble at Mets.com writes about John Maine on his first career home run:

A home run off the bat of a pitcher prompts smiles like a toddler's malaprops or a kitten with a ball of yarn. Shea Stadium smiled from foul pole to foul pole on Tuesday night. It smiled like Jose Reyes after a triple, only wider.

"He didn't smile once the whole way around," Joe Smith said. "Hey, I smiled when I struck out in my one chance. Are you kiddin'? If I hit one out, I would have been doing backflips."

"I just wanted to get back to the dugout," Maine said. And there, he joined in the smiling and executed another personal first, a curtain call wave. His manager and some others thought that might have been a little much.