Sam's Mets Blog

Jose's Departure

2011-12-07T12:08:00.001-05:00

Jose should be bloody ashamed of himself not going with the 78 fucking
million dollar deal with the Mets; beloved teammates, fans; home-base,
as it were. Talk about the .05%!
-e-mail I received from a friend.

In an alternate reality, where the Mets did sign Reyes:

Fred and Jeff Wilpon are sitting around a shabbily decorated Christmas tree:

Fed: Now, I know that you wanted that bike we saw for Christmas…

Jeff: I sure did pop! It was bright red, and had ten-speeds and a bell and everything!

Fed: Well, son, I sure wish I could have gotten it for you…

Jeff: Gee, you mean you didn’t…

Fred: Well, I really wanted to…but you know how tight money has been around here, ever since we had to spend over a hundred million dollars on Jose Reyes’ contract.

Jeff: I know, pop. But a hundred million dollars sure seems like an awful lot of money, for just one ball player…

Fred: It is, son, it is. But remember, we did it for the fans.

Jeff: Golly, that’s right! The fans sure will be glad to have Jose back! Say, I don’t care about any bike! This is the best Christmas ever!

…I guess what I am trying to say is that it really bothers me when people talk about athletes making too much money. If someone is making too much money, it just seems belligerently myopic to focus on the guy getting the hundred million dollars as opposed to the guy deciding weather or not to give it to him.

On some level, I understand the idea that it would be nice if players were to accept reasonable deals, since even a very modest spots deal represents more than the vast majority of people will ever have a chance to earn in their lives, but if Jose had signed with the Mets for $78 million dollars, the Wilpons would have just pocketed the savings. If they had gotten a bargain on Reyes they wouldn’t have lowered ticket prices—they would have raised them, because Reyes being there would have made them worth paying to see. The most fan friendly thing that they could conceivably have done would be to use the savings for further player acquisitions—and their motive in doing that would be to protect their investment, by making their on field product more successful and more valuable. So, if you are asking Jose Reyes to take a nickel less than his market value, you are basically asking him to give Fred Wilpon free money. What’s that Fred? The government made you give back some of the free money that you made off of Bernie Madoff’s ponzie scheme (which you totally should have known about, you disgusting fucking nit-wit)? Don’t worry Fred, have some more free money in the form of a sweet-heart deal from Jose Reyes-- if there’s one thing that I hate, it’s seeing Fred Wilpon without a pile of money that he didn’t actually work for.

That is why it makes me happy when athletes make obscene piles of money—because at least athletes are good at something. Are you in the top 0.001% of the population when it comes to hitting a round ball with a round bat? Cool, have a giant pile of money. Fred Wilpon has such a giant pile of money that he can dispense these lesser giant piles, yet Fred Wilpon, as far as we can tell, sucks at being Fred Wilpon: he is too dumb to realize when he’s making money on a Ponzi scheme, he hires jack-asses to run his team, and he pisses on his players in the press.* If we have to live in a world where some people have giant piles of money and others don’t, I am much more ok with the giant piles of money being in the hands of those whose unique talents delight and entertain millions, than it being in the hands of actual rich people.

There is something that is sort of like capitalist pornography about athlete contracts. In the real world, people get laid through complex processes, involving longing, loneliness, lust, guilt and shame—in the pornographic world it is much more direct: you delivered a pizza to my house? Ok, let’s fuck. You have a unique and valuable skill? Ok, let’s make you rich. It’s much more exposed than the brand of capitalism that you run across in your daily life: you can look at amounts of money over years, and compare that with player statistics, and the expected value of a win, and watch it all jiggle and gyrate. The key fantasy of capitalist pornography, analogous to the big-breasted blond who just wants to blow everyone, is the spectacle of a worker with actual leverage over his employer selling his labor for the most extravagant price that the market will yield.

The Mets didn’t sign Reyes because the team stinks so much that it isn’t worth making long term investments on the big league level. If there was any cause for optimism about the club in the next three to four years, the contract Reyes signed would represent an expensive, but fair, investment—there isn’t any cause for optimism, so they let him walk. If anyone should be ashamed, I say that it’s the guy who owns the terrible team, rather than the guy who prefers not to play for the terrible team** at a discount.

*I’m alluding, of course, to Wilpon’s asinine comments in The New Yorker from the start of the season. Amongst other things, Wilpon blamed Beltran for striking out with the bases loaded to end game 7 of the 2006 NLCS. While I know that Wilpon isn’t alone in this, I’ve never gotten it: how the hell do you think that losing a seven game series comes down to one at-bat? Sure, if Beltran had gotten a hit the Mets would have won, but lots of other people could have won it for the Mets and didn’t. Fred, you fucking moron, the best parts of your rotation for that series were the mummified remains of Tom Glavine and Orlando Hernandez (or was he already hurt?)—game 7 was started by Oliver “the-goddam-worst-pitcher-to-ever-start-a-game-7-for-anyone,-ever” Perez, and you have the nerve to blame it on Beltran? Your take-away from that experience is “Beltran is a chocker and should have won it for us,” not “sweet zombie Jesus our pitching is fucking dreadful, how the shit did we make it this far at all?” That’s the kind of thinking that you expect from some Albanian dude who learned about baseball five years ago. What the fuck were they doing in the ‘70s, just handing out free real-estate?

**Everyone is saying "well, you have to understand why the Mets don’t want to sign such an injury prone player,"—but maybe you also have to think about why an injury prone player wouldn’t want to sign with the Mets. If you’re Jose, you have to know that the ultimate success of your career is going to come down largely to how healthy you can stay. And I think that Jose probably has every reason to feel that his best chances for doing that lie with a team called “not-the-Mets.”

This Long Post about Mike Pelfrey is Brought to you by Unemployment!

2011-08-15T21:37:00.003-04:00

It was way back in the early days of April: the Mets, against everyone’s expectations, had been scoring runs, but had lost a couple of games behind rotten outings from Mike Pelfrey. After about two hours of listening to callers on the Steve Summers show complaining about Pelfrey’s lack of mental toughness and demanding that he be ought-righted to the glue factory, I had had enough: I called in and very calmly pointed out that the season was all of six days old, and that if we were going to assume that Pelfrey would stink all season we might as well assume that the Mets were going to average 6 runs a game as well, which wasn’t going to happen either. In time, I said, the Mets offense would return to mediocrity, and Pelfrey would go back to being a ‘B+’ pitcher. Steve conceded my point, and admitted that overreacting in the early days of the baseball season wasn’t exactly reasonable, but they had to talk about something, already.

It’s humiliating enough call the Steve Summers show in the first place. It is infinitely worse to have your point proved epically and disastrously wrong. Thanks, Mike.

In 2011, Pelfrey’s contributions to the Mets have ranged from putrid to mediocre. His performance (and the lack of an immediately available alternative) is just good enough to justify continuing to give him the ball; his history is just good enough to offer some increasingly faint hope that he has a run of above average games in him. I still disagree with Steve and his callers and think that Pelfrey’s problems have less to do with his mental state and the stress of being named ‘ace of the staff’ in Santana’s absence, and more to do with his just not being all that good at baseball, but at this point it’s a minor difference: Pelfrey stinks, and the only reason to keep running him out there is because someone has to pitch.

But how much does Pelfrey really stink? Are we harsh on him in light of the fact that every year from 2006 on was supposed to be the year that Mike Pelfrey blossomed into an innings-eating #2 starter? Are we unreasonably kind to him because while he might be a stiff, at least he’s our stiff? How much does he stink compared to other people who are routinely tasked with being the starting pitcher in professional baseball games?

Baseball Prospectus’ Wins Above Replacement Player (WARP) is a statistic that tells how many games a team has won by using that particular player, rather than a hypothetical replacement player from the minor leagues or some other team’s discard pile. It is a counting stats (like runs home runs, or innings pitched) rather than a rate stat (like batting average or ERA)—so it is playing time sensitive. The replacement player isn’t league average or real--he just stands for the level of production that you could reasonably expect to get without really trying. So when they say (and they do say) that Mike Pelfrey has a WARP of 0.3 it means that the Mets have won three tenths of a game more behind Mike Pelfrey than they would have behind Joe McSucksatbaseball.

Mike Pelfrey’s WARP of 0.3 has him tied for 9^th on the team with Pedro Beato and Dillon Gee. No regular starter on the Mets has a lower WARP. Gee, however, has taken six fewer starts to accumulate his three-tenths of a win above terrible, so Mike Pelfrey’s claim to worst starter on the Mets is pretty rock solid. Jon Niese leads the Mets with a WARP of 3.3; Chris Capuano (2.2) and then R.A. Dickey (1.1) round out the Mets pitchers who have more than one win above replacement to their credit. This, children, is why the Mets aren’t very good.

The Mets start Mike Pelfrey because they don’t really have any choice but to start Mike Pelfrey: its not like they have a ‘potentially good’ pitcher in the minor leagues whose progress Mike Pelfrey is impeding, or any money burning a hole in their pocket waiting to be turned into a ‘league-average’ pitcher. It’s not like their continued devotion to Mike Pelfrey is going to cost them a shot at the pennant (their devotion to five starting pitchers who are not much better than Mike Pelfrey did that long ago). I got to wondering: where would Mike Pelfrey, long believed to be a potential second or third starter on a decent team, fit on other teams pitching staffs? Is there a team in the National League who could improve their rotation by starting Mike Pelfrey?

NL EAST:

Philadelphia Phillies:

Pelfrey’s 0.3 WARP would put him in 10^th place on the Phillies, tied with Joe Blanton, who went into the season as the Phillies fifth starter—and then got hurt after making only six starts. The Phillies did give eleven starts to Kyle Kendrick, who has a WARP of -0.1. On the other hand, Roy Haladay (5.5) has provided as much WARP as the Mets top two starters put together. Vance Worly (1.6, 14 starts) would be the third best pitcher on the Mets.

Atlanta Braves:

Pelfrey would be the 12^th best pitcher on the Braves, tied with reliever Scott Linebrink. No one who has started more than two games for Atlanta has a lower WARP.

Washington Nationals:

Mike Pelfrey would rank 9^th in WARP, tied with Ross Detwiler, who has pitched in eight games and made three starts. In five starts Yunesky Maya accumulated 0.1 WARP. Mike Pelfrey would not necessarily crack the Nationals rotation.

Florida Marlins:

Mike would rank 12^th on the Marlins, between Leo Nunez/Chris Volstad (0.4) and Ross Detwiler (0.2). Volstad is a starter and wroth almost exactly as much as Pelfrey (sorry, Chris).The Marlins have given 13 starts to players with lower WARPs than Pelfrey’s: Jay Buente (1 start, 0 WARP), Elith Villanueva (1 start, -0.2) Clay Hensley (25 games, 5 starts, -0.2) and Brad Hand (8 starts, -0.4). Pelfrey might be a fifth starter for the Fish, but probably not.

NL CENTRAL:

Milwaukee Brewers:

Pelfrey would be in a tie for 11^th best Brewer with reliever Sean Green. You might remember Green from such crappy Mets teams as last year’s and the one before that. But then again you might not, because he was hurt for a lot of that time, and wasn’t memorable or interesting when healthy. No one who has made a start for the Brewers has a WARP lower than 0.7—that belongs to Marco Estrada who has mainly been a reliever. Chris Naversson and Randy Wolfe are the worst regularly starting Brewers at 1.7 WARP.

St. Louis Cardinals:

Pelfrey would fall between Octavio Dotel (0.4) and former Met Raul Valdes (0.2) at 10^th best on the Red Birds. However, he could probably find a job as their fifth starter. While their top four starters are all comfortably Better Than Pelfrey (BTP), guys like Kyle McClellan and Edwin Jackson have made multiple starts and yielded negative WARPs.

Cincinnati Reds:

Pelfrey would be ranked 9^th, with Cuban reliever Aroldis Chapman. Again, Pelfrey probably could pitch for the Reds, where Edison Volquez (16 starts, 0.2 WARP) and Bronson Arroyo (24, -0.2) have been given multiple opportunities.

Pittsburgh Pirates:

Pelfrey would be tied at 9^th with Chris Leroux, and worse than anyone who has made more than two starts for the Bucos.

Chicago Cubs:

Palfrey would be tied with Casey Coleman and Kerry Wood for 11^th best Cub pitcher. Not only did the former start nine games, but the Cubbies have given 15 starts to Randy Wells, who has pitched to a WARP of -0.3, making the Cubs yet another team who could probably give innings to Pelfrey without dragging down the quality of their rotation.

Houston Astros:

Pelfrey shares his 0.3 mark with Jordan Lyles, Brett Myers and Nelson Figueroa (!!), and it is good for 7^th best on the team. Brett Myers has made exactly as many starts as Pelfrey, with the same uninspiring results. N-Fig racked up his 0.3 in eight games and five starts. I don’t even know if he is still on the team nor do I especially care: I imagine that Astros management feels pretty much the same way. Henry Sosa started one game and managed a WARP of 0 and is the only pitcher to start for the ‘Stros with a WARP below 0.3, so Pelfrey could be Houston’s fifth starter without anyone noticing that anything had changed.

NL WEST:

Arizona Diamondbacks:

The D-backs also have a large-ish 0.3 club: Micah Owings, Joe Patterson and Juan Gutierrez; it is good for 8^th best on the team. Owings (the pitcher who will occasionally pinch-hit) started four games and Snakes have given a total of 18 starts to pitchers with negative WARP value, so the Snakes could probably use Pelfrey as a fifth starter—making the fact that they lead their division all the more surreal.

San Francisco Giants:

If Pelfrey were a Giant, he would be tied with relief pitcher Dan Runzler as the 11^th best pitcher on the team. He would be being out-pitched by former Met Guillermo Mota (0.4). He would be out pitching Barry Zito (9 starts, -0.3 WARP). He would not be starting regularly.

Los Angeles Dodgers:

Pelfrey would share the 8^th rank on the Dodgers with Rubby De La Rosa and Jon Garland, both of whom are starting pitchers. No one significantly worse than them has made multiple starts, so, again, Mike Pelfrey could slip into the back of the Dodgers rotation without anyone noticing.

Colorado Rockies:

Pelfrey’s 0.3 brothers on the Rockies are Houston Street and Aaron Cook (12^th on the team) and the latter has been used exclusively as a starter. Kevin Millwood, Clay Mortenson and Greg Rryolds have all started games while yielding negative WARP values, so Pelfrey might provide (gasp!) an upgrade.

San Diego Padres:

In San Diego, Pelfrey shares his 0.3 with relievers Luke Gregson and Kevin Spence, where it ranks as the eleventh best on the team. Anthony Bass, normally a reliever, made one spot start and has accumulated a 0.1 WARP. Other than that, the lowest WARP for a Friar who has started a game is Wade LeBlanc’s 0.6, accumulated in six starts.

So, according to WARP, in the National League, the Diamondbacks and Rockies would improve their rotation with Mike Pelfrey, while the Cardinals, Cubs and Reds would likely do so. The Astros and Dodgers could slot him in without anyone noticing. On no NL team would Pelfrey be better than a fifth starter.

Obviously, this is a very cursory analysis that leaves out lots of factors, among them health. On some clubs the guys who are BTP are injured, or might get injured, and those clubs would not necessarily turn away from Mike Pelfrey in disgust. WARP is clearly not the be-all, end-all of a player’s value, but I think in this instance it gets the point across, and the point is this: Mike Pelfrey exists on exactly the cusp of how bad a pitcher can be before they stop letting them pitch. Pretty much every single team in the National League has found a way to give four out of five games to a pitcher who is better than Mike Pelfrey. According to Baseball Prospectus’ WARP, out of 122 pitchers who have thrown over 100 innings in the major leagues in 2011, Mike Pelfrey is ranked 114^th. Mike Pelfrey has been having a horrible, horrible season.

I guess you have to assume that the Pelfrey will be better next year, because there really isn’t any way for him to be any worse. On the one hand, it all isn’t terribly important: it doesn’t really matter who you’re fifth starter is, if the rest of the rotation is good. Some of the teams who have been giving the ball to guys who are worse the Pelfrey are doing just fine for themselves. On the other hand, Mike Pelfrey is clearly a fifth starter or worse this season, and even if he bounces back somewhat, the Mets need to find themselves some reliably BTP starters before they can even think about contending.

Pacquiao vs. Cotto: Part 1

2009-11-17T20:36:00.003-05:00

After much intrepid internet research, my friend Javid found a Filipino barbeque place called Tito Rad’s, on 49th St. and Queens Boulevard where $20 would get you two beers, some unexplained “appetizers,” and, most importantly, a place to watch the Manny Pacquiao fight on pay-per-view. Living in New York these days, you get accustomed to 1) there being at least one of any type of ethnicity-place that you can imagine somewhere in the five boroughs and 2) being able to locate them on the web pretty easily; but if there is a Filipino sports bar somewhere, they have a lousy web-presence, since Javid had been looking for them all week, and Tito Rad’s was all that he could come up with.

Once we had a place to watch it, I gave myself over to eager anticipation of the fight. Indeed, all week I had been feeling excited, to an extent that surprised me, since I am not much of a boxing fan at all, and know little about the sport. As Saturday progressed, I became increasingly happy at the prospect of watching it, as well as irrationally nervous that we would find some way of missing it anyway. I mentioned this to Javid, while we were waiting for some friends of mine to arrive from New Jersey before heading out to the restaurant, and he said that he had been looking forward to the fight all week as well.

The obvious reason for the anticipation was simply Manny Pacquiao. Sometimes an athlete comes along whose combination of extreme talent and intense personal charisma allows them to utterly transcend the boundaries of the sport. Babe Ruth is the classic example; it kind of hurts me to say it, but Derick Jeter is a contemporary one. Pacquiao is definitely in this category: a devastating boxer in a number of weight classes, he possess an almost thoroughly unprecedented combination of speed and power, as well as a charming, smiling demeanor. Pacquiao is a true national hero in a way that it is hard for Americans to understand—possibly because there hasn’t really been anyone who fit the bill for the entire nation since the aforementioned Bambino. Filipinos are probably, as a nation, far more heavily invested in Pacquiao than Dominicans are in Pedro Martinez. Pacquiao’s post-fighting career will almost certainly take him into elected office; he has made movies and lately has been talking scripts with Sylvester Stallone; and his band was scheduled to play in Las Vegas immediately after the fight, regardless of the result.

Additionally several fates rested on the outcome of the contest. A victory for the Pacman would cement his place as one of the all time great boxers and set him up for a fight with Floyd Mayweather Jr.; while a loss would certainly signal the beginning of the end of his fighting career and everything that it had meant. Miguel Cotto, Pacquiao’s opponent, was well known and respected in fighting circles, but not to the general public: a victory would put him in a position to become one of the most prominent faces of boxing.

Furthermore, boxing itself is a sport in obvious crisis. In addition to being hurt by the limitations of the pay-per-view market, it is currently fighting for those pay-per-view dollars with mixed martial arts events, whose growing popularity is eating away at boxing’s fanbase. Boxing needs superstars to connect to the general public, preferably in the heavyweight class, and no heavyweight has drawn much attention since Mike Tyson. Welterweight Oscar de la Hoya had pretty much been boxing’s meal ticket until he got dismantled by Pacquiao in a non-title fight; if Pacquiao could win a title as a welterweight against Cotto, the resulting fight against Mayweather would have the chance to be a defining fight for a new generation of boxing fans. Indeed, regardless of the outcome, if Pacquiao vs. Cotto was in any way a particularly good or interesting fight it would do a good deal to assure boxing’s immediate future and forestall the kick-boxing/jujitsu/grappling masters at the gates.

So, in regard to all these questions, the fight contained the thrill of an election: we had entered a phase of total uncertainty, but, at the end of a defined interval, we would, necessarily, have answers.

Who am I?

2009-11-07T17:10:00.000-05:00

What famous director is shooting this ballgame? Post your answers in the comment section. Send a description of your favorite director filming a ballgame to samsmetsblog@gmail.com and I’ll put them up as well.

Alright, camera 1, I want you to stay focused on the pitcher’s eyes; camera 2, I want you to stay focused on the batter’s eyes. Now, in the moments leading up to the pitch we are going to franticly cut back and forth between camera 1 and camera 2, then a quick cut to camera 3, which will have been focused on the batters hands, and stay with camera 3 for only the split second when the bat is actually being swung. Now, someone call up Ennio Morricone and see if he can do anything with “take me out to the ballgame.” Oh, and for the post-game interviews I want all the Latino players to use fake Irish accents, and all the white guys to pretend that they are Mexicans.

Game 6

2009-11-05T20:54:00.002-05:00

“No! I am not Alex Rodriguez, nor was meant to be…”

I watched an inning or so in the local pizza place. The guy behind the counter argued that the Post-season had been rigged in the Yankee’s favor and he claimed that the dimensions of new Yankee stadium were illegal according to an obscure rule in Major League Baseball. A friend of his, a customer at the pizza place, had worked on the lights at the new stadium, and he said that the Stienbuners paid off more people than anyone else in the state of New York.

After this, he went into a sadly predictable anti A-Rod rant. If he were given the chance, he would not ask for more than $2,000 a game to play baseball because he, the pizza place guy, loves to play baseball; he did not understand why it had to be all about the money. He was also annoyed that A-Rod identifies himself as Dominican when he was actually born in the States; the pizza guy is Italian American, loves Italy, couldn’t be prouder of his heritage, but is also proud to acknowledge himself as an American first. I submitted, at this point, that while A-Rod’s claims about his heritage did not necessarily speak highly of him, it was only to be expected because A-Rod is clearly mad, but the pizza place guy remained hardened to A-Rod’s plight.

I like A-Rod because so many things about him--Kabala, Buddhism, the centaur pictures, the photo shoot of him making out with his image in the mirror, the steroids, Madonna, Kate Hudson-- seem calculated to fly in the face of the things that it is easy and pleasant to believe about people who are extremely, extremely good at baseball.

My feeling is that the truth is that A-Rod, and very few other players in the history of the game, posses a quality related to their extreme excellence that place them somewhat outside of the ordinary human understanding. Ted Williams was like this: he feuded with the Boston media, remained aloof from fans, and had his body frozen by a bunch of delusional crooks.

The pizza place guy judges A-Rod by the standards of the pizza place and by these standards A-Rod inevitably fails; the specious process of relating the experiences of A-Rod, baseball superstar, to his own experience as a pizza place guy is somehow important to how the pizza place guy perceives with the world and defines himself. This is ok—it does not make much more or less sense than what most people think about their lives, but it also does not lead him to wise opinions about player evaluation in baseball.

Later, I was watching Matsui come to the plate in my apartment. As he stepped in, the camera cut from a shot of Matsui’s face, to a shot of a fan with a poster with Matsui’s number and a picture of Godzilla, and then the camera cut directly back to Matsui’s face. The Godzilla on the poster seemed strangely childish, a young and whimsical monster, and I realized that it must be hard for Matsui to interpret the weird racial/cultural meanings of this image, and hit major league pitching all at once. Immediately after that, I realized that it was preposterous to think that Matsui had seen the Godzilla poster-- I had only been lead to that conclusion by the grammar of the camera. The truth was that Matsui probably could not see into the crowd at all, do to the lights, and there was little chance that he could focus on an individual poster-- in all likelihood all of his attention was focused on the positioning of the defense, if he was not completely taken up by some inner process, only understood by himself. However, from a life time of watching movies and television I had learned that a shot of a face, followed by a shot of a thing, followed by a return to the face, means that the owner of the face is thinking about the thing—I was so accustomed to this, that, for an instant, I had been completely sure that I knew what Matsui was thinking about, and I felt completely comfortable in applying my own values and beliefs to what I imagined were Hideki Matsui’s experiences.

In order to capture an audience’s interest, telecasts try to get the audience to identify with the player as much as possible; they accomplish this through a series of codes that they have adapted, perhaps subconsciously, from movies and television. This makes for interesting broadcasts; it also encourages people to participate imagine a sympathy with ballplayers that has no basis in reality whatsoever.

In other words, what if baseball telecasts were directed by Werner Herzog? If they were, I think that the pizza place guy would have a totally different opinion of Alex Rodriguez.

Analogy

2009-07-08T19:21:00.000-04:00

Jerry Manuel: So you wanted me to fix your roof?
Omar Minaya: Yeah, I’d do it myself, but I am exhausted after spending all day on the phone with the Cubs trying to re-acquire Aaron Hielman.
Jerry: You’re a madman…. Anyway, do you have any tools?
Omar: Sure, here they are.
Jerry:Um… this is one of those plastic Fischer-Price toy toolsets.
Omar: I have some really good tools only I have lent them to the Wilpons.
Jerry: I hate to say this, but I really don’t think these are going to work.
Omar: Just make do for now! And when I get my good tools back, everything is totally going to be awesome.
Jerry: I mean, there is no fucking way that I am going to be able to successfully fix your roof with these things. Do you think you could go out and get some other tools?
Omar: And be stuck with TWO sets of tools when the Wilpons return my original ones? I think not!
Jerry: The idea that I would be able to fix your roof with these things is laughable and insane.
Omar: Jerry, there aren’t any tools out there that are better than the tools that we will be getting back. Get to work.
Jerry: So when will the Wilpons return your tools?
Omar: There is no timetable yet, but probably mid August.

Latter…
Jerry: Not only the Phillies, but also the Marlins and the Braves, have done a better job of fixing their roofs. The few remaining fans of your roof hate you on a deep, personal level.
Omar: But we’re better than the Nationals, right?
Jerry: Having a better roof than a man who lives in a cardboard box is not something to be proud of.

Dangerous and Insane

2009-04-29T19:44:00.005-04:00

Much as I have previously supported Jerry Manuel, and much as I do like some of the things that he has done, tonight, in his post game interview he exposed a line of thinking seems dangerous and insane-- to the extent that if someone were to advocate removing him, I could not say that they did not have a point.

Specifically, I have generally liked the way that Manuel has used the shiny new bullpen: his willingness to use K-Rod in non-save situations speaks of a flexibility of thinking, a capacity to look beyond the specious statistic of the Save, that speaks well of Manuel’s managerial abilities. On Tuesday, however, after Sean Green allowed two walks and the tieing run in the seventh, he opted to leave him in the game to give up a decisive three-run homer. The Mets never scored again, and suffered a depressing three-run loss.

When asked about the bullpen’s failure in the post-game interview, Manuel said that it did not bother him, because these types of meltdowns were inevitable in a bullpen (this is actually true, see Mets--2008, and also Mets—2007), as much as his club’s inability to score an extra three runs over the last three frames (this is also true—the Mets inability to score in the final innings has gotten to be depressing and weird). However, while both these statements are true, taken together, the way that Manuel put them, they yield a line of thinking that seems deranged at best, and sneaky and disingenuous if seen in a less sympathetic light.

Manuel should have taken Greene out—and even if he thought that his club should have come up with three more runs, there was no sane reason to put that theory into test, when he could have kept the lead or the tie by managing the bullpen more aggressively. There was no reason to test Sean Greene’s metal in a game which, while played in April, counts every bit as much as a game in September.

It is less flattering to think that Manuel deliberately chose to deflect attention from the aspect of the game that he screwed up (bullpen management) by bringing up the aspect of the game that everyone has been whining about in the papers—namely the Mets’ inability to hit in “clutch” situations. If Manuel had removed the struggling Sean Green, and then Green’s replacement had screwed up, Manuel would have been blamed for making a bad choice—if he left Greene in to give up a mere four runs, then the obvious culprit becomes the Mets’ well documented inability to hit late in games or with runners in scoring position. When you find your in-game decisions influenced by the ravings in The Post and the fear of blame, you are failing at one of the extremely few responsibilities of a manager. Yeah, the Mets could hit more, but Manuel also straight-up goofed with the bullpen—which is fine, as long as he admits it.

**
Speaking of dangerous and insane, Steve Somers is an escaped mental patient who is, for reasons thoroughly beyond my understanding, allowed to host a late-night sports talk show on WFAN—which I feel compelled to listen to, like a teenager playing with an infected pimple. His deal is that he calls out Latino players for not hustling, while doing something that is approximately a Jewish-psychiatrist/Jerry Seinfeld shtick. For the last week and a half he has been going on and on about Beltran’s lack of hustle as evidenced by the two (count ‘em—TWO) recent times when he failed to slide, when he probably should have slid (Beltran is hitting about .400—for as long as he does that, he can ride around the bases in a fucking unicycle), while extolling the hustling virtues of Daniel Murphy—I like Murphy as much as the next guy, but if he ever turns into a gold glove fielder hitting .400, let me know.

…also his show features a clip that is dialog from The Untouchables set to music from The Godfather—which is like incest or something. The quote is DeNiro going on about how “every man who gets to be a certain age should have enthusiasms” which is a great quote to use as a hook for a radio program about baseball, but the music just makes it…wrong.

***
J.J. Putz had his first real screw up as a Met today, giving up the tying and go-ahead runs in the eighth. I await the back page of tomorrow’s New York Post with interest.

In case you were wondering, they go together terribly:

2009-04-22T18:25:00.001-04:00

Sam: You know, I might be exactly the millionth fan to watch a Mets game while having gin and a bagel.
Sam’s Roommate: Could be.
Sam: You have to figure that, more than any other franchise, the Mets tend to draw the gin and bagel crowd.

Ranking starts by Mets pitching:

2009-04-14T20:53:00.000-04:00

Since the Mets have only played seven games so far, I can still remember pretty much what happened in all of them. I thought it would be interesting to rank the starting pitching in each game, and see if there is anything to learn from doing this. If I am feeling really industrious, I might update this list as the season progresses:

1) 4/12: Johan Santana vs. Marlins: the Met’s ace went seven innings, striking out 13 for his highest K total as a Met, and walked only one. The Mets lost the game anyway, largely do to an even more dominant performance by Florida’s Josh Johnson and an error by Daniel Murphy that led to the Marlin’s only runs.

2) 4/11: Livan Hernandez vs. Marlins: “brother of El Duque” pitched 6 2/3 innings, before giving up two runs in the seventh, allowing six hits while striking out four and walking three. This is probably the high end of what the Mets can except from their fifth starter, who, at this point in his career, is regarded as durable and “not all that bad” rather than “good.”

3) 4/6: Johan Santana vs. Reds: Santana only went 5 2/3 innings, largely because he needed a large number of pitches to get through the first. In the sixth, he gave up two hits and a run scored on a sacrifice fly, but this just let the Mets show off their shiny new bullpen. Murphy, who Santana would go on to throw under the bus* for costing them the game in Santana’s next start, won this one for Johan with a home run and an RBI groundout.

4) 4/10: John Maine vs. Marlins: Maine gave up two runs in five innings, both on solo home runs. The home runs aren’t great, and neither is the shortness of the outing, which is only ranked this high because Maine pitches on a team with Mike Pelfrey and Oliver Perez.

5) 4/8: Pelfrey vs. Reds: Big Pelf got clobbered in the first inning, giving up four runs, but steadied after that, allowing no more runs to score over the next four innings. A lot of people are happy with Pelfrey for bearing down after a difficult first, but I prefer to blame him for a dreadful inning that the Mets were only able to overcome by scoring a lot of runs.

6) 4/9: Oliver Perez vs. Reds: Ollie pitched three scoreless innings; he also pitched another inning and a third where the Reds scored eight, giving up five hits and five walks. This was an abysmal outing on a couple of levels, and should probably be ranked dead last.

7) 4/13:Mike Pelfrey vs. Padres: For giving up a home run in the first ever at-bat in the Mets new park (something that had never happened in the entire recorded history of baseball), Pelf gets credit for the worst start of the season, at least until someone else does something shockingly dreadful: your move, Ollie. Peflrey only lasted five innings, and gave up five runs.

*If, as the New York Post seems to believe, “throw under the bus” means “tell a reporter about a thing that happened in a baseball game.”

Nate the Great and Mike Piazza

2009-04-04T16:15:00.002-04:00

Whenever someone like Johan Santana comes from one of the provinces to play in New York, there is always a slew of articles and discussions about weather they can handle the intense media scrutiny. This is almost always a big waste of time: the Johans of the world exist on a plane of greatness that is all their own and they are going to dominate-- no matter how many Joel Shermans ask them stupid questions while they are waiting to take a shower.

This is not to say that the New York media has no impact: there is a second class of sports hero who achieves its greatness through a combination of dominance and narrative—and in these instances, the media becomes, not merely the lens through which the greatness can be perceived, but the actual author of the greatness. This frequently leads to the uncouth spectacle of the media, like so many Frankensteins (the scientist, not the monster), feverishly trying to rip apart the creature into which they had just laboriously managed to breathe life. Mike Piazza, formerly of the Mets, and the Knicks’ Nate Robinson are both good examples of this phenomenon.

If he had put his mind to it, Johan Santana could probably have been a better catcher than Mike Piazza; I don’t think that there is any doubt that he could have been a better baller than Nate (I see him as a point guard, getting around 15 points a game, to go along with seven each of rebounds and assists)-- yet both of those players are or were far more important to the identity of their team than Santana is to the current Mets. Both were poorly regarded players (Piazza taken miserably late in the draft* because it was widely believed that he could never field or hit and Nate nearly a foot shorter than many of his fellow players) who went on, not only to have productive careers, but to lead their teams; both embraced their role as hero-of-the-everyman, winning over the fans of the franchise in ways that the Santanas, despite (or perhaps because of) their dominance, will never be able to.

Piazza, of course, was a superstar when he came to New York, but during his time here he inevitably found himself in the center of the team’s most intense situations: his feud with Clemmens, the rumors about his sexuality, his quest for the catcher’s home-run record, and his towering home-run in the first game played in New York after 9-11. Nate is more directly engaged with the fans than any of the other Knicks: he encourages the crowd to cheer during games, part of his free-throw routine includes a salute to acknowledge people that he met playing on-line video games, and he will occasionally take the microphone before games-- to either thank the fans or apologize for the state of the team.

The spotlights that the two men inhabited, however, existed before they arrived and will still exist, focused on other players, when the two of them have faded into obscurity. The narratives existed, and were only waiting for the people willing to act them out; the crowds existed and were only waiting for the appropriate object on which to focus their affection.

It is in light of this fact that I would point out that both men probably took steroids. Only one boy, in the entire high school, can be cast as Hamlet in the school play; and while many might crave the attention, the odds will always favor the ones who need it and are willing to either flirt with the drama teacher or poison their own fathers in order to get their Stanislavsky on.

Nate’s juicing, of course, is purely a matter of my speculation. Nate’s shortness, particularly on a court with other NBA players, is so obvious that it is easy to miss the fact that he is built like a sawed-off Schwarzenegger. Additionally, the frenzy that he gets into when he is either at his best or his worst is, at least, suspiciously similar to the thing called ‘roid rage. Finally, as someone “5’9” in sneakers” trying to have a career in the NBA he would have to be insane (or insaner) to not do everything in his power to give himself an advantage—such as bulking up with performance enhancing drugs.

Even though they have yet to accuse him of juicing, and thereby soiling the immaculate purity of the game of professional basketball, the New York media has never lacked reasons to abuse Nate Robinson. Rather than dwell on the delightful awesomeness of the crazy little man who carved himself a niche in the NBA, they have chosen to berate him for being macho and immature: vilifying him for his role in the 2006 brawl with the Nuggets and calling him out for taking too many impossible shots. I remember reading an article in The Post from the 06-07 season that contrasted the juvenile antics of Robinson with the steadiness and dedication of Eddy Curry and Stephon Marbury. As recently as last week, The Post ran an article about how Nate should be suspended for an altercation with New Orleans’ Chris Paul, in a rare game that Knicks actually won.

Paradoxically, while Nate fights too often, Piazza did not fight enough. Piazza (who was never openly accused of steroids during his playing time, either) was always called out for being too soft and seen as something of a prim Donna and a metro-sexual (at best) wuss. Again, the New York press opted not to worship the player that had come out of nowhere and achieved greatness, and instead set about diligently trying to dynamite the statue that they had helped to erect themselves.

It seems that one of the principals of late capitalism is that “we the people” are to be denied our folk heroes. Adulation is reserved for the LeBron James’ of the world, the god-like players with whom we manifestly have nothing in common. The players that we might relate to, the ones who acknowledge that they are living out all of our dreams, must always be reduced to tragic, incomplete figures: their flaws, either manufactured or magnified, taking up far more ink than the tale of how one of us conquered the world’s brightest stage.

*In thinking about what different animals the NBA and MLB are, it is worth noting that Nate was taken late in the first of only two rounds of the NBA draft, while Piazza was drafted in the 62nd round of the MLB draft, meaning that nearly two thousand players had been drafted ahead of him. Additionally, while the NBA draft covers the entire world, the MLB draft only applies to domestic players: Latin American players are generally signed by sweaty men with sunglasses, a radar-gun, and a brief-case full of cash. Of course, the two drafts are not actually analogous events: the equivalent to Piazza’s late drafting in Nate’s biography, was when he made his college basketball team as a walk-on, having gone to school on a football scholarship. When Nate was taken in the first round of the draft (fellow Knick David Lee was actually the very last pick of that first round) it was sort of like a 62nd round pick, on the strength of a good showing in the lower levels of the farm system, being called up to triple-A.

HOLLY CRAP! MIKE PIAZZA (probably) DID STEROIDS!

2009-03-24T20:14:00.007-04:00

I know what you are thinking, ladies and gentlemen, but don’t worry: the Pope is still Catholic. I checked.

A little while ago Joel Sherman of the New York Post wrote a column that can be summed up thusly:

1) Because Mike Piazza started as an obscure non-prospect who was only drafted in the 62nd round because he was Tommy Lasorda’s godson, and then went on to become the all time home run leader for catchers, and also because he had a bad case back acne (which is commonly associated with steroid use), Joel Sherman suspects that Mike Piazza might have done steroids.

2) Since rumored steroid users (specifically Mark McGwire) seem not to be getting into the hall of fame, Sherman wonders what to do about players, like Piazza, who really seem like they probably did do steroids, even though there are no rumors or evidence that they did.

3) In order to get to the bottom of this, Sherman recently asked Piazza if he had done steroids. Piazza said no, but Joel Sherman has heard steroid denials from the likes of Andy Pettitte, Jason Giambi, and A-Rod, so you will forgive Joel Sherman if he remains skeptical.

4) The whole situation seems to demand that Joel Sherman, paid baseball columnist, think critically about baseball, and he is not amused. He seems to imply that it is all A-Rod’s fault.

Then, Murray Chass wrote a blog post about Sherman’s column, the gist of which is 1) I, Murray Chass, have long suspected Piazza of steroid use, and think it was good of Joel Sherman to bring it up, but 2) Sherman really did not write enough about the back acne, so he is still a crappy little man writing for a crappy little paper. Chass had wanted to write about the back acne and steroids when Piazza had played for the Mets, but was prevented from doing so, because his editors were Mets fans. In 2004, when steroid testing was implemented, Piazza’s back acne mysteriously cleared up.

He also includes this gem: “He [Piazza] told Sherman the hitting came from hard work. That’s what they all said when they were suspected of having used steroids. We used to fall for that line. That’s one of the reasons we missed the advent and presence of steroids. We were gullible.” You were gullible, motherfucker? You are a goddamn journalist: your job description is pretty much ‘don’t be gullible.’ The casualness with which he admits to being an utter failure at his profession is somewhat shocking.

Anyway, now, in a new book mainly about Roger Clemens, The Rocket that Fell to Earth, Jeff Pearlman has reiterated the steroid accusations, with all like sources and quotes and stuff. I would add that Mathew Cerrone’s response at the end of the quote from Perlman’s book is a very solid summary of (what I hope are) the feelings of most fans

While Sherman and Chass put together a little clinic on how you shouldn’t write about PEDs, providing shrillness, week excuses for professional failings, and a lack of actual information, there is an aspect of the Piazza story that intrigues me: Pearlman presents Piazza as entirely a product of steroids, whereas the narratives surrounding most of the prominent players accused of juicing (Bonds, Clemens, A-Rod, et all) all include pre-steroid and/or post-steroid phases when they were also pretty good.

While I don’t have much problem accepting that Mike Piazza did steroids, my guess is that there was probably some reason for Piazza’s transformation from non-prospect to home-run-leader-at-his-position, beyond simply “steroids”—although I have no idea what that reason might be. It would be nice if the tone of the tone of the discussion was such that Piazza would want to tell us, but he must know that if he ever gets tempted to be honest about this, his only reward will be a decade’s worth of articles from the Chasses and Shermans of the world about why he shouldn’t get into the hall of fame.

WBC: Japan vs. China

2009-03-05T14:58:00.002-05:00

At some point in the future, when racism and nationalism have ceased to exist, I am going to look back to the time that I got up at four fucking thirty in the morning to watch China and Japan compete in a game that insane Americans invented, and think that I did my part.

China takes the field behind Ray Chang, a shortstop in the Pittsburgh system. Chang, who was born to Chinese parents in Kansans City, finally got picked up in informal tryouts after going un-drafted.

Japan, the defending Classic Champion with a roster that boasts plenty of big league talent, is starting Yu Darvish, a 22 year-old Japanese-Iranian phenom and sex symbol, currently playing for the Nippon Ham Fighters (the Fighters are owned by the Nippon Ham company-- they do not do battle with pigs). Darvish, if anything, makes getting up in the middle of the night make sense: he is supposed to be a wonderful, rare talent. In Japan, he is something like a combination of Leonardo DiCaprio and young Doc Gooden and although scouts have thought that he profiled as a front line starter in the American leagues for the last couple of years, he apparently has no interest in coming to the states. According to Wikipedia, he was once suspended from his high school team for smoking a cigarette in a pachinko parlor.

I am not a scout, it is the middle of the damn night, and the competition from the Chinese hitters is far from brisk, but after watching Darvish pitch four no-hit innings (after which he was replaced), he really does seem like the goods. He has an easy, powerful delivery that is amazing to watch. At no point was China remotely close to touching him.

Japan took a 3 run lead in the top of the 3rd, off of a home run from 3rd baseman Shuichi Murata, but have not scored otherwise, despite threatening repeatedly. For China, as of the 5th inning, the highlight was Ray Chang making a nifty play to throw out a runner at home.

In the 6th, Japan scored a fourth run on a hilarious balk: the Chinese pitcher was a submariner, and as he brought his hand up to throw, he just twisted his hand to throw to first at the last instant of his motion. Yeah, you’re not supposed to do that. Ichiro went 0-5, but made a good catch in the outfield.

From the broadcasters:
-only one Chinese player weighs over 200 lbs
-Something about the stitching in the ball used in Japanese baseball is more conducive to breaking balls, for which Japanese pitchers are known.

The Japanese team looks really good, and should be a serious threat in the tournament. If they were a team in the majors, I don’t think they would be worse than .500. Yu Darvish is the real deal, and the rest of the pitching also seems extremely good. Their offence seemed disappointing, but they got men on base in most innings and were consistently threatening—they could have easily had more runs. I was somewhat disappointed that I did not get to see any needless sacrifice bunts, which is apparently a feature of Japanese baseball.

The Chinese team is not good, although Chang looks like a fairly decent player. If they want to improve, I think they should use their massive amount of US debt to try and get Manny Ramirez.

Also...

2009-02-10T19:19:00.003-05:00

David Wright: "I know how hard I work... I don't want anyone taking shortcuts."

And yet... D-Wright endourses a product that is banned by the NCAA, for being a performance enhancing substance.

[my point isn't that Wright is a cheat. It's that when you're dealing with these things, there's, like, some nuance and stuff]

Oh, What Have They done to you, Old Friend?

2009-02-10T18:18:00.007-05:00

I wrote more or less this e-mail in response to a text from a friend asking me if I was shocked by A-Rod’s steroid use:

I think, basically, that people who are serious about baseball have, for the last couple of years, recognized that steroids were amazingly fucking rampant and there is no real reason to assume that anyone was clean, and no revelations of steroid use should be seen as "shocking." That said there are a couple of points that I would make in no particular order, some of which would be "shocking" if the main actors (the government and the media) had not established such an abysmal track record of behavior such that the only surprising thing would be if they had acted decently:

1)if you asked me, prior to the revelation, if I thought A-rod was a juicer, I would have said probably not-- because there weren’t any particularly reliable rumors, and he never seemed unreasonably huge. That said, I really am not at all surprised. It does fit in with the conventional interpretation of his psychology (insecure, anxious for greatness/ultra competitive). I generally think that psychoanalyzing a guy based on stuff in the sports section/deadspin is a big waste of time, but if you buy the conventional interpretation of the guy, the juicing fits just fine.

2) The circumstances under which this was revealed really were appallingly unethical: In 2003, MLB decided to do a supposedly anonymous survey test of all major leaguers to determine the extent of steroid use: if over 5% of players tested positive then they would institute random testing the next year: 104 players (over 5%) tested positive and the testing was introduced. The survey test was conducted by a 3rd party contracted by MLB. Somehow, information linking these players to their positive tests was kept (its hard to see why it existed in the first place), and was seized by the government as part of (I think) the IRS investigation of BALCO. How it then got leaked to the SI.com people isn't clear either-- but it was astoundingly unethical for the list to have existed, astoundingly incompetent of the Players Association to have allowed it to exist, and astoundingly stupid/weird that the government felt entitled to take it as part of an investigation of a fairly unrelated thing.

3) It is really hard to guess what went on, but it seems as if the SI.com people had access to the whole list of 103 and chose to only, initially, release A-Rod's name, which is just sort of fucked up. HE WAS NOT THE ONLY GUY DOING THAT SHIT, and releasing only his name is such unethical journalism that it really makes your head hurt.

4) the media's hysterical approach to the steroid issue is appallingly useless. I find myself fascinated by the story of steroids in baseball, but the media has consistently reduced this to a black and white issue, which is not informative, accurate, or useful. Keep in mind that these are the people who have the most access to baseball, and it is kind of their job to write about shit (like a steroid epidemic) that is newsworthy in the sport: yet the writers who are freaking out about steroids right now are, for the most part, people who acted like steroids did not exist in the late '90s,-early 2000s, when it was taking over the sport, and kept their mouths shut when it seemed like it might be sort of good for baseball. In the word’s of Baseball Prospectus’ Joe Sheehan “Take your pick: they missed the story, or they were too chicken-shit to report it.”Now they are repulsively jumping on a bandwagon to make news.

5) The evidence connecting PED use to performance is not all that good. Stat guys are not hugely impressed by the effect of PEDs (although what they base that on is unclear); anecdotally there are a ton of scrubs who took a ton of steroids and remained scrubs.

6) A weird side-effect of this is that Jose Conseco was right: the only person who had linked A-Rod to 'roids was Conseco, who claimed that he introduced A-Rod to a dealer in his 2nd book "vindicated." He also claimed that A-Rod attempted to seduce his [Conseco’s] wife, making it seem fairly reasonable that he would be lie about the 'roids, on account of Conseco is an ass. Conseco seems like such a slime-ball that it actually is shocking when he is right about anything, but his track record with steroids is surprisingly accurate: most of the people he has named have eventually been implicated by other, non-dirtbag, sources.

7) efforts to eliminate performance enhancing drugs (which I basically support) are fairly quixotic. I recently read an article by Will Carrol, the sports medicine guru, about sitting down with a guy who was pushing the next big thing, called SARMs, which is like steroids but better and way, way less detectable. Almost no one has heard of this shit, but as of this year, players in several sports WILL be on it. There is always going to be a PEDs out there that are slightly ahead of the curve, and the innovation will almost always be on the side of the cheaters, rather than enforcement. And with the size of major league contacts, there will always be an incentive to cheat, that some people will give in to.

8) I am WAY less surprised to find out that A-Rod did steroids than I would be to find out that Nate Robinson does NOT do steroids. Honestly, if that guy passed a drug test, I would be shocked.

9) INTEGRITY OF THE GAME IS A FUCKING MYTH: all those old ball players that you love so much were all on speed and threw spitballs. Sorry.

********

When I went home and watched Keith Olberman talking approvingly about Obama’s comment that A-Rod’s actions had “tarnished an era of baseball,” I realized that there was a little more to be said on the subject.

The basic belief that justifies such excesses of the previous regime as Gutamno Bay, torture, and domestic surveillance is that once a person has stepped over a certain line, they stand to loose their personhood; it is the belief that rights to privacy and the protection of the law are not universal, but must be earned by unfailing allegiance and compliance. One might think that for Olberman, and possibly even Obama, the violation of A-Rod’s rights that must have occurred might be at least worth mentioning, regardless of what wrongdoings that violation had revealed.

The last remaining justification for depriving A-Rod of all rights to privacy and due process is to say that it is all about the money: that by making his record breaking millions-- which is given to him by us when we buy a ticket to the ballgame, watch commercials during baseball games, or read the Post—that through our unprecedented investment in A-Rod, we have purchased a piece of A-Rod, and now own the right to pry into all aspects of his ridiculous life. Of course, there is something to this: A-Rod’s millions give him power and privileges that most of us can never reasonably dream of, in theory, they allow him to be existentially different from the rest of us, and so he might be held to an existentially higher standard. However, I would put it to you, that, in a world in a financial crisis, where thirty five hundred of A-Rod’s record breaking contracts were handed to the very institutions that had created the financial crisis in the first place, and then these thirty five hundred A-Rods promptly vanished: if you were to look at the ratio of gratuitous compensation to wrongdoing, A-Rod is not the worst guy out there. He is probably not in the top ten.

The ritual humiliation of the A-Rods of the world serves to set an upper limit on the amount of dignity that any one individual is entitled to, and serves to show what anyone stands to loose if they step over the line. Stay the fuck on the reservation, America.

Mrs. Reyes

2008-08-02T04:07:00.000-04:00

On Friday, July 25th, the Met’s speedy shortstop married his longtime girlfriend Katharine, in a ceremony at City Hall that was witnessed by Reyes’ parents and only twelve other observers. The couple had been together for quite some time; they have two daughters and have been living, along with Reyes’ parents, in the house that Reyes built in Manhasset after he got his contract from the Mets in 2006. They are planning on having a large ceremony in the Dominican in over the winter.

The main source for the story is an understated entry on Adam Rubin’s blog at the Daily News, and while the SNY broadcasters did congratulate Reyes during one of the weekend’s games, very little else has been made of this. This is not all that surprising, because Reyes’ family life is decidedly down-played in his portrayal by the team and the media. While David Wright’s bachelorhood figures prominently in his image, the fact that Reyes has been a father for almost as long as he has been a Met is almost never mentioned. The obvious explanation is that Reyes’ family life falls into no particularly recognizable or approved of pattern (at least to American audiences) and is thus seen as a potential source of embarrassment, or at the very least confusion. Additionally, Reyes is frequently portrayed as childlike (in both good and bad ways) and this aspect of his persona makes less sense (or seems offensively patronizing), when you take into account that he is a father himself. (and perhaps the Mets fear a drastic drop off in ticket sales to female fans if it ever becomes generally known that the shortstop is spoken for.)

Beyond the oddness of the relative invisibility of the Family Reyes, the timing of the thing is strange enough to suggest some sort of dodge involving taxes or immigration law. Since their oldest child is around two years old, it seems unlikely that they were particularly bothered by the fact that they were living in sin. Since the nuptials will actually be celebrated in the winter, it is hard to tell why they felt the need to become legally married three months earlier, on a day when Reyes would have to spend the evening playing a ballgame.

Speaking of the ceremony in the Dominican, I am extremely interested in the Mets-related guest list. Is Billy Wagner invited? What about Willie Randolph? If some footage of David Wright making an ass of himself trying to do the Samba makes its way onto youtube, I will be extremely pleased. Perdiction: Pedro Martinez has to be helped off the dance floor by a trainer, and misses the first month of the ’09 season.

Fernando Martinez for Manny Ramirez

2008-07-29T11:05:00.003-04:00

Just do it, Omar.

Talking to the Media Adds 5 mph to your Fastball

2008-07-24T12:01:00.001-04:00

Larry Brooks has written an article in the Post defending Wagner’s not pitching the 9th inning in Tuesday’s game, which isn’t exactly insane in and of itself: there is no sense in getting Wagner more injure if he doesn’t feel healthy. However, articles in the Post defending Mets for not playing are sort of hard to come by these days (in the same column he sort of implies that Santana is bum for not pitching the ninth inning in that game) and one gets the strong feeling that this puff-piece is Billy’s little reward for being the best quote on the team. Its kind of frustrating because Wagner has gone through periods of serious ineffectiveness (and cost the National League home field advantage in the World Series for the second straight year); aside from his willingness to talk to them there is no special reason that Wagner should be so uniquely deserving of the Post’s mercy. I would have much rather read an article demanding that Minaya trade Aaron Hielman for Oakland’s Huston Street.

Also, if knowing what the word “quarantined” means was a sport, Larry Brooks would be its Jose Lima.

The USA Trilogy/Thank God for the Internet

2008-07-22T18:53:00.001-04:00

Not so much about the Mets, and not so much about baseball. It all sort of popped into my head during a brief break from meditating on Alex Rodriguez, and I figured it was better than nothing:

Don Dos Passos’ USA Trilogy (which I read mainly because it was a high-school graduation present from a friend who has apparently looked occasionally at this blog, so thank you) is probably the Great Un-Appreciated American Novel. A protracted jumble of interweaving narratives, pastiches from newspaper headlines, biographical sketches of prominent Americans, and stream-of-conscious passages that straddles the fence between formalistically brilliant and obsessive compulsive, the work’s major project is too examine how economic circumstances contribute to everything from the formation of individual’s characters, to the course of world events. The book’s socialist inclinations, far more than its formalistic oddity, has to be considered the major factor in its current obscurity; reading the book, one gets the sense that Dos Passos understood (or perhaps expected) the direction in which the country would go—it is a little hard to tell why he bothered.

At any rate, I recently remembered a scene that takes place during the first World War, in which Joe, an American sailor on a British vessel in Trinidad, ignores the advances of a foppish American tourist, in hopes of getting to see a newspaper and baseball scores—Joe is from Washington and the Senators (behind Walter Johnson) looked like they might be in the race. Throughout the scene, Joe’s desire for the baseball scores seems to be an expression of the alienation that Joe feels as a US Navy deserter traveling aboard a foreign ship and his nostalgia for his life and family back home. Joe meets the tourist in a bar and the tourist says that he might have a paper in his hotel. The two then go on a boozy drive through the country-side, while the tourist delivers what Joe probably ought to have recognized as a lengthy and elaborate come-on—but Joe isn’t paying attention to the tourist, he is focused on the possibility of seeing baseball standings. Back at the hotel, the newspaper is nowhere to be found and the tourist offers him $50 for sex; Joe shoves the tourist out of the way and leaves. Back on the ship, Joe tells his story to a British sailor who initially says that Joe should have taken the money, and then suggests that they go to the hotel with a posse and blackmail him. As the scene ends with Joe crawling into his bunk, his major regret is still simply that he didn’t get to look at the baseball scores.

I have always sort of wondered what the sports page that Joe hoped to see would have looked like. It would have had the league standings, and possibly the box scores of some recent games; possibly articles about some of them. Of course, in the old pennant-race system, with the two eight-team leagues, a single day’s standings would have offered a far more complete picture of the baseball season than it would today: once the season was well underway, the teams would settle into identifiable groups of contenders and non-contenders, which would likely only be subject to limited change. If one saw that one’s team was in the contending group, after a prolonged separation from baseball, it would be heartening enough and offer a valuable ray of hope to last until the next port and the next newspaper.

The internet, thankfully, renders the entire interaction obsolete: mlb.com has Joe’s needs covered, and the tourist could have found himself a homosexual prostitute on Craig’s list.

Starting to like this Manuel Fellow

2008-07-08T19:48:00.000-04:00

A strain that runs through much of the dimmer writing on baseball involves extolling the virtues managers who get thrown out of games, and I reluctantly join this chorus in saying that I have come to appreciate Manuel’s tendency to get tossed. I will not go as far as to say that I fault Willie Randolph for not getting thrown out of games—Willie Randolph was a reasonable man, a quality making him nearly completely unique in all of organized baseball, and understood that no greater good would be served by getting ejected. There was a lot to applaud in the understanding, implicit in Randolph’s interaction with the officials, that managerial theatrics ought to be irrelevant to the game’s outcome; something calming and dignified in his acknowledgment that the skill of pitchers and batters would determine the winner, weather Randolph watched from the clubhouse or the dugout.

To use a bad word, Manuel’s interactions with the umpires are somewhat post-modern. Manuel, I think, also knows that his getting ejected is irrelevant, and thus, to him, there is no reason not to have a good time hollering at the umpires until he gets tossed. In the finale against the Philles, after the umpires made an abysmal call on a home run, Manuel kept turning back to get last word in, long after he had been thrown out of the game-- at this point everything was irrelevant: the call had been made and Manuel had been banished, but Manuel stayed on the field, reminding us all that there is something pleasant about a man who yells against injustice, even when the yelling can be shown to have no imaginable effect.

Manuel is a self professed admirer of Gandhi, and I would like to ask him how he thinks Gandhi would handle a blown home-run call in a baseball game he was managing. I suspect that Manuel would reply that Gandhi would understand that there is a difference between the struggle for survival and freedom and the struggle of a baseball game, and that the latter exists largely as a venue for childish rages and frustrations; and that, if he were for some reason managing a baseball team, Gandhi very well might choose to scream at the umpires and use bad language and get ejected.

Possible Explanation of Recent Events:

2008-07-01T09:59:00.000-04:00

[December 11, 2007: Oliver Perez and John Maine are leaving Madison Square Garden]

Maine: I can’t believe those fuckers booed us on the jumbo-tron.
Perez: I know, what were those assholes thinking?
Maine: Seriously, we were both throw-ins in deals for relief pitching, and we went and won fifteen games apiece.
Perez: We pitched pretty good in the ’06 playoffs…
Maine: We pitched damn good in the ’06 playoffs. Now, just because Pedro and Alou spend the year injured…
Perez: And Reyes forgets how the hell to get on base…
Maine: and the entire offense folds down the stretch, now we can’t even watch some basketball without being booed.
Perez: This is bullshit. I never want to win a game for those jerks again.
Maine: Do they know how terifying it is to entrust a game to Gilermo Mota?
[Isaiah Thomas steps out of the shadows]
Isaiah Thomas: You gentlemen seem to have unjustly drawn the ire of the New York sports fan. Perhaps I may be of assistance…
Perez: Hey coach, how’s it going?
Thomas: Terrible.
Maine: How’d you know we were in trouble?
Thomas: Well, I was watching you on the jumbo-tron. I try not to pay much attention to the basketball games they are so…awful.
Perez: But aren’t you the coach?
Thomas: I wish you wouldn’t mention that.
Perez: Sorry, coach.
Thomas: Anyway, perhaps I can aid you in your quest for retribution against the sports fans of New York.
Perez: well, I’m not sure you’d call it a quest…
Maine: yeah, I mean they are jerks, but…
Thomas: Oh come on, it’ll be fun.
[Maine and Perez shrug]
Thomas: Let’s discuss this in my apartment…

[Maine, Perez, Thomas enter Thomas’ apartment.]
Perez: Whoa, nice pad, coach. Is your building famous?
Maine: Yeah, this place seems really familiar, like it was in a movie…
Perez: Was this the building where Annie Hall lived, in Annie Hall?
Maine: Or, was this where Woody Allen had his apartment in Manhattan?
Thomas: No, it was not in either of those movies…anyway, in order to completely destroy the hearts and minds of a sports fan you need to always extend the possibility of hope.
Maine: I don’t understand…
Thomas: see, take my Knickerbockers. They can be counted on to play two, maybe even three quarters of respectable basketball in…most games. For a true believer the possibility will always exist that my wretched team will turn it around…in any given game there still exists the remote possibility that they will come away with a win…
Perez: So the goal is to prolong the terror for as long as possible, by dangling carrots of decent play on a stick?
Thomas: Exactly, if you ever become completely wretched, like the Pirates, or the Oriels, or the NBA’s Grizzlies, the fans will just abandon the team, and spend time with their families or read a book. But if you keep on holding out the possibility of success, they’ll keep coming back like masochistic dope fiends.
Perez: ohh, so why don’t I start out pitching abysmally, up to the point where they start to think about dropping me from the rotation, and then at the last moment come through with a dominant performance against a hated rival.
Maine: And I can start out the year kind of ok, but just when the fans get a nice boost of hope from you dominant game, I’ll follow it up with a four inning loss, where I walk batters and commit a costly throwing error.
Thomas: Excellent…you have learned well, my children.
Maine: I’m thirsty, mind if I grab something?
Thomas: No, don’t open that…
Perez: I got it! This is Sigourney Weaver’s apartment from Ghost Busters!
Maine: Oh shit, there’s a demon in your refrigerator!

The Ejected:

2008-06-25T18:26:00.000-04:00

[Mets Clubhouse, fifth inning, Jerry Manuel and Carlos Beltran. Manuel has been walking around and cursing, several items in the clubhouse have been thrown; Carlos has already calmed down and is watching the game on television.]

Manuel: Fucking umps, like I don’t have enough crap to deal with.
Beltran: oh…oh shit…
Manuel: What? What the fuck is it now?
Beltran: Ollie, he just gave up another home run.
[Manuel nods, a defeated look creeps into his eyes, sits down on the couch.]
Manuel: So who do you think will win American Idol?
Beltran: I don’t know, I don’t really watch that stuff.
Manuel: Yeah.
Beltran: Yeah, I don’t really watch much television now; I spend a lot of time with my kid.
Manuel: Kids are nice. Kids are important.
Beltran: I think it’s very, you know, fulfilling, when you raise a child.
Manuel: Yeah. Family is pretty important, keeps you like…grounded.
Beltran: Yeah, I think so.
[Long pause. Keith Hernandez enters the clubhouse.]
Keith: So this is where the party…oh huh…hi guys.
Beltran: Hi Keith.
Keith: Hey guys, wanna know an old veteran’s trick for dealing with an ejection?
Manuel: What’s the trick?
Keith: You get wasted.
Beltran: and?
Keith: You get wasted. Pretty nifty, right? Hey, I bet there’s still some of Bobby Ojeda’s gin in the equipment closet.
[Keith rummages around in the equipment closet. Produces a dusty bottle of generic gin. Takes a long swig]
Keith: whoo-ee, now that’ll put some hair on your chest. Yeah. Alright, I got a broadcast to do.
[Keith puts the bottle of gin on the table, exits. Manuel and Beltran look at the gin. After a couple minutes, as a Met strikes out on television, Manuel takes a swig of gin, spits most of it out.]
Manuel: Jesus, that tastes like the Koch administration. [Beltran takes a small sip.]
Beltran: That is not very good.
Manuel: He was a pretty good player, though. Real slick fielding first basement. [As he says ‘slick fielding first basemen’ a pained look crosses his face]
Beltran: I didn’t really get to see him much, ‘cause, I was in Puerto Rico, and not all that old.
Manuel: Yeah. He was pretty good.
Beltran: You know what I like to watch on television? I like The Wire.
Manuel: Yeah, The Wire is pretty good.
[Long period of silence, Mariners score another couple runs]
Beltran: You think they gonna deal me for prospects?
Manuel: Man, I have no idea.
[Keith Hernandez re-enters the clubhouse]
Keith: Hey, guys I just thought of something else that helped me deal with an ejection: doing a whole bunch of lines.
Beltran: What?
Keith: You know, coke, blow, the white, snort snort. Hey, I bet there’s still some stuff in the hidden compartment in Daryl Strawberry’s locker.
Manuel: What?
[Keith jimys open a locker, dumps most of the contents on the floor, removes a false bottom to the locker, takes out a big bag of cocaine wrapped in a late ‘80s copy of Penthouse, leaves the magazine in the locker, tosses the bag on the table.]
Keith: Alright guys, don’t have too much fun. I got a broadcast to do. [Exits]
Manuel: We should probably flush that down a toilet or something, before they let the press in.
Beltran: Definitely.
Manuel: or maybe not. Maybe that headline would be less embarrassing.
Beltran: I dunno. So who’s your favorite character on The Wire?
Manuel: Only one? That’s pretty hard. I guess I like Avon Barcksdale, you know, old school gangsta.
Beltran: I like Lieutenant Daniels, because he tries to do the right thing, but sometimes, doing the right thing is hard.
Manuel: Yeah, The Wire is a pretty good show.

THE HAPPY ENDING:
[The clubhouse, after the game, players filling in]
Joe Smith: Mother fucker. What the fuck? Who the fuck trashed my locker? What the hell? [Examines the locker, sees the late ‘80s copy of Penthouse, picks it up] Nice… [Flips through thee magazine] nice…

In the Wake of the Randolph Firing:

2008-06-18T18:49:00.000-04:00

-In the 1960s the FBI spent over a year trying to determine if the lyrics to the garage band classic “Louie Louie” were obscene—at the end of which period they concluded that they were unintelligible. These actions were not less logical than the decision to fire Willie Randolph.

-Perhaps the weirdest development was when the younger guy who works at my local pizza place said, unequivocally, that Rick Peterson was the best pitching coach in baseball. The guys at John’s pizza are pretty blue color and I had not figured them as fans of the Jacket. But the possibly exists that the pizza guy, or one of his friends, had recently “discovered” a truck full of Tuscan tiles which he hoped to move at a greater price due to Peterson’s plug.

-The pizza guy also went on to say that he was so mad over the betrayal of Peterson and Randolph that he wanted them to loose last night’s game. I said that that was a little extreme and that I could never make myself root against the Mets.

-I have listened to so much damn WFAN over the last two mornings that I have started to kind of like Boomer Eiseson’s co-host (Craig Carton?). Is there a support group for that?

-Over the next few weeks the Mets will face some pretty bad teams, thus putting them in a good position to go on a little winning streak, and make the decision to fire Willie look smart. In a rare moment of lucidity, my sources (the WFAN guys) said that this was probably taken into account when determining the timing of Randolph’s release.

-At the end of the day, the decision to fire the manager has a tasteless feel to it, simply because it strikes one a misguided effort to try and control the uncontrollable. According to Baseball Prospectus, the Phillies are leading the division because their relief corps is giving up home runs far less frequently than they ever have before: there is no reason for this, and no reason to think that they won’t return to giving up home runs at their usual frequency. Rather than accept that they are ultimately powerless in the face of the chaotic nature of the universe, the Mets chose to fire Willie Randolph.

"The Mets Win the Ballgame!"

2008-06-12T12:53:00.003-04:00

On Tuesday, I believed* that a hand-held am/fm radio (and batteries) would set me back ten bucks less than MLB’s audio package (and would also be useful for getting instructions from the government in case of an extraterrestrial invasion or catastrophic earthquake). Shortly after making the purchase, I resolved that I would not allow myself of wander around the city with the archaic object next to my ear. This resolution was astonishingly short lived: approaching my subway stop last night, with Pelfry leading by three into the eighth, I felt compelled to find out what was going on, and managed to tune in as Pelfry went to bat to lead off the eighth inning. The crowed, chanting “Pelfry, Pelfry,” was audible over the announcers, the static, and the street noise, and as Pelfry struck out it was one of those moments that redeems several weeks of awful baseball; a wonderful and poignant reminder of the occasional rewards of obsessive fan-hood.

I was unable to help myself again when I got to Queens, and heard Billy Wagner’s blown save as I approached my apartment. I watched the rest of the game in stunned silence in my living room, as Gary Cohen kept on mumbling the phrase “punched in the solar plexus” and the cameras panned over a stadium full of people who looked as if they had just been told that the bank holding all of their savings had gone up in the same fire with the orphanage, until Beltran won it with a home run in the thirteenth.

Oddly, the comments on metsblog, and the couple of minutes of talk radio that I have forced myself to stomach this morning, seemed mainly negative. The feeling was still that the ball club was somehow not made up of winners, still doomed to mediocrity. (would the reaction have been different if David Wright had hit he dinger?)

I have to say that I don’t understand the negativity. Of course, in a hyper rational view of the thing the extra innings win seems fairly attributable to luck, and it is as easy to emphasize the chances that the Mets missed as it is to focus on the ones that they took. But even if you aren’t a fan, this is not a victory that looks bad for the Mets: the performance by Pelfry is a legitimate cause for optimism; the pitcher that the Mets scored their first three runs off of is probably the best in the National League; and the bullpen that followed him and shut the Mets down is also excellent.

And, if you are a fan, I don’t see how any win could be any better. In my mind, baseball will always be superior to other sports, simply because it can involve walk-off home runs. The image of the ball sailing over the fence, combined with the sudden reversal of the team’s fortunes are about the giddiest experience that a fan can have. I love that there is an actual second or two, between when the ball leaves the bat and when it lands, when the fate is literally suspended in the air. I love that there is a moment, at the apex of the parabola, when you can tell that it is leaving the yard and you say to yourself, “holly shit, we won this.” The fact that I had spent the proceeding innings mentally composing a post about how the Mets were all bums and would probably never win another ball game just made it all the sweeter.

When your team wins with a walk-off home run, I think you need to shut up and be happy. There comes a time when you have to examine why you follow baseball, and realize that you root for a team, not because you think it will win the World Series, but because rooting for that team is what you do. Sure, maybe if the players were less old, less injured, and better at baseball they would win more games: but if you can’t experience unqualified baseball joy after a walk-off home run, I think you need to sit down and figure out what the fuck is wrong with your life. (also, eight fucking scoreless innings from Mike fucking Pelfry and you want to talk about the Mets being just a .500 team, you treacherous fucks? Go root for the fucking Yankees if you want to be like that.)

*I just checked: my radio was actually four or five dollars more expensive. Well fuck.

Notes From Pedro’s Return:

2008-06-04T18:32:00.004-04:00

Since Pedro’s return happened on a night game on the west coast and was thus missed by most reasonable people (also, apparently, something happened last night with that election thing? It was really stupid of them to schedule that on the night Pedro came back; don’t they know some of us have priorities?), I am offering the notes that I took on it. Pedro opposed Barry Zito and the San Francisco Giants.

Top of the first:
-Reyes has a kind of “eh” at bat and gets on with an error, or near error, by Giants 3B
-Easley batting 2nd? well he gets a hit, Reyes to 3rd, so working out ok so far.
What’s Easley’s OBP? [.268]Does Willy Randolph know the answer to this question?
-Wright sac fly gets in Reyes
-Beltran takes first 2 pitches, grounds into a double play.

Bottom 1st:
-Leadoff man, Fred Lewis, hits the second pitch for a single.
-Ray Durham, 2B: Pedro throws two balls, not looking great, at all. Durham flies out.
-Randy Winn: Lewis steals second, Castro makes a shitty throw that ends up in the outfield, Reyes works on getting away from the sliding runner, not catching the bad throw, not sure what he should have done, Winn hits a double, scoring Lewis, shity.
-Bengie Molina: Pedro is throwing pretty hard (91). Gets up 2-0 then, throws two curveballs for balls. Molina is fouling pitches off pretty well. Molina hits a ground ball; Reyes gets Winn going to third, nice play by Reyes, rotten base running by Winn, Molina to first.
-Rowand flies out on first pitch.

I guess you take this from Pedro. I guess this looks kind of good. His velocity is in low 90s. He seems a little tentative, but fuck do I know? Two hits, 1 ground out, 2 fly outs.

Top 2nd:
-Church flies out.
-Tatis starts out looking overmatched by Zito’s curve, but hits a double.

pretty pitches are deceptively seductive: often the impression that you take from an at bat will be a very good looking pitch, which will distract you from the end result and the pitcher’s ability to control the at bat, or put the hitter away. I think this has a lot to do with the overvaluation of Zito that has been going on throughout the guy’s career.

-Carlos Delgado, down 0-2, looking pretty bad. Starts watching the curve, takes 2 balls, 3 balls, hits a bloop that gets caught.
-Walks Castro to get to Pete.
-Pedro swings, he wants to get a hit. Grounds out.

Bottom 2nd:
-Bowker 4 pitch walk.
-Rich Aurilia: Pedro makes two nice pitches, 3rd pitch does not miss by much. Throws a couple more balls, Aurilia flies out.
-Vizquel: grounds out, after going up 3-0
[On the ticker: Detroit Piston’s coach Flip Saunders is Fired! Yes!Yes!]
-Zito: grounds out.

Top 3rd:
-Reyes: Reyes really looks like he has his shit together, 3-0, but then gets out on a pop foul. Ball looked like it was going into the stands, but then blew in towards a fielder and was caught; Reyes stands at the plate for a while, looking hurt and pissed
-Easley base hit.
-Wright looking good; draws a walk.
-Beltran: goes up 3-0, but pops out.
-Church flies out.

In that inning Zito looked damn bad, but the Mets were not quite able to turn that into runs. Perhaps his shakiness, ertaticness, hides some ability to control the inning? Nah. Mets just weren’t being that good, and Reyes getting out was a wind related fluke.

Bottom 3rd:
-Lewis: groundball. Reyes makes a nice play to just get him at 1st, should have been safe due to lousy footwork by Delgado, but ump doesn’t notice.
-Durham draws a walk.
-Winn: strikes out, looking good Pete.
-Molina groundball to Easely end the inning.

Top 4th:
Zito looked rotten in that last frame; let’s put some runs up for Pedro, folks.
-Tatis: strikes out.
-Delgado: walks.
-Castro: hits a ball hard, but a nice play by Lewis gets him out.
-Pedro, first pitch swinging, base hit, looks pleased but confused on first base.
-Reyes: grounds out.

Bottom 4th:
-Rowand flies out on a nice play by Church.

The guys are talking about Juan Marichel, w/o mentioning that Marichel was Pedro’s partner in the cockfight video; apparently the dude was a baseball player.

-Bowker hits a ball to Tatis, looks like Tatis could have made the catch, doesn’t, manages to get a close throw to 2nd, but Bowker ruled safe, I think it could have gone either way, lousy play by Tatis not making the catch.
-someone grounds Bowker over.
-walking Vizquel to get to Zito. Vizquel hasn’t been hitting for crap, apparently, so this seems insane.
-Zito grounds out. But now they have to face top of the order in the next frame.

Top 5th
-Easley: draws a walk. Powermind in full force.
-David Wright: base hit, Easley to 2nd.
-Beltran: Keith is talking about a bunt. Beltran, do not fucking bunt. Beltran hits the first pitch for a double, scoring Easley.
-Church sac fly, scores Wright, Beltran to 3rd.
-Walks Tatis, runners at the corners.
-Delgado: shity defense by SS Vizquel, Tatis safe at 2nd, Delgado to first, Beltran scores.
-Zito leaves the game.
-Castro gets a base hit of off new pitcher Chulk (?) to load the bases.
-Pedro gets his second fucking hit of the night, scoring Tatis. Looking extremely happy and animated standing at first.
-Reyes hits a ball for what would have been a double play against any little league team, but a run scores and the bases stay loaded.
-Easley double scores everyone.
-Wright flies out, what a loser.
-Beltran flies out. Apparently this was the biggest inning of the Mets season. Good job everyone.

Bottom 5th:
-Lewis hits a ground rule double.
-Pinch hitter singles, Lewis to 3rd.
-Wynn singles, Lewis scores, runners on first and second, no one out. 9-2, Mets.
-Fly out, advances runners.
-Rowand: groundout, scores a run
-fly out ends the inning.

Now, if they pitched to Vizquel in the 4th and got him out, not unlikely since Vizquel is something like 1 for his last 30, and Zito leads off the 5th inning with an out (by far the most likely outcome of a Zito at-bat), this is only a one run inning. Although, since they lifted Zito in the 5th, it probably would have been a pinch hitter. Still, I think walking the 8th hitter to get to the pitcher is a questionable tactical move.

Top 6th:
-Church gets on, on another absolutely pathetic defensive play. Give credit to the Mets for taking advantage, but the main thing to take away from this is that the Giants are god awful.

Cohen: it looks like Pedro is going out for the 6th inning.
Keith: Unless they have Claude Rains warming up in the bullpen.
Cohen: Or Ralph Ellison.

-Tatis: Church advances to 2nd on a passed ball, Tatis grounds out.
-Delgado grounds out, moves Church to third.
-Castro: takes ball one, Pedro looks ecstatic trotting into the on deck circle, but Castro pops out to end the inning.

Bottom 6th:
-Rich Aurilia doubles.
-Vizquel singles, Aurilia to 3rd.
-Pinch hitter, Brian Horrowitz: strikes out.
-Lewis: strikes out.
-Denker (?) grounds out.

Awesome. So, assuming, and I think safely, that Pedro is done, he has given just a quality start. Still, that’s pretty awesome after all the lay off. Also, I like how after he got runners on the corners in that last inning, he was like “fuck it. I’m Pedro, you’re the Giants, no more runs for you,” 2 Ks, and a grounder.

Top 7th:
-Nick Evens, pinch hitting for Pedro: strikes out.
-Reyes flies out.
-Easley: flies out.

Bottom 7th:
Smith pitching, 1-2-3 inning on 3 groundballs.

Top 8th:
-Wright: flies out.
-Beltran: flies out.
-Church: grounds out.

Bottom 8th:
Feliciano pitches.
-Bowker: pops out to Castro.
-Aruilia strikes out.
-Vizquel: grounds out, on a really nice play by David Wright.

Top 9th:
-I miss the first two batters do to a test of the emergency broadcast system. Castro flies out.

Bottom 9th:
Schoenewies pitching.
-Walks the first batter.
-Walks Lewis.
-Travis Denker hits a 3 run homer, wonderful.
-Wynn hits a ball to Easely, one away.
-Bengei Molina singles, Shoenewies out, Wagner on.
-Wagner throws two pitches, gets a double play, put it in the books.

Hard to know what to make of this one. Not only do the Giants run a butcher shop in the field, but they lack any particularly dominant/competent hitters, so it’s hard to know how much was Pedro, and how much was the sub-par offense. Also, Zito has been pitching badly and definitely pitched badly tonight, so it’s hard to know how much credit to give the Mets hitters. Indeed, if Scott Boras (Zito’s agent) wasn’t such money grubbing twit, Zito would probably have signed with the Mets after ’06, which means they couldn’t have signed Santana. Willy Randolph and Omar Minaya should chip in and get Boras a fruit basket or something since if Zito had pitched like this for the Mets, both of them would have been killed by an angry mob.

At the same time, the Mets took enough of the breaks they were given, and all around did a nice job. In the 5th, for example, Delgado hit a ball that probably could have been a double play, but everyone was safe and a run scored; while the Giants should have made the play, the end result was also due to Delgado and Tatis both hustling. Everything from Pedro seems encouraging, particularly that his velocity was in the low 90s. I think the real lesson is that the Mets should try to see if they could get that kid Lewis away from the Giants for a questionable minor leaguer and an old Jose Lima baseball card, since the Giants obviously don’t seem to be that good at running a ball club; Lewis made some nice plays in the field, and Keith likes his swing. Batting Easely 2nd, at least tonight, worked beautifully.

“I’ve seen the Future…and it is murder.”

2008-06-03T15:33:00.001-04:00

It is widely acknowledged that the Met’s farm system is relatively barren, particularly in the wake of the trade for Santana. With three picks (18th, 22nd, and 33rd) in the first round of the draft this year, the Mets are in position to do something about this. On Metsblog.com, Ike Davis and Anthony Hewitt are mentioned as players that the Mets will likely target. Baseball Prospectus has a list of the top 50 prospects, and this is what they had to say about them:

22 (out of 50) Anthony Hewitt, SS, The Salisbury School (CT)
What He Is: On a pure tools level, he’s the best athlete in this year’s draft, maybe the past several years.
What He’s Not: A baseball player.
In A Perfect World He Becomes: An absolute monster.
Backup Plan: You want fries with that? All kidding aside, he’s a bright kid who’ll go to a good school and end up just fine if this whole baseball thing doesn’t work out.
Open Issues: His risk/reward balance is so thrown off that people have a hard time coming up with a good valuation; like many East Coast prep kids, he’s a year older than most high schoolers.

27 (out of 50) Ike Davis, 1B, Arizona State
What He Is: A good pitcher like his father Ron (a former big leaguer), but far more desired for his big frame and power bat.
What He’s Not: Anything more than a one-dimensional slugger.
In A Perfect World He Becomes: An imposing left-handed power bat.
Backup Plan: Um, a kinda imposing left-handed power bat?
Open Issues: They’re all minor, but he’s been pretty consistently injured; he can get pull-happy at times and lose plate coverage.

I’m not reassured. Hewitt seems like an insane crapshoot, and Davis just doesn’t seem that inspiring. I’ll confess to really not knowing anything at all about the baseball draft. Of the players on BP’s list, Yonder Alonso, a power hitting first basemen, definitely is the one I would go for, but it seems as if he will be drafted by the time the Mets make their first pick.

The Only Valid Opinion Concerning Willie Randolph

2008-05-28T12:59:00.000-04:00

I know that it has been a while since I have done anything, and I know that I chose a dark time abandon the cause, but I hope that I can begin to start to make it up by laying down the one true opinion on Willie Randolph, in comparison to which all other opinions on Willie Randolph will appear as the feeble nonsense that they truly are.

Background: Primitive tribes would often find themselves a Witch Doctor, Medicine Man, or something to ensure favorable weather. Whenever the weather was good, they would talk about how they were really lucky to have such a good Witch Doctor. If the weather was bad, they would call in to the local radio stations and yell about how the Witch Doctor was a moron. Indeed, when examining the function of the Witch Doctor, it becomes obvious that he was mainly there to provide an illusion of control, a figure to either praise or blame as a way of avoiding the horrifying existential reality: that they were utterly at the mercy of the random workings of chance and nature and that there was noting that they could ever do to change that. Sometimes, after long periods of truly bad weather, they would decide to expel the Witch Doctor from their primitive community, just so they could feel like they were doing something to address the problem; sometimes, following such an expulsion, the weather would change and sometimes it wouldn’t. Lacking actual job skills, the expelled Witch Doctors were forced to wander the countryside alone, until they found a baseball team to manage.

If SamsMetsBlog had a set of core beliefs (and it doesn’t), one of them might be that what happens on sports teams is mostly about the players playing the game, and not so much about the managers or coaches directing them. Particularly in baseball, the areas in which a manager can actually impact the performance of his team are minimal. Teams win when they are getting on base and throwing strikes, and the manager does not contribute to any of that directly.

Randolph makes things a little more complicated by messing up the parts of the game that he can effect semi-regularly. However, anyone who thinks that Mets are a mediocre embarrassment because of the half a dozen times when Willie left Heilman in for a few batters to many or sent the up the wrong pinch hitter is insane. The Mets are in trouble because their offense is miserable and their pitching has been completely underwhelming.

The maddening thing is that there is every reason to think that the Mets, as presently constituted, could be one of the best teams in the National League. The players haven’t played as well as their past performances would lead one to hope. They’ve caught a lot of bad breaks. Carloses Delgado and Beltran have hit a lot of hard line drives at infielders; over the course of 162 games a lot of those will go a foot or two to the left or right and be extra base hits.

The opposing theory, I guess, is that Randolph should be able to inspire in his team the kind of intensity and focus that would prevent defensive lapses and make them fight their way back into games. However, I think many people are mislead by the strength of their desire for the Mets to appear more focused and passionate, which leads them to overemphasize the role that Randolph could play in the situation. Even if there is a deficiency of character on the part of the Mets it does not, in any way, follow that replacing the manager would make it better and not exaggerate it. Specifically, it seems that a different manager might be able to elicit better performances from Jose Reyes, who has a history of having been influenced by the people around him, such as Jose Valentine and Ricky Henderson. But it is not at all certain that a change would have a positive influence on Reyes and not a negative one; and by far the most important factor in Jose Reyes’ performance is Jose Reyes, and not whoever is managing him.

Thus, I think that the question that Randolph posed to a Bergen County Record reporter (in what he claimed to believe was an off the record conversation) regarding his portrayal in the media and the public’s resulting view of him, “is it racism?” is, at the very least, a fair question. There are really only two basic pieces of information about Randolph that are universally known: 1) that he is the manager of the New York Mets and 2) that he is a black man. If the response on the part of the public to perceived lackluster performances on the part of the Mets is to demand the ousting of the manager, it seems fair to wonder which of the only two facts generally available about Randolph they are responding to, particularly if you are of the (only reasonable) view that the role that the manager plays in any team is limited, and take into account that Randolph’s tenure has included successes as well as failures.

In the controversy that ensued in the wake of Randolph’s comments, the New York Post’s Joel Sherman pointed out that Yankee’s manager Joe Girardi, a white man, is not any less likely to be fired than Randolph if his team fails to perform. I would view the example of Girardi in a slightly different light. Before coming to the Yankees, Girardi was fired by the Marlins in the same year that he won the National League Manager of the year award. Girardi was entrusted with a lot of young pitching in with the Marlins, none of whom have performed as well since Girardi’s tenure, leading some to suspect over or mis-use on the part of the manager. The Yankees major strength, right now, is young pitching, and their goal is not so much to win with it right now, as to get it ready for the future. If I were a Yankees fan, I would wake up every day hoping to find out that Giradi had been fired on a Stienburner whim, particularly as the team undertakes the unprecedented, mid-season conversion of Joba Chamberlin from a starter to a reliever. Right now, the Yankees are pretty much exactly as bad as the Mets, and the fact that there is a louder cry for Randolph’s head than for Girardi’s tends to support an assertion that race plays a role in the conversations surrounding them.

In explaining himself, Randolph eventually alluded to Isaiah Thomas, which might be a more informative example. Thomas was bad as a coach, and worse as a GM. However, the hostility that he faced was utterly out of proportion to the extent to which he was actually at fault. A basketball coach probably has a bigger effect on his team’s season than a baseball manager, but the Knicks were still bad because the players were bad. If Phil Jackson and Isaiah Thomas had switched places half way through the season, the Knicks would still have been rotten and the Lakers would still have been good. Perhaps Jackson might have managed a few more wins than Thomas, but not as many more as if Zach Randolph had been replaced with a decent power forward, or if they had found a point guard who wasn’t a midget or insane. Thomas did more to deserve the hostility by assembling the god awful players in his role as general manager, but for the most part it seemed that people demanding his head were responding to his role as coach and their bitterness directed at him seemed to have more to do with expressing rage, than a rational understanding of what was going on with the team. (Don’t get me wrong, Isaiah was awful, but probably not that awful.)

Thus, the official Samsmetsblog view (and only sane opinion) regarding Willie Randolph is that he is ok, not brilliant, not a disaster, and not all that important; and also the New York press and sports fans instinct to pile on black coaches/managers is slightly worrisome, but difficult to definitively label as racism. In the end, someone who thinks that the Mets best move is to fire Willie Randolph is like a man who, when asked his view on Bush as a President, talks to you for twenty minutes about how he fucked up the highway system.

better than no post at all....

2008-05-15T12:52:00.003-04:00

From frequent (only) blog commentator” Nigel Fowler:”
Unless you plan to discuss this on the blog, could you please explain to me why Gandolph removed the estimable Vargas and replaced him with the hapless Thielman, who thereafter lost the game?

Could you also explain why Gandolph had Joe Smith pitch to one (1) person, with demonstrable skill, then replaced him?

If I didn't know better I'd wonder if he was trying to throw the game.But perhaps there are things I don't understand.

Unrelatedly, where's the best place to purchase Mets Caps (including a small child's one)? I have a request from England for baseball caps.

I didn’t actually get to catch the game, so I’m going off of the Post, metsblog and gameday (which actually gives you complete play-by-play information for past games, which is pretty cool— if you ever get asked questions about games that you didn’t watch.)

Anyhow, when Vargas was taken out he had thrown 97 pitches, and the Mets seem to like to limit their starters to around a hundred pitches, whenever possible. Pitch counts are very common in baseball now and, if you believe Ron Darling or Comrade Marty Noble, linked to the decline of the West. The theory, naturally, is that by limiting a starter’s pitches you prevent injury and enable superior performances in future appearances. The Mets seem to be a little more interested in limiting a starter’s pitches than most teams, and I get the impression that this is somehow related to a philosophy of pitching that comes from Rick Peterson.

More to the point, Vargas had given up a home run in the 6th inning, and then walked the second batter he faced in the 7th on four pitches-- both of which are generally regarded as signs that a starter is tiring and losing their control. Randolph thought Vargas was exhibiting commonly agreed on portents of a Heilman-esqu meltdown, and for all we know Randolph was right on this.

The decision to leave Heilman in is a little more interesting/almost definitely the wrong thing to do. One factor is that Schoenwisse had been hospitalized for a stomach virus the night before, and was probably regarded as unavailable (he showed up at the park and told reporters after the game that he could have pitched, but whatever). Recently injured relievers Duaner Sanchez and Matt Wise had both appeared in the previous game; Sanchez had been used in the last two games. With a day game on Thursday (meaning that pitchers used in Wednesday’s game would have less time to recover), Randolph’s desire was too get as much as he could out of as few pitchers as possible; he really wanted an inning or two out of Heilman, and was slow to accept that he wasn’t going to get it. And even when it became obvious that Heilman would be unable to perform, they still had to leave him in for another batter or so, while they waited for Joe Smith to warm up.

As for Smith only facing one batter, you seem to be mistaken: all the sources indicate that he also pitched a scoreless 8th, although that was probably not Randolph’s plan. In theory, due largely to the uniqueness of his throwing motion, Smith should be a specialist or situational reliever who is brought in to face specific batters, mainly right-handers. In theory, Hielman is more like a “miniature starter” (he actually began his career as a starter, wasn’t any good at it and got moved to the bullpen, but still dreams about returning to the rotation) who should be able to pitch an inning or two to pretty much anyone. Thus, ideally, Heilman would have finished the 7th and pitched most of the 8th—if another pitcher was needed for the last batter or so of the 8th inning Randolph would have gone to Smith or Feliciano depending on the handedness of the opposing batter. Randolph’s major mistake was not seeing that his ideal scenario was not going to happen soon enough. His only move was to bring in Joe Smith to perform the role that he had planned for Heilman; Randolph did do this eventually, but he probably should have done it sooner.

For what its worth, Randolph is more stuck with Heilman than he is with pretty much any other player. Heilman is one of only a few “homegrown” players on the squad (Wright, Reyes, Smith, and Mike Pelfry are the only others, I believe), and so there are sentimental and financial (he is still on his first contract which is probably fairly advantageous for the club) incentives to retain him. I am pretty sure that he has been on the team too long to be sent to the minors, and most comparable relievers would be more expensive for the team than Heilman.

Willie’s only motivation for throwing a game would be if he wants to get fired. If the Mets don’t do very well this year, and even if they ever go on a serious loosing streak, Randolph will probably be gone. However, he is under contract and “firing” him would probably involve handing him a big wad of cash, so we can’t rule out anything.

Mets caps are available on the web and at the ballpark, and also at a couple locations that sell team merchandise. One of these is located in the big mall in Flushing, the foodcourt of which seems to have a serious dumpling stand.

Incredibly, Jose Conseco’s Credibility has Taken a Hit

2008-04-30T19:34:00.004-04:00

“Here’s something you probably don’t know about Roger Clemens: He’s one of very few baseball players I know who never cheated on his wife. I was amazed by him, to be honest. His wife should be very proud of him.”
-Juiced

So…does this mean that Jose Conseco never actually had any idea what he was talking about?

Having an affair with a fifteen-year old when you are twenty eight (and married with two children, if you want to do the whole bourgeoisie morality thing) is the sort of shit that people generally go the hell to jail for. So for a bit there I was a little disappointed in the ol’ Rocket.

But it just might be mathematically impossible to be white trash-ier than Mindy Mccready. Her resume includes being a country singer (with titles as diverse as “Ten Thousand Angels” and “Guys do it all the time”), being an oxycontin addict (hillbilly heroin, Rush Limbaugh’s drug of choice), a weird incident in 2005 that might have been an attempt on he part to unmask a con-artist and might have been her stealing some dude’s truck (there is weirdly little information about this on the internet), and beating up her mother. So I kinda give Clemens props, in a satisfying episode of the Springer Show sort of way.

If you want to take a moment and actually (shudder) analyze Jose Conseco, you are compelled to realize that he has some very weird issues with Roger Clemens. In Juiced, after making his claim about Clemens’s fidelity, he goes on to broadly imply that Clemens had used steroids. Since the release of the Mitchell report Conseco he has submitted an affidavit saying that he had no knowledge of Clemens’ steroid use, and has also implied that, had it not been for pressure from his publisher—which he links to Clemens’ connection to the Bush family—he would have written more about Clemens’ steroid use in Juiced. Essentially, now, his position is that he never had any proof that Clemens did steroids, but had always strongly suspected that he might do steroids, and he emphasizes either the lack of proof or the longtime suspicion, depending on the situation.

My theory is that Jose Conseco’s two goals in all of this are to be liked by Roger Clemens and to enhance his (Conseco’s) personal celebrity as much as possible. Probably, part of why Conseco wanted to be liked by Clemens was that he knew damn well that Clemens did steroids. Thus, when he initially wrote Juiced he did, in fact, have more about Clemens doing steroids, since it was the most sensational thing at his disposal, but he also threw in the thing about Clemens never cheating on his wife, as an olive branch or consolation prize. Also, Conseco might have known that Clemens’ fidelity would eventually come under scrutiny, and wanted the Rocket to know that he was on his side, at least when it came to screwing underage country singers. Conseco’s publishers made him tone down the stuff about Clemens, because they weren’t dummies and knew that Clemens was the sort of guy who would be a litigious dick about being explicitly called out for steroids. After the Mitchell report, one of the many minor pieces of Conseco stock that went up was the fact that he was prevented from printing unsubstantiated claims about Clemens’ juicing in the first place, and Conseco had to make this known. However, because he still wants to be liked by Clemens, the Clemens camp was able to work something out where he would publicly claim that he had no explicit knowledge of Clemens’ steroid use.

I like to think that, although most of the negotiating was done by their agents, Jose Conseco insisted on a face to face meeting to confirm the details of the arrangement. Conseco went alternately hoping that Clemens would embrace him as a fellow disgraced juicer and eagerly anticipating Clemens’ squirming with the knowledge that he was in some way under Conseco’s power. The meeting was brief and Clemens never made eye-contact with Conseco. Maybe at the end, Conseco said something like “hey, how’s that little blond country singer doing, she was a real nice piece of ass,” and Clemens grunted and shrugged, his eyes clearly saying “jesus christ what will it take to get this fucking spic out of my sight,”…and Conseco, who had been greedily studying the broad, bloated face for any sign of fellow feeling or sympathy, could read that as clear as a billboard, and, after a weak attempt at getting the check, shuffled out into the world to maintain Clemens’ innocence.

Beltran’s Leadership Strikes Again

2008-04-21T20:09:00.000-04:00

When Reyes was taken out of the game against the Brewers on Friday, April 11th, Gary Cohen and Ron Darling spent a moment discussing weather it was for defensive lapses, or for not running out ground balls, before the hamstring tightness was announced. The Mets lost the next two games, which Reyes sat out. At some point, before he returned the next Tuesday, Beltran approached Reyes and gave him a pep talk in which he encouraged Reyes to be himself and to return to the exuberant ways that he had renounced after his September slump; in the wake of being generally blamed for the Mets collapse, Reyes had reported to camp committed to being more focused on baseball and less on theatrics. Particularly, he decided to eliminate his choreographed celebratory handshakes, which had drawn the ire of opponents. After Beltran’s talk, Reyes resolved to return to being the “old Reyes,” to take up the handshakes and everything. This resolution has been followed by good play for Reyes, who had good series against the Nationals and Phillies.

Nothing is as important to the Mets as a dominant Reyes, and anything that encourages this is more than welcome. At the same time the incident furthers the perception of Beltran filling the perceived leadership void, which is also fun.

If you are looking for something to feel skeptical about, you can bear in mind that Reyes’ mini-streak has come against the Nationals, who are bad, and in Citizens’ Bank Park, where Reyes has always enjoyed hitting. He hit three home runs there once in 2006, during a terrible outing by an injured Pedro. Reyes’ homeruns also were the bulk of the Mets offense. The first one, which lead off the game, lead to an exuberant celebration in the dugout. Although they were healthily behind when he hit his second, it seemed to give them new life, and again his teammates were hopefully enthusiastic. By the time he hit the third, the game was already basically lost, and the only person waiting for the triumphant Reyes on the dugout steps was infield reserve Chris Woodward; Wright, who had lead the rush to greet him after the first homerun, was off in a corner.

****
I’m going to vent my disappointment with myself for not having posted enough lately by pointing out that the New York Post’s Mike Vaccaro is kind of a moron. He wrote a whiney column, lamenting that the Mets blew their shot at a sweep of the Phillies and attributing this to Castillo’s inability to get a bunt down in the ninth inning, with runners on first and second, nobody out, and the Mets trailing by one. After Castillo struck out, Wright popped out, and Beltran hit a ball that might have gone for a hit but was well fielded by Phillie’s shortstop Eric Bruntlett. Vaccaro claims that if Castillo got the bunt down, the entire complexion of the inning would be changed, which is sort of true: the complexion of the inning would also have been changed if Beltran or Wright had gotten a hit, or if Castillo had been able to get on base. Identifying Castillo’s inability to put down the bunt as the play that cost them the game strikes me as odd: I’d just as soon blame Beltran and Wright for not getting a hit with the tying run in scoring position in the ninth. Or, fuck it; blame Pelfrey for giving up home-runs.

People have been telling me lately that I am unreasonably impatient with bunting as a strategy, and they are probably right. But my impatience is a results form the fact that the Mets in general, and Louis Castillo in particular, seem to display an unhealthy mania for the tactic. Obviously, if you have to make an out you might as well advance the runners and in certain situations the bunt is an invaluable tool. However, Castillo seems to really love to bunt, which is odd because he’s not an utterly incompetent hitter, and he particularly excels at patience and pitch recognition, meaning that, unless he bunts, pitchers have to throw strikes to get him out. If I was Willie Randolph, I’d send Castillo up and make the opposing pitcher throw strikes until he either walked Castillo, or got him out, or gave him a pitch to hit, rather than sacrifice a competent batter in order to advance runners.

Bill James: Sunday’s Mets vs. Brewers, Worst Game of Baseball Since 1972

2008-04-15T17:54:00.003-04:00

Sabermetric guru Bill James has recently stated that Sunday’s contest between the Milwaukee Brewers and the New York Mets was the worst game of baseball since an Oakland Athletic loss to the Boston Redsox in 1972. In the National League there hasn’t been a worse game since a 1970 contest between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Huston Astros.

“In the course of 162 games, teams will play some excruciating baseball,” said James, “In fact, the human mind is not capable of contextualizing all of the awfulness, and evaluating it in terms of relative terribleness. Thus, I have created several statistics to help us gauge relative levels of suckitude.

“Sometimes,” said James, “both starters will simply have bad outings. What makes a start truly pathetic is when it seems like it might have had potential, but still ends up a disaster.”

Such was the case of the Mets Oliver Perez on Sunday, who entered the 4th with a four run lead that he was unable to protect for an inning. One of James’ statistics, SUC [Starters Underachieving Completely], relates size of a lead to the shortness of the time that it was held. Perez had a SUC of 7.4, and a SUC + (adjusted across eras) of 1.5. “Additionally, the Brewers did half of their damage in that inning with two outs, when it looked like Perez might have been able to escape, contributing to his Lima-factor of 12,” added James.

Another feature of Sunday’s game was that the Mets were able to get the leadoff man on in nearly every inning, but were seldom able to get that runner to score. “Something like that,” said James “speaks volumes of awful about both teams. It reminds you that the Brewers’ pitching was just brutal, but also makes the point that the Mets ability to get the job done with runners on base was, quite frankly, an embarrassment to the sport.”

POOP [Players Offering Outs Pathetically] is used to gauge overall offensive ineptitude. The two teams, aided by the 5 double plays turned against the Mets, combined for a POOP of 24.7 “In a situation like that it is almost as if they were two turds, chasing each other down the drain of America’s pastime,” said James.

CRAP [Continuing Really Awful Play] relates the awful baseball to the inning that it occurred in and also places the game in the larger context of both team’s seasons. Sunday’s game scored a CRAP of 34.6; CRAPs above 26.5 are, according to James “thankfully, exceedingly rare.”

Sunday’s CRAP rating was the highest since the 1972 game, and the eight highest since World War II—the furthest back that James has been able to do his calculations. Strangely, the Mets have been participants in seven of the ten highest CRAP-rated games in that time, even though they were only formed in 1962.

Although all can agree that there was nothing good about Sunday’s game, some dispute James’ assertion about its historic awfulness. Said WFAN’s Joe Beningo “I don’t need a computer to tell me what’s bad baseball. Sure, that Mets game sucked. But I remember a game, in the either ’91 or ’93 between, I think it was the Mets and the Pittsburgh Pirates, were the two teams combined for something like twenty errors. Man, that game was awful.”

While James agrees that miserable fielding is one of the main components of pathetic baseball, he believes that errors are too imprecise a metric. He prefers FUCK [Fielders Un-displaying Competence Kompletely] which calculates not only scored errors but other minor and major fielding miscues; Sunday’s game was completely FUCKed, with a score of 12.8.

Jimmy Rawlins Defends his MVP

2008-04-10T18:48:00.000-04:00

Were there any questions about the value that Jimmy Rawlins brings to the Phillies, they were answered on Wednesday when Rawlins was forced to miss the game with a sprained ankle and the Mets beat the Phillies by capitalizing on lousy fielding and all around sloppy play, in much the way that the Phillies had beaten the Mets in the last nine games the two clubs played. Rawlins was replaced by Eric Bruntlet who committed two costly errors at shortstop, although he did get a hit and a walk in the Phillies 2-8 loss.

The feeling in SABER circles was that the MVP should have been David Wright. Rawlins, who had over 20 each of homeruns, triples, doubles, and stolen bases, benefited from having an historic number of plate appearances, as a result of batting lead off, in a high powered offense, in a very hitter-friendly park. Wright, however, beat out Rawlins in metrics like VORP and EqA, largely by posting a higher On Base Percentage.

If the difference between how the Phillies played the Mets on Wednesday and how the series between them had gone before was entirely attributable to Jimmy Rawlins, than it would be very hard to argue that any player could be more valuable to their team. While this does take away something from the Mets victory, it also helps to underscore the overall fragility of the Phillies.

So, Jimmy Rawlins, you get to be a black guy who is by far the best player on a flawed team from Philadelphia. You should ask “The Answer” how that worked out for him…if you ever find yourself in Denver. (hmm…Rawlins actually did find himself in Denver as the Phillies lost to the Rockies in the NLDS. I remember wondering who Allen Iverson rooted for at the time).

****

If Mike Pelfrey is actually going to start being a viable big-league starter, it could not have come at a better time, as it coincides directly with the news that some new ailment will keep Old Duque away from the big league club even longer. All the talking heads on the post-game show were saying that it was just one start, which is completely true. But, for just one start, you couldn’t ask for much more: it’s not like the long-term out-look would be better if he had pitched badly.

****

Oh yeah, if you’re reading this, Joe Girardi: move A-rod to shortstop, dumbass. Jeter is such a calm-eyed, leadership, team-first guy that he would surely by able to take the hit to his ego. Kinda surprising he hasn’t suggested it himself.

Delgado's Opening Day at Shea

2008-04-09T18:05:00.004-04:00

Lost amongst the Mets spending the winter and spring talking about putting the collapse behind them and then playing Tuesday’s home opener against the Phillies in a way that was somehow more collapse-ey than anything that they did in September ‘07, was the fact that Carlos Delgado had himself what I can only imagine is a fairly unusual game-- hitting a home run (2-4 overall), turning an unassisted double play, and committing a costly throwing error—which, perhaps more than any other non-Heilman/ Schoeneweis factor, lost them the game.

Jason Werth led off the Phillies’ second with a single. The next batter hit the ball hard up the first base line, as Werth started, but only just started, to head for second. The ball came exactly at Carlos Delgado, who was standing between Werth and the bag, and turned the double play by grabbing the ball, stepping on first base, and applying a tag to Werth—all the work of about half a second, since, at the time the ball came to Delgado’s glove, Werth, ball and bag, were all within two feet of each other. The highlight of the play was Werth, whose move was theoretically to run towards second and get caught in a run-down, but opted instead to stand frozen just off of first base, his head turned down, his body askance, and one arm dangled downwards at an angel to cover his crotch: the position was probably the result of him being frozen in the first motions of running to second, but looked very much like some primal expression of embarrassment.

Delgado led off the Mets half of that inning and hit a towering home run to center field, giving the Mets a 1-0 lead. Delgado had been having a seemingly good start to the year, hitting for some ridiculous, small sample-size average, but most of his hits have been singles, and pretty much attributable to a run of good luck on balls put in play. This was an old-school Carlos Delgado monster shot, and it was really great to see. At the same time, Jamie Moyer is no John Smoltz, and it is important to remember that almost all of what the Mets accomplished, and didn’t accomplish, came against the only active MLB player older than Shea Stadium.

In the next inning, Delgado was part of the sequence that scored the Mets second run. Beltran had drawn a one out walk, and moved to second on Delgado’s single. Pagan then got an infield hit on a questionable play by Utley, and Beltran scored on a Ryan Church groundout. Moyer then intentionally walked Brian Schneider to load the bases and struck out Oliver Perez. Perez’ at bat included the oddest attempt at bunting for a hit: as Moyer released the ball, Perez quickly swung the bat into the position used to bunt, and, as the ball reached the plate, dropped the bat and began to sprint towards first without awaiting the results of the ball/bat encounter—they missed each other completely and Ollie took a strike.

In the bottom of the seventh, Ryan Howard faced Scott Schoeneweis with the bases loaded and one out-- Chase Utley was the runner on first. Howard hit a ground ball that Delgado fielded, as the runners went in motion. Delgado threw the ball to Jose Reyes at second. Ideally, Reyes would have tagged second, getting out Utley, and then tossed the ball back to Delgado at first to get out the slow moving Howard and end the inning. Delgado’s throw, however, hit Utley square in the back and then bounced into the outfield, allowing both the runners ahead of Utley to score, and leaving runners at first and second with still only one out. Those two runs tied the game, and Utley scored latter in the inning, to give the Phillies the lead. Utley was running outside of the base path when he was hit by Delgado, and while the thing was obviously a rotten break, it was also the result of sub-optimal defense by Delgado and Reyes- the latter should not have positioned himself with Utley between him and Delgado. Oddly, Utley had reached base by being hit by a pitch: it was the third time he had been hit that day (although the first two had made more contact with his uniform than with actual Chase Utley), tying the major league record for HBP in a game.

So, when was the last time that a player turned an unassisted double play, hit a home run, and committed a run-scoring error in the same game? And what does it tell us about players who accomplish this feat? Probably not very much…although I’d be pretty impressed if anyone has done it twice.

Notes on a Game: 4/6/08

2008-04-07T17:44:00.001-04:00

These are extracted from some notes that I took on Sunday’s 3-1 loss to the Braves. I was fairly pissed that the Mets missed The Traitor in the Braves rotation, and I guess I am even more pissed after seeing how Smoltz pitched. As it was, the pitchers duel between Smoltz and Santana lived up to expectations. Smoltz gave five innings, allowing two hits, two walks and no runs, while Santana pitched seven and gave up seven hits, no walks and one run. The Mets, however, managed to do absolutely didly-squat at the plate, either against Smoltz or the Braves bullpen, which is not generally considered a strength. An additional factor in the Met’s loss was a two-run dinger that Hielman gave up in the eighth—but I think that the Met’s major culprit was still a miserable lack of hitting.

2nd Inning:
Mets:
-Church looks like he’s swinging at garbage…and strikes out.
-Pagan is up, who is, according to the announcers, the first guy to score a run and drive in a run in each of his first four games for a new team since 1969…he still grounds out.
-Schneider goes down, which means they don’t clear the pitchers spot.

3rd inning:
Mets:
-Santana hits a damn double!
-And takes third on a Reyes groundball!
-Santana stays at third for a shallow Castillo fly ball out, probably wise.
-Smoltz strikes out Wright to end the inning.

Braves:
-Kotsay with a leadoff double…ick.
-Smoltz bunts…Santana gets the ball and might have had a play at third, but miss-communicates with Wright slightly and gets Smoltz at first, Kotsay to third.
-Santana makes a beautiful diving stop, and gets Kelly Johnson at first, keeping Kotsay at third. Santana’s pitching is not terrific, but he is still fielding like a motherfucker, and got that hit… amazing ball player (Pope still catholic, in other news)
-Yunel Escobar RBI double. Fuck. Pagan might have had a chance at a catch but didn’t get it.
-groundball to Castillo ends the inning.

4th
Mets:
-Beltran works a 3-2 count...strikes out, but made Smoltz work for it.
-Delgado gets a hit. Hell yes!
-And then Church hits a ball into the outfield, which is caught, and Delgado is thrown out going back to first to end the inning.

5th
Braves:
-Ruben Gotay, who got a hit and scored in yesterday’s horrible game, comes in as a pinch hitter. Ruben will probably hit a dinger, but it’s nice that we’ll see the Braves bullpen in the 6th inning…Gotay strikes out for the second out.
-Kelly Johnson gets a single. Escobar hits a groundball to end the inning.

Keith Hernandez: I’ll look like Hercules unchained. [in Gary Cohen’s shirt]

Gary Cohen:…a very important trivial part of Mets history…

9th
Mets:
Mets down 3. Wright leading off. Let’s do this.
-Wright draws a walk.
-Beltran strikes out.
-Delgado flies out.
-Wright to second on defensive indifference—defensive indifference is pretty cool.
-Church singles. Wright scores.
-Pagan comes up, as the trying run. Church goes to second on defensive indifference.
-Pagan works a 3-2, umpire’s calls are getting arbitrary, Pagan draws a walk. Brining up Schneider.
-If I were Randolph, I would give serious thought to lifting Schneider for a pinch hitter, [as Schneider grounds out]…’cause if Schneider gets out, they loose. If there would be a better chance of Easley getting a hit, fuck it, bring him in and use Casanova for the 9th. What do they have to loose? The only reason to keep Schneider would be if they thought he was more likely to hit than Easley, which they might have.

Thoughts:
Santana:
The losing pitcher pitched 7 innings, allowing seven hits, one run, and no walks. Wins and Losses are a very good way of evaluating pitchers. Santana did not really seem to have his best stuff, but still managed to be pretty amazing. Mets and Mets fans are really lucky to have the guy. (go to samswildlifeblog.com for some pictures of bears shiting…in the woods!!)

The Offense:Wright and Beltran combined to draw three walks, and hit nothing. Reyes never got on base. No one else had a good game at the plate either, unless you want to count Delgado’s two singles. Sorriano, the Braves closer, looked like crap, and I think that the Mets wasted their best opportunity of the game in the 9th, when Beltran and Delgado made outs against him.

The 8th inning sing-along Adventure

2008-04-05T17:04:00.005-04:00

I: Last year, the Mets, following the lead of the Red Sox (who had been doing the same thing for quite some time), played the song “Sweet Caroline” during the eighth inning and encouraged people to sing along to it.

II: This was slightly horrible. Sweet Caroline is a pretty bad song. And a whole stadium of people singing it with differing levels of in-tune-ness was pretty annoying.

IIa: In circles where music is taken seriously, Sweet Caroline is an almost uniquely despised song. I once met a bass player and we had a conversation to this effect.

IIb: It could have been worse: the ballpark is a place of compromise, and will not adhere 100% to anyone’s ideal ballpark. Little as I liked “Sweet Caroline,” it is easier for me to imagine them doing something more horrible, than for me to imagine them doing something I liked.

IIc: “S.C’ is so maddeningly catchy and feel good that you almost have to give it some form of props. All you really have to do is think about it and it gets in your head (sweeeet Car-o-line, la-da-da daa da da daaaaaa –So good! So good!... FUCK!!)

IId: The song is an abomination. Neil Diamond should be burned to death.

III: Possibly in acknowledgment of II, the Mets have announced that this year fans can vote for one of several choices, or write in their own suggestion for a new song to be played during the eighth inning.

IIIa: In conformation of IIb, Billy Jole’s “I’m Moving Out” and Bon Jovi’s “Living on a Prayer” are among the choices.

IV: FARK.com has taken the lead (although others were quick to follow) in encouraging people to write in Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give you Up”—an effort, if successful, that would result in the “rickrolling” of the entire Mets franchise.

IVa: The whole “rickrolling” thing, and internet memes in general, are strange. I get that it is funny to randomly draw attention to different pop-cultural inanities of the past and present. But when you say, of Snakes on a Plane or Rick Astley, that it is “awesome,” what do you actually mean? Is that an honest opinion? Or are you saying that the song corresponds to some set of criteria that you have decided to equate temporarily with awesomeness? Essentially, you are entering a place where traditional concepts like “good” and “bad” have no significance, and the only important quality is some kind of ever-fluctuating, vaguely ironical now-ness—that exists without reference to anything, or references everything.

IVb: That said, an ironical “Never Gonna Give You Up” is, to my mind, far, far more enjoyable than an earnest “Sweet Caroline.”

IVc: That said, I’m not sure how down I am with the Mets being the victim of jokes played by the internet, just sort of on principal.

V: None of this really matters, because the Mets are probably not going to allow themselves to be “rickrolled.” If they don’t want “Never Gonna Give you Up” they won’t have it. They will either go with the next highest vote getter, or just make some other, autocratic, decision.

VI: The whole thing was the subject of a lengthy discussion on metsblog, which also delved into the issues of weather in-game entertainments on the jumbo-tron are desirable or not.

VIa: my feeling on the latter matter: while I like the purist concept of a ball-park with limited non-baseball media, I recognize it as a necessity for many park goers, and have occasionally been grateful for something loud and shinny to occupy my attention in between innings—while other times I have found them inexcusably obnoxious.

VIa1: Ideally they would work on making more in-game entertainments that were fun and interesting, while eliminating ones that sucked. Professor Reyes can teach all the Spanish that he wants; the bit where the kid gets a prize if he hits a home-run in a videogame? Not so much.

VII: Seriously, the song “Sweet Caroline” is quite bad.

A Better World…

2008-04-03T20:05:00.000-04:00

Right now, I have $26 in my pocket. If my pocket, myself and my $26 were in Port St. Lucie, FL, I could use them to buy thirteen Budweisers and thirteen hotdogs, both of which are being sold for $1, to celebrate the first game of the season for the Port St. Lucie Mets. Or, if I was feeling temperate, I could enjoy eighteen hotdogs, with a mere eight Budweisers while I watched Ruben Tejada take his first cuts of ’08, Indeed, any combination of hotdogs+ Budweisers equaling 26 or less could be mine for the having, if only I were in Port St. Lucie watching the Port St. Lucie Mets.

But I’m not. I’m in New York City, working in the sub-sub-library, with neither a hotdog, nor a Budwieser to my name. The only baseball on is the Yankees, and after work I get to walk to the train in the cold.

Congratulations, by the way, to Nelson Figueroa, on making the team while Pedro goes on the DL…if I were in Port St. Lucie I could drink up to 26 Budwiesers in honor of N-Fig’s return to the big leagues.

Wagner: You can’t Pull Fat

2008-04-02T15:17:00.002-04:00

They really didn’t waste any time. In two games they’ve managed to run the dizzying gamut of baseball emotions, from the giddy excitement of finally seeing Santana, to “oh fuck, fuck fuck, Pedro’s injured again, fuck.” The dominance and exuberance of youth, giving away to the frailty and uncertainty of age. The entire spectrum of baseball, covered in two games. Everything that happens from now on will seem redundant.

The commercials on am sports radio have to be considered as a candidate for the lowest form of expression ever produced.

Perhaps the best thing about Santana was the sense, not entirely logical, that we were finally done with relying on the murky depths of the rotation, who would now only appear in the number five spot. With Pedro injured, two out of five starts have to come from some mix of Pelfery, El Duque, Jorge Sosa, Nelson Figureoa, the last of whom, Willy Randolph apparently said would probably replace Pedro on the roster.

It was almost inevitable that Pedro would spend some time on the DL at some point, but the hope was that it would have come at some latter point in the season, after he had demonstrated an ability to stay with the team.

Indeed, in terms of actual baseball the injury to Pedro has the potential to be relatively minor. Pedro was probably expected to do fairly little, with the most serious expectations, after Santana, falling on Oliver Perez and John Maine. At the same time, the idea of the five Cy Youngs between Pedro and Santana, the new ace and the old ace at the top of the rotation counted for something, if only to the fans. In truth, Pedro has not had a very major effect on either of the last two seasons, and, while most of the anticipation was geared towards Santana, there was also a fair amount of excitement at the prospect of finally seeing what the Mets had in Martinez.

And perhaps the best thing about watching Santana was knowing that he would be followed by Pedro, and the expectation that the Mets dominance on the mound would continue into the next game.

…actually sports talk itself might be worse than the commercials. They just blamed Spike Lee for the state of the Knicks.

2008 Preview: Bench

2008-03-31T11:11:00.003-04:00

Although technically part of the bench, Endy Chavez and Ramon Castro have been included in the sections on outfielders and catchers, respectively.

Marlon Anderson
Chinese Zodiac: Ox
Career AVG/OBP/SLG: .268/.317/.396
Although Anderson is listed as an outfielder, he will mainly be used as a pinch hitter, a task at which he freakishly gifted. Indeed, the slightest suggestion from Willie Randolph triggers in Anderson an unstoppable urge to hit a baseball. His neighbors would frequently find him standing outside his house, with a helmet and baseball bat, after Willie Randolph’s Subway commercials had been shown on television.

Damion Easley
Chinese Zodiac: Rooster
Career AVG/OBP/SLG: .252/.329/.406
Powermind devote Damion Easley is back after a broken ankle cut short a promising 2007. Easley can play most infield and outfield positions, and adds a good power bat off of the bench.

Brady Clark
Chinese Zodiac: Ox
Career AVG/OBP/SLG: .278/.358/.387
Nothing against Brady Clark, he seems like a fine back-up outfielder, but the last spot on the Mets bench has become a frustrating mystery. Late last week, the Mets placed good hitting infield reserve Ruben Gotay on waivers, sighting his questionable defense and a recently injured ankle. The thought was that waiving Gotay was a prelude to putting Fernando Tatis, an older player who could play both infield and outfield positions, on the roster. Thus, going with Clark, a more strictly outfield reserve acquired in the off-season , came as something of a surprise. And Gotay was promptly picked up by the Braves, where he will probably be fairly disappointing… except for the .450 that he’ll hit off of Mets pitching.

2008 Preview: Bullpen

2008-03-31T10:35:00.003-04:00

Pedro Feliciano
WHIP: 1.335
Chinese Zodiac: Dragon
Pedro Feliciano is, in my opinion, one of the more overlooked Mets. His value as a lock-down, late innings left-handed specialist is immense. One of the major criticisms of Willie Randolph’s management is his use of a bullpen, and a lot of what people mean by that is his habit of using Feliciano in random situations, for varying numbers of innings. According to occasional comments made in the media by other Mets, Feliciano is kind of a character in the clubhouse, but he gets fairly little attention of his own.

Aaron Hielman
WHIP: 1.274
Chinese Zodiac: Horse
For all the changes to the Mets rotation, both contemplated and made, using Heilman as a starter was never one of them. The theory is that Heilman has more value as a good reliever than a bottom of the rotation starter. However, even though everyone has been saying that for years, Heilman still admits that he would be happier starting. I wonder if a similar change, from the rotation to the bullpen, might be in the future of Mike Pelfrey (who has “won” the 5th starter’s job while El Duque continued to work in extended spring training), who might also benefit from it.

Scott Schoeneweis
WHIP1.463
Chinese Zodiac: Ox
Schoeneweis was a horrendous last year, although he was pitching with a severed tendon in his foot. He also claims, credibly, that the steroids he took were part of legitimate medical treatment. As I promised, if he has a good year, I will write him a letter apologizing for saying bad things about him on the internet. It still irks me that he got the deal they wouldn’t give Chad Bradford.

Joe Smith
WHIP: 1.556
Chinese Zodiac: Rat
Last season, his rookie year, Smith made the camp out of spring training, did ok for a while, regressed, got sent to the minors, and then came back to the big league team near the end of the year and was fairly unimpressive. Smith’s spring also had a disappointing start, but he heated up at the end of the Grapefruit league and made the team for a second year in a row. Apparently, he bet a stake dinner with Duaner Sanchez that he (Smith) would start the year in the minors, and Duaner would make the big league club. Aside from owing Sanchez steaks, things are looking up for Smith.

Jorge Sosa
WHIP: 1.455
Chinese Zodiac: Snake
Although Heilman remains stuck in the bullpen, Sosa is still part of the conversation about the 5th starting job. Last season, with El Duque injured and Pelfery pitching badly, Sosa came roaring out of the minors and won a nice string of games as a starter, before running into problems and being moved into the bullpen. In retrospect, Sosa’s weird little dominant streak went a long way towards masking the problems of the ’07 Mets.

Billy Wagner
WHIP: 1.016
Chinese Zodiac: Pig
Oh, Billy Wagner. On paper, Wags seems like one of the best closers in the National League, and nervous as he sometimes makes me, I am guess I am still happy to have him, over most other options. This season, the major concern with Wagner is a weekly radio spot that he has agreed to do with ESPN. Everyone’s thinly disguised fear is that it is only a matter of time before he does something like call out Reyes for a lack of hustle on the air, or otherwise lands the club in controversy.

Matt Wise
WHIP: 1.261
Chinese Zodiac: Rabbit
Came from Milwaukee in the off-season, seems pretty good. I don’t have much else to say about him.

Duaner Sanchez
WHIP: 1.374
Chinese Zodiac: Rooster
After Sanchez injured his arm in a taxi cab in ’06 they put it back together with screws. If Sanchez can get back, at any point, at anything like how he was pitching before he went down, it will be an immense asset for the Mets. So far, he seems ok given the circumstances: he is beginning the year in extended spring training, might be with the club shortly.

2008 Preview: Outfield

2008-03-30T23:38:00.003-04:00

CF: Carlos Beltran
Career AVG/OBP/SLG: .280/.354/.496
Chinese Zodiac: Snake
The other day, Beltran made a nice, diving, out-of-nowhere catch in a meaningless spring training game. Beltran’s status as a running-into-walls/flinging-himself-at-the-ground-type outfielder belongs in the ongoing catalog of sports-journalistic omissions with vague overtones of racial bias. Guys like Aaron Rowand can win a franchise’s never-ending loyalty with that type of play, but with Beltran it somehow goes unnoticed—in fairness Rowand managed to injure himself more gruesomely than Beltran has, but are you really blaming Beltran for not missing playing time with broken bones in his face? In ’06 Beltran knocked himself unconscious for a few moments while catching a ball at the wall in Huston-- the team that he left for a larger pay-check from the Mets. After the game, he was asked how it compared to a time in ’05 when he knocked himself unconscious running into fellow outfielder, Mike Cameron. Beltran said it was better: “The first time, I didn’t know where I was, but today, when I heard the boos, I knew I was in Huston.” I don’t think he gets enough credit for his sense of humor, either.

RF: Ryan Church
Career AVG/OBP/SLG: .271/.348/.462
Chinese Zodiac: Horse
In 2005, concerned over the soul of an ex-girlfriend, Ryan Church asked the Chaplin of the Washington Nationals if Jews were “doomed.” When the Chaplin implied that they were, he (the Chaplin) had his access to the clubhouse suspended-- and Church apologized. Church came to the Mets as part of the Lastings Milledge deal, where he will share an outfield with fellow Christian Carlos Beltran. In the last days of the ’07 season, Church talked trash as his lowly Nationals won games against the heavily favored Phillies and Mets, and might provide the club with some of the feistiness that they might have been missing last year. He also might make me feel really terrible for being so hard on Shawn Greene last season; Greene actually had a pretty good year—the Mets will be lucky to get that kind of production from Church.

LF: Angel Pagan
Career AVG/OBP/SLG:.255/.306/.415
Chinese Zodiac: Rooster
At some point, when Pagan was at his hottest this spring, a rumor circulated that the Mets were in the process of trading him to the Red Sox in exchange for outfielder Coco Crisp. Crisp is regarded as an exceptional fielder, but had only had one particularly impressive season as a hitter, and was underwhelming in Spring Training, while Pagan, owner of very few big league at-bats, was tearing up the Grapefruit League. Opinion on the internet was divided as to weather or not this deal would be in the interests of the Mets. A brief perusal of their statistics showed that Crisp was an established, big-league player, while, Grapefruit league aside, there was no way to tell with Pagan. Indeed, the numbers indicated that 1) the Mets should definitely take the deal if it was available, but the disparity was so great that 2) it seemed completely unlikely that the Red Sox would ever make such an offer. Sure enough, the Pynchon character for breakfast cereal trade turned out to be complete fiction. However, Pagan’s spring was good enough to earn him a job filling in for Moises Alou.

LF: Moises Alou
Career AVG/OBP/SLG: .303/.369/.517
Chinese Zodiac: Horse
Alou will miss the first months of the season recovering from hernia surgery. If he ever does get healthy, the Mets should freeze him in carbonite, ala Han Solo in The Empire Strikes Back, and thaw him out in case of a close pennant race, or appearances in the post season. Although he missed a ton of time with injuries last year, Alou is still the holder of the longest hitting streak in Mets history.

4th Outfielder: Endy Chavez
Career AVG/OBP/SLG: .271/.311/.375
Chinese Zodiac: Horse
Particularly with the constant threat of injuries to Alou, and with the rawness of Pagan, Endy will continue to be very valuable as the Mets fourth outfielder. Chavez will be used frequently as a late innings defensive replacement, and to give the regulars occasional days off. The Mets are probably wise in their commitment to keeping Chavez as the fourth outfielder, rather than using him as a starter: while his defense is some of the best in the game, over a large number of at-bats, his hitting would probably become a minor liability.

Mets 2008 Preview: Catchers

2008-03-29T17:43:00.004-04:00

Previously, with Lo Duca and before him Piazza, the catcher was expected to be both a valuable component of the offense and one of the more media-prominent members of the team. This year marks something of a change in philosophy, as the Mets are looking to get fewer hits and quotes, in return for fewer passed balls and more thrown out base stealers.

Brian Schneider
Chinese Zodiac: Dragon
Career AVG/OBP/SLG: .252/.323/.377
I’m not sure how sold I am on the concept of a defense-first catcher. In the end, though, truly good hitting catchers are so hard to come by that perhaps the wise thing is to go with defense, which you can more or less count on, rather than overpay for a player like Paul LoDuca, who is a good hitter for a catcher but still not overwhelming in the context of major league line-ups in general. (In LoDuca’s case the issue is further confused because the two things that he excelled at, hitting for average and not striking out, are probably generally considered more valuable than they actually are) Still, half of a prized outfield prospect doesn’t exactly seem like a bargain, particularly because Schneider is already having hamstring problems in spring. I sincerely hope that Schneider is at least deeply adequate, just so that I won’t have to waste more energy cursing the Milledge deal.
UPDATE: Atlanta was able to tie the first North American regular season game in top of the nineth inning, thanks to a Paul LoDuca passed-ball, so Schneider seems like a little bit of a better idea all ready. And the Nationals won on a walkoff homer in the bottom of the nineth, so that was cool.

Ramon Castro
Chinese Zodiac: Dragon
Career AVG/OBP/SLG: 234/.310/.413
Ramon Castro’s solid hitting and defense are offset by the fact that he has never shown himself durable enough to catch a full season. What is it like being a perfect back-up catcher? Is it like going through life knowing that you excel at substitute teaching? If I were Willie Randolph I would see if I could sort of push things to the point where Schneider was more Castro’s backup than the other way around. The highlight of Castro’s spring came when he stuck a plastic cup onto Luis Castillo’s cap with several wads of bubblegum.

Others
“I got one that can throw but can't catch, one that can catch but can't throw, and one who can hit but can't do either.”
-Casey Stengel

Raul Casanova will probably start the season as the Mets back-up catcher, while Castro recovers from a hamstring injury. Casanova is part of a group of catchers in the Mets minor league system that includes Gustavo Molina and Robinson Cancel, who have had nice spring trainings but are each regarded as some combination of bad at hitting, bad at defense, or too old to be a viable, long-term option in the major leagues. Given the frailty of Castro and Schneider, I would not be even remotely surprised if, at some point in the season, the Mets go and overpay for a scrub to fill in behind the plate. In my uninformed opinion my, the Mets fucked up miserably last year when they allowed prized prospect Jesus Flores to be taken by the Nationals in the rule 5 draft; now they have almost no prospects at catcher, and a long-term solution better than Schneider seems unlikely.

Do…I owe the New York Post…an apology?

2008-03-26T20:37:00.001-04:00

Like most other pre-lobotomy sports fans in the greater New York area, I have come to regard The Post as fountain of lies, a journalistic shit-stain further tainting our collective unconscious (and making us pay a higher psychic price than we imagine) —and while that is not the main theme of this blog, it is an opinion that have not hesitated to express here, when appropriate.

However, when I looked at the back page of that publication this morning, I was greeted with one of the most brilliant headlines I have ever read, a headline involving two of baseball’s foremost legends, a headline that kept me grinning all the way to work, a headline that read “Conseco: A-Rod met ‘roid dealer, tried to pick up my wife.”

…if you follow the link, be sure to look at all three images in the mini-slide show. The pictures of Conseco and, especially, A-Rod are completely priceless. The article itself is kind of bad.

Mets 2008 Preview: Starting Pitchers

2008-03-25T12:00:00.004-04:00

Today I’ll be previewing starting pitchers because, after the infielders, I am most sure about the composition of the rotation.

Johan Santana
Chinese Zodiac: Sheep
Career ERA: 3.22
The arrival of the second best athlete traded from a Minnesota team in the last ten months catapulted the Mets from a shaky team with questions at several positions, into favorites to compete, not only in the NL East, but also for the world championship. I spent a lot of time thinking about this and decided that you probably are better off being a basketball team with Kevin Garnett than a baseball team with Santana. The logic being that in MLB there are perhaps two or three pitchers (Beckett, C.C. Sabathia) that give you more or less what you get from Santana, where as the NBA has one other player, Tim Duncan, who gives Garnett’s combination of lock-down interior defense and solid scoring near the basket; and Duncan has been proving for years that if you surround one of these guys with the right combination of jump shooters and flopping foreign role players, you can compete for the championship until you run out of fingers for rings. Still, in much the way that a KG or a Tim Duncan can improve their team on offense and defense by controlling the paint and taking pressure of their teammates, the presence of a true ace allows for a better rested bullpen, and takes pressure off both the back of the rotation and the lineup. Fortunately, aside from the loss of KG and Johan, everything else about living in Minnesota is completely awesome.

Pedro Martinez
Chinese Zodiac: Pig
Career ERA: 2.80
How will Pedro’s surgically repaired shoulder hold up? How will he adjust to being the number two pitcher on the team? How many jack-ass articles will be written in The Post about Pedro being too greedy and egotistical to come back to the Mets in ’09? Where will Pedro pitch in ’09? And how will he cope with the feelings of remorse brought on by PETA’s letter of protest? Honestly, the outlook on all of these things is good, and the reports from camp are that Pedro is almost enjoying his secondary status. And, in much the way that Santana’s dominance takes pressure of the rest of the Mets on the field, Pedro’s eccentricity and charisma should take pressure off of them in the media. PEDRO FACT: Pedro drives a black Austin-Martin with his number “45” engraved on the hubcaps.

Oliver Perez
Chinese Zodiac: Rooster
Career ERA: 4.43
Sam’s Mets Blog favorite Oliver Perez continues on his quest for some kind of consistency in ‘08. Why can’t he just be good all the time, dammit? The neat thing about Perez is that he still holds out the possibility of transforming into an ace, although the chances of this happening seem more remote every year. I suspect the same oscillation between brilliant starts and disasters. In other news, Ollie won his salary arbitration with the club, which got him a raise of something like $ 4 million. I would really like to know how he spent the night after the arbitration hearing; I hope it involved drinking tequila with Rick Peterson.

John Maine
Chinese Zodiac: Rooster
Career ERA: 4.19
At some point during spring training, one of the Mets Notes, on Mets.com, was a bunch of bullshit about John Maine going on line for the first time in his life. My assumption is that a reporter saw Maine on a computer and Maine claimed he had never used one before as a joke-- either that, or it was a joke on the part of the reporter. With other ballplayers I might be more inclined to believe this, but Maine is presented as almost an intellectual by baseball standards, doing crossword puzzles and Soduku and occasionally speaking in full sentences. Apparently Maine and Perez have been playing pranks on each other in spring training, and I wonder if this is just fun and games or the seeds of real animosity between the two pitchers vying for #3 status.

TBD
The Old Duque (Rooster, or possibly Snake) vs. Big Pelf (Pig)debate took a turn for the terrible as both of them got lit up by the Cardinals on Sunday. Omar Minaya has apparently mentioned Nelson Figueroa (Tiger)and John Niese (Tiger) as possible alternatives. Although, El Duque and Pelfery will split another start before the season begins, I would have to think that any alternative is looking very good. As Dorothy Parker said, “When given a choice of bottom of the rotation starters, I always take the one I haven’t tried before.” Personally, I’m pulling for N-Fig.

Mets 2008 Preview: Infielders

2008-03-24T19:21:00.006-04:00

Going into the last week of Spring Training, I will be providing pre-views of the Mets team, not because this isn’t information that you could find on Mets.com, the Post, or any one of a dozen other Mets blogs, but because this is a sports blog and sports blogs do this sort of thing. Today we are starting with infielders:

1B: Carlos Delgado
Chinese Zodiac: Rat
Career AVG/OBP/SLG: .280/.386/.549
Last year was one of Delgado’s worst, and the Mets are sincerely hoping that he bounces back. Now that Santana is on the team, a Delgado renaissance is not as essential for the Mets as it had been before. Still, there are a couple of questions surrounding Delgado’s struggles: were they the result of nagging injuries, or the fact that after the age of thirty-five, many left-handed sluggers start having trouble picking up the fastball? A guy who I met in some bar observed that all last year Delgado had been having trouble pulling the ball, which my knowledgeable source (the last game of the ’69 world series was on the tube, and this guy knew exactly what Nancy Seaver looked like) said was a problem that could be caused by a wrist injury, like the one Delgado was dealing with all last year. So, outlook: good.

2B: Luis Castillo
Chinese Zodiac: Rabbit
Career AVG/OBP/SLG:.294/.368/.358
If this was, like, five years ago the right side of the Mets infield would be ridiculous good. As it is, every time a ball gets hit between first and second, the doctors at the Hospital for Special Surgery start dreaming of new golf clubs. I love what Castillo brings to the team, in terms of his offensive skill set, patience at the plate behind Reyes, and a sort of hustle-ey, veteran-ey, vibe that he gives off. He just seems about as durable as a $2 umbrella. I find it really odd that he was able to get such a long-term deal. FUN FACT: the foul ball that Moises Alou was trying to catch during the Steve Bartman incident was hit by Luis Castillo, who went on to draw a walk in the at-bat. I’m sure they’ll get to spend lots of time reminiscing, when they’re both on the disabled list.

SS: Jose, Jose Jose—Jose, Jose
Chinese Zodiac: Pig
Career Avg/OBP/SLG: .284/.330/ .426
Other than the obvious, injury related issues (who will play in left field, who is the 5th starter?), Jose and the collapse are perhaps the team’s biggest question going into the season. Obviously, Reyes will be better than he was in September. On a larger level, the collapse calls into question just what the Mets have in Reyes, forcing us to examine the possibility that Reyes might simply be a good player, having a few exceptionally good years, rather than a great player, metamorphosizing into a legend, as we had been inclined to believe earlier. Clearly, this year will be pivotal in answering these questions. Venturing a guess: I think Reyes will be awesome.

3B: David Wright
Chinese Zodiac: Dog
Career AVG/OBP/SLG:.311/ .388/ .533
For all that went wrong in ’07 there is the consolation that David Wright is clearly turning into one of the profoundest hitters in the game, and, even after the acquisition of Santana, the young offensive talents of Wright and Reyes remain the most exciting thing about the Mets. In his stupid auto-biography, Juiced, Jose Conseco blames a lot of his problems on the fact that he, a Latino, came up with the A’s at the same time as Marc McGuire, and they were cast into racially stereotypical roles, Conseco the swarthy rogue, McGuire the all-American Wunderkind, for marketing purposes. Might something similar be happening on the left-side of the infield in Flushing? Hopefully not. Conseco claims that he and McGuire injected each other in the buttocks with steroids before nearly every A’s game. Is an eroticized fantasy of Wright and Reyes doing likewise lodged deep in the subconscious, under the gelled hair, of more than a handful of a certain sub-set of Mets fan, as they drive their muscle cars down the L.I.E. to the gym?

5th Starter: Big Pelf vs. Old Duque

2008-03-20T16:24:00.001-04:00

The rotation is clearly the strength of the club, to the extent that the concerns about the bullpen and the health of the line-up do not yet strike one in any particularly ominous light. Santana is Santana, and Pedro, Maine and Perez are as good a bunch to have following him as you could realistically hope for. But, as good as that group is, the precise identity of the fifth starter, when he is finally needed, remains uncertain.

The candidates for the job are, at this point, Mike Pelfrey and El Duque, each of whom has their own unique and glaring downside. El Duque, as far as it is possible to judge these things from reading lies in the papers, seems to be totally over the hill, and I am not even remotely sold on Mike Pelfrey as a guy capable of getting big-league hitters out on a consistent basis, over an extended period of time.

WHIP (Walks + Hits/Innings Pitched) is a newish metric for evaluating pitchers that is fairly brilliant in its simplicity. WHIPs around 1.10 are considered extremely good. In the Minor Leagues, Pelfrey has generally managed to get by with a WHIP of slightly over 1.30, however during his brief stints in the big leagues his WHIP has been over 1.70 which is strikingly worse. Admittedly, the most recent of these was his best, as he finally won a couple games late last season; but any relatively new pitcher is liable to occasionally foil an offense that hasn’t seen his stuff before. Reports of him from the minors, and the occasional good inning in the Big Leagues give one significant cause for hope-- but the discrepancy between his potential and the results he has achieved in the Majors is glaring enough to lead one to believe that he either suffers from a severe form of stage fright, or his stuff is in some liminal range of quality and becomes ineffective against Major League hitters. Whatever his problem, his results so far in spring training do not support the conclusion that it has been corrected.

To accommodate pitching with a bunion on his foot, El Duque has altered is trademark delivery (a consolation, if he doesn’t make the team, is the knowledge that even if he had we would still be missing out on his high leg-kicks). Altering a pitcher’s delivery is something that is not lightly undertaken, and does not uniformly yield good results. He recently pitched in a simulated game, in which he never threw harder than 81 mph and got taken deep by a bunch of minor leaguers. Even if he had been throwing effectively this spring, you would have to think that it would only a matter of time before he got injured again, forcing them to call on Pelfrey or someone worse.

Writing the above paragraph, however, fills me with a weird sense of déjà vu: this isn’t the first time that old age and frailty have lead people to pronounce Old Duque finished, and they haven’t been right yet. Last year, he was actually sort of the second best pitcher on the staff, after John Maine; his WHIP was 1.17.

If Pelfrey was a young pitcher who I really believed in, I would advocate seeing what the kid can do and trying to find another club willing to see if El Duque can still work his age and logic defying magic. As it is, don’t think there is really any choice other than to wheel El Duque out to the mound and see what happens—not so much on the strength of what he seems capable of now, but because of what he has done in the past, and how little reason there was to expect it then.

HOW can you tell, you Son of a Bitch?

2008-03-18T11:16:00.003-04:00

AS best as I can tell with out anybody of consequence confirming or denying - or, for that matter, returning a phone call/e-mail - there's sweeping validity to a rival tabloid's report that James Dolan met recently with Donnie Walsh in Indianapolis to discuss taking over the Knicks as soon as the season is over.
-Peter Vecsey

NRI watch:

2008-03-17T13:05:00.003-04:00

Ruben Tejada went 1-3 on Sunday to put his batting average at .500. In the same game Nelson Figueroa allowed one run over four innings, to bring his Spring Training ERA down to 3.38.

At the Kobe Bryant Museum

2008-03-11T20:58:00.001-04:00

In case you were too busy watching spring training to notice, today was national “blog good things about Kobe day,” initiated by Hardwood Paroxysm. This is my contribution (sincere apologies to Donald Barthelme):

We went to the Kobe Bryant Museum and wept; more than any other museum, the Kobe Bryant Museum induces weeping—the statistics proving this are kept in a little white-note book, in the breast pocket of the director’s shirt, and he takes them out, almost apologetically, so that people will feel less alone in their tears and uses them to argue for increased federal funding. The holdings of the Kobe Bryant Museum consist principally of three hundred thousand pictures of Kobe Bryant.

In the foyer of the Kobe Bryant Museum is a seventeen foot-tall picture of the Infant Bryant, having recently slain two snakes that snuck into his crib. To the Infant Bryant the snakes are merely unexpected playthings. In a caption, the snakes are identified as Mambas. The booties on the feet of the Infant Bryant are Nikes.

The Kobe Bryant museum is made from a translucent polymer that was designed specifically for the building. The polymer was dropped off by forty technicians, who came on a boat from Japan, all wearing throwback Lakers jerseys. The Museum rises from the ground at a 60 degree angle; to stand in any of the sharply angled rooms gives one a sense of standing on a precipice. The architects relate this to the majesticness of Kobe Bryant’s jump shot.

In the basement of the Kobe Bryant Museum carpenters uncrated new pictures of Kobe Bryant. The huge crates stenciled FRAGILE in red ink…

The guards at the Kobe Bryant Museum carry buckets in which there are stacks of clean white pocket handkerchiefs. Even brief exposure to one of Kobe’s game winning shots, or a passing glimpse of devastating drive to the lane, may induce weeping. In a room replaying highlights from the 2002 championship, people stand in the flickering glow of the tubelight and weep.

Those who are caught by Kobe’s eyes, in the various publicity stills, room after room, are not unaffected by the experience. It is like, people say, committing a small crime and being discovered at it by your father, who stands in four doorways, looking at you.

On a plaque: “Kobe Bryant’s wife Vanessa was the only person in the world to ever own a Lamborghini Murciélago with an automatic transmission.”

Standing in front of a podium a man with a sad, sonorous voice explains: “rotated a mere ninety degrees in either direction the number eight becomes the symbol for infinity. Set beside the number one, the singular, the individual, the phallus, the subjective- we are presented with the image of all things, encapsulated in one instant. This is a theme that will reappear throughout the work of Bryant.”

People started at tiny pictures of A-I, LeBron and Shaq. These and other small pictures hung alongside extremely large pictures of Kobe Bryant.

NRI Watch Continues:

2008-03-11T20:21:00.003-04:00

Nelson Figueroa's ERA has balloned to 3.86. Ruben Tejada's average climbed to .556, and he picked up his 3rd RBI.

Pitching Coaches say the Darndest Things:

2008-03-10T18:48:00.003-04:00

“Initially, John Maine did not see himself going into the phone booth, putting on a cape and flying.”
-Rick Peterson [Italics mine]

Tejada Disappoints

2008-03-08T16:08:00.005-05:00

Ruben Tejada's average has shrunk back to .500. Figueroa's ERA is still 0.00

Jermy Brown, Chad Bradford and Moneyball

2008-03-05T20:33:00.003-05:00

The recent retirement of Jeremy Brown, a minor league catcher for the Oakland As, attracted an unusual amount of attention, since the drafting of Browne, a fat college player who no one else thought was a big leaguer, is one of the central events of Moneyball, Michael Lewis’ book about the Oakland As, their manager Billy Beane, and their surprising ability to stay competitive, through the use of cutting edge statistics, despite having only a fraction of the resources of most baseball teams. Since Beane’s model rested heavily on optimal use of the draft, many have used Brown’s retirement to voice the opinion, largely held in baseball circles, that the “moneyball model” is stupid, and fans of statistical analysis are starting to call these critics stupid in return.

It is peculiar how much Moneyball is a rallying point in the debate about statistics and baseball. On the mainstream side of things, the book is met with a resentment that is altogether unnatural and weird; as a response to this hostility, the book’s adherents adore it with a fervor that is as cult-like as anything on this side of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. In attempting to deconstruct the mainstream hostility to Moneyball and statistical analysis, the stat minded frequently refer to a dichotomy between the complex realities revealed by statistics and the stories that sports writers like to write, which are pleasantly familiar to the audience, and easy to tell.

For all the conversation surrounding Moneyball, it is almost always assessed on the strength of its arguments, and seldom, if ever, regarded as a literary work, which is a shame. As much as anything else, Moneyball owes its strange power to being exceptionally well written and marvelously told. And, as a literary work, it rests largely on fugues derived from one of the classic sports stories: the story of the athlete who, due to some clear and glaring disadvantage, was generally deemed unfit to play but, in the end, proved everyone wrong.

It is the story of Beane’s minor-league roommate, Lenny Dykstra, short and psychotic, who rushed past the athletic and charming Beane into the major leagues; it is the story of fat Jeremy Brown, drafted in the first round; it is the story of Scott Hatteberg, whose knees were too shot to go on catching and looked to be out of baseball until the Athletics reinvented him as a first baseman; and it is the story of Chad Bradford, and his weird and wonderful sub-side-arm delivery.

Watching Bradford pitch has always evoked, for me, a very child-like quality of joy. Perhaps, there is something inherently whimsical about the submarine motion of his arm—mainly there is the quizzical thought, as he drops his hand to the ground “oh, no that’s not how your supposed to do that,” and then he whips the arm up, (whoops-zip), sending the ball looping towards the plate-- the simple delight in seeing something so far out of the ordinary; the living proof that cats can be skinned in many ways.*

Michael Lewis’ chapter on Bradford is one of the great pieces of baseball writing of our generation—perhaps the best thing that can be said about it is that it truly does justice to its subject and provides Bradford with a background and aura appropriate to his unique place in baseball. And, indeed, if other players mentioned in Moneyball have faded or disappointed, Bradford still ranks as a legitimate success for whatever philosophy brought him into prominence in the big leagues.

Whatever else it is, Moneyball is a good book that tells a good story—a highly subjective account of some people and some things that they did. It is not a manifesto, but a brief history of the Oakland Athletics and their manager, that describes how some of their thinking influenced some of their actions. If there is anything in particular to be learned from the book, it is that the As were generally rewarded for seeking a new perspective on player evaluation through the use of statistics: but what they sought, and what they found, was not a dogmatic or all encompassing program, but rather a different point of view—which, like other points of view, provided both illuminations and lapses, and has evolved and altered with the passing of time.

And at the end of the day, as is the case with the mainstream commentators approach to statistical analysis, it is always disheartening to have to watch the old guard reject the chance at a new perspective so haughtily, and cling so fervently to their well worn dogmas in response.

*Clearly, I am strongly prejudiced in favor of Bradford, since he pitched for the Mets during what is now considered a magical season. But a lot of the magic was enabled by the fact that they led the NL in bullpen ERA. (Scott Schowenwise & Guillermo Mota: I hate you)

It's a good thing Pagan has been hitting...

2008-03-05T20:11:00.003-05:00

Well, that didn't take long.

Two Assholes

2008-03-04T19:37:00.004-05:00

Mathew Wallace, of Newsday, is really annoyed that the Mets put out an add campaign last year that sort of implied that they would win, and then had the nerve to loose. He thinks that the Mets are old and bad, and that if they don’t win this year, next year everyone will be traded and fired. He poses this question: “Can the addition of Santana, who can help out only once every five days, really cure all that ailed the 2007 Mets, the failures of heart and discipline and character?”

Well, no, Santana can’t do that, and when the Mets compete for the “heart and discipline and character” pennant they just might be screwed. But Wallace seems to be confusing “heart and discipline and character” with “a bullpen.” And the failures of the bullpen are something that Santana actually could cure, since he will (hopefully) do a good job of pitching innings that otherwise would be pitched, badly, by the bullpen. And if the pitchers in the bullpen pitch fewer innings, than they might do a better job in the innings that they do pitch. So Santana does have a really good chance to help the Mets in one of the areas most closely associated with the collapse, even by only playing once every five days…as most people with a passing familiarity with the game of baseball are aware.

***
Utility infielder Scott Spiezio, formerly of the Cardinals, has a weird goatee that he dies red and a hard rock/grunge/metal band called Sandfrog, and he hit the Mets really hard in the 2006 NLCS. Now he has been release by the Cards, after a warrant was issued for his arrest, following a wild night of drinking, driving, fighting, and hiding in closets. My favorite: “As the two men were helping Spiezio, he began vomiting. Parisi asked Spiezio why he couldn't make it to the toilet. Angered, Spiezio grabbed Parisi and began wrestling him. Parisi tried to protect himself and Spiezio said, 'You know I can kick your ass.'”

…Sandfrog’s web page is just a black screen, so I guess that means they are more into Metal than the other stuff.

For more on these and other stories, take a look at “It’s Mets for Me” which also has a good picture of a man throwing a kitten.

RUBEN TEJADA WATCH: Tejada is now hitting .750 with two RBIs.

Thomas Pynchon moonlighting at Baseball Prospectus:

2008-03-04T15:35:00.001-05:00

"Slugging first baseman Yonder Alonso has yet to go deep."

Ruben Tejada is Hitting .500 (but he needs to work on his RBIs)

2008-03-03T20:33:00.004-05:00

10. Ruben Tejada, 2B/SS
DOB: 9/1/89
Height/Weight: 5-11/165B
ats/Throws: R/RAcquired: NDFA, 2006, Panama
2007 Stats: .283/.401/.367 at Rookie-level (35 G)
Year In Review: A previously obscure Panamanian, Tejada put up a .400+ on-base percentage in the Gulf Coast League in his stateside debut.
The Good: Tejada earns high praise from Mets officials for his advanced approach (he walked more than he struck out) and his baseball intelligence. He has a line-drive bat and uses all fields, and he shows excellent fundamentals defensively.
The Bad: Unlike most Latin American teenagers, Tejada isn't especially toolsy. He has little power or projection for any, and his speed and arm are both no more that average, leaving him with the likely profile of a second baseman in the end.
Fun Fact: Tejada hit just .186 with the bases empty, but more than doubled that with a .377 mark with runners on base.
Perfect World Projection: An everyday second baseman and ideal No. 2 hitter in the lineup.
Timetable: Tejada might lack upside, but his polish is more than enough to handle a full-season debut at Low-A as an 18-year-old.
-Baseball Prospectus

BP ranks Tejada as the tenth best prospect in a system that they think is awful. Their blurb about him interested me, because you have to love the high on-base percentage, and I think it’s neat that what he has going for him is an “advanced approach,” “baseball intelligence,” and “polish,” when he is only 18 years old. And his high walk totals and lack of power seem somewhat a-typical. Since the Mets will need a new second basemen in the next couple years, I had thought about saying something about him here, but then I figured “Nah, what’s the use, he’ll probably just get traded for something, or rot in the minors, so why get folks’ hopes up?”

Well, if I had mentioned him, I would have seemed smart when he drove in the winning run in today’s game against the Braves. In his only at-bats of spring training (so far), Tejada went 1-for-2. Still, you’d think he should have more than one measly RBI to go along with that .500 average…

I did, however, mention Nelson Figueroa, a finesse pitcher who hasn’t been in the majors for a while, but had a good run in Winter Ball this off-season. So far in Mets camp, Figueroa has pitched three innings and allowed no runs, three hits, no walks, and 2 Ks. Hope I’m not jinxing him by pointing that out…

Beltran’s New Intangible Tool:

2008-02-28T19:38:00.001-05:00

Carlos Beltran, who recently proclaimed that Mets were the team to beat in the NL East, is in many ways your classic five tool player: he 1) hits for average, 2) hits for power, 3) is an excellent base-runner, 4) fields his position exceptionally well, 5) and has a strong throwing arm. Jimmy Rawlins, the Philadelphia shortstop at whom Beltran’s statement was directed, is fairly toolsey himself, but people more frequently praise his fire, leadership, passion, and, lately, his NL MVP award.

The five-tool label is justly regarded with a fair amount of skepticism, firstly because it is hard to accurately judge who actually posses said tools, and also because it is not really necessary to posses all five tools in order to be an amazing ball player. David Ortiz does literally nothing for the Boston Red Sox other than draw walks and smack the shit out of the ball; you’d still want him on your team over the vast majority of baseball players, even if that meant playing him at first and being defensively weak there as a consequence.

The five tool designation is used to identify the players who posses the physical gifts necessary for the game of baseball, and there is an implied opposition between them and the gritty players, the “grinders” and “hustlers” (the David Ecksteins, Paul LoDucas, and Endy Chavie), who, while not blessed with inordinate physical gifts, have gotten themselves a place in the game (and in the affections of sports writers) through heart, passion and character. Classic five tool players include Alex Rodriquez and young Barry Bonds and the implication, when one considers the way in which writers and fans have treated the arc of their careers, is that their superabundance of talent actually hurt them, both as human beings and ballplayers. Due to their amazing physical gifts, they were never forced to develop the fortitude and intangibles of their less talented counter-parts and this is the reason that A-Rod is a choke artist and a head-case and Bonds is an arrogant asshole. Five tool players are frequently presented like the rich girl in my high school photography class, who took far and away the best pictures of any of us: she had a really nice camera and had taken pictures of India-- the rest of us had ok cameras and pictures of New Jersey. I felt no need to giver her any particular credit.

While this attitude is rarely explicitly stated, it is also clearly prevalent and can even be somewhat inferred from the very phrase “five tool player.” Tools are extremely tangible objects, means to the end, rather than an end in itself. The tool exists only to be used; calling someone a “tool” is a fairly serious insult. In the world of actual tools there is no credit or honor associated with owning a very good set of them: you are given credit for using them.

Beltran, then, is further typical of five-tool players, in that, while he has been excellent at most of the measurable aspects of baseball, there has always been a sense that he was intangibly lacking. This was probably never clearer than in the opening days of his Mets career. In a weird departure from A-Rod, the knock on Beltran was that he had hit too much in the post-season, his home run barrage for the Astros in ‘04 coming suspiciously on the eve of his free-agency and leading some to believe that he had done it on purpose, in order to get a larger paycheck. This paycheck he got, and large it was, from the Mets in 2005, and he then proceeded to have, by his standards, a fairly bad season. With their typical sportsmanship and logic, the Shea faithful started to boo him, which Beltran (perhaps unfortunately) took hard; he was pissed enough that Julio Franco had to talk him into coming out for curtain call after he hit his first game winning homer of ’06.*

Beltran is tied for the club single-season home-run record, but, as the New York press never tires of pointing out, is not really your typical New York player. Beltran does not have the exuberance of Reyes or Pedro, the polished charisma of Wright or Jeter, the venerability of Tom Glavine or Marriano Riverea. He doesn’t seem to like speaking to the press; he is not known as a clubhouse leader; he is not a character or a practical joker. He doesn’t really seem to do anything except for hit (for power and average), field his position very, very well, throw out runners, and steal bases at one of the highest percentages in major league history. Off the field he is quite, charitable, religious, and dedicated to training. He is apparently slightly vain about his cloths.

This year, it seems that the poor bastard spent the off-season reading the Post. He learned that the Mets collapse was due to a lack of fire and clubhouse leadership; he lamented, with the venerable of gentlemen of the sporting press, that what little of the later there had been departed with Tom Glavine and Paul LoDuca.

So Beltran reported to camp in ’08, firmly resolved to be more intangible. It is, perhaps, to be regretted that his first foray into leadership was such a blatant copy of Jimmy Rawlins; but Beltran is new at it and if he is going to steel from someone it might as well be from a master-- an MVP of intangibility, if you will. I look forward to his further intangible efforts with interest…as long as it doesn’t take away from his hitting.

*Julio got so much credit for having talked Beltran into that curtain call that maybe they would have gotten rid of him sooner if Beltran would have decided to just trot out there by his own damn self. And if they get rid of Julio earlier maybe they win two more games in ’07, and then…Beltran…what an asshole.

Met's Martinez honored at Dominican Sporting Event

2008-02-23T12:23:00.006-05:00

I feel deeply irresponsible for not having responded more promptly to the Pedro Martinez/cockfighting incident. In that I have an excuse, it is because I find the matter utterly trivial, and was unable to resolve the debate about what form my sarcastic response should take. The principle objections to cockfighting, that it is 1) brutal and 2) unkind to chickens, are inarguable, in and of themselves. However, in that we live in a society where people frequently eat chicken McNuggets and frequently watch pro-wrestling or hockey (not to mention financing and implicitly supporting murderous wars, but whatever) without being subject to any form of public condemnation or censure, all objections to cockfighting are pretty much hypocritical and preposterous.

I’d actually like to take the opportunity to put in a plug for Roger Corman’s Cockfighter (1974), starring Warren Oates. Oates plays a man who has vowed not to talk, until he wins the Kentucky Cockfighter of the Year Award, which is actually given out, oh, not necessarily annually, but only when there is a deserving recipient. The brilliant thing about it is that, story-wise, it perfectly mirrors your classic inane sports movie about an introverted athlete who needs to make peace with himself or his love ones, en-route to the success that he craves. Only its about cockfighting. It’s also amusingly permeated with skevy ‘70s sexual mores. Any movie where someone loses their girlfriend to Harry Dean Stanton over a cockfight gets tons of points.

******

The Clemens Hearing:
Nigel: I haven’t seen anyone in such unabashed self-righteous denial since Nixon.
Sam: yeah, well at least Nixon didn’t try to pin it on his wife.

*******

I recently subscribed to Baseball Prospectus, and found an article about the top performers in the Winter Leagues. The top rated pitcher was Nelson Figueroa, who, while he hasn’t distinguished himself in the majors lately, won championships in Taiwan and Mexico this winter. He is an older player, who works mainly with off-speed stuff: if he fits in, in the majors, it would seem to be as a durable, back of the rotation guy, or a long-man in relief. Apparently he is a non-roster invitee at the Mets camp, although I haven’t been able to find any mention of this on the Mets website.

******

Further Pedro Speculation:
Part of me thinks that Pedro put the video on YouTube himself, since he was tiered of everyone paying attention to Santana. Either that or he was attempting some sort of reconciliation with Anna Benson.

2008-02-23T11:58:00.003-05:00

Dr. Louis Fishman, who was variously known in life as Lou, Sonny, and, to the author of this blog, PopPop, was a longtime Knicks fan who died in the early morning on Tuesday, January 22nd, after suffering a stroke on the previous Wednesday and having spent the interval in a state that was more or less unconscious and inert.

My last conversation with him had, not surprisingly, taken the form of an argument about the Knicks. It was my contention that the team was badly assembled and that all of the players were, relative to other professional basketball players, bad at basketball, and I saw this as the major explanation of the Knicks troubles. My grandfather blamed the team’s abject state on Coach Thomas; he felt that Thomas “just sat there” on the bench and did not show the animation and passion appropriate for a man being played well to run an historic franchise into the ground. (I speculated, privately, that, had Thomas been a white man, what my grandfather called apathy would instead be seen as “cool” and “collected.”) My grandfather maintained that the Knicks players were, in fact, quite talented, and that a competent coach (such as Larry Brown?) could have turned them into a winning team.

A particular point of non-agreement was our respective assessments of Jamal Crawford. Early in the season, I had observed that the Knicks depended on a dominant scoring performance from Crawford to even be in a game. The problem is that Crawford is no player to depend upon: he is a streak shooter whose performance regularly fluctuates from awful to brilliant. He takes a lot of shots, and, while on some nights many of them go in, on other nights almost all of them miss and, given the state of the Knicks’ rebounding, a missed shot is very much like handing the ball to the other team. An inherently unreliable player, he had, due to the badness of the team, found himself their most reliable scoring option—which essentially dooms the Knicks to mediocrity and inconsistency. My grandfather took the opposite point of view, and maintained that Crawford was one of the five or so best players in the East. I abused Crawford’s defense and might have referred to him as a far crappier version of Rip Hamilton.

It is hard to overstate how actually pleasant this conversation was for both of us to have. We both, I think, felt a desire to connect with the other that was out of proportion with our meager abilities to transcend the gulf of years; our patience for minor differences in attitude, opinion and demeanor; and our capacities to even understand such a desire, much less express it. We had few subjects of conversation in common, and on the remaining ones we would generally either find ourselves in tedious agreement, or so fervently opposed to each other that frank conversation was completely impossible.

The great mercy of sports is that, due to their relative ultimate banality, a level of difference of opinion that would be unacceptable on a subject like the State of Israel is almost welcome when it comes to the New York Knicks. Both my grandfather and I possessed somewhat argumentative personalities, and it was pleasant to find ourselves in a disagreement where we could be sure that all that was finally at stake was the evaluation of a group of basketball players, and not larger judgments on ways of life or habits of thought.

On Tuesday, January 15th, the Knicks beat a tired Washington Wizards team; in their previous game, on Sunday, they had beaten a tired Detroit Pistons team. On Wednesday, in an e-mail to a friend discussing the victory, I wrote “the next time Jamal Crawford goes 6-for-fucking-7 from downtown, the Knicks might win that one, too.” Sometime before or after I sent that e-mail, my father called me and told me that my grandfather had had a stroke.

At that point it was unclear what exactly the ramifications of this would be—although in retrospect this uncertainty seems mainly due to the reluctance of all parties concerned to contemplate the worst and likely outcome while there was still a credible cause for hope. When I spoke to my father, my grandfather had been sent home from the hospital; his refusal of treatment having been honored largely because he was himself a physician. His speech was impaired and he could not swallow. There was a chance that the symptoms would clear up in the course of the night and there was also a chance that they would get worse.

The Knicks were playing the New Jersey Nets that night and I was pleasantly surprised to find that they were winning when I checked the score on-line before I left work.

As I had planned on the train, the first thing I did when I got to my apartment was turn on the television and check score, to see if the game would be a cheerful and appropriate topic of conversation when I called my mother, which was the next thing that I did. The Knicks were up by something like fifteen or twelve, with six or so minutes left to play, and so I decided they were safe.

My mother was watching television with my grandfather, whose condition had not improved. Speech was now impossible for him, and he had resorted to communicating with notes, although this was also becoming difficult. At the same time he seemed comfortable and peaceful. Were they watching the game? No, they had switched to something else when the Knicks had been trailing earlier. Well, I have good news…

I spoke with my mother for a little longer. When I got back to the game, the Knicks lead had shrunk to five, and it promptly proceeded to evaporate completely, putting the game up for grabs in the closing minutes. What the hell were Randolph and Curry doing on the floor at a time like this? Where was David Lee, IsiahThomsas-yousonofabitch? I felt insanely guilty for having potentially inflicted this spectacle on my grandfather, which had probably given him another stroke.

But the Knicks hung on, their victory assured after Jamal Crawford, who had had another very good game, stroked in a three pointer in the game’s final minute. I decided that I would call my mother again, to tell her the final result in case they had turned it off at a point when it seemed that the Knicks were going to lose.

As the game ended I experienced a lonely feeling of uncertainty which frequently comes at the end of a game and dimly mirrors the feeling of finishing a very good book. I had briefly vested my interests in a group of people who were not myself, and in the wake of their departure, and my return to my actual circumstances, I was left in a certain confusion about what to do next.

This time my course of action quickly appeared to me out of this emptiness: I was going to call my mother and tell her to tell my grandfather that I had been wrong, and that Jamal Crawford was a great basketball player. And following closely on this realization was the knowledge that my grandfather was going to die.

They had actually watched the end of the game, which had somehow not been fatal for my grandfather. He apparently smiled when my mother told him about my change of heart regarding Crawford, and wrote on a peace of paper to ask if I was at home. Home in Queens or home in New Jersey? I was at home, but in Queens.

After my grandfather fell asleep that night, he never woke up in any recognizable way, although a debate about his level of awareness persisted until he died on the following Tuesday. His children, my mother and her sister and brother, inhabited his apartment in a rapt state that almost mirrored their father’s, while my father, my sister, and myself appeared, when we could, on the fringes, brooding and protective, making coffee or brining food. As we slipped into an existence without him, our efforts at understanding each other and ourselves were like Jamal Crawford’s jump shots: frequently bouncing sharply away from the rim with an ugly clang and sometimes falling perfectly into place at the end of a marvelous parabola, graceful and improbable.

If Carlos Delgado can Hit .400, then Barak Obama can be Elected President

2008-02-05T20:12:00.002-05:00

At some point today, I thought to myself, “huh, I sure am glad that the Mets went out and got Santana, because otherwise I might be tempted to pay attention to/worry about this whole primary election thing, which, from the small pieces of information that I have gathered somewhat inadvertently, seems to be a total bummer.”

The election process, at this point, reminds me of the Mets two weeks ago when they had not gotten Santana and the club was trying to muster enthusiasm over the possible signing of Liavan Hernandez: a development, which under sane circumstances would be regarded as pretty much a disaster, emerges as a positive only by virtue of the absolute horror that proceeded it.

The one possible ray of hope would seem to emanate from Barak Obama, who distinguishes himself by having provided me with no particular reason to hate him. He seems sort of like Steve Trachsel would seem, if he pitched for the team that you rooted for and the other starters in the rotation were Jose Lima, Scott Schoenwise, Barak Obama and me: it’s not quite like he gives your team a good chance of winning, but he doesn’t really guarantee a loss so, hey, that’s something.

I was still glad that the Mets had signed Santana, (thus removing the temptation to transfer any psychic energy into supporting Obama) because the signing of Santana seems to bode more definitely well for the cause of Mets baseball, than the election of Obama would bode for the cause of things in general not going to hell completely. Santana definitely make the Mets a stronger ballclub; the Superbowl was clearly an excellent football game and I am completely glad that the Giants won. You can’t really ever reach that degree of certainty about anything in politics, which is one of the reasons that sports are great.

But, if through some strange all-American alchemy, it were possible to get Obama the Democratic nomination by sending Santana back to Minnesota, would I pull the trigger on that deal? I honestly can’t figure that one out. Fortunately, my Google Overlords have bestowed upon me the power of putting polls up on my blog, so you can weigh in-- that is if the process of voting in the primaries hasn’t exhausted your capacity to choose between two categories that are meaningless. (do bear in mind that the question refers to Obama getting the Democratic nomination, not becoming President of the United states)

FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH, the Mets are paying Santana $137.5 million for six years of pitching (an option exists for a seventh year, but whatever). In 2005, according to a Democratic Party Website, the Iraq war was costing $195 million a day. So, for the money that the Mets are giving for six years of Santana, they could afford to occupy Iraq for a little less than seventeen hours. (in 2005)

Great News

2008-01-29T20:51:00.001-05:00

So it looks like the Mets got Johan Santana, at the mere price of Carlos Gomez and three of their best pitching prospects. I’m almost sad: I had pretty much resigned myself to futility in ’08, and now I’m going to have to be all disappointed, angry and depressed when they blow it.

But seriously folks: Santana, Pedro, El Duque, Ollie and John Maine? That rotation is so good that I think I’ll be able to sleep at night, even with Shoenwise in the bullpen.

Anyhow, in honor of the Mets sudden relevance, and because this is the 100th post on this blog, here is a look back at ten of my favorite posts:

--This post suggests that an additional honor be bestowed on one of the inaugural Hall-of-Famers.

--This post also looks back at baseball history, at a player whose rare disability gave his team an unusual dimension.

--“Please Sir, can I have some more?” Oliver Perez is currently in arbitration talks with the club, asking them for an extra $4 million. This post illuminates why I would be happy if he got it.

--Gary Sheffield latter clarified his comments about Latinos being easier to control than African-Americans, saying that he was actually talking about how Latin-American players are ineligible for the draft, and thus more at the mercy of ballclubs. I took his pre-clarified statement to task in this post.

--This is a chronicle of my first trip to Shea in ’07.

--“The Called 3rd Strike in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is probably the best title that I ever came up with.

--This post discusses the similarities between mets.com and Pravda. And now that Comrade Marty Noble has been utterly discredited, can I have his job, please? No?…bummer.

--I offer these posts as a specimen of pre-Mitchell thinking on PEDs.

--This is a poignant reflection, on the time between the second-to-last, and last games of the season.

--It is hard to feel sympathetic towards Stephon Marbury, as the Knicks recent stretch of not being utterly horrible seems highly correlated with him being out for the season. I still like the job that this post did of exploring the intricacies of his persona.

Thanks to "Nigel" for help with the list.

NBA Updates

2008-01-25T10:07:00.001-05:00

Firstly, a few weeks back I made a reference to Oscar Robinson without including a link to The Big O’s website. This was a mistake. Particularly, his FAQs are one of the most eloquent commentaries on the idiocy of ever asking anyone anything about sports.

Also, on December 22 I wrote “…the Bulls are so bad this season that they lost a game to the Knicks. The Bulls are so bad that they would probably be better if they had hung on to Eddy Curry…So why aren’t people assembling with gigantic pink-slips to demand the ousting of the Bulls management?” On December 24th, Scott Skiles, the Bulls coach, was fired. While I give myself points for prescience, this seems to weaken my argument that Isaiah Thomas was operating within an acceptable level of awfulness. Since the ousting of Skiles the Bulls have played about .500 basketball, and the players have unanimously voted to bench my fellow Laurentian, Joakim Noah, for insubordination to an assistant coach—which seems not to have had any positive effect of the level of team unity. (Noah was actually only a Post Graduate at L’ville and went to actual high-school somewhere in New York)

I am Jack’s Tenuous Grasp on Reality

2008-01-15T20:46:00.001-05:00

First off, thanks to Dan for sending me the link. This is completely amazing.

Jack Kerouac created a personal fantasy baseball league, using invented teams and made-up players, which he played (presumably by himself) and modified, from the years 1937 (when he was 13) until 1965 (when he was 42, eight years after the publication of On the Road). Detailed biographies were created for players and coaches, and were kept in spiral-bound notebooks. The article is vague about how games actually operated: “He created a set of cards that, in combination with the skill level of the batter and pitcher, controlled the progress of the game, possibly in conjunction with the use of dice,” which yields a picture of the legendary beatnick, sitting in a cold-water flat, with a jug of wine and a Camel hanging out of his mouth, playing Dungeons and Dragons by himself.

There is, I believe, a cautionary tale about technology here. Kerouac’s system, a fantasy baseball league with one participant, has to be one of the nerdiest things of all time. It might follow, since this thing seems to have taken up a lot of Kerouac’s time over a thirty year period, that Kerouac, in some essential way, was one of the nerdiest guys ever.

However, because the technologies needed to enable serious, hardcore nerdyness had not yet been invented, Kerouac went on to literally write the book on being cool. Coolness would seem to consist of drinking, smoking, sleeping with lots of girls and being an ass about it, doing recreational drugs, hanging out with non-white people, and listening to jazz music; Kerouac not only participated in all these behaviors, but he helped make them popular with America’s youth. (a last component of Coolness, New York Mets baseball, wasn’t invented until 1962)

The increased connectivity of the world has provided many more options for people who want to participate in things like imaginary baseball leagues, and since Kerouac’s death millions of people have spent thousands of hours on things like videogames, internet fantasy sports leagues, and Dungeons and Dragons, all of which seem to share a certain spiritual kinship with Kerouac’s baseball leagues. Did On the Road only get written because no one had invented Playstation in the 1950s? I guess we’ll never know.

Or maybe it’s a reason to be hopeful. The granddaddy of all hepcats seems to have been born to have a pocket protector and an opinion about StarTreck—under the pressure of circumstances he became Jack Kerouac. So throw your X-box out of a high window, tell you buddies on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan-fiction message-board that they can get started without you, buy a bottle of the cheapest wine at your local liquor store and head on down to the nearest highway and stick up a thumb… and you too might start a social revolution.

Kerouac seems to have named all of his teams after American car companies. That sort of makes the whole thing perfect.

Confused by the Acquisition of Pagan

2008-01-08T07:17:00.001-05:00

The Sam’s Mets Blog brain-trust is completely divided on the impact of the Angel Pagan trade—indeed, while it is almost universally agreed that he brings a good name to the squad it is hard to tell if it is really a good baseball name, or if it is something more fitting for a minor character from Pynchon.

And what does he mean for the team? The club, apparently, says that they acquired him only for depth, which, if true, is a depressing admission of a lack of faith in Carlos Gomez or a firm conviction that Alou would spend the entire season injured. It would also imply that they gave Milledge away for a pile of beans in Ryan Church. All these things are bummers.

On the other hand, could it mean that they are considering a deal including both outfield prospects, Gomez and Francisco Martinez, for pitching? If this is true, it might or might not be a good thing. The need for pitching is desperate and I’d really by happy to see anything done to address that, but is throwing away their entire outfield future for some big name that might or might not produce a really a good plan? Hard to say.

Delgado says he is fully healthy and ready for 2008, and I sincerely hope that he is. With the way the team is looking, they could really use a monster year from Delgado in ’08. My prediction: in the middle of a 3-60 stretch Delgado says something insightful about the election, making it impossible for me to hate him.

Not Happy with the Guys who Call Nets Games:

2007-12-26T22:43:00.001-05:00

So they did this text poll during Wednesday night’s Nets game against Detroit: other than Jason Kidd, who is the best rebounding guard in the history of the NBA? Oscar Robinson won with forty-odd percent of the vote, followed by Magic Johnson with twenty-odd percent, Michel Jordan with just slightly less of the vote than Magic, and Clyde Drexler picking up the remaining votes (not very much). The announcers said they were surprised: they didn’t think that the Big O’s generation would be familiar enough with text messaging to achieve that result.

Now, the answer to that question is clearly Oscar Robinson. Over his first years in the league Robinson averaged a triple double (ten each of rebounds, points and assists), a feat which no one, at any position, has ever even approached. Major League Baseball will probably see another .400 hitter before anyone in the NBA will average a triple double again. The Jason Kidd caveat is irrelevant: when Kidd gets ten rebounds it is a minor occasion and Kidd does it far more frequently than any other guard in the today’s NBA.

Screw the Nets guys for thinking that the Big O’s winning was due to old folks knowing from cell phones, rather than young folks knowing from the history of the NBA. I very rarely (I actually think this is a first) feel the need to stick up for my generation, but I’ll say this for us: we tend to critically examine the numbers generated by sport, and even put those numbers in some kind of historical context. We fucking know that the Big O was the probably the best rebounding guard in the NBA. We aren’t like the previous generations of sports fans who only believe in things that they saw: we understand that a sports team consists of an aggregate of parts that can best be understood by examining statistics. Young basketball fans have straight up used the internet for to do more than watch videos of dunks: we have educated ourselves about the history of the game, and tried to understand today’s game in that context. I am unbelievably insulted that the Nets announcers attributed those poll results to anything else.

Anyway, in light of that Nets game, you heard it here first: Detroit Pistons win the championship. It is delightful to watch anyone do anything as well as the Pistons have played basketball over the years. Although the West is generally regarded as the vastly superior conference, Tim Duncan and Steve Nash, the linchpins of the two least flawed teams, are both a year older and playing with teams that do not seem to have grown in proportion to Detroit. This year, Detroit has wildly improved bench and a great mix of exciting young players coupled with a veteran core that has proved unbelievably consistent over the years: it is hard to think about their team and not imagine big things.

Merry Christmas From Sam’s Met’s Blog

2007-12-26T22:40:00.002-05:00

I have extracted the worthwhile passages from Jose Conseco’s Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant ‘Roids, Smash Hits and how Baseball got Big, in order to spare my readership from the whole thing. Merry Christmas.

“Mark [McGwire] didn’t like to go out with me because the girls wouldn’t pay attention to him. They would all pay attention to me. That was mostly because of Mark. He was never the best looking guy in the world.”

On being traded from the A’s to the Texas Rangers:
“I also wonder what role the steroid issue might have played in the trade. No one in the A’s organization ever came right out and said it, but by then there were a lot of rumors about me using steroids…
“But the Texas Rangers apparently weren’t worried about that. The managing general partner at that time was George W. Bush, before he was elected governor of Texas. At that time, he was very visible in the role of team owner…Sometimes he’d come down to talk to the great pitcher Nolan Ryan who had the locker over from mine when I first joined the Rangers.
“It was understood by then that teams knew all about steroids in the game. There was no question George W. Bush knew my name was connected with steroids—the story Tom Boswell had written in 1988 wasn’t the last word on the subject—but he decided to make the deal to trade for me anyway.
“And then, not long after I got there, I sat down with Rafael Palmeiro, Juan Gonzalez, and Ivan Rodriguez, and educated them about steroids.
“Soon I was injecting all three of them…Bush and Tom Grieve, the general manager, would have seen all three of those guys getting bigger before their eyes, starting within weeks after I joined the team. But they never made an issue of it, or said anything to me or to any of us about steroids.
“Was I surprised that no one ever brought it up? Come on. You never really get to speak to the owners or the GM on a daily basis. They spend their days off by themselves…I never had any sort of conversation with Bush. I shook his hand and met him once, but that was about it. He was around a lot; you saw him on his way in or out, but always just briefly. We were busy practicing or playing baseball. Bush did gravitate toward Nolan Ryan a bit, probably because he was a legend, and also closer to him in age. He didn’t talk to us Latinos much.”

“I used to use that thing when we would go deep-sea fishing; if we caught a shark, I’d shoot the hell out of it with the Street Sweeper.”

Knick Fans Have Mainly Lost Their Minds

2007-12-22T12:19:00.001-05:00

Knickerblogger.net is a site that I like a whole lot since it has a lot of good statistical information along with some sensible explanations of how statistics work, and some opinions about the Knicks that aren’t completely insane. Their recent recap of Isaiah Thomas’ tenure as coach of the Knicks does a much needed job of putting things in some sort of perspective.

The point to be taken from their recap is that the team that Thomas took over was not only awful, but also old. In that situation, one thing to do is let the contracts expire and try and build from the draft, with the hopes of becoming relevant in the future. Had Thomas gone that route four years ago, the Knicks might, right now, be approaching semi-serious contention. Thomas, however, proceeded to make trades with the goal of winning immediately, some of them with draft picks, and assemble what has finally revealed itself as one of the worst rosters known to man.

It’s not as if Thomas’ employers or the Knicks fans would have had much patience for re-building at any point during Thomas’ tenure. Possibly they could have been won over by it, but the temptation of immediate wins and playoff appearances was not something felt by Thomas alone. The people concerned with the Knicks all honestly believed that making the Knicks immediately relevant could and should be attempted.

The route that Thomas went thus involved taking a number of chances, and, unfortunately, none of them paid off. This can, in part, be attributed to bad judgment by Thomas, but one has to keep in mind that, as a GM charged with turning a bad team into a winning team, while suspended over the piranha-tank that is the New York Press, it was pretty much Thomas’ job to take those chances. The Dolans gave him a handful of chips, and we all looked nervously over his shoulder as he walked to the crap table.

Thomas’ first move was the trade for Marbury. Marbury has had serious flashes of brilliance throughout his career, and there was reason to believe that he could carry a team. There was also, even then, a good case to be made that Marubury was bad for teams and threatening to chemistry, but it wasn’t as if there were dozens of super-star point guards for Thomas to choose from. Thomas’ gamble didn’t pay off, but, given the overly ambitious goal of the Knicks, it wasn’t one that Thomas was necessarily unwise in taking. Given the short-term (and ultimately more important) goal of generating buzz around the team, it was practically inevitable.

Only someone with a serious problem with depression could have anticipated how badly the Curry trade worked out. When Thomas got him, Curry was very young and had led the league in field goal percentage one year. He was seven feet tall: it defies reason that someone seven feet tall could be so incapable of rebounding. It was almost impossible not to see potential in Curry and it seems unfair to expect Thomas to have anticipated Curry’s miserablness.

Furthermore, it is not as if the Bulls, who should seem to be on the winning end of the Curry deal, are much better, right now, than the Knicks, but, at the time that Thomas took over the Knicks, the Bulls had a far more interesting and talented young roster than the Knicks have had at any point in recent history. Despite that, the Bulls are so bad this season that they lost a game to the Knicks. The Bulls are so bad that they would probably be better if they had hung on to Eddy Curry.

So why aren’t people assembling with gigantic pink-slips to demand the ousting of the Bulls management? If the Mitchell report has taught me anything, it is to be less hesitant in calling out the sports establishment for ridiculous racism. Thomas was given an extremely difficult task, and he proceeded to do it badly. Looking back over the league’s last few years, it is not exactly as if there were many sure-fire ways of catapulting the Knicks into contention that Thomas passed on. Top notch talent is extremely hard to come by—particularly when you don’t have much to offer in return. With the benefit of hindsight, Thomas’ biggest mistake was probably not mortgaging the farm to get Kevin Garnett from Minnesota—but even that would have been a risk that he would understandably have shied away from. The series of more minor moves that he did undertake worked out badly, but any move that he could have made would have been a gamble with a significant chance of failure. The Knicks roster is a mixture of bad luck and bad judgment, for which Thomas deserves a significant amount of responsibility, but in no way warrants the bitterness of the anti-Isaiah campaigns, which are very revealingly deconstructed by Basketbawful’s Evil Ted.

There is something about successful, outspoken black men who disappoint expectations that brings out an ugly edge of hatred in American sports fans. It makes what happens on the floor at Madison square garden seem relatively pretty.

PEDs Do Nothing for the Prose Muscle

2007-12-17T20:47:00.001-05:00

Since the Mitchell Report was largely a vindication of Jose Conseco and his book, Juiced, I decided to pick it up and am now 68 pages into it.

If I injected myself with steroids for every time he uses the phrase “It just goes to show you,” I would be bigger than Hulk fucking Hogan.

Clemmens and Pettitte are Scum

2007-12-13T20:49:00.001-05:00

At first, I was pretty excited: I’ve had lots of fun at Paul Lo Duca’s expense in the course of this blog and he just got named in the Mitchell Report. Paulie never hit for much power anyway, and I had a lot of quips planned about him asking for his money back.

The Mitchell report is part of a very strange genre of documents that collect stories and evidence of human foibles and fallibility in the form of official reports. In general, the goal of these documents is to eliminate any poignant or poetic relationship to their material, and deal only with firmly establishing facts, and use these facts to lead to pragmatic, defensible prescriptions. Occasionally, as a result of this essential hostility to a personal reality, documents of this sort offer moments that capture the human condition as poignantly as anything in literature. One such moment happens in the Mitchell report, when they quote notes from a discussion by Dodger’s officials regarding Lo Duca:

“Steroids aren't being used anymore on him. Big part of this. Might have some value to trade . . . Florida might have interest.. . . Got off the steroids . . . Took away a lot of hard line drives.. . . Can get comparable value back would consider trading. . . . If you do trade him, will get back on the stuff and try to show you he can have a good year. That's his makeup. Comes to play. Last year of contract, playing for 05.” [italics mine]

I found myself reading that over and over again. There are maybe two or three writers who could do something that good on purpose; create a situation in which two opposing principles were so thoroughly interwoven. It conveys, with beautiful efficiency, Lo Duca’s feistiness and pride, but in a voice that is almost psychopathically clinical. The clinical voice is aware of Lo Duca’s personality and is trying, in its clinical way, to fit him into their clinical plans; Lo Duca’s personality is a factor to be taken into account, either a positive or negative factor in their plans. You realize that, in the eyes of those who control him, Lo Duca is just like the horses that he famously bets on; you get the sense that Lo Duca sees this as well. If I ever saw a passage that strong in a Michael Chabon book, I would assume that he had gotten help from his mommy.

And, in case you missed this, the source here is notes from a meeting of Dodger’s team officials. Anyone who wants to place the blame for steroids on “bad players,” and not the entire managerial and administrative culture of MLB, is completely misinformed.

Except for Clemmens and Pettitte. Fuckers. Cheaters. Hypocrites. Sanctimonious shits. Child-molesters. All-American John Wayne scumbags who were so fucking clean, and so fucking choir boy, and so godamn white and such true Yankees and good guys AND ALL THE TIME THOSE MOTHERFUCKERS WERE CHEATING AS MUCH AS BARRY FUCKING BONDS. Clemmens, who will through a fastball at your head if you look at him funny, was too much of a wimp to inject himself with the ‘roids and had to get someone to do it for him. Yankees. (Clemmens mother died of cancer and it is a big deal for him that he is very sad about…before dieing of cancer she used to turn tricks at a leper colony.)

What the Hell is Wrong with People?

2007-12-12T19:34:00.001-05:00

According to northjersey.com, John Maine and Oliver Perez attended the Knicks game on Monday, and were booed when they were shown on the Jumbo-tron. Seriously, what the hell?
I am not that happy with the Mets at this moment. On sober reflection, my initial optimism about the Milledge trade was unfounded/insane. They gave away a guy with some up-side, for two guys with zero-upside, who don’t seem to meet any immediate needs (ok, they needed a catcher. But they’re up to the eye-balls in outfielders. And Church is an unfortunate guy to replace Shawn Greene with.)

And the not-signing Santana or some other amazing pitcher thing is pissing me off. And I wish that Schoenwise had been busted for steroids and gotten the 50-game suspension just so we wouldn’t have to watch him for the first chunk of the season.

But, at a Knicks game, there are simply too many other things to boo; and in the context of Madison Square Garden, the Mets franchise is a paradigm of winning, responsibility and success.

The Mets were a huge disappointment and ought to have made the playoffs. I try not to be a mean-spirited fan, but I can understand the urge to hold that fiasco against all the players personally. However, the Knicks are so bad that I like the Met’s chances against them in a game of basketball.

Center: Mike Pelfry—dude is 6’7”
Power Forward: Moises Alou—played hoops in high-school.
Small Forward: Carlos Gomez-- 6’4”, athletic, fast as hell.
Shooting Guard: Jose Wright/David Reyes—young, in good shape, could probably make a lay-up.
Point Guard: El Duque—extremely competitive man; a state-mandated test once revealed that he had the highest basketball IQ in Cuba.

I would bet on that team to beat the Knicks. And if I saw Maine and Perez at Madison Square Garden, I would not boo them: I would try and see if there was an extra jersey lying around and if either of them could make a jump shot.

And of all of the Mets to boo, Maine and Perez are two of the worst. Both of them were pleasant surprises in 2007. Neither was anything like an ace, but neither of them was completely terrible. They both showed tons of upside. They are fun guys to have on a baseball team that you root for, because every game they start has the possibility of being either an amazing performance or minor disaster. The fact that they both over-performed in 2007 was the only reason that the Mets got to go through the worst collapse in sports, as opposed to just spending the season in second place. And, in the face of a non-Santana ’08, they are the closest thing that Mets fans have to a reason for not being completely depressed about the state of the pitching.

Basically, if you feel so strongly about the Mets that you are booing Ollie and Maine on the jumbo-tron, you better be at the Garden because you are waiting to go to Penn Station to catch an Amtrack to Atlanta, where you are going to burn down both Turner Field and Tom Glavine’s house.

Quiz Answers

2007-12-10T15:02:00.001-05:00

These are the answers to the Catcher Quiz, sorry they’re so late:

Garry “the Kid” Carter (e), the Chick-Track incident was one of many that contributed to the deterioration of the Championship team’s chemistry.

Paul “Captain Red-Ass” Lo Duca: (b), rumors are that Lo Duca might be headed to Toronto, where he will have lots of off days to peruse the racing form as the Jay’s back-up catcher.

Mike Di Felice: (a), trying to set that woman’s ass on fire is the most memorable thing that Di Felice has ever done.

Ramon Castro: (c): An incident in a Pennsylvania Hotel is the only part of this backstop’s career that can be described as “Kobe-esqu”

Mike Piazza: (d), Piazza’s attempts at suing Belle and Sebastian were short-lived, due to complexities of jurisdiction

The Knicks are Awful; Milledge is Traded

2007-11-30T14:18:00.001-05:00

The major crisis with the New York Knicks, at this point, is that the fans and commentators are running out of bad things to say about them, but the team keeps on getting worse. Everyone has been going on for years about how awful the Knicks are, but the Knicks, undeterred, find ways to sink to new lows. I wish we hadn’t been that hard on them before: that way it might be possible to put games like last night’s in some kind of sane perspective.

I like that Nate Robinson hit a three-pointer in the last second of the game to bring the score to 59, one point above the Knicks’ franchise all-time low. That is the best you can say about the Knicks right now: certain players (Nate among them) are not as insanely horrible as one might have expected based on last year.

According to The Post, Milledge just got dealt to the Nationals for Catcher Brian Schneider and Left Fielder Brian Church. I swear on Casey Stengle’s grave that the following conversation happened:
Phoenix Park Bar, during the Met’s pen-ultimate game. I had left work to catch what I hoped were going to be the last frame’s of John Maine’s no hitter. The no-hit bid was still going on at the time, and another Mets fan and I were having good thoughts.

Mets Fan: And this guy on the Nationals guaranteed a sweep of the Phillies.
(we both know the Nats lost the first game)
Sam: That’s awesome. The Met’s should trade for the guy who said that. Who was he?
Mets Fan: Ryan Church.
Sam: The Mets should totally get him. What position does he play?
Mets Fan: Outfield.
Sam: huh. I guess that could be a problem…

I’m intrigued. I guess I think that pitching is a more important upgrade than whatever they hope to accomplish with this deal, but Church and Schneider both seem like good guys to have around, and I’m not sure what they really could expect from Milledge. I could see him going on a tear and putting up near all-star numbers, but mainly because stuff like that happens to the Mets. I can also envision him turning into a fairly average big-league outfielder. I will be intrigued to see the first time he plays against the Mets, particularly if he gets to bat against Billy Wagner.

John Maine and Oliver Perez: a long day’s journey into VORP

2007-11-30T13:29:00.001-05:00

On Baseball Prospectus, if you go to the Team Audits, you can find hitters listed by VORP. VORP is a stat that is used to try and figure out how much a player contributed to in relation to a fictitious “replacement player,” and the stat tells you how many more runs the team scored because a particular player, and not a typical minor-league call up, was at that position. David Wright lead the Mets with 81.1 runs more than a hypothetical minor-league third baseman, followed by Carlos Beltran who was responsible for 51.1 more runs than a hypothetical center fielder; unfortunately for the Mets, the hypothetical minor-league center fielder was unavailable, and they had to call up Carlos Gomez, who was last on the team with a VORP of -4.4.

The stat can be calculated to figure out the effectiveness of pitchers as pitchers—which is useful. In the following discussion I am considering the offense of pitchers, and so my comments have to be taken less as referring to what the stat says about the players and more as what the players say about the stat. Of the Mets hitters John Maine ranked an even zero, which is to say that the average minor league pitcher should have provided exactly as much offense as John Maine: not a shock since it is widely acknowledged that John Maine is a bad hitter even as pitchers go. Tom Glavine (5.2), Jorge Sosa (2.5), El Duque (.8) and Brian Lawrence (.8) all provided slightly more offense than the potential minor-league replacement. Oliver Perez had the worst VORP as a hitter of any Mets pitcher with -1.4, which I found interesting, because, while Perez’ swing is ugly, he does occasionally get his hits and the announcers talk benignly about his efforts at the plate, even going so far as alluding to using him as a pinch-hitter in extreme situations. Perez, indeed, particularly seems like a good hitter compared to Maine, who is, as I mentioned, known as a particularly bad hitting pitcher.

The table on baseball prospectus also lists the player’s batting average, on base percentage, and slugging percentage (total bases over at bats, used to get an idea of a hitter’s power). For Perez, all of these numbers are .161, which means he did not hit a lot, never walked, and only hit singles. Maine’s numbers are .109/.194/.164, which means that while he hit less frequently than Perez, he walked occasionally, and hit for a little bit of power; specifically, he walked five times and hit one homer.

Maine had a total of 6 hits, to Perez’ 9, but broke exactly even with the hypothetical minor leaguer—compared to whom Perez cost the Mets 1.4 runs (a hypothetical minor league pitcher, of course, would have allowed way more runs, 24 to be exact, than Ollie did, so the 1.4 runs that he didn’t hit don’t really matter). In the end this is just another illustration of the general point that on-base and slugging are, according to the new metrics, the major ways in which hitters can help an offense, as opposed to hitting for average. It also, I guess, makes a point about the particular ways in which hitters get to be overvalued based on average. A casual fan would have had a 30 percent better chance of seeing Oliver Perez get a hit of any sort than John Maine; indeed, if they had seen Maine’s lone homer, they probably would have developed an even worse opinion of him, since the event was so wildly celebrated in a way that made a point about its extreme unusualness. Of course, the fans were right to celebrate it: it was good for the fifty-odd points of slugging percentage that propelled Maine’s VORP to zero.

Kevin Mitchell and the Case for Chemistry

2007-11-26T09:51:00.001-05:00

I recently read The Bad Guys Won which is an extremely light-weight chronicle of the 1986 Mets. Not surprisingly, its model of baseball is quite different from the statistical model of the sport that I have been paying attention to lately, and it is full of stuff about how the Mets success was related to their in-your-face attitude and particularly strong performances were triggered by vendettas or special showings of character. It views the raucousness and looseness of the clubhouse as a primary factor in the team’s success, and one could get the impression that the pitching and hitting were incidental. Another view would be to say that they were a group of very good players, who happened to spend most of a championship season boozing and skirt chasing—and consider the boozing and skirt chasing, not as a reason that they won a championship, but as a factor in their not having won more. Although, as The Bad Guy’s Won points out, the major factor in the Mets having not repeated was that team was quickly disassembled after 1986.

One of the guys who comes out well in that book is Kevin Mitchell. Mitchell was a versatile rookie and valuable contributor on the 1986 Mets; he was also a former gang member with gold-teeth and scars form gunshot wounds. In the early ‘80s, when they were both prospects, he tried to murder Daryl Strawberry over a game of pick-up basketball and he was a central participant in most of the brawls that the ’86 team were involved in. (a future post will discuss the change in standards for troubled, African-American rookies and will be called “Kevin Mitchell Makes Lastings Milledge Look Like a Punck”)

In a move that has to be recognized as an exceptional piece of baseball jack-assery, even from the franchise whose history includes the Midnight Massacre, Mitchell was traded for Kevin McRynolds after the championship season. The logic behind this move was awful: management perceived Mitchell as a corrupting influence on Strawberry and Gooden and wanted him away. As far as it is possible to tell about these things, that seems not to have been the case at all: Mitchell seems not to have had much to do with Strawberry and Gooden off of the field, and indeed, to have mainly put his troubled past behind him. The author of The Bad Guy’s Won sees the move as a fiasco because Mitchell was a beloved clubhouse presence and a “gamer.” They see the loss of a well-liked player, who was the unofficial club-house barber and always “played hard” and “wanted to be there” as indicative of a trend that would rob the team of its character and leadership and prevent it from winning further championships; they mention in passing that Mitchell would go on to win an MVP. McRynolds, who they obtained in exchange for Mitchell, performed well but not exceptionally over the next couple of years.

I would venture to say that the reason not to have traded Mitchell was because he was a rookie with a 124 OPS+, who could play every single infield and outfield position. That is a really valuable player. If 1986 Kevin Mitchell were available in 2007, and the Mets were able to get him in a package for Pelfry and Gomez I would be extremely happy. I think it is easy to be a good clubhouse presence when you OBP .344 as a rookie and hit 22 doubles to go along with twelve dingers; one wonders if the Mets were more hurt by the loss of their unofficial barber or the loss of an extremely versatile defensive player, showing all the signs of developing into a dangerous big-league hitter.

Mitchell’s stats from 1986 show a likely future MVP candidate; stories about his volatility and past show a player whose latter years might indeed be marred by “an indifferent attitude as well as other distractions.” However, while Mitchell would eventually win an MVP and latter sport an attitude that took away from his play, all the evidence is that he fit in very will with the Mets of 1986. Teammates from ’86 still speak of him fondly, and The Bad Guys Won contains much evidence that he had found a comfortable place on the club. Mitchell was a key part of the rally that ended in the grounder through Billy Buckner’s legs, and one wonders if his latter “bad attitude” had its origins in his “gangster past” or in his rejection by the club for which he had performed well and fit in with his teammates and coaches. One gets the feeling that once the Mets shipped him off as a bad influence, Mitchell was treated as such by all of the clubs that he eventually played for, until their perceptions eventually came to match the reality. Indeed, the case for chemistry is resurrected somewhat when one considers that if Mitchell had stayed a Met, he might have gone on to be even better. It is really too bad that the Mets let him go in a trade that they came up with out of racism and stupidity.

Not that sorry to lose Tom Glavine (and now I kind of hate him)

2007-11-20T15:49:00.001-05:00

Ok, it is not as if they are easily going to find anyone to pitch those 200 innings any better than Toothless Tom did, but that has more to do with the thinness of the pitching market than Glavine himself.

A silver lining is that now we won’t have to deal with knowing that the ace of the staff (probably the ace for practical purposes, certainly for publicity ones) will certainly go into the Hall of Fame wearing the cap of the Atlanta fucking Braves.

I would feel a lot more sympathetic towards Glavine if he had not been obviously willing to go back to the Braves after last season. The only reason that he didn’t was because the Braves did not extend him an offer—if they had, he would have won his 300th for Atlanta.

It is idiotic to blame the Mets collapse on Glavine; his performance in the last game was the least of many, many problems, and should never even have been an issue. However, they had a realistic enough chance to force that one game playoff until half way through the first inning. They were still in the race until Glavine delivered the worst game of his entire career.

It is not as if he was sort of bad in that last game, giving up seven runs over three innings. He gave up seven runs, and recorded ONE out. He made Jose Lima look like Nolan Ryan. And it’s not as if, after that horrendous performance, he signed with the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Tom Glavine, you personally hammered the last nail into the coffin of the 2007 Mets and then promptly went and signed in with the Atlanta Braves…screw you, man.

I just hope he’s saved the actual worst game of his career for the first time that he faces the Mets.

....thanks for the memories, though.

"You gotta have a catcher...

2007-11-20T15:22:00.001-05:00

or else you'll end up with a lot of passed balls."
-Casey Stengel

Minaya said on the call that Castro "could be an everyday guy," prompting a spontaneous, tongue-in-cheek remark from Castro's agent Seth Levinson, also on the call. "You should have told us that before we negotiated a contract."
-mets.com

Good Bit on Bonds

2007-11-20T10:44:00.001-05:00

The fact that this was one of the first things that I got when I googled “Barry Bonds,” which I guess means that people have been reading it, is one of the first things in a long while that gives me some sort of vague sense of hope. I really couldn’t have done better myself. She even gets points for blithely working in a reference to a semi-obscure gangster movie: “The feds have made Bonds into Al Capone, when he's more like Pookie than Nino Brown.”

For the love of God, DO NOT FUCKING SIGN ECKSTEIN

2007-11-17T17:33:00.000-05:00

“David Eckstein is 4'10" and appears to suffer from borderline albinism. Despite this, he is a mediocre MLB shortstop. After he throws the ball to first base, it looks like he needs to lie down from exhaustion. He also runs hard to first base, as most baseball players do.Baseball analysts have interpreted this data to be somehow indicative of something more powerful than mere "tangible" baseball skills, perhaps residing somewhere deep in the (non-human?) DNA of David Eckstein.”
-Fire Joe Morgan.

You should go here and read everything that they have to say about Eckstein. I used to find it quite funny, until I learned that the Mets want him to play 2B. Now it just scares me.

The fact that the Mets want this guy, the fact that Comrade-Coach Randolph is “an admirer of Eckstein's spunk” opens up levels of disgust with people in power that would probably be new to me if I hadn’t come of age in Bush’s America.

So far the ’08 team is looking horrible. Good thing you didn’t pursue A-Rod, you assholes…

[In fairness they want Eckstein for 2B, which makes a little more sense than shortstop. He still is 1) not good and 2) way worse that Castillo. Please, please, please, Omar, don’t get Eckstein. Re-sign Valentin. Call up Anderson Hernandez, try Gotay out full time, anything]

A Quiz! What Fun!

2007-11-17T13:03:00.002-05:00

In honor of the massive downgrade at backstop that is Yorvit Torrealba, can you match the Mets catcher with the career OBP and crime?

1) Garry Carter
2) Paul Lo Duca
3) Mike Di Filice
4) Ramon Castro
5) Mike Piazza

a) .287/Arrested for trying to set a woman’s ass on fire with a cigarette lighter in a nightclub, and then punching a parking lot attendant in the face.
b) .338/ Problems with gambling and younger women. Never arrested, thus a “good citizen.”
c) .310/ Plead “no contest” to a charge of misdemeanor indecent assault, spent a year on probation.
d) .377 (holly crap, was this guy good)/ No criminal or unsavory activities. Did have a “Belle and Sebastian” song named after him, which is, for a professional athlete, sort of worse.
e) .335/ Fined $200 for littering after he left 4,000 Chick Tracts on Darryl Strawberry’s lawn.

Post guesses in the comments section. I’ll put up answers latter in the week

Disappearance Explained:

2007-11-17T10:09:00.001-05:00

Poor guy.

Recent Activities of Starbury

2007-11-14T10:17:00.001-05:00

Reading over the previous post, I realize that I failed to place Stephon Marbury’s mysterious departure from the Knicks in any kind of context and that someone relatively oblivious to Knicks basketball might have gathered the impression that this was just some relatively normal guy who decided to go AWOL. Let me assure you that this is not the case, and offer a brief review of things that Steph has been up to in only the last six months:

THE STARBURY 1’s: Stephon released a line of inexpensive ($15-20) basketball shoes. He spent a lot of the time promoting the line over the summer. The idea was to provide a good looking shoe, which underprivileged fans (mostly kids) could reasonably afford. This is actually a very good project—most great NBA players spend a lot of time selling ultra expensive shoes, to relatively poor people, with commercials that make it seem as if owning a $100+ pair of sneakers is part of some journey to self discovery. Doubters point out that Stephon Marbury shoes would never move at Air Jordan prices, and some people have said that they are very cheaply made, but I actually give Steph a lot of points for this one. While a lot of basketball players make a big deal about having come from strained circumstances, Stephon is very unique in having actually attached his name to a product designed for underprivileged fans.

PROMISED TO MOVE TO ITALY: Stephon and family went to Italy and had a great time. Steph said that once his contract with the Knicks was up, in two years, he would move to Italy and play in the basketball league over there—he said that he absolutely was going to do this and compared himself to David Beckham.

SAID THE KNICKS WERE ON THE VERGE OF A CHAMPIONSHIP: When he was asked if he would follow through with his Italy plan even if it seemed as if the Knicks were on the verge of a championship he said, “I think we’re on the verge of a championship now.” That is the craziest thing on this list.

CAME OUT IN MILD SUPORT OF MICHAEL VICK: Steph bucked the sports establishment party line, and introduced the possibility that Michael Vick’s dog fighting activities did not necessarily mean that Vick was the son of Satan. He pointed out that other behaviors that are not overly kind to animals (he mentioned deer hunting) are more or less accepted in our society, and suggested that the revulsion to dog fighting had to do with its association with hip-hop culture. I don’t support Michael Vick at all, but you have to see Steph’s point. The outrage over Vick seems kind of odd, when you consider that over the last winter the vice-president of the god-damn country, while probably drunk, went out to shoot some birds that had been bread in captivity for the express purpose of being released right in front of a group of probably drunk white-men with guns. Of course, the vice-president actually shot an old man by mistake and Stephon got mercilessly blasted by the media for having said anything non-condemning about Vick.

HAD TO TESTIFY IN COURT ABOUT FUCKING A KNICKS INTERN IN HIS TRUCK: The fact that this was part of a lawsuit by a different woman brought against Isaiah Thomas made me speculate on Thomas’ innocence, since the Marbury/truck/intern episode seemed more scandalous than relevant. The intern had previously been dating Marbury’s cousin. The truck was parked outside of a strip-club.

BECAME A BORN-AGAIN CHRISTIAN

UPDATE: Looking over my Starbury list, one might get the impression that African-American athletes who try to break the mold (sell cheap shoes or point out that Michael Vick doesn’t have a monopoly on animal cruelty) are subjected to a myriad of degradations (like having to testify about intern/truck sex) and forced into a lot of weird ideological positions (like becoming Christian/Italian) as part of an effort to reconcile themselves with their public and their consciousness of the world—although these efforts are likely to cause the athlete to appear even more absurd and further their alienation. Then I was going to say something sarcastic about how this is obviously not the case and I’m sorry for misleading you, but fuck it, here is the un-ironic truth: the racial situation in this country is a god damn travesty, and all of us, every mother’s son, should be FUCKING ASHAMED.

Steph

2007-11-13T21:03:00.001-05:00

I guess, in times like these, we Mets fans need to stick together. So if you see famous Met fan Stephon Marbury wandering around the city with a kind of a dazed look on his face, you should probably say something supportive (“At least you’re a better husband than Jason Kidd…well probably”) and offer him directions back to the Garden.

According to the Post, with whom Stephon actually has a surprisingly decent relationship, the Knick’s point guard got on a plane out of Phoenix (where the poor Knickerbockers are going to get just brutalized by the Suns in a little while) and headed back to New York—for reasons that are unclear. Now, in sports, it is kind of a big deal that the guys on the team are supposed to travel with the team and hang out with the team unless some very emergency/life-or-death stuff is happening; this is so much the case that when Roger Clemens signed a deal that allowed him to miss road-trips with the Yankees to spend time with his family, certain people started talking about the collapse of Western civilization. The logic with Clemens was that the guy was so damn good that he could make his own rules (he turned out not to be…but that joke was on the Yankees, good times); Starbery is not Roger Clemens (this is actually the great tragedy of the man’s life) and likely to be in a lot of trouble/not a Knick any more.

Steph is simply not as good at basketball as he thought he was—and just how crazy this relatively simple revelation has made him is an interesting commentary on the state of our athletic culture. Stephon entered the NBA in 1996, and ever since then has been making a specious argument that he is one of the very elite players in the game. He simply isn’t. His numbers aren’t that great, and teams always improve their record after he leaves. It is ok to be worse at basketball than Michael Jordan—Stephon Marbury is a good basketball player, perhaps even above average in the NBA. But he never seems to have quite gotten his head around the idea that there is no shame in not being the absolute best—in being a good (not great) pass-first point guard, playing limited minutes, or, in certain situations, coming off of the bench. Stephon could obviously have been an amazing role-player on a great team; but the philosophy of motivational posters has very little to offer role-players, and very little encouragement for those players who need to make terms with their mediocrity to succeed.

In 05-06, when Steph was in the process of getting Larry Brown run out of New York, he came through with the claim that he was the best point guard in the NBA. This claim was ridiculed at the time, and Marbury, whose play has deteriorated while other guard’s play has maintained and even improved, has to wish that he’d kept his mouth shut. Tonight, Marbury’s Knicks will get eaten alive by Steve Nash’s Suns, and the fact that Nash has been considered (by manny) the best player in the NBA, let alone point guard, since approximately the time of Steph’s comments, might have something to do with Marbury’s absence.

Jose Reyes: a statistical reflection

2007-11-06T09:55:00.001-05:00

According to the Moneyball/Sabermetric school of thought, the single most important statistic for a leadoff hitter is their On Base Percentage, also known as “not making an out.” The “not-making-an-out” percentage is, in fact, considered the most significant aspect of any hitter, but it takes on an even more extreme importance for the leadoff man, for the simple reason that they come to bat most often, and are presented with the most outs that they can try and not make. The knock on Jose Reyes at the start of his career was that he didn’t get on base enough; stat-guys hated early Jose Reyes, because they knew his speed would continue to entice managers to leave him in the lead-off spot, while his low OBP would continue to hurt his team; the silencing of Reyes critics had almost entirely to do with his raising his On Base Percentage.

Fun fact: in 2006, in which Reyes was very good, and in 2007, which Reyes started very well and ended kind of horrifically, he put up exactly the same OBP of .354; the average OBP for NL shortstops in 2007 was .337, David Ortiz led the majors at .445 and David Wright came in eight in the major leagues at .416. In 2007, Reyes got three fewer hits in 34 more at-bats—his OBP stayed the same because he drew 24 more walks. In September, when he got about six to ten fewer hits than he had in any other month, he still managed to walk eleven times; it was his second lowest walk total (he walked only 9 times in July), but he never got higher then 14 walks in any given month. Thus, I think Mets fans have reason to be significantly encouraged by the fact that Reyes was able to keep his walks-totals relatively consistent, even in the depths of a bad hitting slump.

Perhaps even more encouraging than the walk totals were the developments in the penultimate game, which was marred by a near brawl that resulted from the Marlin’s player’s perception that Reyes was acting showing them up and acting like a jack-ass. Do you know what else increases a hitter’s OBP? Getting hit by a pitch. It is now becoming apparent that Reyes’ season long habit of celebrating with teammates on the dugout steps was, in fact, the result of a deep Sabermetric understanding of the game.

Coaches vs. Managers

2007-11-03T17:59:00.001-04:00

The start of the NBA season has provided the opportunity for certain reflections on the differences between the role of baseball manager and basketball coach, which, when considered practically, cause recent happenings amongst the management of various New York teams to be appear bizarre.

The advent of Sabermetric thinking in baseball has led to many new conclusions, some of them controversial and difficult to accept (such as the non-existence of clutch, and the fact that weather a ball put in play is caught or falls for a hit is a piece of luck that has absolutely nothing to do with the pitcher) and others that are fairly intuitive—in this latter category I would place the revelation that the manager has a minor effect, if any, on the outcome of a baseball season. This is intuitive, because all that a manager in baseball really does is determine the batting order, set the rotation and decide on which relievers to use; occasionally they will put on the hit-and-run, or have a hitter bunt, but these situations come up relatively rarely. Success or failure in baseball has almost entirely to do with the individual battle between pitcher and batter. Having good or bad pitchers or hitters will outweigh good or bad management; there is no statistical evidence that certain managers, by virtue of their presence, leadership, or teaching are able to get their hitters to hit more and their pitchers to throw more strikes. If the Mets were able to obtain Johan Santana at the expense of being managed by the 9th caller on the Mike and the Mad Dog show, they would be idiots not to accept.

The basketball coach, however, would seem to have a more significant role in determining his team’s fortunes. Different coaches employ different scoring and defensive strategies; the coach determines which five players will be on the floor at any given time, and they will occasionally stop play to give their players very specific instructions about where to run, who to guard, and what to do in response to specific, possible actions on the part of the opposing team—and all of these things could have an effect on the outcome of the game that was more or less independent of the skill of the players. Furthermore since basketball involves players working closely together, precisely timing passes, rebounds and shot attempts, it might not be wrong to consider the impact of “intangibles” like “chemistry” and “teamwork”—and again it seems that the coach could have some effect, by either creating or failing to create an environment that leads his players to work well together; in baseball, whenever someone is talking about chemistry or teamwork it is a generally a sign that you can stop paying attention.

As a result, the commotion surrounding Torre’s departure from the Yankees struck people with a serious statistical interest as a little bit weird. Torre had the distinction of being the highest paid guy ever at a job that was fairly irrelevant, so good for him. He had shown himself to be reasonably be good at it and has some ability to deal with Steinbrners and A-Rods and the New York media—all good accomplishments, but perhaps not seven million dollars worth of accomplishments. You can definitely argue that seven million dollars is too much money to pay a guy for a job that is fairly unimportant; you could also argue that the Yankees have all the money in the world, and that there was no good reason to not bring back Torre, since he had clearly shown himself to not be horrible—mainly you can argue that a new manager is WAY less important to the Yankees (and every other baseball team ever) than a new starter and maybe another arm or two out of the bullpen.

However, it is particularly interesting to contemplate the irrelevance of the departed Torre, and contrast it with the possible relevance of the contract-extended Isaiah Thomas. Every year that Torre managed, the Yankees made the playoffs—and even if the manager is irrelevant, it is impossible to say the Torre’s teams were not successful. Thomas has turned the Knicks into a disaster on pretty much every imaginable level—not only has he coached the mediocre players that he himself assembled (and mortgaged the franchises’ future to assemble) to a loosing record last year, but he then managed to drag the franchise name through the mud of a really embarrassing lawsuit.

So, Torre had an unimportant job and was kind of good at it, and got fired/given an offer he had to refuse. And Isaiah Thomas has a job that probably does matter, and is measurably awful at it, and got a contract extension.

Weird, right?

(I actually sort of like Zeke, but that’s just because I know that I wouldn’t find the Knicks more amusing if they won...and because I also don't give a fuck about all those white people)

Oh Fuck It, Let’s Sign A-Rod

2007-11-01T20:54:00.001-04:00

This is kind of an apology. As either of my reader’s might remember, I actually started this blog with some scathing words about David Wright saying in spring training that he would be willing to move to accommodate the acquisition of Mr. Rodriguez. My response to this was to question, not only Wright’s intelligence and sanity, but also the ethics of the newspapermen who were willing to feature the headline prominently (“Wright: I’d Move for A-Rod”) at the risk of fatally shocking Mets fans.

At the time that I wrote that first post on this blog, I was by no means a professor of A-rodology, getting most of my information on that person from the back-page of the New York Post. Even that is no excuse, and should, in fact have quickly revealed the flaws in my anti-A-rod thinking: everything said in the Post is either a lie or irrelevant, and frequently both; since the Post’s running implication was that A-rod was somehow to blame for the less than optimal performance of the Bronx Bombers, it should have been instantly, and manifestly, obvious that the only decent thing about the team in the Bronx was, in fact, Alex Rodriguez..

At the time of the first post on this blog, I also had some peculiar notions about clutch hitting (I thought it existed), which contributed to my feeling that Rodriguez would not do any good for the Mets. Particularly, I believed that the October stage would prove too much for A-Rod. I did not in know that A-rod’s career post season numbers are not actually all that bad and that he has only been truly awful in the last handful of post-season series for the Yankees; I had not reflected that the New York media’s perception of A-rod as a choker in the post-season (and post-season stats in general) was based on a ridiculously small sample size-- although if I had I probably would have remembered that small sample sizes are truly awful sources for any sort of information, and my A-Rod conversion would have begun much sooner.

Simply put, A-rod is the best hitter in baseball, by a lot. EqA (Equivalent Average) is an ultra-complicated stat that aspires to measure the total level of a player’s offensive contributions, with corrections for the league’s overall level offensive talent; it takes into account base-running, but not defense. It was designed to look sort of like batting average, in a failed attempt at not scarring off old baseball men. League average is always .260; A-Rod led the AL with an EqA of .340—the only person with a higher EqA in baseball was Barry Bonds, who gets a boost because he gets a walk pretty much every time he bats with runners on base.

VORP (value over replacement player) is the number of runs that a player contributed, over the average offense of someone at their position (again, not adjusted for defense). A-Rod led all of baseball, with a VROP of 96.6. I could go on, or discuss his traditional stats (which aren’t too shabby, either), but my point is that it is pretty much impossible to argue that A-Rod is not the best hitter in baseball. If you choose to believe that the best hitter in baseball becomes psychologically incapable of performing in pressure situations and the playoffs, you are welcome to do so; to me, it seems that his dubious play-off stats are likely the result of a small sample size, and the fluctuations in performance that occur with all baseball players.

Now, just because A-Rod is the best hitter in baseball, it does not follow that the Mets ought to sign him. The Mets are relatively good offensively—their weakness is pitching. If there were any particularly good free-agent pitchers on the market, or if the Mets were particularly strapped for cash, a case for not signing A-rod could easily be made; however, neither of these things are the case. The pitching market is very thin this off-season, and the Mets have a ton of money to burn. In addition to revenues from the network (SNY) and the seats and all the rest of it, they will get $20 million (or 2/3 A-Rods) a year from Citi bank, for playing in Citi Field; also Pedro and Delgado’s expensive contracts will be coming off of the books after 2008 which gives them some long-term flexibility. As it stands, the single best way to make any team better, right now, is to get Alex Rodriguez—the Mets can afford to do so, and almost certainly should give it a shot. And with A-Rod hitting in the middle of the Mets line-up they will score enough runs to be able to use Mota and Showenwise whenever the hell they feel like it; when Alou gets injured, and they are forced to go with Gomez, they won’t really have to worry about the massive drop off in offense; they could think about letting LoDuca go, and signing a defensive catcher.

Unfortunately, just because the Post said that David Wright would be willing to move over for A-rod last spring, that does not mean that there is a particularly logical place for D-Wright to go. The re-signing of Alou (a weird move anyway, because Alou WILL spend half the season injured) bodes really badly for the signing of A-Rod: if they did not have Alou they could think about putting Wright in left field. As it is, the options seem to be either first or second base. I have a feeling that Wright at second would end badly, although I don’t really have a lot of evidence to go on. Unless there is a really compelling reason to think that Delgado will be much better than he was in ’07, putting Wright at first, and getting rid of Delgado, either through a buy-out or a trade, seems like it might be the way to go-- I am very sad to say this, because I really like Delgado, but he was truly awful last year. An infield of Wright, Castillo, Reyes and A-Rod… it makes that Howard-Utly-Rawlins jive that they have going on down in Philly seem sort of quaint.

Moving Reyes to second, and letting A-rod play Shortstop is a rotten idea, because it would be too obviously a slap in the face to Reyes, who fared badly at second (and expressed an overall distaste for the position) after the advent of “Colorado” Kaz Matsui. Of course, if one wanted to run the team with ruthless efficiency, they could sign A-Rod and let him play short, and then try to deal Reyes for someone like Santana, C.C. Sabathia, or Fausto Carmona—but this is a course of action that I do not support in the slightest.

The defensive positioning seems kind of minor, though, compared to what is at stake. A-Rod is ridiculous good, and the best upgrade available—he would pretty much make a place in the playoffs a lock. As I said in the title of the post, fuck it, let’s get this guy. And give David Wright a chest-protector for Christmas.

Miscellaneous Post-Season Observations:

2007-10-07T13:51:00.001-04:00

First off: hell yeah, Kaz Matsui. I feel very good about the big hits that Kaz got in game two to sink the Phillies; it seems like fitting closure to the troubled Kaz-Mets relationship. It was nice that Kaz could help avenge the team that he utterly disappointed—and I think that the fact that he did it in a way that was not actually useful to the Mets at all (i.e., he could have hit a lot against the Phillies in the regular season and hurt their playoff chances) reflects nicely on the horrible treatment that Kaz got at Shea. I had these thoughts before it happened, and actually spent the morning of game two trying to visualize Kaz coming up big against the Phillies—I was picturing a game winner off of Bret Myers in the ninth, but I’ll still take credit for having predicted a brilliant Kaz performance.

Whenever I watch a relief pitcher in the playoffs, I hope he gets lit-up, resulting in a decrease in trade value, and making him more likely to end up on the Mets.

Earlier in this blog, I might have implied that Bob Feller is either a hypocrite or a moron. This is probably true, but I approve of his recent threat to show up at a Cleveland Cavaliers game wearing a Pistons hat. This was made in response to Cavaliers Superstar Lebron James attending the Indians-Yankees series wearing a Yankees hat. It was revealed, when King James was questioned re: hat, that he had grown up a Yankees fan, because he rooted for all the teams that consistently won championships in his youth, the Cowboys, Bulls and Yankees. While I am not very dogmatic about fandom, and feel that people should root for whoever they want to (unless it’s the Braves, Yankees or Phillies) I think that just rooting for frontrunners is a kind of voluntary admission of an utter lack of character—which in this case jives with my overall perception of Lebron James. James is about as good at basketball as you can possibly be, but, more than another heavily marketed sports figure, James projects an aura of pure success that is almost hostile to any ideological concerns. When former minor NBA player John Amaechi came out of the closet and wrote a book about it, James was quoted as saying that he would not feel comfortable hearing such an admission from a teammate, for the peculiar reason that keeping one’s sexual orientation secret would violate the level of trust necessary in a basketball locker-room. In essence, James would never want to hear about a teammate coming out because James feels that being in the closet in the first place is a violation of trust; James is hostile to admissions of homosexuality because he is too accepting. Fortunately, before people confused themselves trying to figure out what he meant, and if it could possibly be anything other than a very underhanded and gutless way of supporting the somewhat hateful status quo while claiming a moral high ground, Tim Hardway went and said that he hated gay people, which was a significantly easier sentiment to dissect. Anyway, I hope that Feller follows through with his threat; leading James to wonder for about a second and a half what that weird old man in a Pistons hat was doing at a Cavaliers-Heat game.

John Amaechi/politicol correctness footnote: After Amaechi came out, a gay friend of mine asked me what his career numbers had been like, since he knew that looking them up was the sort of thing that I would do. I told him that they had not been very good at all, and added “but it’s probably pretty hard to put up dominant numbers when you’re going to gay bars every night and getting fucked in the ass with a paper bag over your head.” My friend said, “you know, I really wasn’t cool with what you were saying until you got to the phrase ‘paper-bag.’”

Scott Schoenewies: Took Steroids, Still Sucked

2007-10-03T10:34:00.001-04:00

I guess I feel vindicated. I am fucking infuriated that they signed this guy for three damn years, and let Chad Bradford go because three years was too long of a contract for a relief pitcher: the Mets were Chad Bradford away from a playoff birth.

Gilbert Arenas (whose blog is excellent)feels very strongly that the Marc Ecco/Barry Bonds baseball/ asterisk incident is a travesty for a variety of reasons, some of them valid and some of them unhinged. I pretty much agree; I think that Ecco’s involvement is moralistic, pompous and obnoxious. First off, the thin pretense of making his judgments a popular decision is crummy and degenerate: of his three options, the asterisk is the only one that could ever conceivably be chosen by a popular vote. Shooting something to into space could never appeal to a large enough mass of people: the voters have been told by the baseball establishment, the media, themselves, and even Mark Ecco’s stupid poll that the ball is valuable, they want to keep it on earth—relinquishing it to the void of space would never gather enough popular support. Also, doing nothing to it is not an interesting enough option to get people to vote for it en-mass. Because the poll was conducted by voluntary participants, the only people likely to vote were those who felt that Bonds had tainted the legacy of baseball, and that his ball needed to be marked by an asterisk, to ensure his infamy into the age of the robot ball-player.

The asterisk is fucking stupid. Look, one hundred years after the fact I know that Ty Cobb was a racist motherfucker; I also know that he probably bet on and fixed a game or two; I know this despite the fact that there was no interest or effort made by the baseball establishment or anyone else to keep either of these aspects of Cobb’s history in the public consciousness-- the latter fact was actively suppressed by Commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis, who banned all the Black Sox participants for life, in order to avoid the disastrous fallout that would come from the utter disgrace of the best (white) baseball player of all godamn time. I somehow think that people will be able to remember the doubts about Bonds and his record for as long as there is an interest in the sport.

And really, Marc Ecco, how do you see the asterisk functioning? Eons in the future when archaeologists or aliens uncover the Hall of Fame, do you actually imagine some pith-helmet wearing motherfucker picking up the ball and saying “well, other artifacts indicate that this was a baseball, part of a vaguely incoherent game played on a diamond shaped field—however, the presence of the branded on asterisk indicates that the player who hit this ball might have done so with the aid of performance enhancing drugs.” Does this strike you as fucking likely? If that is the scenario that you are preparing for, they should start branding all of Babe Ruth’s bats with a hotdog, just so the future archaeologists will have more insight into our ancient sport. Or are you more thinking: “look, son, that asterisk got on the ball after Marc Ecco bought it and let people vote on the Internet.”

In conclusion, Scott Schoenewies is a crappy pitcher, a fact that was completely unchanged by his taking steroids. This, and several other things, indicates that the relationship between taking steroids and not sucking at baseball is a little more complicated than any idea that can be effectively conveyed by an asterisk.

If Scott Schoenewies feels like proving me wrong and being amazingly damn useful for the Mets next year, I’ll send him a letter of apology.

What was it like?

2007-10-02T11:18:00.001-04:00

Examining recent history, I feel as if I ought to have turned this blog into some kind of anatomy of despair a week or so ago, and the posts in that time should paint a grim portrait of futility and desperation climaxing in the Sunday’s fiasco. Indeed, the progression of recent games seemed almost exquisitely calculated for baseball fan torture: the ray of hope that lasted with the lead, finally replaced with resignation, and then despair following Perez on Sunday, only to be suddenly re-kindled with Maine’s no hit-bid, followed by the perfectly disastrous game on Sunday.

The termination of the Met’s seasons raises ‘important’ questions that I would like to think Sam’s Mets blog’ had been in a unique position to answer: what does it feel like to be on the bad end of the worst collapse ever, in sports? What does it say about you when your team fails so miserably? What can be learned from the absolute depths of baseball misery?

First off, and one of the reasons that these questions are not readily answered, I have to say that denial and selective perceptions of reality play a significant role. On some level, I think everyone who closely followed the Mets saw the seeds of futility all along, but chose not to pay them too much attention. There were problems with the team, the inability of the offense to pick up the pitching, the occasional ineffectiveness of the bullpen, the perceived lack of spirit on the squad, that were there all along. Everyone remembered the 2006 Mets, the energy, the rallies, and the excitement. We knew that we weren’t getting that this year, but chose to emphasize the fact that the team was in first—the extent to which that might have also been true of the players is impossible to determine. Indeed, the coverage, both among blogers and print journalists, always hinted at a need for the team to pick things up—but felt that the failure to do so would hurt the team in the playoffs and not the regular season. Much of the difference between ’06 and ’07 was chalked up to an improved NL east, yet at the same time the other contenders, the Braves and the Phillies, were both demonstrably flawed teams, and nothing really made the notion of either of them surpassing the Mets seem like a certainty. Indeed, up until the final game, the possibility of success had never been completely removed, and it was always easiest to focus on that possibility, rather then the unpleasant options.

On a personal level, the 2007 baseball season was when I began to develop a minor interest in advanced baseball statistics, particularly the ones relating to the debate about the existence of clutch hitting. At some point, it became reasonably clear that I was looking for some sort of excuse for the Mets players, for a model of the baseball world that would attribute their shortcomings to bad luck rather than a deficiency of character or ability. In other fans, I think a similar anxiety expressed itself in the debate about Willie Randolph’s competence.

Perhaps, for me, a final moment of despair happened last week when I realized that I was on the Knicks website, looking up the date of the first game of the season; when I saw what I was doing, I somehow finally understood that things with the poor Metropolitans had gotten very, very, bad indeed.

Posted late (Blame my neighbor's wireless)

2007-10-02T10:16:00.001-04:00

This was written between the pen-ultimate and ultimate games of the season:

At some point it occurred to me that I have a valid passport, a little money in the bank account: hop a buss to LaGuardia, get on the first plane out of the country, away, anywhere where it would take only a minor act of will power to never learn the results of tomorrow’s game, or at least put it off until I had had time to grasp its irrelevance, to realize that my self and the game were separate, independent things, to be able to view it as a random, incidental occurrence.

It was an idea that was amazingly tempting and viscerally repulsive-- perhaps because I knew, from the instant that I had it, that there was no conceivable way that I would actually act on it. Still the realization that I had it in my power to step away, to turn my back on baseball, completely disassociate myself from whatever despair or triumph tomorrow might yield, was at once sobering and awkward.

There was something seductive in the idea of completely uprooting myself from something that I had followed so closely—abruptly amputating something that had almost become part of me; the idea of knowing nothing at all about tomorrow’s outcome seemed weirdly reminiscent of freedom.

For, after all, what really are the Mets? Are they simply the record, the box score? The twenty-five men on the roster? Perhaps. Also the coaches, the players in the minor league, the administrative offices, Omar Minaya, the Wilpons. Gary Cohen, Howe Rose, are not entirely Mets, but then again, perhaps they are more the Mets than the team itself, since it is mainly through their accounts (and not the Mets themselves) that the team reaches the world. Keith Hernandez and Ron Darling have to be considered in a slightly different light since they are former players, and helped form part of the history that had makes the franchise what it is. Are Wally Backman in his trailer, Doc Godden in prison, Roger McDowell-- now the Braves pitching coach, still Mets? The images of them in blue and orange, the memories that they still evoke, are, perhaps, more real and vibrant than whatever they might be currently doing with themselves.

And then there are the fans, the seething unwieldy mass that calls the team into existence. It is their capitol that ultimately finances the Mets, through tickets, hotdogs, and commercial time. More important, perhaps, than any financial investment, is the emotional investment, the desires and fears that they have projected onto the ball club. All of them see the team in a marginally different light, experiences the team in a slightly different way—and what could the team really be, other than the aggregate of all these feelings, the amalgamation of the impression that it leaves in the minds of its followers.

Then again, there is the feeling that all that is grotesquely too complicated; that the Mets are, in fact, merely the instant of play, in the moment that it happens. They are men standing on a field, and if we, and they, attach a certain importance to certain of their actions, if when one of them goes to a certain place we call it a ‘run,’ if when a ball is caught or falls we view it as either a success or a triumph, it is a dimension and a vocabulary that we have created ourselves, and that reflects but vaguely on the actuality of the situation: that a man in a uniform has been either aided or hindered in his efforts to run around in a circle.

LET’S GO METS!

Uncanny Mets

2007-09-28T13:38:00.002-04:00

With things going this bad, you start looking over you past for moral failings, superstitiously asking what you could ever have done to deserve this. Magical thinking sets in: a week ago, the author of this blog put on a Mets hat, and, when they won, kept it on until they lost on Monday. This initial reaction is a rebellion against the realities of the situation: that the fan is completely powerless and there is no correlation between the fan’s desire and the team’s success, perhaps even no correlation between a team’s desire and their success, that, finally, the outcome rests on chance and convergences and levels of complexity, that, perhaps, no individual can fully control or imagine.

Of course, it is hard to argue that if the Mets were simply a better ball club they wouldn’t be in this position. If the bullpen was simply better pitchers, who recorded a few more strikeouts, the four games that they need to clinch the division might have been won long ago. Perhaps, sadly more to the point, if Jose Reyes were simply a better ball player, if he had spent more of the last month on the base baths, things could very easily have never reached this stage. The MVP chants that greet Wright have a sinister subtext: they hint that Reyes has been playing poorly.

The fact that the team’s folding has coincided with a Reyes-funk cannot be overlooked. When the team is playing at its full potential, Reyes is unquestionably their MVP. When the team has succeeded lately, it has come from the RBI abilities of Wright and Alou-- both are great hitters and valuable players. However, when he is playing well, Reyes single-handedly opens up a dimension of the Mets that no other team in baseball has, and gives them an enormous advantage against almost any opponent. In their optimal state, Reyes is the engine that drives the Mets; in the month of September, Reyes has stolen five bases, and been caught four times.

Indeed, in the long run, Reyes is the reason that, no matter what happens in next three days, it still won’t be insane to think that the Mets might win a World Series in the not too distant future: the running game can be a huge asset in the post season, when pitching is superior and runs are at a premium. Reyes’ ability to conjure runs out of very little could be decisive in the playoffs…if the Mets get near the playoffs, and if Reyes ever fucking gets on base again.

The Mets had been in first place for the better part of two years, yet to suddenly share it with the Phillies, to replace nervous optimism with a sense of impending doom, feels weirdly familiar, like a return to native state. Indeed, Freud associates an unpleasant feeling that he refers to as ‘the uncanny’ with a sudden regression to an earlier state of psychological development; one of the frequent features of these earlier states is magical thinking, the belief that wearing a hat might influence a ballgame.

“Like the opposite of icing on the cake."- Billy Wagner

2007-09-27T10:50:00.001-04:00

Screw the post-season, the Mets are making history. Think about it: teams make the playoffs all the godamn time; someone does it nearly every year. No team in the history of Western civilization, has ever, even once, failed to make the playoffs, while holding a seven game lead in mid-September; the Mets have a really good chance at being the first. They are not satisfied with routine, or traditional achievements, they are striking out for new, never-before-accomplished goals, opening new frontiers of failure.

You knew that they were kind of screwed when Minaya sighted Philip Humber’s work in the college world series as a reason to feel confident giving him the ball for his first career start in a critical game in a Pennant race. That’s sort of like if the good guys were in a Martial Arts competition and they decided that the guy that they would send to fight the Black Ninja would be the guy who was really good at “Mortal Combat.”

Actually, Minaya’s college world series line about Humber isn’t as dim as all that, and gets at one of the arguments against clutch performers: major leaguers are the elite, and represent a miniscule fraction of aspiring athletes-- to even be considered to appear near a major league baseball team, you need to have proven yourself on all other level’s of the sport, you have to have already faced pressure and shown that you can handle it. It is not as if, at the time that it happens, pitching in a high school championship is more intense, for its participants than pitching in the major leagues, or a pennant race. In fact, the highschooler (or collegian, or little leaguer) is in some ways under more pressure, because they know they need a good performance in order to ever be considered for a gig in the majors. It seems sort of ridiculous that there could be ball players who advanced through the minors, oblivious to their surroundings, coasting completely on natural talent, and feeling no sense of urgency until they end up in a critical situation in the majors. Once you’ve made it to the major leagues things are kind of all-right, even if the Post calls you a choke artist. First off, you get to call yourself a major leaguer and then even Joe Smith makes a couple hundred grand a year. He is a year younger than I am, the losing pitcher in last night’s game, and he could still afford, if he was so inclined, to hire me as his personal sub-sub-librarian.

Unfortunately, I suspect that the decision to go with Humber had less to do with the an understanding of the flaws in the concept of clutch and more to do with a desire to ape the successes of the Yankees that has been with the Mets ever since they hired Casey Stengal (also, see Matsui). Someone in the front office was looking over at the Bronx and happened to notice the success that they were having with unproven, young arms; they formed a committee, looked over some scouting reports, and, by the last week of the season, decided to give it a shot. In fact, I can imagine the conversation pretty clearly:

Omar Minaya: Willie, it’s ok, we’ll let you use Humber on Wednesday, but you have to follow the Philip Rules.
Willie Randolph: um…ok…Philip Rules?
Omar: Yeah, the Philip Rules.
Willie: Right… um…what are the Philip Rules?
Omar: uh…well… how about putting him on a pitch count?
Willie: Rick Peterson’s the pitching coach, fucking everyone is on a pitch count.
Omar: and…hmm… how about he gets, like, eight days between starts or something?
Willie: Well, the seasons only lasts another five days…
Omar: Right. So don’t use him again for another eight days.
Willie: Yeah, you got it, shouldn’t be a problem.
Omar: So I have your word that you’ll stick to the Philip Rules? Even if it causes tension in the clubhouse?
Willie: uh…yeah.
Omar: and do you…do you think you could do something for me? You think, when you talk to the media, you could maybe mention the Philip Rules to them? Sort of explain what it’s all about?
Willie: um…no. I’m not gonna do that.

Fire Joe Morgan

2007-09-24T12:07:00.000-04:00

These guys are just hopping mad that sabermetric analysis isn’t taken seriously by mainstream baseball analysts and have recently become one of my favorite internet sports commentators—to the extent that they have the downside, along with Get Your War On, of being the only thing that makes me laugh out loud at work. Actually, there is something basically similar about Fire Joe Morgan and Get Your War On, in that they are both fueled by being ferociously bitter about a state of things that is deeply inevitable—refusing to tone down their level of anger despite the fact that they are clearly pissing in the wind-- although Sabermetrics seem to be doing a little better than the idea of a sane American foreign policy

Recent games

2007-09-24T11:14:00.001-04:00

On one hand, the Mets have managed to survive any number of weird catastrophes and hang on to a two and a half game lead above the Phillies; on the other hand they seem to have chosen pretty much the worst time imaginable to slowly unlearn the game of baseball and expose the glaring, pitching-related weaknesses of the team. It’s funny, the team that we have been watching for the last week is pretty much exactly the team that we should have expected out of spring training—a rotation of question marks and old guys, neither of whom go that deep into games; a relatively -to- atrociously weak bullpen, that features Aaron Heilman as the strongest set-up man for Billy Wagner; and a potent enough offense to club their way past either of these shortcomings.

All of which becomes a lot less reassuring when you consider that the Mets have found their recent vindication against the Florida godamn Marlins who sort of seem like they are giving a presentation to their kindergarten class called “How I spent my summer on the bottom of the NL East.” People talk a lot about an obscure concept called fundamentally sound baseball, and that you need to play it, and the Marlins are a perfect example of why: whatever fundamentally sound is, the Marlins aren’t it. I’m mainly thinking of the eight unearned runs that the Mets were able to score behind Pedro. If the race stays close with Phillie, you really couldn’t ask for anything more than to close the season out against these guys, yet the Mets (chiefly the ‘pen) were still able to find ways to keep the Marlins in the games.

In the middle of all of this, Lastings Milledge went out and made himself tradable for a lot less pitching, by leaving the dugout to yell at the umps an unusually high (twice) number of times, following an ejection. You can almost say this is a good thing, since it might make them less likely to trade him in the first place, and then he might develop into a really good player, and then it will be good that they didn’t trade him. But, it is starting to get really obvious that someone needs to be traded for pitching, in fact, it seems more and more that they should have traded someone for pitching a while ago. Given that, Milledge is probably the guy to go, since they have Beltran signed to a long-term deal, Endy Chavez, perhaps Moises Alou, as well as the prospects Carlos Gomez and Francisco Martinez. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not anti-Milledge-- I want the club to keep him around, and next year he could be very important for them, since neither of the outfield prospects seem especially ready; but I am pro-pitching, and favor doing anything reasonable in the off-season to get some sort of reliable middle-inning relief.

But no one gets traded for pitching until the off-season, and the Mets have to handle the next week, and whatever might come after it, with the relievers that they have. And, we have the rest of the season (the part that wasn’t especailly important) to prove that those guys are, on occasion, capable of being effective.

Steroids, part IV

2007-09-20T10:28:00.000-04:00

I can practically guarantee that at some point, some twenty-second century Foucault-type historian will write a thesis about how the debate and policies about steroids in MLB quaintly prefigured the radical changes that would follow in professional sports. For, whatever one thinks of steroids and steroid users, they are just the very beginning and the future will offer ways to alter and enhance athletes and human beings that are, at this point, completely unimaginable.

It might, for example, become possible to graft the muscle memory from a Sandy Cofax directly into the brain of an aspiring athlete, thus teaching them pitches in hours that otherwise would have been learned over an entire career. Perhaps, vast advancements will be made in the field of prosthetics, and the next three hundred game winner will do it in record time with an untiring robot arm (purists will suggest that he get an asterisk). Modern scouting, vastly more involved than anything that has existed before, will seem antiquated and vague when players have earpieces, or even screens projected onto their sunglasses, not merely giving them information on the history of the opposition, but also calculating the trajectories of balls, as they are hit in real time, adjusting for the wind. Robotic eyes (think Terminator) might lead to the re-birth of the .400 hitter.

The very nature of the ball player could change: the future might offer (hopefully) the opportunity to see an entire squad of cloned Ty Cobbs facing off against an entire squad of Bob Gibsons. At some point someone will isolate (or think that they isolated) the “clutch hitter” gene, and the next A-Rod will be guaranteed by the lab to hit with runners in scoring position, or you get your money back. Parents, frustrated in their own careers, will spend evenings trying to decide weather their unborn outfielder will hit for power or average, and weather they should spring for the speed gene, or put all their money in hand-eye coordination—it would be nice to get the leadership trait, but that one costs extra.

Exactly what will happen, and how it will be integrated into baseball, is of course ridiculous to attempt to predict. There will always be a minor culture of cutting edge modifications being illicitly introduced in sport; a crisis of a different order will occur if and when some form of modification (such as gene therapies, or prosthetics or something else entirely) becomes pervasive in the general population. Once people in general have become modified, the debate about what sort of modifications will be acceptable in athletes will take on a new dimension and will probably be followed very shortly by a new home-run record (and stolen base record, and life time batting average, etc.).

Of course, putting on the Twilight Zone-goggles, it is not hard to imagine a future where hormone and gene therapies, prosthetics, and mechanical implants have endowed the general population with supper-human physical abilities, and athletes are the only segment of the population that is left in their ‘natural’ state. Kept as some reminder of the ‘original’ humanity for the general population, these beings will compete at twentieth century games in twentieth century bodies: over time, their relationship to the evolving species will more closely resemble that of horses to breeders, trainers and jockeys.

Call Me Marlowe...

2007-09-20T09:42:00.001-04:00

…not because I secretly wrote the works of William Shakespeare, and not because I’m a hard boiled detective who has coffee and cigarettes for breakfast and whisky for lunch--while there might be some truth to both those characterizations, I am, at this moment, the Marlowe that has gone to, and come back from, the heart of darkness.

Sam, of ‘Sam’s Mets Blog’ fame, attended The Lawrenceville School for the last two years of his secondary education. At some point during the summer, an alumni e-mail list yielded an offer to attend a Yankees game with other alumni for what seemed to be a minimal cost—being generally interested in New York sports, particularly of the baseball variety, passing up this offer seemed foolish. After some consideration, I actually decided that watching a team that I despise while listening to a bunch of ageing preppies discuss their golf games and trying not to get Bud Light all over their polo shirts was an experience that I could take a pass on, and never mailed them a check. But they sent me a ticket anyway, and I decided that I might as well go.

Indeed, from the outset of this adventure, a basic similarity struck me between the Yankees and The Lawrenceville School. Both of them seem like some aging gambler who has spent the last thirty years stacking the deck, and yet somehow manages to believe that their continued winning is a result, not of the actions that they took to alter the odds in their favor, but of their skill at the game. The Lawrenceville School attracts rich kids, and provides them with an exceptional education and a resume that colleges drool over; if they somehow manage to succeed in life it is because of the strength of character that was instilled in them by the school. The Yankees get the best/most expensive free agents that they can, and win due to the discipline and pride that comes with the pinstripes.

Shea seems like a quaint and antiquated appendage of the military industrial complex, and I am not exactly prepared to offer any excuses for it, but it is, at the very least, quaint and antiquated, and, quite frankly, a little bit crummy: the neon baseball-playing stick figures on the outside belong very clearly to a graphic style not entirely current, the banners of great Mets that hang in the concourse around the stadium seem musty and dated. The whole thing seems like it belongs more in the province of whimsy and World Fairs: junior is merely in the boy scouts, at this point, and if that will eventually take him to Vietnam, well, that is on the horizon, and not specifically the spectacle that we are presented with.

To paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson, Yankee Stadium is what the whole hep world would be doing on a Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. The stadium is indeed a truly impressive, beautiful building, but the architecture of the place also serves to make the individual seem small and irrelevant. Met fans have, through decades of disappointment, had some sort of realism drummed into their skulls and their relationship to the team is equal parts adoration and anxiety (not dissimilar to the emotion referred to as love); Yankee fans, however, are sustained by some kind of raw fanaticism and belief. The most telling illustration of this is that, in Yankee stadium, whenever a Yankee bat makes contact with a ball the fans cheer fanatically until the second that it is caught, or lands in foul ground—Met fans have generally learned to withhold judgment until the completion of the play. In someway more diverse and proletarian than their Met counterparts, Yankee fans are more universally in team colors, and more uniform and dogmatic in their relationship to their team.

The social aspect of the evening was actually significantly better than I had expected. Due to an atrocious lack of planning, the Lawrentians were supposed to meet in Stan’s Sports Bar, which was more packed than the rush-hour train that had brought me there, and thoroughly un-navigatable. The primary beer that they serve is the Bostonian Sam Adams, and I assume that three or four times a season someone is struck by the irony of this-- tonight was my turn; eventually, however, I noticed a sign, hung among the bad paintings of Thurmon Munson and Derrick Jeter, proclaiming that Sam Adams was the only good thing to come out of Boston (I think I disagree with both aspects of that statement). I failed at finding my fellow alumni, and went into the Stadium on my own. When I eventually found my seat, the other alumni actually turned out to be more or less reasonable and inoffensive people—although I hedged my bets by not paying too much attention to them.

The worst aspect of the evening occurred when I was trying to get into the stadium: they would not let me in with my messenger bag and directed me back to Stan’s where I had to pay seven dollars to check it. Why they could not have paid a little more to have someone search my bag (I can’t fucking believe that this country has reached a point where I fucking want people to search my bag) is entirely mystifying and infuriating, but if I were to find out that Steinbrenner was a silent partner in the bag-check business, I wouldn’t be surprised. This was actually responsible for both of my reasons for leaving the game quite early: firstly I didn’t want to try to retrieve my bag anywhere near the time of the mass exodus from the stadium, and also I left my niccorette in it—you can’t smoke at all in Yankee Stadium, whereas in Shea they’ll let you light up in the weird walkways that run along the outside, overlooking the dismal bay.

Waiting for El Duque:

2007-09-19T17:29:00.001-04:00

Reporter: Does this make...
Hernandez: I don't know.
Reporter: I didn't even ask you the question.
Hernandez: It's the same. Every day.
-Mets/Pravda

Suggestion for Willie Randolph:

2007-09-18T11:07:00.002-04:00

"I do voodoo. Hell yeah."
-Ozzie Guillen, June 2006

Steroids, part III

2007-09-17T11:27:00.001-04:00

Perhaps one person in fifty or a hundred is endowed with the abilities, both physical and mental, necessary to play baseball or any other sport on a professional level. For the vast majority of people, to watch any professional sport is to watch (and evaluate, criticize, demean, condemn or approve) people doing things, throwing a ball at ninety miles an hour for a strike, throwing an ephus pitch, hitting a ninety-mile an hour ball out of the park, beating the catcher’s throw to second, leaping in the air or flinging one’s self precisely at the ground to catch a fly ball, that they are almost existentially incapable of doing. An enormous part of the appeal of professional sports in a capitalist society is the affirmation that they provide, for the fan, of a hierarchy that is perceived to exist amongst human beings. The fan is on the outside, looking in, watching the few, the privileged and the gifted compete at their games. By enjoying a baseball game, a fan makes a statement that they are ok with both the existence of the hierarchy and also with their place at the bottom of it. By deriving pleasure from the experience of being a ‘have-not’ when it comes to pitching, speed on the base paths, or slugging ability, they are tutoring themselves in how to enjoy being a have-not in regards to other things: money, land, and political power.

A seemingly erroneous perception about steroids is that they threaten the existence of this hierarchy and that ‘just anyone’ who takes steroids will become able to play professional sports. This is quite provably false: firstly, steroids have little effect at all unless they are combined with a rigorous work-out regimen. Furthermore, a close follower of the game will have observed that a player’s innate ability still seems to account for more of their successes or failures than their chemical intake: Guillermo Mota was on steroids at the time, but he still made a crappy pitch in game two that cost the Mets the 2006 NLCS; lots of players have taken steroids, but only Barry Bonds has hit more home runs than anyone else.

Still, the perception exists that steroids have the potential to serve as an equalizer and confer the coveted athletic abilities on ‘just anyone’ and the idea that they have the power to threaten or destroy the hierarchy of natural gifts must be responsible for much of the negative reaction against them, since the affirmation of this hierarchy is much of what draws fans to the game in the first place. The tragedy, of course, is when aspiring players buy into the fallacy-- when ‘just anyone’ actually goes and takes steroids in the vain hope that they will make it will make them a ball player, and finds themselves, at the end of the day, still not a ball player, but beset, nonetheless, with the medical problems that come from using steroids; indeed, it is mainly on behalf of this ‘just anyone’ that MLB is obliged to take drastic action to eliminate steroid use.

It is interesting, in the context of the above observations, to point out that some of the earliest and most widespread use of steroids occurred, with the blessing of the State, on Soviet Olympic teams.

Mets vs. Phillies

2007-09-17T11:20:00.001-04:00

I had these thoughts the first time this happened, but then they swept Atlanta and things seemed to be looking up. Now however, that they have twice, twice goddammit, faced the Phillies, the team which, all year, they have had the most emotional incentive to beat, with a chance to pretty much eliminate them from post-season contention, and they haven’t even beaten them one time out of seven. It is things like this, that lead you to severely question weather or not the team has the ‘will to win,’ the ‘mental toughness,’ ‘bullpen,’ or whatever else it takes to make a serious post season run. Looking at Mets.com this morning and seeing Brian Lawrence listed as the starter, leads you to wonder if they’ll even make the playoffs.

I actually attended the fiasco that was the end of the season series with Philly. Looking over the box score, there is an impressive symmetry of numbers: for every strikeout that Perez got, he gave up a walk; for every run that the Mets scored, they committed an error. Their level of play was basically miserable, but they still had the game weirdly within reach, thanks to a three run Beltran homer, until the bullpen, specifically Guillermo Mota, imploded and eliminated any chances the Mets might have had of a comeback. The bullpen is the definite, glaring weakness of the team, and one questions Randolph’s sanity for returning to Mota miserable outing after miserable outing, but, really, who else has he got? Mota has been terrible, but its not like there is some really good reliever hanging out, forgotten, in the Mets pen, that Willie Randolph is refusing to go to out of stubbornness…well, there is Joe Smith…

The problem, though, is that the Mets are not quite this terrible against teams other than the Phillies, and one can’t help but think that this goes back to Jimmie Rollins’ much publicized statement that the Phillies, and not the reigning champion Mets, were the team to beat in the NL East. This afforded everyone on both teams a nice opportunity to talk tough in spring training, and gave the beat reporters a couple free inches of minor news; it also created an extra incentive for both teams to play well against each other. In these games, the games where there was something intangible at stake, in addition to the games in the standings, the Mets played pathetically. These games, against the upstart Phillies, seem to be the closest that the Mets have faced in the regular season to a playoff atmosphere, where they will be forced to come through with the season on the line.

The notion of the ‘clutch performers’ is not taken very seriously by Sabermatricians; apparently, if you do the math, it all boils down to chance. Indeed, if this were a different sort of blog, I would probably turn to the strange kabala of statistics and match-ups to try and account for the Phillies dominance of the Mets. As it is, I can only hope that the Sabermatricians are right, and that my feeling that this is an erratic, gutless, and nervous team, unable to perform under pressure, is grossly uninformed. The Mets have enough of a lead, and an easy enough schedule the rest of the way, that they will, almost certainly, end up in the playoffs; but in the NLDS, a short series played under pressure, I am not particularly fond of the Mets’ odds.

Of course, the Phillies still have a more than decent shot at the post-season, via the wild card, in which case I would have to revise my prediction of a first round exit for the Mets. If the Phillies do, in fact make the playoffs, I think that the only thing to expect would be the NL East teams contending for the NLCS. If this does come to pass, I actually like the Mets odds: the Mets are a historically unlucky team, but Philadelphia is one of the more cursed cities when it comes to professional sports, and the Phillies regular season dominance of the Mets seems like it could be only setting the Phillies up for an extra excruciating post-season defeat--in much the same way that Smarty Jones, the last championship caliber thing to come out of Philadelphia, won the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness, leading the citizenry of Philadelphia to wager on him heavily for the Belmont, in which he was fairly unimpressive.

Steroids, part II

2007-09-14T16:32:00.002-04:00

Steroid use distinguishes itself from other forms of cheating in baseball, in that it has attracted significantly more attention from both the public and the baseball establishment; as far as I know there has never been a senate committee to investigate ball tampering. It can be argued, of course, that steroid use is more widespread and has had a more significant effect than other forms of cheating—this is clearly supported by the surge in power numbers that began in the late ‘90s and tapered off in the wake of testing. However, part of the reason that steroid use is so widely condemned and has attracted so much interest has to be because people consider tampering with a baseball and tampering with a human body to be infringements of a different order.

The human body was created in god’s image, and to modify it or alter it, to attempt to improve on the divine design, is a significant act of hubris. This same line of thinking is responsible for much of the historical prejudice against medicine, and while few people formulate their thoughts in exactly that way, it is a recognizable component in the reaction against steroids. It is interesting to point out that different alterations on player’s ‘god given’ bodies have almost certainly had a more pervasive effect on the sport than performance enhancing drugs. If the ‘pure’ game of baseball is played by players whose bodies have been completely unmodified, than Tommy John did far more to contaminate the integrity of the sport than Barry Bonds ever could. It is good that Pedro has already put together a Hall of Fame career, because if the medical science were even five years behind what it is now, his career would probably be over; Babe Ruth might have been half a dozen cortisone shots away from eight hundred home runs.

Of course, medical advancements theoretically only restore what had previously existed, at best returning a player to a previous condition, whereas steroids are supposed to improve upon what was already there. Still, if one accepts the premise that players were only meant to be so strong, it is hard to argue that certain players weren’t meant to succumb to career ending injuries.

Steroids, part I

2007-09-13T10:37:00.001-04:00

This is the first part of an extended meditation on the use of performance enhancing drugs:

The “opinions and controversy” section of Bob Feller’s wikipedia article reveals two interesting facts about its subject: firstly, that Feller, like Billy Wagner, admits that cheating has been present through out baseball’s history, and himself admits to throwing spiters and scuffing the ball in certain critical situations, and secondly, that Feller is a vocal critic of Barry Bonds and has adamantly stated that he thinks that no steroid cheats should be allowed into the Hall of Fame(of which Feller is the second senior living member), particularly Bonds, Mark McGuire, and Sammy Sosa.

This is, exactly, the problem with people who condemn steroid users for tampering with the integrity of the game: those in the best position to judge, frequently suggest that there was little integrity in the first place. In fact, scuffing a ball was in some ways a more deliberate and dishonest form of cheating, since it was deliberately breaking the clearly stated rules of the game (rules which came into effect after a tampered pitch killed the only person to die playing a professional game of baseball), and MLB’s anti-steroid policies are relatively new, nebulous and evolving. Yet to demand the exclusion of Whity Ford or Bob Feller from the Hall of Fame seems completely unreasonable, and to accept that the mass of ball players experience the fan’s reverence for the game, and are unwilling to look for any edge they can find to advance their careers and earn their livelihood, seems like unreasonable optimism.

Before this goes any further, I would like to state that ‘Sam’s Mets Blog’ is against steroid use, and feels that MLB should take whatever measures are necessary to eliminate, or failing that severely limit, its impact on the game of baseball. The reasons for this are that steroid use is insanely bad for you and if it is present it creates a compulsion for certain players to use, in order to compete against other users. Players should not be in a situation where they stand to gain a significant immediate advantage by sacrificing their long term health, or where doing so seems like the only way to obtain or extend a career playing against other players who had already made that choice. Furthermore, watching steroid users is not more rewarding or enjoyable for a serious fan, and the ‘power game’ that steroid use seems to enable is not the most interesting form of baseball—if steroid use is largely present, it creates a situation where players are poisoning themselves to provide an un enjoyable game, which doesn’t seem to be in anyone’s interests.

However, it is important to understand that the basis for objecting to steroid use more than other forms of cheating is medical and not moral, and that the idea that steroids have contaminated a previously existing integrity is somewhat specious. The integrity was probably not there in the first place; and then again, the idea of a profound honesty, in a game, that in the real politic of people's lives decides and means nothing, is a little bit of an odd one, particularly when people seem more interested in this integrity, of a thing that barely exists, than they are in certain other institutions with a seemingly more immediate effect on their lives.