Mets 2008 Preview: Starting Pitchers

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.

What the Hell is Wrong with People?

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.

Waiting for El Duque:

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

Unreasonable Speculation:

So, if the Mets make the post-season, and if everyone is healthy, the Mets will face a minor dilemma: they will have five starting pitchers when they will only use a four man rotation. So, of the five, Martinez, Glavine, El Duque Maine and Perez, one of them needs to be moved to the bullpen—any Met-ologist will point out that this was done to Sid Fernandez on the 1986 Championship Team. It is unthinkable, for reasons of ego and star power, that Glavine or Martinez would pitch in relief. In the most recent Mets Mailbag, someone asks if El Duque’s nearly legendary relief outing for the White Sox in the 2005 ALDS would make him a leading candidate for the bullpen assignment; the mailbag’s emphatic answer was no, which was kind of too bad since the first draft of this post was mainly about how the Mets should not let the 2005 ALDS tempt them into using El Duque in relief.(the White Sox put him in the ‘pen because he had an awful end of the season and they thought they had better options for starters, which is not the case of 2007 Mets) This narrows the field down to Maine and Perez.

For a lay person the question of weather Maine or Perez should work in relief is fascinating, since there is no real information of any sort to go on. In terms of success rate, they are very evenly matched: Maine’s performances tend to stick closer to some sort of mean, whereas Perez’ vary more sharply and he is more prone to both excellence and miserable failure. They have similar, brief, histories in the post season: both were very adequate in the games that they pitched for the Mets last year.

Eeven less concrete than their numbers, is the fan’s perception of a difference between the two in temperament, particularly in what is perceived as their mental/emotional state when they end up in trouble. Maine, apparently, is prone to lapses of concentration; he occasionally misplaces his pitches and gets ‘hurt by the longball.’ Perez, on the other hand, is liable to ‘get rattled’ when things don’t go his way: when balls get misplayed in the outfield or when he disagrees with the umpire about balls and strikes. Once one of these minor setbacks occurs, Perez is prone to losing his composure, and his command, and issuing walks until his composure returns or he gets taken out of the game. The generalization is that Maine hurts himself by not reacting enough to the game, the opposite of Perez, who makes trouble for himself by being too emotionally involved.

Of course, the Mets Mailbag precedes its response with the customary hedge, saying that it is far too early too discuss these things and that no one knows who will be healthy and what the situation will be if and when the time comes to make these decisions, but then says this: “I wouldn't use Perez in relief. He's too erratic for the role,” and goes on to speculate that Maine might be a serviceable short reliever, based largely on his dominance early in games—this is in fact a very good point, and Maine’s first trips through the lineup have been extremely dominant all season, and there is some kind of logic to thinking that he could repeat this dominance in relief outings.

In my expert opinion, though, the South Paw from South of the Border might have a little bit of a better psychological make-up for a relief pitcher. It is frequently said of Perez that he “wants the ball” in big games, that he wants to be out on the mound when the season is on the line. He is an adrenaline pitcher, and a component of his wildness is a taste for danger; there is something about him that reminds one of Billy Wagner, who is capable of protecting a lead of exactly 1.5 runs. The theory about Perez, that his emotional involvement in the game leads him to fall apart, works both ways: it has been known to lead him to excellence as well. The Met’s best bet might very well be to run him out in relief and hope for the best.

UPDATE: Mets fans are dopes.

Comrade Met-thusala Will be Pursuing New and Exciting Opportunities...in Siberia

So Julio Franco has been designated for assignment, which means that if no one claims him off of waivers (and I don’t know what that means) or trades for him, in 10 days he will be a free agent, which, almost certainly, means the end of his Mets career.

I meant to introduce this as a running gag much earlier in the blog, but last year, mainly in the lead up to the post-season as pitcher after pitcher went down with injury and Mets.com remained cheerfully optimistic about the situation and refused to contemplate the team’s impending doom, my Dad and I started to joke about the similarities between the Mets’ website and the Soviet Newspaper, Pravda, and eventually started referring to Comrade-Coach Willie Randolph (whose assurances were treated, by mets.com, as essentially the equivalent of wins). One of my plans for when I am finally shit out of ideas for posts was to cut and paste a mets.com bit into Word and then use the Find-and-Replace feature to change “runs” for “tractors,” “player” for “worker” or “comrade,” and “the Atlanta Braves” for “decadent Western capitalist bourgeoisie pigs.”

Anyhow, during the past year or so, in which I have (embarrassingly) read virtually every piece to appear on Mets-Pravda, none of them have seemed quite so Pravda-ish as the announcement of Franco’s designation for assignment. It perfectly evokes the feeling of being written by a harassed, low-level functionary whose only purpose in life is to flatter half a dozen sprawling, petty, and incompetent bureaucracies, all of which have the power to ship the writer off to Siberia for life, if they feel that his reportage does not do justice to their heroic endeavors on behalf of the people.

According to Mets-Pravda, Comrade Franco had, in fact, formed the resolution to leave the club, even before the members of the Politburo, in their wisdom, decided that they were better off without his services. Franco, apparently, thinks that his goal of playing until he is fifty (a little over thirteen months from now) would be best served by going somewhere where he could play more often. The Mets, apparently, felt that their goal of winning a championship would be best served by having a pinch hitter who could, you know, hit.

Indeed, Franco has, apparently, been feeling that he has been receiving inadequate playing time since last year, and it was only perseverance and optimism that kept him around Flushing for this long.

The Mets were motivated in their decision to release Franco by a desire to keep Sandy Alomar around, who is a spring chicken at a mere 41. Alomar frees up Ramon Castro to pinch hit; with a 3rd catcher they don’t have to worry about Lo Duca having to leave the game (due to injury or ejection—neither unlikely) after Castro has been used and handing the catcher’s mitt over to a guy with a god-damn knee brace. But they were also wanted to have his “leadership” around.

But according to Mets-Pravda, wasn’t Franco coming through with leadership by the tractor-load? And what 48-year old ball player would think that he could get more playing time on a baseball team other than the one unhinged enough to sign him in the first place? Was Franco’s deranged desire for more chances to ground weakly to second turning him into a team cancer? Was he the one tampering with their mojo and leading to a break down in team-chemistry?

An alternative theory, which touches on an issue that various people on the internet had picked up on before Franco was even released, is that there is a slight conflict inherent in having Franco as a player, and Ricky Henderson as a coach. Franco and Henderson are contemporaries and Henderson has been adamant that he can still play—once MLB was done with him he knocked around in semi-pro and independent baseball, and re-stated his desire to play recently, in response to the Yankee signing of Roger Clemens. Franco on the field would have been a constant provocation to Ricky, and probably Franco’s release was necessary, just so that Willie Randolph wouldn’t have to listen to his hitting-coach constantly asking to pinch-hit: “hey Willie, those guy’s can’t hit as good as Ricky. Why don’t you let Ricky hit? Ricky might even steal a base.”

GAME IN PROGRESS NOTE: It’s official: when I grow up I want to be El Duque. After walking the pitcher, with two outs, to load the bases, and giving up two runs as a consequence, what does he do in his at bar in the next inning? Singles, and then steals freaking second, the second or third steal of his entire American career. That guy is the man… either that or Ricky’s tutelage is already paying off.

Injuries Shaping Both New York Baseball Teams:

This was initially intended as an audition for the yet-to-be-created job of sports writer at Timessquare.com, but they haven’t gotten back to me and it is getting less topical by the minute:

The baseball season is a marathon, not a sprint. This is one of those things that players, coaches, and sports writers like to say until they are blue in the face—but fans and the press persist in acting like the Yankees, at twelve games out of the lead in the AL East, are in significantly better position than they were at thirteen.

Due to the length of the season, the frequency of games, and the nature of the game itself injuries are a more integral part of the baseball season than they are for other sports. Particularly, baseball teams have to be able to weather injuries to multiple players— good GM’s build them that way.

At the same time, no team could be expected to weather the injuries that have faced the Yankees. Initially it was their pitching, as first Chien-Ming Wang and Mike Mussina went to the DL, followed shortly by Jeff Krastens, Phil Hughes, and Darrell Rastner. Even Karl Pavano bravely overcame his brief bout of health, and is now scheduled for Tommy John surgery, which should end his Yankee career. However, they eventually reached a point of equilibrium with their pitching when Wang and Mussina returned, and now Roger Clemmens is expected momentarily to provide even more help on that front, but only in time for the injury bug to transfer itself to the offense. Hideki Matsui, Jason Giambi, and Johnny Dammon have been dealing with nagging injuries, hampering their games. Now Giambi is out for the rest of the season, just in time to avoid being suspended for admitting to doing steroids. At this point their ability to score runs seems to come and go with the pain in Dammon’s calf.

The Mets got beat the first time that they played with their entire opening day outfield injured, but all-star third basemen David Wright was joining them on the bench due to back-spasms. In fact, the Met’s starting second basemen, Jose Valentin, has been on the DL since April, and they played almost all of May without their number two starting pitcher, Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez, and half of it without Moises Alou. The club is still waiting for Alou’s return; although Shawn Greene and Carlos Beltran, the other two outfielders, should be out for significantly less time.

But the injuries have not slowed the Mets down much, largely because, outside of El Duque (who is at best “pre-injured,” rather than healthy), they have been lucky enough avoid injuries to pitching. The Spring Training line-up that barely lost to Brandon Webb, might have beaten a less dominant pitcher. Indeed, many of the changes that the Mets have gone through as an organization are seen in their personnel at second base. In 2005 they had poor old Kaz Matsui— the most laughable and doomed of the Mets efforts to emulate the Yankees. In 2006, injuries to Anderson Hernandez and the continued awfulness of Kaz, forced them to experiment with Jose Valentin, a veteran form whom they had hoped for little more than the occasional pinch-hit. Valentin, however, played the position admirably, won the job of every-day second basemen, and became a valuable member of the ’06 Mets. He had continued to contribute for them into 2007, until he went down with injury—but he was replaced by Damion Easley who has also stepped up, fielding well and hitting seven home runs. Ruben Gotay has been filling in as Easely’s back-up, and he hasn’t been awful either.

To those of us out of the loop, it is impossible to tell weather the fact that the Mets have been regularly able to come up with a completely decent back-up option for second base and most other temporary needs is a result of managerial brilliance or dumb luck—but it is a huge part of why the Mets are holding onto a (admittedly not very impressive) lead in their division and the Yankees are hoping that a magnificent run of dominance and luck will have them in the Wild Card race sometime in August.

So it begins...

Drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, listening to nimrods on the am radio go on and on about hockey, waiting and hoping that they say something about if El Duque is healthy enough to pitch. An add for the star-registry follows someone whose system will eliminate your credit card debt. Jose Valentin might also be headed for the DL- the Dailey News makes a brief reference to calling up Anderson Hernandez or Ruben Gotay…Gotay, I think I remember him getting a hit or two in Spring Training, that’s nice.

Well, it is a team of old men, and we all knew it would get here sooner or latter. [someone says that the Yankees would be justified in firing Joe Torre, someone else thinks they’d be crazy- they talk about this for a while… Torre won’t be fired] I kind of hoped that we could make it for another month or so, before dipping into the minor leagues and seeing things like a Chan Ho Park start… Tiger Woods wants me to get laser surgery on my eyes, a perky woman asks if I want to be a millionaire she offers to teach me how to sell things on the internet…

With El Duque we definitely knew it was coming, sooner or latter, and if the offense does what it’s supposed to (hit far, far better than they have for the last week) they could weather a month of Park. But an extended absence of Valentin might screw them completely. I really wish they had went and got a second baseman in the off-season. The good performances form Valentin were like finding a twenty that you didn’t know you had in your pants… it’s pretty cool, but shouldn’t really be the backbone of a long-term financial strategy. Valentin was just so freakishly and unexpectedly good- both at fielding his position and getting some hits. Particularly with all the ground-ball pitchers and the double play being such an important aspect of the Met's game so far this season, you dread going back to being defensively weak at second.

If Chan Ho Park knows what’s good for him he’ll pitch us a good one tonight: with Pelfery the way he has been, there are clearly starts on this club for a guy who steps up, and Park is getting the first shot at being that guy.

One factor in the tension between Mets and Yankee fans is stuff like this: I want to hear about Jose Valentin’s knee, but ‘Boomer’ just keeps on talking about weather or not Jeter should defend Torre to the press, and so why didn’t he defend A-Rod.

There was an interesting and slightly poignant moment during Saturday’s broadcast. Shawn Greene, along with Sele, Schoenwise, and Newhan had been to see the Holocaust museum (presumably while Reyes and Wright hit up the Air and Space Museum for freeze dried ice-cream), which led Ron Darling and Gary Cohen to discuss the different edifying sights in Washington. Darling praised the Vietnam memorial and spoke about the mass of names. He alluded to having lost two cousins in the war, and was starting to describe the experience of finding their names on the memorial, when Beltran got the Mets first hit of the game. Darling acknowledged the hit and said another sentence or so about the memorial while Beltran was running the bases, but then the baseball took over and he and Cohen began discussing Beltran’s hit, and he never brought up the Vietnam Memorial again.

more El Duque

Twice now, I have made it into the bar near where I work with the Mets trailing by one, and gotten to watch the decisive inning. I liked the first time, last Monday, a lot better: the Mets put up seven runs to take the lead for last time. On Saturday, I arrived in time to watch El Duque’s nightmare inning, where he gave up two home runs, and than hit the pitcher and was ejected.

It was worth watching, actually, if only to see the generally calm Hernandez franticly arguing his ejection, and being restrained by Willie Randolph. El Duque’s complaint was that he had unintentionally hit the pitcher and was not retaliating for the home run; I suppose that it does him credit that he was mortified that his action was interpreted as malicious. On the other hand, El Duque had just hit the pitcher and given up two homers, and it is extremely hard to think that it would have been in anyone’s interest for him to stay in the game.

It raises some interesting questions about the psychology of athletes, particularly pitchers in intense situations. If you had been allowed to go onto the diamond and ask him, I am sure that El Duque would have told you with complete confidence that he knew what the problem was with his delivery, was not tired, felt fine, and was going to retire the next four batters who faced him, some of them on strike-outs. Everyone else watching the game, and a whole bunch of people listening to it on the radio, knew perfectly well that El Duque no longer had his stuff that outing and that there was no sane reason for him to stay in the game and keep on giving out hits to what might be one of the worst teams in the history of baseball- but El Duque, for all his experience, believed firmly that his ejection was an injustice and that, if given the ball, he would perform.

That level of confidence, and that ability to divorce one’s self from certain aspects of reality, to refuse to learn from immediate experiences, is essential to maintaining the mindset that can throw strikes with runners on base and the game on the line. If El Duque did not believe that he could retire every batter, he probably would not be able to retire any batters. Keeping track of reality, making adjustments to compensate for failings is why managers have jobs- perhaps the most important aspect of the managerial role is that they accept the burden of reality, so that every player is free to believe that they are either Babe Ruth, or Cy Young.

El Duque can be forgiven for thinking that he was in no trouble and was fit to stay in the game; he might even have been right. It is interesting, though, to wonder how far this mindset it extends, and to think about lesser players, whose contracts, salaries and playing time would give the lie to their excellence. Does Jose Lima believe that every pitch he throws is going to be a strike? Does he feel that every hit is a fluke, and that it is only a matter of time in each outing before he finds the adjustment that he needs and becomes un-hittable?

It’s raining in New York right now, but I don’t care- I just hope that it clears up in Philadelphia by the afternoon.

Games 2-6

Since I last said anything about them, the Mets have been playing .500 ball, gaining dominant wins over St. Louis and then Atlanta, before losing to Atlanta twice. The two losses seemed mainly to do with breakdowns of their defense and bullpen, whereas the victories seemed defined by commanding offensive performance coupled with solid starting pitching. This is, more or less, what we are lead to expect from the team: we are told that their line-up is the most powerful in the National League, and team officials see this as mitigating any shortcomings from pitching and defense. When they all hit, the Mets are fairly close to unbeatable- but all offences are prone to periods of stagnation, and over the course of 162 games, the laws of probability indicate that there will be a bunch of them where they don’t hit, or don’t hit very much- and these are games that the Mets have a perfectly decent chance of losing, at least until Mota, Sanchez, and Pedro get back.

Looking back at yesterday’s game, it seemed obvious that Willie Randolph has been reading this blog, and took to heart my thoughts on the desirability of having David Wright hit in the two-hole. With Lo Duca taking the day off, Randolph had Jose Valentin (who did miserably) batting second, and Wright, same as ever, hitting fifth. Shawn Green had better be extremely careful.

Reflecting on today’s home opener, and the six games that preceded it, it seems that the thing that Mets fans should hope for most fervently is the emergence of either John Maine or Oliver Perez as the real ace on the rotation. This is in no way a criticism of Glavine or El Duque: both of them are, and have been, great pitchers and will be both useful and essential to the team this season. The best thing that can be said for either of the youngsters is that they have shown that they might, at some point, be capable of doing what El Duque and Glavine have already done: survive in the big leagues for many years as an unquestionably dominant pitcher. At least the potential to do this has been shown by both Maine and Perez, and the chance to see how they perform over a full season is one of the most exciting things about the 2007 Mets.

El Duque

More than anything else, the career of Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez is a reminder of the subjective nature of truth, the impossibility of correctly identifying anything using only the metrics derived from our rational experience of the world. Blinded by his arthritis, and hamstrings, and disputed birth certificates, we had forgotten that El Duque was also a ferocious competitor, possessed of a devious wealth of baseball savvy- an unquestionable asset to the team.

Don’t get me wrong, there is no reason to believe that last night was any particular indication of how the season will go: the Cardinals played terrible defense again, and were pretty bad over all- and until the Mets win the World Series or are eliminated from contention I’m not going to stop having nightmares about El Duque going down for the rest of the season. But the thing is that you just never know with El Duque. At one point last night Ron Darling said that it almost seemed as if El Duque would invent new pitches in the course of an inning- slightly altering his delivery, tinkering with the velocity, searching for the perfect pitch and keeping hitters perpetually in confusion. Of all the athletes in baseball, it is perhaps most fitting that we don’t even know when El Duque was born, because there is simply no way of quantifying or predicting what he brings to the game. Outside of the fear of injury, the only constant with El Duque is some sort of Faustian sympathy that he has with the game of baseball, perhaps most strongly evidenced by his occasional offensive contributions: the fact that he had never done it before was no reason to believe that he would not steal a base, the fact that he was a negligible hitter over the course of his career was no protection against last night’s two RBI double.

Anyway, it does seem silly to attribute much predictive merit to last night’s game, but, whatever happens over the course of the season it seems a reasonable assumption that El Duque is going to help keep in interesting.