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.

Pelfrey

Everyone loves coming of age stories, perhaps because in actual life there is not really any such thing-- all the rites of passage that we pass leave us no more prepared or less confused than we had been on the other side of them; all our Conformations, Bar Mitzvahs, and Graduations merely so many moldy rabbits feet hanging from our key chains, as we realize that what is called Maturity is merely a greater proximity to death (not the illuminating, consummately desirable virtue that our elders had commanded us to cultivate) and begin to change Wonder for Fear.

Anyway, baseball hangs out somewhere on the fringes of ‘actual life’ and so we were not prevented from seeing a nice coming of age story out of Mike Pelfrey last night. Pelfrey had been terrible in all of his previous starts, and I was frankly for sending him back to the minors and seeing if Humber or Park or Sosa or somebody could do a better job. But, after being terrible again in the first inning, Pelfrey got it together and was good for another five and a third, leading one to believe that, particularly if he is able to use last night’s start as a source of lessons and confidence, Pelfrey might be a good guy to have around. The encouraging thing was that he seemed to be mainly getting outs with groundballs, which is what is supposed to happen when he has his stuff-- previous outings had featured fly balls and strike outs.

On the other hand, Willie Randolph’s line-up tinkering is making me nervous, since it seems to indicate that the skipper is deeply concerned with how things are going—and I’m assuming that Randolph is slightly better informed than I am. As has come up before, I am not a proponent of Wright batting second, partially because I am not convinced that Wright has the best make-up for a number two hitter, but also because I feel that spots other than the two-hole make less than optimal use of Lo Duca’s talents. At this point, of course, things are still up in the air, since Lo Duca and Wright both had decent nights at the plate, and the Mets lost anyway. Well, at least they aren’t as screwed as the Yankees (now that’s not something that Mets fans get to say all that often), whose young pitcher’s first successful outing was cut short with a hamstring injury that could have him out for weeks.

After consulting the Canadian Quarter of Pitching Perdictivity, I am sorry to inform you that Perez is going to have a rough outing to-day.

BASKETBALL NOTE: There was a weird moment in last night’s game between Dallas and Golden State, where both teams realized that they had no chance at all of winning the series: Dallas, because they haven’t been playing terrifically and are facing elimination for the rest of the way, and the Warriors because they are the Golden State Warriors trying to eliminate the Dallas freaking Mavericks.

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.

Lastings Milledge

What I’d like, thanks for asking, is for Willie Randolph to give Lastings Milledge a start before he sends him down to New Orleans on Friday to make room for Mike Pelfry. On some level, Randolph should just do it for the fans: we seem to be generally interested in the kid and it would be nice to see him play a game or two before he gets traded off for some geriatric pitcher.

On the other hand, giving Milledge a start, and Green or Alou a day off, seems to be generally in keeping with Randolph’s philosophy, at least in regards to the relatively inexperienced members of the bullpen. A couple of times now, Randolph has drawn the ire of sports writers and fans for leaving untested relievers in the game in tight spots. The logic behind doing that, I believe, is that with their line-up and the vast majority of the season still to be played, the temporary damage done by a bad relief outing is worth risking for confidence that these relievers stand to gain from success, and the information that Randolph and Rick Peterson stand to gain from watching them compete against big league hitters in meaningful games. By a similar token, it would be valuable to see the “new, improved” Lastings Milledge in a major league game while the opportunity still presents itself.

On larger levels, Milledge poses an interesting question to the club. With super-sub Endy Chavez on the bench; Francisco Martinez and Carlos Gomez, two outfield prospects who collectively embody all the qualities of Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, and The Flash, waiting in the minors; and Beltran signed to a long term deal, there is not much long-term future for Milledge with this club. His value to the team, at this point, seems to be primarily as insurance in case Green or Alou gets injured- or someone else gets injured and they need to make a quick trade.

It all goes back to last season, when Milledge spent some time with the club and exhibited a “bad attitude.” His crimes consisted of high-fiveing fans in the stands after hitting his first home run, showing up late for a game, and a couple of mistakes in the outfield. Also, he did something during his September call-up to inspire someone to leave a note on his locker saying “Know your place, Rook.” [UPDATE: at some point over the summer it became generally accepted that the note was left by Billy Wagner]

To me, all of that seemed like a classic case of sports writers creating a story out of a series of trivial incidents merely to have something to say, something with which to fill their quota of column inches for the week. All of Milledge’s transgressions seemed in keeping with a guy who was twenty-one years old, playing his first handful of games in the majors. The club itself, at least publicly, never seemed concerned about his behavior; if there had been any better off-field story lines (Paul Lo Duca’s divorce was a little messier, Pedro Martinez took a month off to attend space camp, David Wright dating Paris Hilton) we might have never heard of Milledge as anything other than a prospect having a slightly disappointing first outing.

Opening the real can of worms, I can’t shake the feeling that the media’s perception of Milledge, a black guy, was racially charged. Milledge’s crimes, showboating and laziness, are the particular shortcomings that the media likes to subtlety associate with African-American athletes. Given the paltry evidence available to me, the problem with Milledge seems to have been constructed- and the fact that it was constructed around Milledge, and not someone else, likely has something to do with his race.

The amazing turn-around that Milledge has exhibited, losing all that weight in the off-season, exhibiting a better attitude, and working harder, seem like the natural maturation of a very young player learning the ropes and coming into his own. However, the way that it is written about, serves to emphasize his initial delinquency- which I am inclined to believe was slightly fictional in the first place. Neither Milledge’s attitude nor his performance would have had to have been very bad for a little experience and a little more maturity to have led to a significant improvement.

As for the note on his locker, it seems to me that the real question is not what he did to deserve it, but what is so weak and vulnerable about the order of the veterans that it could be threatened by a 21-year old kid, and needed to be enforced with an anonymous note.