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

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.

Suggestion for Willie Randolph:

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

Mets vs. Phillies

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.

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.

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.

"Sam from Queens"

I started a post about Carlos Delgado and politics, but I think that the last post was pretty good, so I’m just gonna lay some “Sam from Queens” type thoughts (uninformed, yet adamant, opinions on how the club should be run) on you, just so no one develops too high of a standard. Here goes:

The HELL David Wright should bat second. Probably, Willie Randolph had better things to do in the off-season (family or some crap), so he can be forgiven for not having gone to Mets.com on a regular basis to see if there were any trade rumors to take his mind off of the deadening madness that is life- however, if he had, he would have been regularly reminded that Paul Lo Duca led the team in batting average (Pedro Feliciano led it in ERA). The main thing about the Mets number 2 hitter is not so much their production, as how good a job they do of giving Jose Reyes a chance to steal- everyone knows this. David Wright is an RBI guy who can hit for power; Lo Duca is a contact hitter, generally one of the best in the game, who rarely strikes out. Part of why Lo Duca excelled last season was his patience at the plate, his willingness to take pitches, to go to 0-2, in order to give Reyes as many opportunities to swipe a bag as possible. Essentially, this involves balancing TWO tasks at the same time (hitting the ball and looking after Reyes) - this is not something that I imagine Wright being capable off. I see Wright as a simple man, with simple tastes, whose brain has about enough room for one concept at any given moment- when that concept is “hit the ball hard” things seem to work out. Last season Lo Duca was able to successfully juggle a gambling problem, a messy divorce, and hit .318. A lot of the criticism about Lo Duca is that he is not fast enough to be an ideal number 2 hitter, and this is clearly true. However, given the power behind him in the line-up (Beltran, Delgado, and Wright) speed is less important for him than it would be for other number 2 hitters. Honestly, if they are that keen on having someone faster than Lo Duca hit second, I think the clear choice is actually Beltran. Beltran can hit for average and has good speed, and, I think most importantly, probably has the maturity and concentration to bat with Reyes on first, at least more successfully than David Wright. If you did that, you could put Wright in the number 3 spot, and bury Lo Duca (and his team leading batting average) somewhere in the dole drums at the end of the line-up with Green, Valentine and the pitcher.

Oh, and here’s a solution for the outfield problem: take Shawn Green out back of the stadium and shoot him. Promote Lastings Mildedge to take his job. Use Chavez extremely liberally, either in place of Alou, or Mildege, or as a late defensive replacement. Any slack could be taken up by the couple of back up outfielders that they are carrying anyway.

Willie Randolph: Thanks Sam, those are both extremely valid suggestions, really I don’t know why we don’t listen to the advice of embittered sub-sub-librarians more often.