Confused by the Acquisition of Pagan

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.

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.

Trip to Shea: 6/25

Baseball is a sort of slow game and following it diligently is a somewhat meditative process that becomes more rewarding as one’s knowledge increases, and in its final form endows one with a certain reverence for history. However, if one were ever to seriously doubt the American-ness of the sport, it would take only a very brief time at the ballpark to see that baseball is not our national pastime without cause.

The ballpark is like America. To sit in the warm summer air with several more hours of baseball ahead of you is delightful. The smell of the hotdogs and grease is delicious. The green of the field is beautiful. The feeling of unity, of shared hopes and fears with the teaming mass of fans is wonderful. There is something whimsical and mechanical about the grounds crews, like the figures on an elaborate coo coo clock. The seats all face inwards, towards one central project, yet one frequently looses the game to the antics of the fans, and the distractions and exultations to make noise that emanate from the big, neon screens. The seats are arranged in tiers, that are in fact clear demarcations of class, as the tiers correspond directly to changes in price; yet it would be somewhat uncouth (and, indeed, misleading) to form an opinion of one’s fellow fans based on how much they paid for their seats. You can’t spit without hitting someone trying to overcharge you for something that will make you fat.

The following observations are presented in approximately chronological order:

I showed up very early for the game, and paid five dollars for a wad of glossy advertising that happened to contain a score-card and the rosters. The score-keeping process was badly explained, in a poorly written, smarmy piece that uses (of all things) game 6 of the 1986 NLCS as an example. My efforts at keeping the score card ended after the third inning, when I decided that I found keeping it distracting and couldn’t find the symbol for “wandered off the bag and got caught in a run-down like a chump” which is what happened to Valentine in the first.

In many ways the high-point of the evening was watching Reyes and Carlos Gomez warm up before the game started. The energy and excitement of both young players, even as they did something as mundane as stretch out, was visible in the stands.

There were only a handful of players on the field during the national anthem, and they all stood for it, but with differing levels of attention. David Wright looked like he had wandered away from basic training. Paul Lo Duca also looked military but more like an embittered Clint Eastwood character, whose life is the army, because his wife left him, because she realized that his life was the army. Reyes and Gomez were fidgeting, and I think Delgado was talking to the trainer standing next to him out of the side of his mouth.

Lo Duca, perhaps because of his all-star election campaign and perhaps because of his recent ejection and impending suspension, was the only player whose name was regularly used as a chant (Paul—Lo—Duca, clap clap, clap clap), aside from the “ole/Jose” song.

Alcohol at the ballpark is primarily available in the form of domestic beers (Budweiser and Miller) sold in plastic bottles, that are specially designed so that the effects of getting hit with one will be minimal; one of these will set you back $7.50. I didn’t have one. In retrospect, I wish I had, if only so I could have gotten a first hand-look at the process by which they were distributed: I saw bottles in the hands of two men sitting several rows in front of me, who looked and acted very much underage—I would have imagined, however, that the carding process would be rigorous. Perhaps they had really good fakes? Back in the day, I would never have tested my fake ID in a place as well-lighted, organized and corporate as a ballpark.

Conversely, I never saw the four young men sitting in front of me with beer-bottles, but from overhearing their conversations I gathered the impression that they had been drinking. They liked to sing along with the jumbotrons, and one of them made a comment about how a sound clip of them slurring the words to “Enter the Sandman” should be put in an advertisement against teenage drinking; the fact that the guy thought that they would make “a million dollars” on that advertisement could probably be included in the commercial as well.

The primary interest of these four young fans was Billy Wagner, and they salivated whenever they posted his pitch speeds. On this night that made sense, as Wagner worked a scoreless ninth and tenth. Personally, I felt like Wags owed me that, since the last time I went to the park Reyes hit for the cycle and Wagner blew the save.

Prior to a Delgado at bat late in the games, they blasted the song “Mr. Roboto” and flashed the words “MISTER DELGADO” on the screen, along with clips of him doing impressive things. What the hell?

The picture of Keith Hernandez advertising “Just for Men” hair color that they show whenever a new pitcher is brought on (“stay in the game with Just for Men”) is one of the most atrocious pictorial representations of any human being ever. It makes him look like a combination of a used car salsmen and a terrifying, aging lounge-lizard-- which would, I guess, be a men’s hair-dye salesman.

Shawn Greene won the game with a walk-off homerun in the eleventh. The Mets piled onto the field behind home-plate and I exchanged high-fives with the four Wagner fans in front of me. The jubilation of the moment rendered irrelevant all the tawdry commercialism surrounding the ball-park. The yells of fans as we exited the stadium were louder, more vibrant, more real, than five dollar score cards and seven dollar beer.

apology

This should probably be my lesson to get out of the crystal-ball racket, and I can’t really shake the feeling that by making announcements I managed to damage the karma of the team. But, while looking over the highlights once I got home, it occurred to me that there might have been a few things other than karma at work.
First off, I don’t think Shawn Greene has any damn business playing behind Oliver Perez. Not very long after Moises Alou got injured, Perez took a one-hit shut-out into the ninth inning. The out fielders behind him were Carlos Beltran, Endy Chavez and Carlos Gomez. All three are centerfielders by vocation, all three are defensively excellent, all have good speed. Watching that game I couldn’t shake the feeling that, had Alou and Greene been playing instead of Gomez and Chavez, Perez’ outing would have been far less impressive. Against Perez, hitters hit a lot of balls into the outfield, and how often they get caught and how long it takes them to make their way back into the infield, can easily be the difference between success and failure in an Oliver Perez outing. The first run against Perez was a walk that was driven in by a triple from a first baseman who had hit six previously in his career, and stolen all of three bases. I have this weird feeling that, had the ball been run down by someone who didn’t have a broken bone in their foot, the batter would not have reached third base and the runner might not have scored; if the ball had been fielded by someone with Gomez’ speed and Gomez’ arm (someone such as Carlos Gomez), they might have had a play at second.
So, yeah, "Nigel" it was actually all about Endy: they miss his defense as much as they miss Alou's bat.
In the end, though, it was the walks that did Perez in, so I guess there is also a lesson about the in-game web-surfing habits of my favorite south-paw from south of the border: Perez obviously does not keep up with this blog, if he did, he might have known to stop walking people.

Thoughts on Leadership, Aging

During last night’s broadcast, Ron Darling had one of those moments, which I assume all ex-pro sports casters are contractually obliged to have, where he blithely jumped from calling into question the current Mets team’s intensity and conduct (there had apparently been laughter coming from the showers while Glavine was giving his post-mortem comments on Sunday’s game), to claiming that today the entire game is played with a lack of toughens and respect—he referred to the modern ball player as “sensitive” and whined about them listening to their i-pods on the team flight, instead of commiserating with pitchers and figuring out how to win. To back this all up he told a story about how upset he was after a tough loss for the Mets in the ‘80s, where he would have won if anyone had gotten a hit; but after the game the position players were apparently more interested in college football than why they screwed over Ron Darling. Of course this actually makes the opposite point, and one would not be surprised to learn that throughout the game’s history there have been things somewhat more compelling to certain players than their immediate failings—and I seem to recall that in the ‘80s the Mets were pretty good, despite the preference of football over Darling.

I’m not generally tempted to listen to people who are being crotchety, but there are actually some points here. It’s hard to tell if the Mets are just on a run of awful luck, or if they are losing because they are taking things for granted and not “doing the little things that it takes to win.” Well, I guess it is actually pretty clearly a combination of the two, but there is no way of knowing which is the principal factor. Darling and Gary Cohen seemed to think that the answer is for one of the veterans to step up and get the clubhouse in order—the only candidate that they discussed at any length was Paul Lo Duca, although Julio Franco’s name was also mentioned.

For my money, I wish it could be Carlos Delgado—although there are a myriad of reasons why it probably can’t. The principal of these is that, perhaps more than any other single factor, the Met’s current problems are a result of just how god awful Delgado has been this year. Lately, Delgado has been hitting approximately nothing with runners in scoring position, and while he has been hitting more home runs, they have generally come without runners on base. Then there is the feeling that things have never been exactly right between Delgado and the team brass: they tried to recruit him as a free agent in 2005, but he found their efforts to woo him patronizing and offensive and signed with the Marlins instead; when they traded for him before 2006, everything was supposed to be resolved, but it is still hard to know how well he gets along, as a proud and clearly intelligent Latino, on a team owned by the Wilpons and in a clubhouse that seems to be dominated by venerable old white guys like Tom Glavine and Billy Wagner.

Beyond these issues, I think that Delgado is the perfect person to lead the team—in previous years he has been the definition of clutch and he clearly commands the respect of most people who know him. There are tons of things that point to the idea that Delgado is a man of uncommon character-- from his charitable efforts to, quite frankly, his refusal to sign with a team that he felt treated him condescendingly. Perhaps most telling was the fact that, during last year’s post season, Lo Duca published a comment about how Delgado was a great man both on and off the field—which I found significant because Delgado’s politics are openly left of center and Lo Duca seems to spend all the time that he can spare from the ponies signing baseball caps for soldiers and policemen. I wish that it were Delgado’s team…but if he just felt like getting a couple of RBIs I’d take that too.

On a kind of an opposite note: Willie Randolph needs to buy a water-board and a cattle-prod, and go to work on Carlos Gomez if he ever even thinks about hitting a home run again. What’s the point of being faster than Jose Reyes if you hit the ball out of the park? There isn’t one.

Oh, and condolences to Jose Reyes: yesterday was his birthday. I’m about two months younger than the star shortstop, and I’m already shaking in fear at the mere idea of being twenty-four… and it’s not like people start questioning your fitness for library work when you turn thirty-five.

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.