Warning Track Power

More Shea demolition photos...

2008-10-14T18:27:00.001-04:00

...via Matt Cerrone and Metsblog:

http://www.metsblog.com/2008/10/14/view-my-photos-of-demolition-from-shea/

Still so weird.

Sad face

2008-10-10T01:33:00.007-04:00

Just thought I should put something new up here, you know, in light of recent developments. Plus the Phillies won Game 1 of the NLCS tonight. Christ.

Off-season commentary is forthcoming. In the meantime, feel free to peruse the following links:

-Shameless plug: Me on the Mets getting bounced (maybe you've already read it)

-For video and pictures of the dismantling of Shea, go to:

http://video.wnbc.com/player/?id=720161#videoid=720161
http://sheagoodbye.blogspot.com

It's pretty jarring, actually, to look at these pictures. I haven't spent nearly as much time at Shea as some Mets fans, but it's still where I saw my first baseball game, and it's still where I've seen the majority of baseball games I've attended over the years. I was never actually there for any of the great Mets moments in my lifetime, but it's still the location of some pretty good times connected with the Mets, and I still called it home. A seat that I probably sat in at some point has probably been taken apart by now, a urinal that I probably used removed. And by the time the Mets play another regular season game, all that will be left of Shea is a spray-painted baseline in the Citi Field parking lot.

As Mets fans, we should all take a moment to appreciate the significance of big Shea's date with the wrecking ball. It might not have been the nicest stadium in the world, but it still means something to all of us. Citi Field is going to be great, if expensive, but in the meantime let's take a look at those pictures, and the others like them that will follow, and reflect on what won't be there next season. Let's think about what it will look like the next time the Mets make the playoffs, when the backdrop for the next chapters in Mets history won't be our familiar longtime home. How weird it's going to be. I think it's especially difficult to imagine because Shea has always fit the Mets so perfectly - it's somewhat inferior, and dirty, and second-rate, but it's blue-collar, hardscrabble, definitely lovable, and it's been through a lot. The Mets basically represent that in a baseball team.

At some point I'll go up with a post about my favorite Shea moments. In the meantime, do yourselves all a favor and take a moment to reflect.

RIP, Big Shea.

(Images courtesy metstradamus.blogspot.com, sheagoodbye.blogspot.com)

A win and they're in (sort of)

2008-09-27T20:48:00.005-04:00

Well, here we go again. Isn't it funny how history repeats itself? (Let's hope not exactly)

Although the Phillies clinched their second consecutive division title today, Johan Santana came up HUGE on three days' rest and the Brewers laid an egg, so we go into tomorrow needing only a win to prolong the season to at least Monday. If the Mets and the Brewers both win tomorrow, the last regular season game at Shea will be a one-game playoff for the wild card, on Monday night. If the Mets win and the Brewers lose, we've got an NLDS date with the Cubbies. If the Brewers win and the Mets lose, we're screwed. And if both teams lose - well that's just downright embarrassing.

The road to this point might have been slightly different, but it's scary how similar this last weekend of the season is so far to last year's. The Mets, trying to save face, playing the Marlins at home, and losing an ugly game on Friday night. Saturday brings an electrifying win - last year for the sheer gravity of the blowout and the brawl, this year for Santana's dramatically affirming performance; affirming, that is, as in Johan being worth every little bit in personnel and money that we paid for him.

Last year the Phillies lost on Saturday and we went into Sunday in the exact same position - a win forces no less than a one-game playoff. This year the battle is for the wild card, who will probably end up being the sacrificial lamb in the Cubs' eventual road to an unfortunate and quirky defeat in the NLCS. Oh well. Stranger things have happened.

But here's hoping that one way or another, the last game of the season, at Shea, against the Marlins, will be different in '08 than it was '07. Hopefully Oliver Perez won't reprise the role of Tom Glavine. If he can generate a quote from Jerry Manuel remotely along the lines of what Manuel said after the game today, we should be in good shape:

"How many did he pitch? How many did he throw?" said Jerry, grinning. "Wow, wow, wow, wow. I think if I had to describe that one, I would say that was gangsta. That was real gangsta."

Gangsta indeed. I don't know about anyone else but I'm pumped for tomorrow. It all comes down to this.

(Image courtesy espn.com)

It's a pennant race

2008-09-26T20:39:00.002-04:00

Carlos Beltran's game-winning hit helped the Mets rebound from Wednesday night

3 games. Tied in the wild card. 1 game back in the division.

Last night's win was electrifying - one of those faith-restoring victories that made me excited for the coming weekend. If the Mets go on to make the playoffs, Ryan Church's game-tying slide in the 8th will be remembered as one of those bizarre plays that alters the course of a season at just the right time. Dude was dead to rights, and he found a way to slip into home plate under Koyie Hill's glove after somehow avoiding the lunging Cubs catcher while tip-toeing around the home plate dirt.

So can we pull it off? At the very least, we're going into a decisive weekend with momentum, as opposed to despair.

And I like that Johan - as opposed to Tom Glavine - will be pitching a potentially decisive last game of the season. Of course, we have to get there first. Fasten your seatbelts.

(Image courtesy newsday.com)

You only get so many chances

2008-09-24T23:19:00.006-04:00

If the Mets go on to miss the playoffs, tonight's game will turn out to be the perfect metaphor for exactly why. You only get so many chances.

I tuned in during the bottom of the seventh inning, with the Mets down 6-5 after Oliver Perez gave a 5-1 lead back to the Cubs. With Jerry Manuel taking a gamble, the light-hitting Ramon Martinez dropped his first hit as a Met into a perfect spot in the right field gap for a leadoff double. Jose Reyes put down an average bunt, but Ronny Cedeno mishandled the throw covering first, and the Mets had runners on first and third with nobody out.

You almost can't even get too worked up about this inning. Daniel Murphy lined out, doubling Jose Reyes off first - unlucky. David Wright's flare to left went a little too far, settling in Alfonso Soriano's glove for the final out. Nothing you can do about supreme misfortune, although I contend Reyes should have been running there, to prevent exactly such a situation.

Mets bullpen holds the Cubs, we go to the eighth inning. Carlos Delgado leads off with a double. Carlos Beltran comes through with a flare into center - this one drops and it looks like Delgado might be able to score, until Luis Aguayo, most likely self-conscious and perpetually casting doubt on himself for all the other terrible decisions he's made in the third base coach's box, makes another one, holding Delgado. Still, the Mets have first and third with nobody out - again.

Ryan Church strikes out. First and third with one out. Ramon Castro comes to the plate - Beltran steals to take out the double play option with the slow-footed Castro up at bat. But Castro ends up grounding out anyway, the runners hold, two outs. Endy Chavez pinch hits for the pitcher's spot and is intentionally walked to bring up Ramon Martinez again. Luckily, Martinez works out a walk, and the Mets don't totally waste the threat. 6-6. Jose Reyes is up with a chance to give the Mets a lead...but grounds out to end the inning. 6-6.

The bullpen holds again in the ninth, giving the Mets another chance to pull it out, and then victory looks certain when Daniel Murphy leads off with a triple. Wright, Delgado, Beltran coming out. On 3-2, with Keith Hernandez insisting that a strike ends the game (in the form of a Wright hit), Wright chases a pitch out of the zone. One out. Delgado and Beltran are walked, but that means the bases are loaded for my man Ryan Church. Church hits a sharp ground ball, but the Cubs get the force at the plate. Two outs. Ramon Castro, looking less-than-confident, swings through strike three to send it into extras.

So pretty much, despite putting a man on third with nobody out in each of the last three innings, the Mets scored a total of one run. On a bases loaded walk. It was like a bad re-enactment of Groundhog Day. And if you've read the recap, you know what happened in extra innings tonight. You only get so many chances, but the Cubs finally took advantage of theirs and put the game away with a three run rally in the top of the tenth. The fans left - I honestly don't blame anyone who did - and the Mets went silently in the bottom half.

As I've written many times in this space, we've grown accustomed this year (since Jerry Manuel took over) to the Mets somehow finding a way to respond to these gut-wrenching, "you can't lose that game" type of losses. But if the Mets couldn't find a way to win this game, they might as well be SOL.

You're only handed a victory on so many silver platters. The Phillies lost - this game would have tied us up in the loss column. The Brewers won, so this was a must-win for the wild card chase, although with the way we've played the Cubs' b-squad this week, if we do win the wild card and have to face them in the NLDS, we're out of the playoffs in three. Mark my words.

The point, though, is that for all the resiliency, for all the excitement and the tenacity this team has shown at times, you've still got to put it away. What happened to the Mets? One month ago, they would have pulled this one out.

This isn't a repeat of last year. No, last year's team was complacent and lazy - that's not what's befallen the '08 Mets. It's something far different - something that cuts beyond Jerry Manuel, beyond Omar Minaya, and falls squarely on the shoulders of everyone in the Mets locker room right now, from Jose Reyes to David Wright. This year's story, if it continues to play out as such, is one of possession and loss. Something within the Mets - calling it fire, or desire, or killer instinct doesn't quite do it justice, but something - something gave them an ability to find wins in difficult places, to play .600 ball over the summer and make themselves relevant. They were tough. Gritty. But that's all gone now. Whatever that something is, they had while they were storming back over the summer, and now they've lost it. When it came time to cash in tonight, this team looked totally afraid and inept. That's something that Jerry Manuel can't change. The bottom line is: if the Mets want to make it to the playoffs this season, this whole team better grow a pair, and fast.

If we fail to make it happen in these next four days, I'll be at a loss for how to respond. How do you even care about upgrading a roster that, despite its shortcomings, was still good enough to make the postseason? Any future move the Mets make, any success they have from April to August, will bear the cross of two consecutive September crap-outs. A new manager won't fix that. Minaya's four-year extension has nothing to do with it. It's something the players have to deal with on their own, exorcise by themselves, the sooner the better. Just ask the Cubbies. Which reminds me: are we really about to have our season ruined by the team that hasn't won the World Series since 1908?!? Lord have mercy.

I'd love to believe, and the Mets have pulled bigger ones out of their you-know-where before, but I just don't see it happening this season. You only get so many chances, and right now, we suck.

(Image courtesy nydailynews.com)

"Preachers Preach"

2008-09-17T13:20:00.003-04:00

That's what Jerry Manuel says, in reference to the team meeting he presided over last night before another unfortunate loss, marking another unfortunate chapter in another September swoon, setting off a round of premature obituaries from the ESPN talking heads, conjuring up doomsday images of another year that looks like it might end up being lost, all due to a late-season inability to beat the Washington Nationals.

“We just touched base on where we are, and try to get back in the direction we were headed, remind them of the good baseball we played and the good baseball we’ll need to play," said Manuel. "Preachers preach, and I just wanted to let them know where I am.”

If there's one thing that's currently tempering my feelings of despair at the thought of another September collapse, it's my hope that Jerry Manuel really is a much better Manager than Willie Randolph. Sure, the Mets have done a total 180 under his leadership this season, but there's one point we've all been making since April: the only thing that can settle us Mets fans at this point is a trip to the playoffs, to make up for what was lost a year ago. Until Manuel gets us there, all of the July and August excitement that got us back into the race is meaningless.

If Manuel is indeed a preacher, with the capacity to will his team go out and get it done on the field, now is the time to show it. Throughout the summer his calm but actually effective, assertive-when-it-needs-to-be leadership has paid dividends for the Mets. I can't imagine that Manuel hasn't had a certain amount to do with this team overcoming one unfortunate circumstance after another this year, and now it's time for the Mets to snap out of a second straight solemn September and get it together for 12 more games. Then it's a new season.

The bullpen woes are getting awfully frustrating, sure. But the Mets have blown an unprecedented amount of unblowable games this summer, and they were 3 1/2 up until the start of the weekend. As it stands, the visibly flawed and now Fernando Tatis-less New York Mets are one half game out of first place, locked in the tightest of possible pennant races.

This is what September is made for, and this year the Mets aren't frantically looking in the rearview, unable to prevent their car from going off a cliff. This year they actually know what second place looks and feels like. Remember that last season the Phillies didn't take over first place until there were just two games left. This year, there are 12 for the Mets to mount one last turnaround.

I still believe that this year's Mets team is fundamentally different. Consistency is far less important, seemingly, than resiliency. Remember that 1-5 road trip at the beginning of August? They looked pretty bad then too. But this team seems to have an indomitable capacity to look terrible, and then somehow get it back together. The amount of screw-ups that the '08 team has endured and come back from should inspire them to find something within themselves that allows them to endure and prevail in the face of one more. And it's not as if the Phillies aren't also flawed.

The bottom line is that this could still break either way. But I have faith that the Mets can pull if off; this season there shouldn't be any sense of "boredom" because they think they're too good. They know they need to step it up, now. The sense that they'll have to if they want to win another division title seems much more acute than last year, and they also know that one final charge to the post season will scream "this is a new year!" and shut everyone up once and for all. Then we can all relax and enjoy an October baseball schedule that will include only one New York team, not named the Yankees.

So yes, I believe. Ya Gotta. I can only hope the Mets, this year, will justify that faith.

(Image courtesy cbslocal.com)

Nice bounce-back win

2008-08-28T00:41:00.003-04:00

Delgado was 3-4 with 2 jacks and 3 RBIs. What's gotten into this guy? I don't know, but I like it

6-3. And it only took nine. Phew.

(Image courtesy news.yahoo.com)

Not a good game to lose

2008-08-27T01:29:00.009-04:00

It's not like you needed me to tell me that. It's pretty much universally recognized that blowing a seven run lead against your division rival in a late August game with first place on the line is not very advisable.

Shades of 2007 - watch out!!!! Tonight's game was the supreme manifestation of every fear that Mets fans have relative to our blossoming rivalry with the Phillies. This was like the game where we had a ten run lead and Philly almost came back and won. Except this time, they, you know, did end up winning. They're the team that doesn't quit, scores lots of runs, finds ways to gradually erase early seven run leads.

Mets fans have been conditioned to panic. This game sucked, but to characterize it and everything the result supposedly stands for so simply and viscerally would betray many of the facts in this situation. Like how we're (still) 9-5 against the Phils this season. Or how our success since Jerry Manuel took over can widely attributable to the fact that despite their own issues, the Mets themselves have made a habit of responding positively to setbacks - not quitting has been pretty central to this season's turnaround.

Or like how the Phillies have at least as much of a propensity to screw it up in the big spot as we do. Had they not stumbled over the summer, the Phils should have put us away earlier in the season when we couldn't buy back-to-back wins with Willie at the helm.

Get over it already. The Phillies have a bunch of good hitters, so they score a lot of runs. Sometimes, they don't score those runs until they're already down by 7. It happens

That said, it's still impossible to overlook the fact that you just can't blow a 7-run lead on your division rival, in a pennant race, in a game to determine sole possession of first place. Despite all the renewal, it sure feels like the Mets have had a lot of these games this summer. Just think of where we'd be had we held a few more of these leads.

It might be nice to win at least one of our final seven games against Philadelphia this season. Looks like it might once again be pretty important for the Mets to tap into some more of that newfound resiliency. What a long strange trip its been.

The Grateful Dead would be proud

(Image courtesy michpics.wordpress.com)

10 of 11...somehow

2008-08-22T22:08:00.003-04:00

Do you hear that? It's the sound of a rejuvenated Shea crowd, cheering loudly and confident in a tight game that the Mets will find a way to pull it out. That crowd - and the Mets' ability to both excite and win improbably - has always been a hallmark of the Amazins' success, when they've been successful. That's what made it all the more painful to watch the team sleepwalk through a year and a half under from early '07 through the middle of this past June.

Of course, the crowd was never much help. It seemed that over the same period the only time anyone got out of their seats at Shea, or clapped their hands, or said, well, anything, was when the scoreboard or loudspeaker indicated that any of those things were appropriate.

Everyone used the term "malaise" to describe what the Mets seemed mired in through the first couple months of '08, appropriately. The entire aura around the team seemed very lethargic, from their ineffectual manager to the aforementioned crowd. No one was having any fun. People went to games to boo. It was like watching an old married couple that can't really stand each other anymore. Kind of sad.

Not everyone seems to notice these things, and maybe I'm just overreacting, but watching the end of the Braves game the other night, you could tell the fans were really into it. The players feed off that energy; every Met in the dugout was on the top step with their cap turned inside out, and when Omar Infante dropped Carlos Delgado's soft liner to left to score the winning run, the whole stadium went nuts and the Mets all celebrated like they were 12 years old and Jerry Manuel was going to take them out for ice cream after the game. When Delgado put the Mets ahead to ignite a five-run eighth on Tuesday night, it was the same deal.

There's a fundamental difference between a crowd that's on its feet because they're supposed to be, and a crowd that's on its feet because everyone in the stadium is just that stoked. The '07-beginning of '08 crowd would have been cheering for the Mets to pull out that win the other night, but it would have sounded tepid, dispassionate. It's just not the same.

What a difference a few months make. I went to two games within about three weeks of each other, at the end of July and beginning of August, and there seems to be a real positive buzz around Shea these days. It's as if everyone is just glowing at the fact that this season has somehow been rescued from the gates of hell. Carlos Delgado...hitting? Everyone is just so high on success right now.

Often times you appreciate something that much more when it's been taken away. After the Mets raised expectations astronomically in '06, only to fall short and then deliver last year's double downer, we're all just happy that the Mets are playing with passion again. Somehow or another, it's translating into victories, bullpen woes be damned.

Any team is only as strong as its weakest link, and the Mets are no different. How far they end up going this season will correspond directly to the amount they're able to win despite the ongoing issues in the 'pen. One thing that's encouraging, though, about this latest winning stretch, aside from the fact that Mets for once are finally beating up on crappier teams: despite being repeatedly undermined by injuries, a terrible bullpen, and other glaring flaws, they have been relentlessly determined to win. And they have. At a 39-21 clip since Jerry Manuel took over (as of tonight's win), the Mets have been playing like that for the better part of two months now.

Win or lose, that's a team I can always cheer passionately for. Judging by the recent tone of the Shea crowd, I think most Mets fans agree.

(Image courtesy newsday.com)

Mets bullpen blows it again

2008-08-11T20:54:00.002-04:00

I've got to hand it to the Mets for becoming relevant again this season. They've been fun to watch and have taken the season from a pretty deep low point (basically the entire Willie part of the year) to a situation where they're in contention and are likely to at least stay in the mix through September.

It's unlikely the turnaround will turn into a playoff berth, however, if they lose many more games like the one today.

Another rough day for Heilman, and the rest of the 'pen

You just have to win when you hand your bullpen a 5-1 lead. You just have to. Who can we even trust out there to get anyone out? Eddie Kunz?

This Mets team has showed a lot of resiliency since Manuel took over, and they've needed it. Billy Wagner is the most reliable member of the 'pen, and he's got 7 blown saves. Will Billy's forearm get better? I hope so. It makes me uncomfortable to say it, but we need the dippin' Virginian more than anything right now.

As a this year move, getting Huston Street from the A's at the deadline is looking better and better in retrospect. When it comes to building a sustainable franchise, however, it's not really ever a good idea to trade your two top prospects for another team's relief pitcher (even if he is a closer). Nobody wanted to trade Fernando Martinez, (rightfully so I think) so the collective calculus seems pretty much to have been for us to leave it be and see how far the current squad can take us.

Might as well enjoy the ride...

(Image courtesy nydailynews.com)

1-5 road trip

2008-08-03T21:25:00.004-04:00

Well, at least we can all temper some of that excitement, right? Relax a little bit, and remember that the last thing this Mets team is going to do is run away with this thing. Curb your enthusiasm.

Breathe in, breathe out.

All it took for the Mets to lose first place and (potentially) four games in the NL East standings was one 1-5 stinker of a road trip. A sweep at the hands of the also-ran Astros, and all of a sudden there's some gum in the gears.

It's not as if the Mets were going to win every single game for the rest of the season. 10 straight had to end at some point. But then the Mets responded in kind with consecutive series wins in big tests at home. We began using adjectives like "resilient" to describe the team, even batting around words like "mettle" and "guts" when talking about our players.

I'm hoping these last six games were an isolated incident, and that it just didn't go well on this road trip. Looking back, you can tell it might not have gone so well when you figure that the Mets in the last week managed to lose individual games started by Johan Santana, Mike Pelfrey, and Oliver Perez, who had all been brilliant lately. Pelfrey lost for the first time in nine starts. After pitching to a 1.38 ERA in the month of July, Perez had a rough, though not horrible day today (4 ER in 6 IP). The bullpen wasted another strong effort from Johan Santana, who once again seems to have been removed from a game too early (with one out in the 7th, and a 4-1 lead on just 103 pitches). Did I mention that John Maine got hurt?

It's that bullpen that seems like the biggest ongoing cause for concern. Duaner Sanchez's fastball is topping out at 86 MPH. Aaron Heilman has been pitching better, but he's been exposed time and time again and you can't rely too heavily on the guy. Billy Wagner's arm hurts, and when he is in there, he's turning into a slightly more lovable version of Armando Benitez. The other guys are going to have their hiccups, and they picked an unfortunate time to experience them together. Hopefully Eddie Kunz can be an effective reinforcement, because there wasn't a whole lot out there at the deadline for anything other than Omar Minaya's firstborn child.

Look, if one thing has been made clear over and over again this season, it's that these Mets aren't that good. They've proven they can compete for the division, but we also now know that in the post-Willie Randolph era the momentum halting 1-5 road trip is still a part of the team's repertoire. Jerry Manuel has proven himself to be a much better manager; that doesn't mean that the Mets don't have some issues which go beyond the guy leading them.

What this road trip has done is turned the Mets' upcoming home stand into another test. It will either get worse, and the Mets will go 2-4 or lose comparably to the Padres and Marlins, or the Mets will again display some of that newfound resilience and regain their footing. One thing's for sure and that's that Chris Carlin wasn't kidding on WFAN last Friday when he called this the "don't screw around portion" of the Mets schedule. The hardest team we play before a quick two-game series in Philly beginning on August 26 is the aforementioned Marlins, who we'll see this weekend.

Another thing's for sure and that's there is more than enough room in October for a flawed Mets team coming out of the NL East. If this remains a close race, anything can and will happen. There are going to be some peaks and valleys in the season, and with the Mets competing against other teams that aren't that good either, this road trip won't look as bad if the Mets can just prevent it from getting out of control. We know that that won't necessarily be easy, but we've also been given reason to believe that it can happen.

In the end, what are the Mets going to do? At this point, anyone's guess is as good as mine.

(Image courtesy nypost.com)

Mets skip trade deadline rager

2008-07-31T20:48:00.004-04:00

If you didn't believe the Marlins would still be a threat with just a third of the season to go, you've officially been put on notice.

And that was before the Fish almost landed Manny Ramirez.

The Marlins handed the Mets their first series loss in over a month yesterday; the first for Mike Pelfrey since before Memorial Day. The Mets got out of Miami with a solid win on Tuesday night, but all in all you've got to be a little bit concerned about the Marlins. The team leads the league in come from behind wins for a reason. They fight hard, even if they play sloppy, NBA Jam baseball (see Dan Uggla) in a football stadium.

Not that the Mets didn't play hard in losing 2 of 3. Jerry's still got them playing inspired, tenacious baseball. Ultimately they've got some obvious shortcomings, and they can't be expected to win every game or every series. Mike Pelfrey's going to have a bad start. It happens. Let's just hope the bullpen gets it together and Ryan Church makes it back soon.

It's a new and nice thing for me to feel confidence in the Mets. I actually thought they were going to win last night. While they may not win the division in the end, I still think they will. When it comes to an important game, or responding from a tough loss, I have a newfound faith that the Mets will get it done. As I mentioned in my last post, it's interesting that resiliency has become a sort of hallmark for a team that was disturbingly soft just a little bit earlier in the season.

We could have used some reinforcements at the deadline, but with nothing available for anything less than Jon Niese or Fernando Martinez, sometimes no news is good news.

****

Still, this was one of the more active trading seasons in recent memory. The Mets got to the party and decided to lay off the keg. Wise.

But with Mark Teixiera, Ivan Rodriguez, Ken Griffey, Jr., Manny Ramirez, Xavier Nady, C.C. Sabathia, Rich Harden, and Jason Bay all trading places in the last month, there were definitely some winners and losers this July. Let's examine.

The big winners:

New York Yankees: Much as it pains me to say it, the Yankees owned the trade deadline this year. Xavier Nady and Damaso Marte for Jose Tabata, a maybe prospect, and several scrubs was a bigger steal than the Mets getting Johan Santana by default. Then they got Pudge Rodriguez for Kyle Farnsworth, and saw Manny Ramirez get traded out of the AL East. Add to that the fact that the Rays got no major reinforcements, and the Yankees seem poised to walk away from 2008 having bought out the rest of the league. Once again. It's pretty depressing.

Still, you've got to give Brian Cashman some credit. The Yankees wouldn't have been able to engineer those deals if they weren't able to take on limitless contractual obligations, but still: he got three key parts for peanuts.

Chicago Cubs: Already in good shape, they added Rich Harden. If he can stay healthy, they'll be in as good shape as ever to break their now-100 year curse.

Milwaukee Brewers: Added C.C. Sabathia. The downside? They added C.C. Sabathia. That was a "this year" type of move, and if they can't pass the Cubs or make a playoff run as the wild card, they'd better be able to sign him. As we well know by know, the prospects in those trades often aren't insignificant.

Los Angeles Dodgers: Just one game out of first in a crappy division, now they've got Manny Ramirez. They gave up some talent, but no Clayton Kershaw, and nothing from their big three of Andre Ethier, Matt Kemp, and James Loney. And they kept the Marlins from making a deal for Manny. Thanks, Ned Coletti!

Manny's going to the beach...not the one in Florida, thankfully

Los Angeles Angels: ...of Anaheim. They were already the best team in baseball, and they added Mark Teixiera. They'll probably resign him. LAA of A has really flown under the radar this decade. They've been good just about every year, won a title, and they've got a good chance this year to win another.

The losers:

Boston Red Sox: Get Jason Bay for Manny Ramirez AND two prospects. If that doesn't sound fair, it's because it's not. The Sox basically paid to get rid of Manny. It's understandable that they wanted him out of town, but I have to question the approach here.

Jason Bay is no Manny Ramirez. Without Manny, and with the Yankees' reinforcements, the Sox basically have the third-best chance at this point to win the AL East. They still could squeak into the playoffs and make some noise, particularly with their pitching, but all in all the outlook for the Sox isn't so good right now.

If you're going to give yourself less of a chance because you want your disgruntled superstar out of town that badly, you might as well at least trade him for prospects in a forward-looking move. Instead, the Red Sox gave up two more of their own prospects and overpaid - dramatically - for Jason Bay. They're going to regret that.

Pittsburgh Pirates: Made out pretty well in the Bay-Ramirez deal, netting two prospects apiece from the Sox and Dodgers, but still got a pretty weak return when you consider the fact that they just traded two of their starting outfielders and one of the better lefty relievers in the game. There's a reason they haven't had a winning season since the early 90s.

Some other trade deadline notes...

The Reds and White Sox also made a pretty big deal involving Junior Griffey, but I don't really know as much about the players being exchanged there. That deal gives the ChiSox a pretty good chance to hold onto the AL Central, while the Reds make a deal they had to make and get a couple of young guys to aid in their rebuilding effort. Both winners.

Watch out for the Indians in the next couple of years. This year is a real disappointment for Cleveland, but they sold high on another superstar (Sabathia), just like they sold high when their luck ran out in the early 2000s. They've got a strong young nucleus, and stand to have some money now to bring in some lower-profile reinforcements. I say they're poised to make another comeback sometime soon.

****

With exactly a third of the 2008 regular season to play, the Mets head to Ten-run Field in Houston tomorrow night for Pedro's return (how many times have we said those words in his short Met career). With 54 games left, the Mets currently sit 1 game from first place, with the Marlins knocking on the door just 1 more game back in third. The Braves are 9 out, just traded Teixiera, and are unlikely to make any noise, but you can never be too complacent with the team from Atlanta, especially as a Mets fan. It's going to be a wild ride. Stay tuned.

(Images courtesy nydailynews.com, photobucket.com)

Unconventional Wisdom

2008-07-26T12:42:00.004-04:00

The winning streak ended last Saturday. The Mets lost a devastating game to Philadelphia last Tuesday night. Ryan Church is still on the DL, and yet the Mets have still won 14 of 17 and continue to play exceptionally well.

A previous post in this space might have enumerated the Mets' myriad deficiencies, starting with Mike Pelfrey's lack of guile, Oliver Perez's lack of focus, Johan Santana's lack of aceness, the Mets' lack of two starting outfielders, and the downward arc of Carlos Delgado's career. It wasn't looking too good for the Mets this season, regardless of who was managing our team.

I was largely in alignment with the mainstream, but the Mets' recent surge has made many people look foolish, myself included. Pelfrey is 7-0 in his last nine starts. Johan and Perez just fired gems against the Phillies. Carlos Delgado has four home runs in his last nine games while hitting at a nearly .400 clip in month of July. And the Mets have won 14 of 17 without those two starting outfielders. Sometimes, you'd rather be wrong.

I was at Shea on Tuesday night, for my first game in 2008. I have tickets to the August 8 tilt against the Marlins, but I figured I'd try to go support the team for at least one of the games in the all-important Phillies set and get an extra game in before the big ballpark is ushered out and going to Mets games becomes a triple digit affair in the money department.

The atmosphere was electric. The Mets and Phils, tied for first place. Santana pitching. A full house on hand. Insults and peanuts, thrown in the direction of every Phillies fan in attendance over the age of 18 (you've got to draw the line somewhere).

Two home runs (one by Delgado) and eight strong Santana innings later, and the Mets have a 5-2 lead going into the ninth. Billy Wagner is unavailable, and Jerry says Santana's done, so it's up to Duaner Sanchez to close the door.

All of a sudden, Sanchez and three other relievers can't get a Phillie out. One six-run ninth later and Phillies win, 8-6. A boisterous ride home on the 7 train, ruined.

This was devastating. The worst loss of the season. A nine inning microcosm of last September. You don't lose that type of game and go on to win a division, I said on the ride home.

But what happened next? Two games and two Mets victories later, and we vault into first for the first time since early April...9-4 for the season, so far, against the Phillies. One game after that, and we're up by two after another Phillies loss, and another sensational performance by Pelfrey.

What we're seeing from the Mets right now is some serious resiliency, the hallmark of any good team. It was only this morning that I was able to fully process the fact that this winning stretch has required the Mets to really bear down on a few occasions. That loss on Tuesday night? No big deal. A blown lead that first night in Cincy last week? We'll put up a four-run ninth. The second game of this remarkable turnaround was the one in Philly where Tatis put us over the top in the 12th after Jayson Werth temporarily ruined Billy Wagner's (and my) afternoon.

It's interesting that Jerry Manuel has gotten the Mets to internalize everything that Willie Randolph ever talked about but could never actually get his team to put into practice. The Mets are fighting, and battling, and finding ways to win games. Manuel's "guys" are playing with the kind of inspiration and loyalty to their manager that Willie could never quite inspire. After Tuesday night, he would have given the media some positive nugget to chew on about battling back in the next two games of the series, but the Mets likely would have found a way to roll over again. That's assuming that if Willie was still around, this last Phillies series would have even been important at all.

And it's somewhat unfair for me to still be ripping on Willie Randolph. It's possible that the Mets' recent success has less to do with Jerry Manuel, per se, and more to do with a team responding to any new face, or the right guys being hot at the right time. Still, it's hard to argue that Jerry has pushed the right buttons. The cerebral Manuel's calm sense of urgency, with a twist, certainly appears to be trickling down throughout this entire Mets team.

Can they keep it up? Everyone on the Mets is stepping it up right now, from Delgado and Pelfrey to Robinson Cancel and Argenis Reyes. Reyes and Wright have rounded into form and are poised to put up numbers as good as anything we've seen from those two. Santana is a second half pitcher, and you have to like what you saw in a big game last Tuesday, even if he didn't end up getting a much-deserved win.

There is a lot of season left, and we don't know if Delgado can continue his pace, or if Pelfrey will keep being dominant, if Ryan Church will come back, if the bullpen will hold, if Carlos Beltran will finally get it going consistently. But I do remember how I felt about the Mets from around this time last year until about a month ago, and I like this a lot more. Regardless of what happens between now and when the leaves change, the Mets have turned their season around, and it's finally fun to watch again.

(Image courtesy nydailynews.com)

Nine wins

2008-07-15T17:41:00.003-04:00

Does there have to be an all-star break?

(Image courtesy www.newsday.com)

Assessing Jerry Manuel

2008-07-08T22:51:00.011-04:00

If the Mets fail to make the playoffs this season, it won't be because of their manager. That bears repeating, because for most Mets fans that would have been an entirely different statement just a few short weeks ago.

With tonight's win, the Mets have improved to just 13-10 since Jerry Manuel took over the team. On paper, that doesn't look that much better than the .500 ball they've been playing for close to 14 months now. In the Mets' recent 12 game stretch of three consecutive important four-game series, they began by splitting the first two (4-4) and only finished 7-5 because they took three of four in Philadelphia. Last night's win in Philly and the game tonight against San Francisco are all that currently separates the Mets from .500.

There's a lot about the Mets right now that doesn't look a whole lot different. Billy Wagner can still blow a save against the Phillies, and Aaron Heilman can still lose a game to the Cardinals. Ryan Church is still out with a concussion. Moises Alou should still retire. The Mets still beat the living daylights out of the Yankees in game one of that two stadium doubleheader, only to lose the nightcap to Sidney Ponson.

But while I might a month ago have attributed inconsistent play and any team shortcomings to a failure in managerial leadership, the difference right now is that I've quickly grown re-accustomed to the feeling of confidence in my team's manager, something that's obviously been lacking for quite some time. As most Mets fans, I suspect, will do if the Mets don't go anywhere this season, I'm prepared to chalk any failures up to the fact that this team might just not be that good. If the Mets don't go anywhere this season, it will be because the rest of the offense has had to prop up Carlos Delgado, Luis Castillo, and starting outfield slots in right and left that have been lacking a starting outfielder for significant portions of the season. It will be because Aaron Heilman, 0.64 June ERA and all, will always be unpredictable, and Billy Wagner seems to be far from ironclad when it comes to closing out big games.

These issues weren't Willie Randolph's fault, and they're not Jerry Manuel's fault. So why was Willie blamed for the Mets' collective failures (fairly in my opinion) while Manuel seems to be enjoying our (my, at least) affection and confidence?

There will almost always be a honeymoon period with any new manager, especially when they replace someone who became as deeply unpopular as Willie Randolph. And part of the initial satisfaction with Manuel seems to have come from the fact that he differs from Willie when it comes to a few key things that seem to have annoyed everyone most about Randolph. Still, Jerry Manuel has already endeared himself to Mets fans in a way that I think was always elusive for Willie Randolph.

Manuel is also a calming influence guy, but he's already been ejected three times and he doesn't find arguing with umpires to be pointless. He seems to place more value on conspicuous action, when necessary, to protect players (witness the Carlos Beltran situation with Brian Runge) or team dignity. He believes in setting roles for the bullpen. He talks about the need to play fundamentally sound, but before tonight's game actually got his team together to work on fundamentals, instead of just trusting the players to figure things out for themselves. Manuel seems to be a bit more willing to try new things in order to solve lingering problems. He has the advantage of having done this before (six years in Chicago), but in general he just inspires more confidence as a manager than Willie had been since really the end of last summer.

I just like the way this guy runs the team. At this point, I propose the Mets keep Jerry Manuel, regardless of what happens the rest of the season. Where Willie Randolph led the Mets through intentional dispassion and a Torre-like lack of managerial personality, Jerry Manuel seems to be more of a Met guy, already having established himself as a Gandhi-quoting cerebral type with an edge that comes out when necessary, like during the Beltran vs. Runge situation, the argument last night over the ridiculous Ryan Howard home run call, or the "tongue-in-cheek" comment his first night on the job about knifing Jose Reyes if he acts up again.

Mets fans were leery of Manuel because he came directly from Randolph's right hand. But it's also clear from the early body of Manuel's work and the other coaching changes on the staff that this is a fundamentally different Mets leadership at this point. Manuel may have worked with Willie, but he's his own man with his own ideas, and he's taken the team in his own direction. Mets fans understandably didn't like the idea of another Willie guy taking over for Willie, but the fact remains bench coaches don't play a very assertive role and Mets fans knew hardly anything about Manuel before he was promoted. To a large degree, I think we've all been pleasantly surprised more than anything else.

In replacing Willie, the Mets tapped the easiest resource, an experienced manager out of their own dugout - this seemed less than exciting for those of us who would have preferred a more radical change, and admittedly, Jerry Manuel was not on my short list of favorite candidates to take over the Mets. Regardless of my prior feelings, however, or what happens the rest of this season, I must now admit that the Mets careful, risk-averse solution has for the moment left the Mets with a manager with whose leadership I am at least comfortable, and I think its hard to dispute the fact that the Mets were fortunate to have a guy like Jerry Manuel so readily available.

(Picture courtesy nydailynews.com)

And the sky hasn't even fallen...

2008-06-27T19:59:00.005-04:00

...Not yet, anyway. Carlos Delgado just hit two home runs and drove in nine in this afternoon's double dip opener, the Mets first ever win in any game played as part of an intra-city, two stadium double header.

The second home run stoked the fears of sky-loving citizens everywhere, but it seems like everything's holding up alright.

Game 2 starts in about ten minutes. It's Pedro vs. Sidney Ponson, who I'm told won't be allowed to pitch with his customary jagged bottleneck.

Sidney Ponson everyone!

15 runs sounds good to me. Can it be duplicated? It's high time we fix the broken record.

Mets outslug Yanks in opener (sny.tv)

Images courtesy emptythebench.com, nydailynews.com

Battle of the Manuels

2008-06-17T20:31:00.013-04:00

If the Mets somehow come roaring back this season to make the NL East race interesting, who wins the division may come down to an epic battle of the Manuels.

VS.

It should be CRAZY.

Aside from that, let's run through a few more points regarding today's news.

As mentioned, the Mets managed to screw up a move that should have been seen as a real potential rejuvenator for this team. Now everyone's talking about how little class the Mets and Omar Minaya have, and where most fans have wanted to see Willie go, we all really just feel bad for the guy at this point. In true Mets fashion, we've managed to generate negative vibes from what should have been a positive move. Nice.

So instead of being happy when I heard the news, I just sort of shrugged, and thought first about how our organization really can't seem to do much of anything right. How in god's name do you get your fans to react negatively to a move they all pretty much were calling and chanting in the seats for?

Only the Mets...and you do it by lacking the fortitude to make the move when it would have been bold and ballsy. Instead you cave into the pressure of your city's media, and then send subtle hints in your press conference that you shouldn't be blamed for the way it was done because in the end it was really the media who drove you to do it in the first place. “You guys do your job very well,” said a sarcastic-sounding Minaya to his media gathering (Thanks to metsblog for the quote). Was he hinting at the aforementioned pressure?

Second point, and for this we'll go counter-intuitive for a second. I might submit that maybe this whole debacle is a net-plus, because with the just about universal consensus that the Mets screwed this up, now the pressure is off the new manager and coaching staff, with more attention focused on how badly we screwed up. Yeah? Wishful thinking I guess, but maybe the negative attention on Omar lets Jerry Manuel relax a little bit for his first few games.

My third point is also one I made earlier this morning, and that's that this team has some other issues. It's got some talent, no doubt, but unless Jerry Manuel can wave a magic wand and get Carlos Delgado to hit and Moises Alou to somehow lose 10 years, there are still some issues on this team. I've been beating the Delgado and Alou thing to death, but they're the most glaring ones. In his press conference, Omar made the rare move of taking personal responsibility, noting that he bears some blame for the team he put on the field. Time to get to work, Minaya. The issues with Alou and Delgado may be a little harder to resolve, but the Mets could start getting their roster in gear by not carrying three catchers and promoting another guy from triple-A (Pascucci or Aguila) to fill out the bench and step in occasionally at, you guessed it, first base and left field.

So the Mets have a few more kinks to work out, but the other at least is that with the end of this whole saga, (Omar said unequivocally that Manuel is the manager for the rest of the year) everyone can chill out and focus on baseball again. Now that Willie's gone, Omar can think about how little sense it makes for a major league team to carry three catchers.

And while many fans are unsatisfied with the promotion of Jerry Manuel, I really don't think any of us know that much about the guy. Bench coaches rarely speak to the media; I don't even think I'd ever heard Manuel's voice before I watched some clips from the presser. He's got a smooth voice that Matt Cerrone over at metsblog compared to a radio DJs - I'd say it sounds more like a cross between Barry White and an old black preacher. His post game pressers will be fun to listen to, soothing if nothing else.

But that's neither here nor there. I'm encouraged because although he's not the fiery guy that many of us might have wanted, he's probably the best choice for an in-season replacement. He's here, he knows the team, and he probably is a little bit more outwardly fiery than Willie. He, not Willie, took on the umps forcefully after that blown call on the Delgado home run/foul ball against the Yankees. And regardless of his motivational techniques, he's new and he's bound to have some new ideas. For all the fuss about Willie's demeanor, we forget that a new manager also brings with him a few plans for how to shake up the lineup and the bullpen and get his own winning mix out there.

So don't sleep on Jerry Manuel. There's really not a whole lot to lose at this point - we either turn it around this year, or Manuel's probably gone and we get a new manager next season with a few new players as well.

In the meantime, with the drama over, hopefully we can all remember how much we love our Mets instead of how much we don't like our manager. Send some positive vibes; with Santana on the mound tonight the Mets have a chance to win a second straight series. A new day has dawned and we can all move forward.

Let's go Mets. Now let us go forth and be fruitful.

Images courtesy cnnsi.com, jamd.com

Fired Willie

2008-06-17T07:18:00.003-04:00

As of around 3 am Eastern Daylight Time this morning, Willie Randolph is no longer the manager of the New York Mets.

Two ex-Mets

After a win? Now that hardly seems fair.

A win, no less, in which Aaron Heilman struck out Vladimir Guerrero and Torii Hunter with two men on in the seventh to keep another lost lead from fully slipping away. A day after Robinson Cancel gave Willie a temporary reprieve, even the embattled Heilman couldn't save his erstwhile manager.

I should be happy, right? I'm just not so sure if this even matters. Rick Peterson and Tom Nieto are also gone, although Nieto in this situation is pretty much an extra in Omar Minaya's drama. And it's all even unfolding under the bright lights of Hollywood! Well, Anaheim, but Arte Moreno's not counting, so why should you?

But I'll refer back to the point I made yesterday: this Mets team has a few more problems than anything Willie's done. If Omar Minaya's got any guts he'll release Carlos Delgado and Moises Alou tomorrow, and follow through on his four years old pledge to make the Mets younger, faster, and more sustainable. I don't know, however. His bungling of the Willie situation would lead me to believe Delgado and Alou aren't going anywhere anytime soon.

Did it just occur to Omar last night that Willie deserved to go? Not last October 1, or at any time in the last three weeks? Was Omar waiting for the right moment? If he was, I dare say that it's not right to fly the manager of a New York team out to California to tell him he's lost his job, after his team wins. If Willie was going to go, he should have gone before the Rangers' series, before game 2 yesterday, or after the next Mets' loss. Or at any time in last three weeks/8 months. The Mets really screwed this up, and despite calling repeatedly for his head this season, I actually feel bad for Willie Randolph.

On the bright side, we can write Rick Peterson's obituary as Mets' pitching coach. He catches a lot of flak for the Victor Zambrano "10 minutes" claim, but in a cleaning house like the Mets just performed, he had to go too. He's been here too long, and the Mets aren't pitching well enough. Plus the guy's full of it and thinks he knows everything. I'm ready to see what Dan Wharthen can do. As for Tom Nieto: Tommy, it seems we hardly knew ya. Any words of wisdom for Ken Oberkfell?

Jerry Manuel will take over as manager, with Oberkfell (formerly the AAA manager) coaching first and Wharthen (formerly the AAA pitching coach) assuming the same duties at the major league level. Luis Aguayo, the New Orleans team's field coordinator, will step in as Manuel's bench coach.

Jerry, Jerry, Jerry! We'll see what Manuel can do to fix the mess...

Images courtesy nydailynews.com, tshirthell.com

Robinson Cancel saves Willie's skin

2008-06-15T17:40:00.007-04:00

With his first hit in...nine years? As pathetic as the 2008 Mets' season has been, you know things are getting interesting when the third string catcher wins the game with his first hit since Orel Hershiser was pitching for the Amazins'.

Which brings me to my next point: the third string catcher? The Mets' roster management has been so bungled in the past three weeks that its left me with a healthy doubt that anything can change this season with the current hierarchy.

Extending well beyond the status of our beleaguered manager. Two or three weeks ago, whenever it was we got swept by the Braves, I was fairly confident that the firing of Willie Randolph had the singlehanded potential to turn these Mets around and get us on a roll toward the playoffs. A fiery type - Lee Mazzilli perhaps? - could have gotten this thing fully turned around.

Now I'm singing somewhat of a different tune, inspired by Jim Mora. PLAYOFFS?!? Let's hold a lead first. Or replace our injured starting right fielder with someone other than, say, a third string catcher.

Apologies to Robinson Cancel, who makes Ramon Castro look like Kate Moss

This Mets team is deeply flawed. The flaws carve a canyon far deeper than the depth of any of Willie Randolph's ineptitudes. Would I still like to see Randolph fired?

Maybe, but I'm not so sure it would make any difference at this point. Perhaps Willie would do a better job if, say, the Mets had a starting left fielder. Or a real first baseman. Or a bench that included hungry players who have put up numbers in AAA and earned a chance at the major league level. Instead of, you know, Marlon Anderson and his sub-Mendoza line batting average.

Where's Chris Aguila? Hitting over .300 with good power in New Orleans, he was up for a day last week, until Omar Minaya somehow determined that Cancel was a better option. Then there was Abraham Nunez, and Nick Evans, and, heck, Raul Casanova, all promoted over Val Pascucci, the 6 foot 6 first baseman/left fielder in triple-A who's got 10 home runs in just over a month with the Zephyrs.

Nunez had one hit in about three weeks with the AAA club. Raul Casanova, like Cancel, is also another catcher...a waste of space with 25 precious roster spots. Nick Evans came from double-A. Omar Minaya doesn't seem to have the attention span anymore to perform any General Managerial duties other than making a blockbuster trade.

I'll tell you what I can't stand: that the Mets continue to trot out a old first baseman who doesn't look like he gives a crap, despite his .240 average and power numbers in a two year decline. Or that they don't have the balls to release the 42 year-old left fielder who's played all of fifteen games this season due to three different injuries. Or that their pitching coach seems like a better fit at a zen monastery or on a self-help bookshelf than in a major league dugout. Why isn't anyone talking about Rick Peterson (myself included)? The Mets' pitching hasn't exactly been stellar this season.

All I'm saying is that the Mets' travails these past couple of weeks have made it abundantly clear that this whole thing is so much bigger than Willie Randolph. Do the Mets have some quality pieces? Sure. But if the Mets rallying to win 7 of 9 and then going 3-6 in their next three series has taught us anything, it's that this is absolutely not all Willie's fault.

I used to think that in order to save 2008, the Mets would have to man up and fire Willie. Now it seems clear that in order to save 2008, the Mets are going to have to grow a pair and find a way to cut the dead weight. Omar Minaya should dump Delgado, Alou, and Rick Peterson. Then learn that the 23rd, 24th, and 25th men on the roster are just as important as Wright, Reyes, and Beltran, and perhaps give some of those minor leaguers who have earned it a chance when the Mets have a roster vacancy.

The Mets need change, but it's of the more wholesale variety. What they do with Willie Randolph doesn't matter. Several smaller but still significant moves are both more pressing and can easily match firing the manager for shock value. I don't want to root for Carlos Delgado in October, or a pitching staff that's still led by the Mullet, or the Jacket, or whatever you want to call him. Which is convenient, because there's a good chance that with the present orange and blue formula I won't face that dilemma.

In true Mets' fashion, the job status of Willie Randolph is what's being truly mismanaged. I'm thoroughly convinced, though, that if the Mets want to catch a good Phillies team this season (or the two other teams in front of them), they might want to look at some other potential improvements.

Image courtesy bp1.blogger.com

In a weird place

2008-06-08T20:27:00.006-04:00

I'm not sure what to make of the Mets' 4 game sweep at the hands of the cellar dwelling Padres. Which is interesting, because two weeks ago, I might have picketed Shea. Right now, I'm just confused.

I feel bad for not having written anything on Wednesday. I missed a chance to talk about how well the Mets were playing - that's in the past now. Perhaps it was Gary Cohen who jinxed it, when after Wednesday's win he told Matt Yallof on Mets' Post Game Live about how badly the Mets were going to beat up on San Diego this weekend.

You couldn't blame Gary, really. The Mets went into San Diego having won 7 of 9. The Padres entered Thursday night's game with a 24-37 record, and the distinction of being the worst hitting team in the National League. The latter held up over most of the weekend, as the Pads scored just two runs in each of the first three games this weekend. Unfortunately, two is more than one, so by this afternoon's game the former stat had improved by a factor of three.

Fast forward to the eighth inning of today's game, with Duaner Sanchez on the mound, the Mets up 6-4, and two Padres on base. Sanchez powers a 93 mile-an-hour fastball by Scott Hairston for the second out. He bears down well, and seems poised to get out of the inning with Jody Gerut coming up next. The catch? Gerut's a lefty, and Sanchez is a righty, so the first law of over-managing states that Billy Wagner, the lefty, is forced to come in to face Gerut and try to nail down a four out save.

There are libraries of conventional wisdom to vindicate Willie Randolph's decision here. Your closer's ready; bring him in to set up the lefty vs. lefty match-up and end the threat in the 8th.

But it's interesting to note that while Randolph did the conventional thing, Pads skipper Bud Black saw something in Gerut, opted not to pinch-hit, and Gerut came through with an RBI single. 6-5. Tony Clark follows with a three-run homer, to give the Padres an 8-6 lead they wouldn't relinquish. Oh, snap. Sunny San Diego wasn't so sunny this weekend for the Metsies.

I didn't like taking Sanchez out there for the mere reason that he just looked like he was getting out of that inning. And he looked pretty disappointed walking off the mound when he got the hook the moment he struck out Hairston, as if he too was wondering why people act like it's a felony to have a right-handed reliever pitch to a left-handed batter. And for christ's sake, it's not like Jody Gerut is Tony Gwynn.

Willie's known for going with his gut quite frequently, and it often backfires. The gutsy thing to do today would have been to leave Sanchez in to face the lefty, trusting in his capability after a big K to get one more out. Today, Willie went by the book, and it backfired.

But what's more interesting to me is that Willie ultimately chose to go with a barely-warm Wagner instead of a pumped up Sanchez. Especially knowing that Wagner has trouble coming in in the middle of an inning.

In the broadcast, Keith Hernandez said that Willie made the right move. Matt Cerrone agreed - twice - in his post-game remarks on metsblog, as if trying to preempt the all-but-certain anger of his site's readers.

And to be fair, we wouldn't be talking about any of this if the fastball Wagner zipped by Clark the pitch before the home run had been called a strike. It was a strike. The Mets should have been out of that inning. Instead, we're all left only to ponder.

The Mets need to figure it out, and soon. Sanchez should have stayed in. But I can't even fault Willie for anything else these last four games. The Mets aren't playing listlessly anymore; now they're just losing. I really am confused, because for nine beautiful games the Mets were fun to watch and looking solid again. Now, I'm left only to ponder.

30-32, 100 to play. 7 1/2 behind the first place Phillies...ugh. They'll turn it around, right? I mean, right? Time's running out on "it's still early."

I just want my team back, and I'm still waiting.

Pictures courtesy padres.com, mets.com

The NY Times OP-ED Page Does Baseball

2008-06-07T14:56:00.007-04:00

Former Cub, Phillie, Yankee, and Texas Ranger Doug Glanville waxes poetic in today's New York Times about the Cubs' heartbreaking loss in the 2003 NLCS against the Marlins. Glanville was a reserve on that team, but I would recommend his piece as a must-read for anyone else who watched or remembers that series. The Mets were irrelevent at the time, but after a 95 loss campaign I was still focused on what was both a riveting and in the end pretty disappointing post-season. With the Cubs and Red Sox both in 7 game LCS series that year, that's probably the closest we ever came to seeing an epic World Series battle of two cursed organizations; of course, in perhaps the most authentic fashion the Cubs and BoSox both lost that year and we were instead treated to the double downer Marlins and Yankees show.

It's interesting that with both teams (Cubs: 39-23, Red Sox: 38-26) looking pretty good right now, we could be set up for a Cubs/Sox battle in 2008. But of course, the number of cursed organizations in such a potential battle has since fallen to one (twice).

Note the other fans not named Steve Bartman also reaching for the ball

Anyway, check out Glanville's piece. Let's all hold hands and pray for the health of Johan Santana's bruised shoulder, as the Mets try to leave California with a winning record.

The Problem With Being Preordained (New York Times)

Image courtesy generalstupidity.wordpress.com

Perez

2008-06-02T22:09:00.006-04:00

You get the distinct sense that if Oliver Perez can't put it together this year, he probably never will. It's still the bottom of the first inning right now, and Perez has already given up a single, a double, and a home run. Just a little triple and he'll have pitched for the cycle! There's a walk. Oh man, this is SO exciting.

This last week has been promising, don't get me wrong. But if the Mets are going to go anywhere this season, I don't think they'll be able to count on Ollie Perez. Just as I finished that last sentence, Ray Durham pounded a two-run double into the left-center field gap to give the Giants a 4-0 lead. Just as I finished that last sentence, Ryan Horwitz launched an 87 mile-an-hour straight ball into the left field bleachers for the second home run of the inning and a 6-0 San Francisco lead. This is getting old.

In general, I mean. Willie Randolph is out of the dugout and Oliver Perez officially just lasted 1/3 of an inning. That's Tom Glavine game 162 stuff right there...except for the part about Perez not being a Hall of Fame pitcher. But I digress; OP has just been horrible this year. I don't know whether he can't handle expectations, or whether last season really was just a fluke, or whether he really is just a crazy head case, but the exciting, energetic lefty the Mets thought they'd stolen from Pittsburgh has proven to be more of an enigma than anything else.

When you win 15 games one year, hire Scott Boras as your agent, and are entering the walk year of your contract, you have to be pretty special to pitch the way Perez has thus far in '08. Special, in this context, is not a term of endearment. Perhaps it's all part of some elaborate scheme on Perez's part to stay in Queens. He knows the Mets aren't likely to give him a Gil Meche contract. But maybe he doesn't want to pitch anywhere else, so he's doing his best to insure that there's no chance in high heaven he gets a Gil Meche contract, and the Mets will be the only team that wants to sign him.

Next question: is Oliver Perez capable of that kind of cold calculation? I don't think he's very smart. Scott Boras probably is. But I do think that Billy Wagner hit it on the head when he said that trying to talk to Perez about pitching is like talking to a brick wall. Even when Perez pitches well, you kind of get the sense that it's all smoke and mirrors and the slider somehow goes over the plate and it all just finds a way to work out. I certainly don't have any confidence that he'll be able to duplicate his success from start to start; in fact, I've never not been nervous before a Perez outing. Any optimism is always cautious.

Oliver Perez is the pitching equivalent of a really attractive girl with a horrible personality

It just doesn't look like he thinks or cares enough about the science and the head game behind pitching. Where Johan Santana pitches, Oliver Perez throws. And you can't be a consistent and successful major league pitcher by just throwing.

I don't know how much longer the leash is going to be on Perez, but a 15-game winner, however erratic, probably deserves at least a few more starts. The question after that is what the Mets should do if Oliver Perez still can't figure himself out. Send him to the minor leagues? Trade him? Who takes his spot in the rotation? Quite frankly I just hope the kid can realize his immense potential. We've seen it, which is why it's all the more frustrating when he gives up 6 runs in 1/3 of an inning.

****

The Mets did look good on this last homestand. They'll play 7 straight in San Francisco and San Diego, and if this isn't just another flash in the pan they should be able to win some more games here against the NL West's bottom feeders. I can excuse a loss tonight, after the Mets arrived in San Francisco at 4:30 this morning and Perez didn't really do anything to help anyone's cause. In general, I'm trying to hold off on judging the big picture anymore with these Mets, because that's driven me crazy for the last year and the whole thing just kind of keeps repeating itself.

All I want is to see them play well, and maybe provide the added bonus of being fun to watch. The wins usually follow. Two comeback victories in the same week is a phenomena that I'm not used to, and it's really amazing how much it looked like everyone on the Mets just started having a good time in the middle of last week.

****

6-2 in the sixth now. I slotted myself in to watch this entire game, but with a 5:30 wake-up tomorrow morning, it looks like Oliver Perez might have punched my ticket to sleep. It's worth noting that Claudio Vargas pitched magnificently in relief of the lackluster Perez tonight. Somebody wants to stay on the team...

(Image courtesy mikesmets.com)

What would you do?

2008-05-24T12:24:00.004-04:00

Tell me I'm not the only one who remembers that show. I don't even remember the content, so much as the advertisements for it and the "wha- wha- what would you do?!?" theme music. Is that show still on? I wouldn't know. It's probably been replaced by Hannah Montana.

The title, however, is ever relevant to the current state of the Mets. I don't mean to sound like a broken record, but this Mets team has been playing like one for just about a year now, and there truthfully is not a whole lot else to talk about besides the Mets' inconsistency, gutlessness, and what should done about it. Everyone's talking about Willie Randolph, and there's only so many times you can say the same thing in slightly different ways.

And everyone should be talking about Willie Randolph. If we want to get philosophical about this, we can note the many ways that it's not entirely his fault. It would certainly not be fair to blame him entirely for the Mets' ugly level of underachievement.

Omar Minaya flew to Denver last night to reiterate his support for Willie:

"Willie Randolph is our manager," Minaya said when asked if Randolph's job was in imminent danger. "He has my support. He has our ownership's support. I am here to support Willie. I'm here to let him know my support, to encourage him and to let him know we believe he can get this team on track. Willie's totally dedicated to doing that, and I believe he can do that."

Not sure what this gesture on Omar's part is about, but he's giving every public indication that the Mets are going to stick with Willie. Part of what he said later, though, sort of ticked me:

"You'd like to be better than 22-23. I think we have a team that's better than 22-23. That being said, I am one to look at the big season, the big picture. It's about playing 162 games, and the goal is to win at the end of the season. The goal is to get to the playoffs. The goal is to win the division first. You have to look at seasons not in a 20- or 40-game window. On Sunday, we beat a very good Yankee team, and then we went to Atlanta and lost to a very good Atlanta team. As a general manager, I try not to look at things only in the smaller window. I try to look at the bigger window." (Mets.com)

This attitude epitomizes everything that's wrong with the Mets right now. If Omar Minaya is really looking at the big picture, he sees the Mets' 74-79 record since last June 1. I just don't know how after the four game sweep in Atlanta Omar can even get off bringing up the nice Yankee wins last weekend. If we're going to follow that logic, we can point to several of the Mets 74 wins during this period and say we played well, so you can't always look at things in a smaller window. The problem is the always predictable following up of the good games with, say, a four game sweep in Atlanta (or Philadelphia).

Fact is, there's something fundamentally wrong with this Mets' team, most people know it, and it's been that way for quite a while now, longer and longer every day. Omar comes off sounding slightly delusional with the suggestion that we can continue to stay the course and things will naturally straighten themselves out. You'd think he spent some time crafting the Bush Administration's post-war plans for Iraq.

Let's not get too political, but to use another analogy, the theme for these Mets is the same as the one that's propelled a young Illinois Senator to the brink of the Democratic Presidential Nomination. We need change!

Whoever's at fault, it's just not working for the Mets. If the definitition of insanity is indeed doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, then the Mets are absolutely clinical right now. I think June 1, 2007, to June 1, 2008 is a pretty decent sample size, and the results, as I mentioned, have not been pretty for the Metropolitains. Something needs to change, because this team, as presently constituted, is going to ride out this season doing exactly what they've been doing for the last calendar year.

And the Manager, fairly or unfairly, is often the first to go. It's not necessarily about the degree to which Willie deserves to be fired - for the record, however, I do think he's earned it. Most importantly, though, when evaluating the status of Willie Randolph's job, we have to ask whether he's contributing anything legitimately positive to the Mets right now that might help reverse the flow of water into a ship that's clearly sinking.

So there's my question, I suppose, to anyone who thinks the Mets shouldn't fire Willie. What do we gain by keeping him around? How does he help us save 2008? Because as dire as things seem right now, 66% of the season is yet to be played. Mets fans more than anyone else should know right now that the trajectory of an entire season can change in two weeks. There's no reason that such a dramatic turn of events can't happen in the Mets' favor this season if we make the right moves, as we Met fans tend to forget in the current toxic orange and blue climate that we root for a team that came roaring back in '69, '73, '99, and '01 - even if we did ultimately fall short in a couple of those years, all was not lost.

But it's going to take something. For a historically cautious franchise, the only way to save 2008 might be to bite the bullet and make an uncommonly bold move. Because it's painfully clear that there needs to be something significantly different about this Mets team, and soon.

(Images courtesy rugratonline.com, obamamedia.files.wordpress.com)

No Good

2008-05-22T23:22:00.002-04:00

Sometimes, a picture really is worth a thousand words.

(Image: nydailynews.com)

Johan Santana, Mets lose 4-2, swept by Braves in Atlanta (Daily News)
Santana, Mets swept by Braves, fall below .500 (Newsday)
Mets undone by Braves' late rally (Mets.com)

Sunday Night Special

2008-05-19T09:49:00.003-04:00

Maybe I'm in such a good mood on this Monday morning because I had the fortune to be pleasantly surprised last night. Who doesn't like a good surprise?

I'm a naturally optimistic person, but when your favorite baseball team underachieves to a chronic .500 record for the better part of a year, makes you look silly every time you try to figure them out, and constantly loses the Sunday night game after you thought they showed you something on Saturday afternoon, you learn to be cynical. Just a little bit, as Willie Randolph might say.

So I was a little bit surprised last night. And while nothing that the Mets did over the weekend makes a lick of a difference until they can, say, win 8 of their next 10 or something like that, they definitely did look good. They hit in the clutch. Oliver Perez pitched well. They responded to adversity: first "f---ing shocker," then the nonsense in the fourth inning last night.

Everyone loves Derek Jeter and it makes me sick. I mean, it's all a little ridiculous. Like when Carlos Delgado rips a shot down the left field line in the fourth inning last night, where it bounces off the foul pole and richochets into the stands (on the foul side) for a three-run homer. Anyone who has ever umpired a little league game knows that that's still a home run.

Where's his Edge? I'm talking about his car, of course

Mike Reilly, the third base umpire and the only guy on the field with had both a good look and the authority to make a decision on the matter, hesitates for a second and then signals fair ball, home run. Derek Jeter argues. Everyone loves Derek Jeter. Mike Reilly begins to doubt himself becaues Derek Jeter said it wasn't a home run, then lets Bob Davidson, the home plate ump with a decidedly worse view of the play, overrule him, and the ball is called foul.

The replays clearly showed a home run. But we don't have instant replay in baseball: only Derek Jeter, whose word is clearly more valuable than an umpire's initial judgment. Willie Randolph argues a little bit, Jerry Manuel argues a little bit more and gets ejected, but ultimately the home run is nullified, and the Mets are still only up 3-0 instead of 6-0.

So what happens next? Does Chein-Ming Wang find his stuff and manage to strikeout Delgado with the reprieve he's been granted? Will Oliver Perez find a way to blow a 3-0 lead, where things might have been a little bit more secure if he had been given six?

Delgado makes us all feel a little bit better and gives a bit of an f-you to everyone by ripping a single through the right side. Ryan Church scores and the Mets are ahead 4-0.

It looks like things could still take a turn for the worse when Perez immediately gives two of thoes runs back in the bottom of the inning on a Jeter single and a towering home run by Hideki Matsui. Perez is pitching okay, but he looks erratic. What else is new, I guess.

But Perez gets out of the fourth, then puts up three and 2/3 more scoreless frames while the Mets put up seven more runs. Church, who also prevented the Yankees from taking an early lead with a nice sliding catch in right in the second, hits a shot out to center field in the sixth. 9 home runs for Church in the early going, 5-2 Mets. Two innings later, David Wright leads off with a double, scores on a shallow sac fly, and the Mets mount a two-out rally to score five more runs in the 8th and put the game out of reach. Jose Reyes caps it off with a three-run shot, then goes Fred Astaire all over the Yankee Stadium field.

Reyes was in a good mood after hitting a three-run homer in the eighth

So there you have it. We did look good this weekend. But we really can't infer anything more until the Mets come back from Atlanta and Colorado next week. With the help of a double header tomorrow, they'll play four games in Atlanta between Tuesday and Thursday, then go out to Coors Field for the weekend. I'd like to see the Mets win both of these series. Is that too much to ask? In any case, the next week is the difference between this Yankee series being another chapter in the Mets' adventures around the .500 mark, or a potential launch point.

Over the past year, I've learned to temper any expectations with this team, but the weekend showed once again how good they can be.

(Images courtesy orbitcast.com, mets.com)

Statement Game?

2008-05-18T19:37:00.002-04:00

The Mets responded convincingly to clubhouse-gate yesterday afternoon, beating the Yankees 7-4 in the kind of crisp, well-played game we've gotten used to seeing about every other day or so. I mean, seriously. The Mets have now won 21 games. After at least 15 of those games there have been encouraging signs that the Mets are finally prepared to break out of this up-down nonsense.

Johan Santana was also pitching. The Mets have now won seven of Santana's nine starts. That's good: you have to win when your ace pitches. Unfortunately, the fact that that the Mets are 7-2 in Santana starts means they're just 14-17 when Johan's not on the mound. The Mets .500 hovering act is only thrown further into relief by the fact that they can only ever seem to look more-than-mediocre when their best pitcher goes.

Still, yesterday's win did have the air of a statement game. Billy Wagner's "f---ing shocker" comments after Thursday's game created the first real controversy surrounding the 2008 Mets. For all the listless play, part of why the Mets have been painful to watch is because it's all been kind of boring. Win, loss, loss, win; they can't seem to get anything going but the overall narrative hasn't changed much.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is that maybe these Mets needed some real trouble. Because Rocky taught us that its not how hard you hit, but how hard you get hit, and keep moving forward. I've been saying that the Mets need something to happen, something to rally around, and while I'm still not sure if the firing of Willie Randolph will be necessary to achieve this, "f---ing shocker" at least carries with it the potential to wake this team up.

And they did respond in kind yesterday. Along with Santana, who despite giving up three home runs pitched into the 8th inning and handed the ball directly to Billy Wagner, which is always a formula for success. Jose Reyes (2-5, HR) and David Wright (3-5, HR) carried the offense, and the third inning Church to Castillo to Schneider-with-the-foot-block relay was a huge play, after the Yankees had already taken a 2-0 lead and the game showed potentially dangerous signs of getting out of hand really fast. Carlos Delgado even turned on a Joba Chamberlain fastball for a key RBI in the 8th inning.

So, once again, we have some encouraging signs. But the trouble with trying to analyze these Mets is that you just don't know what anything is going to lead to. Was yesterday a turning point? That will depend on what the Mets can do against Chien-Ming Wang tonight, and how Oliver Perez does or does not step up in what I hope the Mets consider to be another very important game.

(Image courtesy cinematicwallpaper.com)

Willie Harris, Met Killer

2008-05-16T09:23:00.003-04:00

Apparently Willie Harris is pretty good at defense. The former Brave and current Nat, who went Endy Chavez over the center field fence at Shea last season and robbed Carlos Delgado of a potential game-winning homer in the rubber game of a big mid-summer series, was at it again yesterday, laying out on the left field line to rob Ryan Church of what would have been likely been a game-tying bloop double. Harris also contributed a leaping catch Wednesday night and a key sacrifice in the eighth inning of yesterday's game to set up the game's only run and help the Nats take three of four from the Mets, who ended up turning in a 3-4 record on a seven game homestand against two of the National League's three last place teams.

Last season's play against Delgado

So here's to you, Willie Harris. It's always the little guys, who come in late in the game for defense and somehow end up screwing you in the end. I miss Joe McEwing.

****

So the Mets waste the best start of Mike Pelfrey's young career, fail to do squat offensively off the Washington Nationals' pitching staff, and lose 1-0. I feel particularly bad for Pelfrey; that's two good starts in a row for big Pelf, and he's got two hard-luck losses to show for it.

In the 8th inning, Jose Reyes tried to go first to third on a bunt, and got thrown out. At least he was hustling - unlike David Wright and Luis Castillo, who dogged it on Wright's fly ball in the third inning and could only many it to first and third, respectively, when Austin Kearns couldn't make the play. There were two outs, so Castillo really should have scored from first, and he probably would have if he had been running hard.

The Mets, after yesterday's debacle, are now 20-19. If we're looking for some silver lining here, starting the season at a .500 clip at least manages to better illuminate this team's shortcomings. We played the exact same way for two-thirds of last season, but the hot start enabled Willie and the rest of the team to sell us that false, "class of the NL" bag of goods. Now, after playing under the same malaise for the first forty games of this season despite the addition of the best pitcher in baseball, there's no escaping the fact that the formerly upstart Mets have become a lazy, stagnant bunch under their ineffectual manager.

The thing is, I don't even know how this happened. I really don't. Willie, quite honestly, did an excellent job with this team in '05, and especially '06. The Mets, in an early warning sign, had a hard time completing sweeps in the beginning of last season, but they still played .600 ball through the end of May. We all knew they were good enough, and how they descended into seemingly inescapable .500 listlessness is as far beyond me as how they managed to blow a 7 game lead with 17 to play after posting a 9-2 record to begin the month of September.

But they are the Mets, and things don't always make sense. They also looked pretty good in those first few games in Florida. I really thought they were back. Think really hard back to the beginning of April. Did you ever think that, six weeks later, the Marlins would be the ones holding a stubborn two game lead in the division?

As the spring ended and the season got off to fast start those first few games, we really thought that Johan Santana had turned the page. But clearly the Mets remain stuck in the mud, wheels spinning but going nowhere, unable to move on to the new day that the acquisition of the stud left-hander was supposed to dawn.

Interviewed on WFAN yesterday morning with Boomer Esiason and Craig Carton (great show, by the way), Gary Cohen was asked, generally, what he thought of Willie Randolph's job security. In a statement that I thought was pretty frank for a broadcaster, particularly Cohen, he responded: "They better start winning some games or no one on this team is safe."

The tide is turning, and in 2008 no one within the Mets' organization has been lulled into last year's false sense of security.

Is there change in the air? The first subway series this weekend, between two underachieving New York teams, should be interesting.

(Image courtesy graphics.nytimes.com)

Up, Down

2008-05-11T09:47:00.002-04:00

At its most basic level, yesterday's doubleheader was a perfect microcosm of the Mets' yearlong toil in mediocrity. They won the first game, lost the second. They went from 71-71 since last June 1 to 72-72. Nothing too exciting there. Just the same old, same old.

Mike Pelfrey (6 IP, 2 ER, 8 H, 3 BB) actually pitched a little bit better in game 2 than Johan Santana (6 IP, 3 ER, 10 H, 1 BB) did in game one. Pelfrey took a loss, Santana got the victory. So it goes sometimes. Life's not fair.

The Mets' offense, which looked inspired in the first game, once again fell flat against a horrible pitcher in the second. The Mets let Bronson Arroyo, who came into the nightcap having given up 50 hits in 32 innings - that's really bad - drop eight frames on them, and were left looking like they couldn't quite figure out Arroyo's 87 mile-an-hour fastball and token curveball. Arroyo, who lowered his ERA to 7.14 with last night's performance, gave up just one run on four hits and struck out nine, turning in an outing that was arguably better than anything we've seen from a Met pitcher so far this year.

The best hope for our season might be to root for another month or so of .500 ball while also - stay with me here - hoping that the Phillies can rip a few off and open up a nice lead in the East. Nothing unovercomeable, just 4 or 5 games. A lead that can be obliterated by a nice hot streak, but that there's no prayer more of the same can possibly erase.

Because that might just further illuminate the sad truth that Willie really doesn't seem to be capable of getting anything more than a win and a loss out of this Mets team. And that's just not acceptable. The only player hitting .300 in a reasonably stacked Mets lineup right now is Ryan Church.

The Wilpons, faced with the ugly prospect of Citi Field boo-birds, will squirm. The pressure will mount for Omar Minaya, faced with the prospect of a sullied reputation despite putting a team on the field that should currently be well on its way to a third consecutive division title, to cut ties with his boy Randolph.

Said Willie after last night's letdown, "I guess we got all our work done in the first game." This isn't going to work for that much longer. It's not working right now.

The Mets will probably win today. Will that mean anything tomorrow?

Unlikely.

(Picture courtesy mlb.com)

Rain Delay

2008-05-09T19:22:00.003-04:00

What's in your iPod?

Pedro Martinez says he likes to keep it romantic.

Ryan Church likes Linkin Park.

Aaron Heilman's into Pearl Jam.

When he's not cursing out Cubs fans, Joe Smith is all about the country music. It's okay, he's from Cincinnati.

I was a little disappointed to find out that David Wright also likes country music. I've just, never seen the appeal. Wright also likes Jay-Z, who I personally think is overrated, though he did also say he likes hip-hop in general. I wonder who else he's into. Touching on another genre, he did drop Frank Sinatra's name, which I thought was pretty sweet.

Jose Reyes, unsurprisingly, says he almost always listens to reggaeton.

Carlos Delgado also likes the reggaeton, and Latin American music in general.

Mike Pelfrey says he doesn't have an iPod.

The Mets and Reds will play tonight, but SNY's Kid's Clubhouse is holding down the fort until the tarp comes off the field at Shea. The iPodless Pelfrey will pitch for the Mets whenever things get going; it's a big start for big Pelf, who's out to rebound from three tough outings and prove that his first two solid starts were no fluke.

It's still raining pretty hard at Shea, but I guess they're pretty committed to getting this game in. But welp, there it is. Looks like we're rained out tonight - the Mets and Reds will go for a day-nighter tomorrow, throwing Johan Santana in the day game and Pelf in the nightcap.

Tomorrow's double dip will represent the first two of seven upcoming games against two last place teams, so here's hoping we can get this stretch off to a good start.

(Image courtesy nytimes.com)

Another Day

2008-05-06T15:01:00.008-04:00

Another failure by the Mets to build any sort of meaningful momentum. Confounded for six innings by Chad Billingsley, who improved to 2-4 on the year last night, the Mets' offense turned in another listless performance against a mediocre pitcher.

A .500 team never fails to play .500 baseball. The Mets are 2-2 in their last four games, 3-3 in their last six, 5-5 in their last ten games, 7-7 in their last fourteen.

You get the feeling that, after winning 15 games last season, if Oliver Perez can't finally put it all together consistently in a contract year then he probably never will.

OP was roughed up again last night

I feel bad for Omar Minaya. I really do. People question whether the Mets have hit their ceiling; sports pundits who are bad at their jobs and Mets fans who don't know what they're talking about suggest that Minaya should be fired along with Willie Randolph if the Mets fail to make the postseason, or don't get it together.

But it's his fault? The guy's made three mistakes since he took over the Mets. Their names are Heath Bell, Henry Owens, and Matt Lindstrom. Two career minor leaguers and a so-so young pitcher on the New York/Triple-A shuttle, all traded away in the '06 off-season in deals that haven't really yielded anything for the Mets. Ben Johnson, acquired in the Bell deal, was, in fact, released yesterday. From AAA.

Since the big moves early in his tenure, in New York's what-have-you-done-for-me-lately environment Omar's only acquired the best pitcher in baseball for an extremely light package of might-miss prospects, built the Mets a solid bench, and brought in Ryan Church and Brian Schneider in a move that, while criticized at the time (I was a critic), so far looks like a winner for the Mets.

Omar Minaya has put a team on the field that should win 95 games. Disagree? The Mets won 96 in 2006 win Tom Glavine at the top of the rotation for most of the year. And Steve Trachsel as the no. 2 starter. In '08, the .500 Mets look like the '05 team without the energy. Braden Looper was our closer that year.

Willie Randolph keeps saying everything's going to be alright. Dude, you're not Bob Marley. Shut up and manage a major league baseball team. Of 2007's dark shadow, Randolph says:

“In spring training we were past that. Obviously the fans are having a tough time moving past that. So we just hope that they eventually get behind this team, because we’re going to make them real proud before the year is over.

“We live in an environment where they want it when they want it. Believe me, my team is really solid and together, how we look at ourselves. I don’t think that we define who we are by the reaction we get. We know mentally where we want to go, who we want to be, and we can’t get there until September. In the meantime, you’re going to go through your ups and downs, your scuttlebutt or whatever it is. I think we understand in this town that’s the way it’s going to be.”

It wasn't "alright" last September, and it's not alright now. For almost a full calendar year the Mets have been a .500 team. For the same amount of time they've played as if nothing will allow them to take a step forward without also taking one back. It's great that our manager is calm and optimistic, but that plus whatever else he's doing is obviously not getting his team to play up to its potential. And what in the lord's name is "scuttlebutt." I'm so sick of this guy.

At the beginning of last season I thought that the circular, Senatorial sentences that Randolph always speaks in were strategic, a coy front while the General rallied his troops in the clubhouse before every game to go out and kick ass. Last September taught us that, truth is, that's the only thing Willie really knows to say. And when some adjustment seems required? Oh we're relaxed, we're gonna be fine, we know what we have to do, we play hard, we play to win, says Willie. Everything's gonna be alright...

The Mets, quite obviously, need to elevate their level of play right now, and Willie Randolph, for nearly a year, hasn't seemed capable of getting them to do that. For every series win against Arizona or Philadelphia there's a decisive loss the next night. The Dodgers have now won 11 of 14 , after last night's victory. Think really hard for a second. Can you even imagine the Mets pulling that off right now? Sad, right?

You can't blame the manager for everything. Steve Phillips really did do a crappy job assembling the Mets teams of the early 2000s, when Bobby Valentine got the ax. But sometimes the blame can't possibly fall any place else, and it's beginning to seem pretty obvious that Willie Randolph's sunshine and lollipops demeanor isn't doing anything for the Mets right now. The Mets remain in need of a jolt, a kick-start, and if the ultimate leader of this team, Willie Randolph, is incapable of providing that, then a change has got to be in order.

I'll give it to Memorial Day. Julio Franco just retired...

(Image courtesy ap.google.com)

I'll be!

2008-05-05T21:01:00.005-04:00

Another team makes a late-inning error against the Mets, sparking a three run ninth and handing the Mets a 5-2 victory.

The Mets take two out of three in the desert from the "class of the National League."

After losing 13-1 to the class of the NL, circa 1991.

If Barry Bonds and vintage Bobby Bonilla combined to hit 13 home runs against the Mets in one game, and the year was indeed 1991, then it might be okay to lose that badly to the Pirates

I love roller coasters!

Which reminds me, Oliver Perez pitches tonight against Chad Billingsley and the Dodgers.

One in the same

(Images courtesy southernledger.com, usatoday.com, nysun.com, dailygalaxy.com)

13-1 (ouch!), Inconsistency, Blogging

2008-05-01T11:54:00.004-04:00

Yeah, the Mets lost 13-1 yesterday. I watched the first inning and a half, left before Oliver Perez's meltdown, went out to a job interview, came back, and the score was 8-0 in the top of the sixth. Before I could watch the Mets hit again, I saw David Wright muff a routine grounder, Angel Pagan misplay two deep fly balls, and Pirates' lead grow to 13-0. Perhaps if I were watching a basketball or football game there still would have been a chance. Baseball? Not so much.

Pagan took a bad route to a ball in the left-center field gap and let it fall; Perez just pitched badly

I'm actually kind of relieved that the Mets lost the way they did yesterday. It was ugly, turn the page. The bullpen didn't blow it, the offense can't really be blamed, it was just a terrible day. And maybe it was one of those wake-up call blowouts, just what the Mets needed to finish a month where, quite frankly, they're lucky that .500 ball has kept them within a game of first place.

So I'm not too concerned about yesterday, in particular. Are the Mets lucky that despite the ongoing inconsistency, the Florida Marlins are still the only thing between them and the top of the NL East? Yes. Do I continue to be disturbed that we're still seeing a lot of the same things that sealed our fate last year? Yes. Will our upcoming road trip to Arizona and LA tell me a lot more about where we're at right now? Absolutely. Micah Owings, Brandon Webb, Dan Haren. We match up okay, with Maine, Pelfrey, and Santana, but if we win two games this weekend I'll still be shocked. The D Backs are 20-8 for a reason.

But I want to touch briefly on something else that's drawn my attention. Metsblog, basically my primary source for everything else going on in the sports blogosphere, had an interesting post last night about a roundtable discussion on Bob Costas' HBO television show, Costas Now.

Here's a video clip of the discussion, if you're interested.

The upshot, essentially, is that Costas hosted a discussion on his TV show about internet media with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Buzz Bissinger, along with the founder of the popular sports blog Deadspin.com, Will Leitch, and Cleveland Browns Wide Receiver Braylon Edwards.

Bissinger was angry, and clearly determined to seize his chance to call out Leitch, as the representative of everything unholy in new media, modern journalism, whatever you want to call it - blogs, basically. Leitch spent the majority of the segment defending himself, Edwards just kind of sat there, and Costas seemed to side with Bissinger.

“I just think that blogs are dedicated to cruelty, they’re dedicated to journalistic dishonesty, they’re dedicated to speed…it is the complete dumbing down of our society,” offered Bissinger. (metsblog)

The animosity goes both ways. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry behind the keyboard thinks they can do a better job than the people with actual press credentials, and the people with credentials (Bissinger, Costas), who have worked hard to establish themselves as journalists, written books, won Pulitzers...those guys feel threatened by decreased newspaper readership and a seismic shift in the way people around the world get their information, and they see blogs and other forms of new media as inferior to the good old days, when if you wanted to be a sports reporter you had to work your way into the press box.

Either blanket opinion totally oversimplifies the meaning of new media - which isn't going anywhere - and perpetuates an acrimonious relationship between some bloggers and credentialed journalists that probably shouldn't exist in the first place.

Sports bloggers like Leitch, or myself for that matter, aren't trying to steal Buzz Bissinger's thunder. We're simply taking advantage of a new tool that allows us to communicate the experience of being a fan, or a sports observer, or whatever. And, despite what Bissinger and Costas might suggest, blogs aren't dedicated to bringing people down.

Says Costas, in the brief segment on Leitch before the roundtable talk, "if you're an athlete, you don't want to end up on Deadspin" - he's referring, here, to Deadspin's propensity to link stories depicting athletes partying; I linked to a Deadspin story last December, when it was reported that John Maine caused a bit of a stir at a New York City nightclub. Bissinger and Costas see this as trash. I don't. I could care less what John Maine does on his spare time, and I think I like him a little bit more when I get to glimpse him as more of a real person.

Deadspin is a fan site, not a news outlet. And as fans, we've always been interested in who are sports heroes are outside of their uniforms. Even if they're not our sports heroes, and just random athletes, there's still a certain curiosity there.

Putting this dispute aside, that's also not the only thing that gets on Deadspin. Deadspin, or even my blog for that matter, certainly most of the other blogs that I link to (save metsblog) are not report-and-recap sites, they're really exercises in creativity, more than anything else. Creativity in communicating a fan's perspective. That's something I would think two esteemed journalists should welcome, certainly not frown upon.

Some bloggers might have visions of journalistic grandeur, but most of us aren't really thinking like that. We just do what we do - we're fans and we write about being fans. We might be a bit more blunt - I called Aaron Heilman a pouty little sissy recently - but there's always a line between what goes through a fan's head and what gets written in the newspaper. Aaron Heilman just had a bad outing if I'm writing for the wire. And most of us, despite a different take on the whole thing, still can write pretty well, thanks.

Still, Bissinger doesn't like the tone of a lot of these blogs. He's referring more to the comments section, I think. If that's his problem, he might want to cruise over to the New York Times' politics page, where updates on recent campaign trail developments certainly attract some harsh rhetoric, if not inappropriate language. It's not just confined to impolitic sports blogs; this is what happens when everyone gets a voice, through the comments' section, or their local town meeting, or whatever. Some people are crazy. They can say whatever they want, but they're crazy. We have free speech in this country. We've been walking this line for 230 years. The internet, really, is just the supreme manifestation of one of our founding principles.

And it's not like credentials are going anywhere. If you want to write for a real news outlet, you still have to know what you're doing - you're just more likely to be posting to a website in addition to having your work printed. "Real" journalists - in sports, politics, the entertainment business, everywhere - use blogs as a more effective way of communicating to a changing audience. A revolutionary tool, to provide up-to-the-minute insights and analysis, thoughts and observations in the middle of a game, a debate, an election night. Check out this one, this one, this one, and this other one as a few examples.

And there still is a line between Mets beat writer John Delcos' blog for the Journal News, and Ted's Fansite. That's not to say that Ted's Fansite is illegitimate; it's just a different mode of communication. The balance is part of the wider internet medium and, ultimately, the future of sports, politics, everything really.

Besides, Buzz Bissinger should watch himself. I haven't read any of his stuff, but I hear he's pretty good. Still, for every blogger using harsh language, there's a guy with credentials who doesn't know his head from his left foot and uses good grammar to still sound like an idiot. Marty Noble was the biggest homer in the world last season until the tide started turning for the Mets; many bloggers pinpointed some of the threatening issues with last year's team long before Noble caught up to the curve.

Bissinger's eruption the other night was clearly the past. He might want to have a few revelations, or the future is sure to keep smacking him in the face.

(Pictures courtesy nytimes.com, signonsandiego.com)

The third inning

2008-04-29T16:26:00.005-04:00

It's the third inning, and the Mets are already down, 2-0. David Wright's at the plate with a man on base. You may recall that in a similar situation the last night, Wright drew a bases loaded walk. Then Carlos Beltran and Ryan Church drew bases loaded walks to put the Mets ahead, 3-1. Unfortunately, Angel Pagan, perhaps gunning for a bases loaded walk of his own, then struck out looking on a 3-2 fastball to end the only real threat the hapless Mets had all night. They went on to lose the game, 6-3.

But that was yesterday and this is today. It's the third inning, and the Mets are down, 2-0. David Wright's at the plate with Endy Chavez on first base. After going 8-11 in Philly last weekend, Wright is 0 for his last 19 and desperately needs a base hit. What does he do? Bang! Base hit through the first base hole into right. The Mets have two runners on base for Carlos Beltran.

You may also remember that Beltran hasn't been hitting the ball too well lately; despite a couple of good games in Washington, his average on the year is still closer to .200 than .250. You're expecting bad things, hoping for good ones. But where did that get you last September, or when Aaron Heilman came on to face Felipe Lopez on Thursday...sorry, I'm getting off track. But you're still not expecting good things. Until...crack! Beltran hits a long drive to center field...

Is it going to go over the fence? Is Mark Kotsay going to catch it? Is this going to somehow turn into a painful double play? I don't know!

The ball falls in on the warning track behind Kotsay. Endy will score to tie the game, Wright's being waved around third. Kotsay gets the ball to the cutoff man, Braves backup shortstop Brent (Brant?) Lillibridge, but he's too small and skinny to possibly come up with a good relay throw so Wright's going to be safe at the plate and the Mets will take the lead, right?

Holy crap, Lillibridge fires a bullet to the plate. Wright slides feet-first, attempting to poke his toe around the glove of Braves catcher Brian McCann. What's the verdict, Blue? Wright's safe! With a fist pump!

Things are going good, real good. The Mets came through in the clutch, with singles and doubles instead of RBI walks and groundouts. The Mets tie the game at 2 in the bottom of the third inning.

But wait! It gets better! Ryan Church is up, and, and, wait for it, BAM! Church knocks a shot right over the first base bag, and it's headed for the right field corner. He doesn't have the best speed, and Francoeur's got a pretty good arm, but it's kicking around back there, and he's going for three...he's safe! Yay! Church comes through! Singles, doubles, triples, the Mets are ahead 3-1!

And then? Uh-oh, it's no fun Delgado, here to ruin everyone's fun. He hits a weak tapper to first base, but Mark Teixera can't throw home because Delgado's in the way, and Church was running on contact so he scores, and all of a sudden the score is 4-1 Mets! Sweet!

No fun Delgado, here to ruin everyone's fun and refuse to give curtain calls. Gosh!

The Mets get just one more chance to score the rest of the game, and don't capitalize. But the damage is done. The Braves get back a run against Heilman in the sixth, but Sanchez and Wagner shut the door and the Mets have a 4-3 victory, their second in the last five games!

****

Not to place too much stock in four runs, but that's exactly the kind of inning we needed. The Met offense had looked so pathetic, with the RBI groundouts and runs scored only on mistakes by our opponents, that I had genuinely forgotten, a little bit, what it felt like to watch the Mets put together a solid attack. And Sunday's win, with the three home runs - two of them by Delgado - who decided to be no fun anyway and not give a curtain call even though he had just hit two homers, got us a series win against the big bad Braves, our third (series win) in four tries against them and the Phillies. And so while I don't doubt this Mets team's ability to be inconsistent, the third inning on Saturday afternoon was refreshing, encouraging, and exactly what I needed to see. Maybe it's a building block...who knows.

Johan (3-2, 3.12) goes for the Mets tonight opposite Ian Snell (2-1, 4.21). If we win three in a row, that's called a winning streak. It has happened before!

(Image courtesy mets.com)

Not cool!

2008-04-27T19:18:00.006-04:00

Anyone reading this blog on Monday morning may be expecting me to say something about the Mets' somewhat redemptive but altogether sort-of hollow series win over the Braves this weekend. Considering the fact that the Mets could well come out of this Braves series and lose 2 of 3 to the Pirates these next few nights, I think I'd rather hold off until I can put two pretty good games in context.

But I'll tell you what I am angry about: SNY is sleeping with the devil. More accurately, the devil across town.

Has anyone else seen the new spots Derek Jeter is doing for Ford? One features about 30 seconds of people across the city of New York finding different ways of complimenting Derek Jeter and affirming that "that guy's got an edge." It's funny, right, because they could just be talking about the Yankee captain's legendary ice-cold nerves in clutch situations (thought not as much in the Yankees' consecutive first round playoff exits the past three years). Or it could be a deodorant commercial, right? Oh man, I was on the edge - no pun - of my seat the first time I saw that ad. What is this guy endorsing? Lending his "edge" to?

But wait, of course! They're all talking about his car! Ford's newest mid-size SUV, the Edge.

How could I be so remiss?

There's another commercial where Jeter plays himself playing it off as a coy sales associate while some Haley Joel Osmond looking little kid can't believe his parents aren't being sold a new family-size automobile by his pro baseball hero. "Jeter" drops several hints as talks up the Edge and its panoramic vista roof, showing off the Air Jordan wristbands under his dress shirt and the cleats he's chosen to wear instead of regular dress shoes. Finally the jig is up when Jeter makes an all-star play to catch a stray pair of Ford Edge keys and flip them into the hands of the perfect family's eager father. The commercial ends with a magnanimous Derek Jeter giving the wise kid an autographed baseball.

I'm sure Jeter is loving the extra millions he's currently earning through his latest media whore-out - he's signed on as the poster boy for Ford, specifically for the Edge SUVs. I hope he likes the free Ford Edge he surely drives to Yankee Stadium every now and again.

But let me be clear: that crap has no place on the METS television network. I understand that Sterling Mets owns only a third of Sportsnet New York, and that it does purport to be the network of New York Sports; unlike YES - the Yankee Entertainment Station, or whatever, the network with its Yankeeography segments, Michael Kay sit-downs, and homer announcers, dishing out propaganda that the Russian political regime would surely admire.

Still, the TV home of the Mets can't run some other ads? And it would be one thing if I only had to see Derek Jeter's face plastered over my team's television network like, once a game. That's not the case though. I'm seeing one of the Jeter ads at least once every break between innings.

I know the money, class, and Yankee image thing appeals to the Wilpons. Always has. But the mere fact that our well-spoken, good-looking young star would rather spend more time working on his swing than his endorsement pitches doesn't make it okay for us to repeatedly run lame ads on our station featuring the arguable face of our crosstown rivals.

Our guy's better than that

Is nothing sacred?

(Photos courtesy carbodydesign.com, davidwrightfoundation.com)

Is anyone surprised?

2008-04-25T11:41:00.007-04:00

They certainly shouldn't be, not when it comes to witnessing another implosion by Aaron Heilman.

This guy might be. Aaron's his guy. He (Heilman) is just in a little funk, he'll snap out of it, start making some good little pitches, get some good little innings under his belt. Give him some time.

And this guy? He bends all the way over to pick up that routine grounder 9 times out of 10. Nothing you can do about that, just buck up and get it back against the Braves this weekend. His average will creep up, he'll get in a nice little groove.

And the Mets, as a whole? They're his guys, too. Big boys, they'll get the hang of it. They play hard night in and night out, for Willie, because they're his guys. We'll all sip a little champagne at our nice little party at the end of this long little season when we win this whole thing.

We're just starting to gel, give it some time.

Fire Willie.

Heilman allows slam as Mets fall to Nationals (Newsday)
AARON BLOWS IT AGAIN (New York Post)

(Pictures courtesy metsarebetterthansex.blogspot.com, metstradamus.blogspot.com, gotnysports.blogspot.com)

Dueling Perspectives

2008-04-23T14:41:00.005-04:00

Pathetic. Lackluster. Frustrating. Profoundly irriating. Just when you think the Mets are getting going, just when you think we're back in gear, just when you think the cobwebs have been fully shaken off, just when you think a new mindset has finally taken over, it's the same old inconsistency. The same old up and down malaise that's been with us for over a year now.

The Mets win 5 in a row, take two of three from Philadelphia in their own building, and only fail to sweep the series when a second-rate shortstop pulls a play from Ozzie Smith's playbook straight out of his ass. Then, as if one tough, hard-fought loss somehow threatens to tear down all that is good and holy in the world, we lose two ugly games to the Cubs at Wrigley, 7 and 8 to 1.

Neither game got blown open until the eighth inning, but in either case it's not like the Mets had a chance anyway. We scored runs on a double play (Monday) and an RBI groundout. In general, we looked like a fresh-out-of-little league prepubescent seventh grader trying to hit high school pitching. Strikeout. Tapper. Pop-up. Soft groundball to short. It seemed like there was no solid contact in this series.

Carlos Delgado

Where does the malaise stop? The Mets don't have to be collapsing to be nothing better than a sorry group of .500 ball-playing underachievers. At a certain point Willie needs to be held accountable.

****

Now wait just a second. It's still early. We've seen some good things. That five-game winning streak was encouraging. We took a couple of tough losses, but how many runs could you have expected us to score off of Zambrano on Monday night, anyway?

The Mets still have to play 88% of their games. We've had some injury problems - when Brian Schneider gets back we can hit Ryan Church in the 2-hole again...the offense was really clicking when he was up there. Pedro'll be back in a couple months. Moises Alou will make our lineup more balanced and our offense more potent. Duaner Sanchez still has to work himself back to full strength; when he does, that's another reliable reliever that Willie can turn to more frequently.

Speaking of Willie, you can't always blame the manager. It's not his fault. He's all ABOUT fundamental baseball, but he can't keep Carlos Delgado from making senseless mental errors in the field. Willie's approach is exactly what this team needs right now. It's a long season, and we all just need to chill. The Mets have too much going for them to not be able to get going.

****

If the Mets do indeed still have 88% of their games to play, this season might kill me. There's nothing more frustrating than watching wasted potential. Wasn't Johan Santana supposed to bring a new attitude to this team? We were confident, right? Ready to go out and get it done on the field...is this team too mentally fragile to handle the slightest bit of adversity?

To borrow another little league analogy, the Mets are the team with all the big kids who can hit home runs and pitch fast but can't get a hold of themselves when they strike out or make an error, or get a bad call from an umpire. I guess the Phillies, in this analogy, would be the team with all the skinny kids who might make some mistakes but never quit and as a result probably end up winning some games (and division titles) that they shouldn't.

The hardest outs to get against the Phillies are the last nine. The Mets, collectively, are like a loud hyper-active puppy who yelps and runs away with its tail between its legs the first time it gets yelled at. No fight. If the Mets are down, they're probably out.

****

But what about Sunday night? They WANTED that game. What are you going to do about Eric Bruntlett, it was a fluke play. If the Mets didn't have any fight, they wouldn't have even come back from that defecit in the first place.

****

They can want the game all they want, they probably wanted to win the division last year, too. But the fact is, if they had it in them they would have found a way to pull it out. That's not even the issue though. I'm not complaining about the Phillies series.

The Mets have two - TWO - five game winning streaks in the last year-plus, now. The bigger issue is the fact that they can't seem to play well, consistently. And this goes back to what I was saying about Willie. That IS his fault. Whether he's just a bad motivator, or his approach is wrong for this team, or he's just not connecting with his players, whatever the case - they can't get anything meaningful going. 2006 FEELS like a long time ago.

When is he under fire?

The Mets should have roared out of the gate this season. Even without Pedro. Clearly something is still hanging over their heads.

****

I wouldn't pay much attention to that. As I mentioned, the Mets do have a few other injury issues, too. And the thing about this year is that where last year the Mets were allowed to strut around arrogantly playing up-and-down, .500 ball for most the summer, this season the fans, the media, the Mets' brass, everyone's on notice. No one's going to let them slide the way everyone did last season. And remember, we're still missing Alou and Pedro.

****

Alou and Pedro, Alou and Pedro. We got those two guys back last summer, too. Did a lot of good, right? I'm talking about the underlying mindset with this team. Whether they're scared, or emotionally fragile...I don't think they're passionless, they definitely want to be doing well.

The point is, Willie's level-headed approach doesn't seem to be working with this team. Someone better light a fire under these guys. Maybe the cloud of 2007 won't disappear until Willie does...

You're right, it is still early. But the jury won't be out for much longer.

****

Give it some time. Johan's pitching tonight.

I'm all torn up inside.

(Photos courtesy completist.wordpress.com, nymag.com)

Leave it

2008-04-22T09:59:00.007-04:00

Aaron Heilman's got to go. I praised him yesterday for his handling of a sticky situation on Saturday, but that was a diamond in what has otherwise been a rough, rough season thus far for Heilman.

The essence of why he'll never be able to be counted on boils down to the fact that he's a pouty little sissy who can't put the team far enough ahead of himself in order to embrace his role as a reliever. Two years after the last chance he had to crack the starting rotation, dude still thinks he should be in the rotation.

But the problem with having Heilman in the bullpen is that if he is indeed a pouty little sissy who, rightfully or wrongfully, cannot embrace his role as a setup man, will he ever be truly reliable out of the bullpen? How can Aaron Heilman excel at a job he isn't fully committed to?

Trace his work as a reliever back to 2005, when the Mets foolishly committed him there in the first place. Heilman was sent to the bullpen because Willie Randolph though Kazuhisa Ishii to be a better bet in the rotation, and he (Heilman) pitched so well that he never left. Heilman finished '05 with a 5-3 record and a 3.17 ERA, but his ERA as a reliever was considerably lower. Despite the bullpen success, Heilman was still going to be given a chance to get back into the rotation to begin the 2006 season.

Heilman was lights out, as a starter, that spring, but that's when Brian Bannister came along as well. Bannister pitched just as well, Heilman was deemed to be more valuable as a reliever, and since then he hasn't left the pen. And while his ERA has held steady in the 3's (3.62 in '06, 3.03 last season), he just hasn't looked quite the same the last two years. He did pitch very well to end the 2006 season, but ever since Yadier Molina he's developed that knack for giving the big home run, or even just the big hit - witness last night, for example.

Jose Reyes made a leadoff error to allow Derrick Lee to reach base, but that was before Heilman hit Aramis Ramirez and gave up a single to Kosuke Fokudome to load the bases with no one out. He nearly worked out of it against the Cubs' 6, 7, and 8 hitters, but that was before Ronny Cedeno, that pesky eighth man, sent a high fastball straight back through the box for a floodgate-opening two-run single.

His heart just isn't in it. As a result, his demeanor on the mound radiates whiney me-first pansy over the 8th inning bulldog he needs to be. He just can't seem to make that critical out pitch, and as a result, hitters are convinced that if they just wait him out and foul a few off they'll get around on something. That's exactly what both Fokudome and Cedeno did last night. And you can blame the Reyes error all you want, but the rest was Heilman's fault. The other thing he consistently does poorly is work with the cards he's dealt. That's like, the essence of a go-to reliever's job.

Willie's got his blinders on, and we know he's going to continue calling on "his guy" in the big spots. He'll stay with him for way too long, just like he stayed with Guillermo Mota for way too long last season. I'm not sure I want to know anything else about the special relationship Willie seems to cultivate with his veterans.

At a certain point, though, the Mets are going to need to figure out what to do about Aaron Heilman. I'm convinced that if the team sees Heilman as an issue they want to address, a good solution is out there. The bullpen probably has enough depth without him, for one - we still need to see a little bit more from Duaner Sanchez. But I'm also betting that he could probably net a decent bullpen arm - the arm, perhaps, of someone who actually wants to pitch in the pen - from a team who might be looking for a guy who's got decent stuff and is still convinced he should be starting.

Whatever the case, the first step is admitting you have a problem.

(Photo courtesy graphics.nytimes.com)

Take it?

2008-04-21T17:34:00.001-04:00

The Mets lost to the Phillies last night, snapping their second five game winning streak since September, 2006. Despite the loss, New York left Citizens Bank Park last night with a series win, a 4-2 advantage, in the early going, in head-t0-head match-ups against Philadelphia, and a 10-7 overall record.

Jose Reyes had a good week

The Mets are 5-1 since last Sunday's wretched loss against the Brewers sent fans' collective psyche to a new low, stoked anxieties about the Mets ability to overcome September, 2007, and renewed calls for Willie Randolph's firing.

So, if you're a Mets fan, do you take it? The Mets lost last night, which we never like to see, but they showed fight. They weren't just blowing off the third game of a three game series after winning the first two; you could tell this was a game they wanted to win. After falling behind 4-0 on two Chase Utley home runs, (even without the homers, Mike Pelfrey did NOT pitch so well last night) the Mets mounted a 4 run rally in the top of the sixth to tie the game. David Wright pumped his fist emphatically after scoring the third of those runs, and the Mets only fell behind again when Pedro Feliz hit a Shea Stadium double out to right for another Citizens Bandbox home run. The Mets rallied again in the ninth, but a would-be game-tying single by Carlos Beltran was turned into a fabulous play by the usually unreliable Eric Bruntlett, who dove to his left to stop the ball and fired a one-hopper to first to retire Beltran and end the game.

Despite the series win, and the encouraging effort last night, David Wright was pissed after the game. Said Wright, "these are the games that can bite you later on. We had a chance to deliver a knockout blow and we didn't. We won a series...great. But we had a chance to make a statement."

I'll certainly take that. The Mets young star and emerging leader is keenly aware of the cavalier attitude that doomed the Mets last season, and doesn't want to let a single game slip, or pass up a single chance to kick an opponent while they're down.

But while I'm happy that David Wright is angry, and that the Mets are bitter about losing last night, I'll take the results of the past week. There's certainly a lot to be encouraged by.

There's Jose Reyes, who was taken aside by Carlos Beltran before last Tuesday night's game and told, simply, to be himself again. For Jose, that bit of veteran advice has him at 12 for his last 28, with two home runs, a rally-igniting triple last night, and a return to the playfulness and dugout dances which, while oft criticized, are a signature part of who Reyes is and how he plays the game and energizes the rest of the Mets. I'll take seeing Jose Reyes perform one of these dances in the Phillies' house after hitting a key home run in the seventh inning Saturday afternoon which ended up providing the Mets' margin of victory.

I'll take seeing Aaron Heilman, who's still having a tough time so far this year, strike out Geoff Jenkins and Jayson Werth in the 8th inning of that same game, with the bases loaded for the Phillies and the Mets clinging to a 4-2 lead. That's a situation where Mets fans have been trained to expect the worst.

I'll take seeing the Mets withstand late Phillie surges in both that game and Friday night's game, where despite getting 7 innings and 10 strikeouts from Johan Santana (I'll take that too), the Mets still needed an insurance run in the ninth to gain some breathing room after the Phillies cut the lead from 5-1 to 5-4 on a Greg Dobbs home run.

I'll take the Mets missing multiple opportunities on Thursday night, but somehow finding a way to win in 14 innings to finish off a sweep of the Nationals. Even if they needed a walk, a wild pitch, a throwing error, and another wild pitch to score Damion Easley with the winning run. The bullpen had to be pretty good (7 innings, squat) to put the Mets in position to win at that stage of the game.

Speaking of the bullpen, for the most part, I'll take it. They've been great in the last six games. I'll take Duaner Sanchez coming back, finally, to bolster and help solidify things. I'll take Sanchez looking good, even in only three innings this past week. I'll take Scott Schoeneweis pitching pretty well so far this year, giving Willie another viable left-handed option in the late innings. I'll take Jorge Sosa continuing to justify Willie's decision to keep him in the bullpen. For the most part, he seems to be best suited for such a role.

Despite D Wright's disappointment at not coming out of Philly with a sweep, the Mets have made something of a statement in the past week, if not to the rest league yet, then certainly to Mets fans, or at least me: they're ready to re-establish themselves as winners, shake off the dust, and rise up.

Thanks, Matisyahu, for the metaphor

Most importantly over their last six, they've won. But the way they held off the Phillies, then made them scratch and claw for even one weekend win in their own building, was particularly encouraging.

Are we back? I don't know, but it's safe to say that 2007's cobwebs did trip us up in our first 12 or so games, especially after we suffered the misfortune in game two of losing Pedro indefinitely. Now Pedro says he's coming back earlier than expected, Moises Alou could return soon, the Mets are playing well, and all that stands between us and first place is the feisty Florida Marlins (yeah, okay Hanley Ramirez).

Have the Mets turned a corner, finally? If so, I'll take it.

(Pictures courtesy mets.com, modiya.nyu.edu)

The week that was

2008-04-17T16:14:00.006-04:00

Whew, I've been slacking. My ongoing goal and charge is to write 3-4 posts each week during the Mets' season, so that I may properly reflect the daily variables of a long baseball season and what it's like to follow any given team day in and day out as a diehard, loyal, and lifelong fan. Particularly one following a team that drives me as crazy on a constant basis as the Mets do. When I'm back in New York and have a chance to watch my usual 3 to 4 games per week over the summer, I'll be able to reflect this even better.

That said, it's been a crazy week. I left New Orleans on Tuesday, turned 20 last Sunday, and attended the 25th annual New Orleans French Quarter Music Festival (high marks - all for free, sponsored by locally brewed Abita beer...more high marks) pretty much all weekend, so basically, I'm making excuses. But it has been difficult. I took the internet access-less Amtrak from New Orleans all the way to Washington, DC, where I sit now, feeling the spring breeze blow through a Foggy Bottom dorm room at the George Washington University.

The other thing about baseball season is that, beyond the day-to-day flow, there's really a marvelously complex feel to it when the games on those individual days stretch out into series, and homestands, and roadtrips, over the course of the weeks and months. Baseball is the only sport that's played nearly every day for six full months, and in that sense I've always seen it as the game that in its professional season most honestly mimics the true pace of life, with the concept of the daily grind continuously developing into something broader and greater.

If I had written in this space every day for the past week, you would have seen me project a positive message in response to last Friday night's win, something along the lines of:

It sure is great that the Mets turned in a solid performance tonight and seem to be ready to build off of their dramatic walk-off win against the Phillies. That's three in a row!

Saturday, I would have lamented Johan Santana's less-than-impressive debut, while probably resorting to some tired version of "can't win 'em all."

On Sunday, I would have likely pulled my hair out before getting a chance to write about the Mets' 9-7 loss, the one where Oliver Perez had one of those meltdowns and helped give back a 6-2 lead. The Met offense also hit into 5 double plays.

Monday, I was all set to write a post called "Willie Watch," or "The Fire Willie Formula," or "Firing Willie," or something of that nature. After Friday night's victory the Mets were lackluster the rest of the weekend, pathetic, punchless, so 2007. The Mets need to turn the page on 2007 and what better way than to...I almost wrote this same post after the home opener, and it continues to be in the reserves. I hope that it's like oil in Alaska and I never need to bust it out.

These roller-coaster emotions, though, are all part of that daily beauty of baseball I was trying to refer to in those first few paragraphs. With the benefit of hindsight, I recognize that the Mets ended this six game stretch where I didn't get to the computer pretty well (4-2 after the sweep tonight of the Nationals). But one does get lost in the game-to-game whirlwind, for good reason sometimes.

So yes, I can put things in perspective a little bit better, having withheld judgment and not taken the time to organize my thoughts until things played out a little bit more. And while I hope my writing more often speaks to the raw daily emotions of being a Mets fan than the detached weekly analyst's perspective, once in a while, maybe the contrast is useful. Just for it to be there, if nothing else.

Mets fans - and by extension, the Mets - are going to need to maintain an attitude this year that continually serves to balance that contrast, between day-to-day and broader perspective. Last year was all about broader view, to the point where we took the regular season for granted and paid for it in the end. This year, we're all about holding the boys accountable, and it's great that everyone is just balls to the wall, every game, to the point that we're willing to let the boo birds fly for ridiculous offenses that under any normal circumstances are generally forgivable, certainly non-booable (like when Carlos Beltran got his for a 3rd inning double-play grounder on Tuesday night). But we fans will have all have died horrible, stomach ulcer-related deaths by late September if we can't ever also chill out and think about the bigger picture. And then we won't even be around to see how any potential pennant races pan out.

As for the Mets, they played great this week. Mike Pelfrey pitches 7 innings for the first time in his adult life? Beautiful. Jose Reyes (after a pep talk from Carlos Beltran) starts to look like he's having fun again (going 8 for 15, over three games, in the process)? Even more beautiful. The aforementioned Beltran hits a clutch homer last night, D Wright carries the offense on Jackie Robinson night, Duaner Sanchez comes back, Nelson Figueroa pitches awesome, again, Joe Smith looks like the baller we all know he is, Carlos Delgado gets a clutch hit...oh mah GOD it all sounds so good! But it's also only three games, and it also happened against the lowly Nationals (no offense, Lastings Milledge). So I'm happy, but once again - dare I say - I have to withhold judgment, at least to a certain degree. The key is consistency, folks. The Mets still have recorded only one 5 game winning streak since September, 2006. And it's the Nationals.

I've got more to say, but I'm not wasting any material right now.

But you know what I didn't realize? We're going back to the Bank this weekend! Citizen's Bank, that is, to play the Phillies. Tomorrow night Johan Santana will face Cole Hamels at 7:05. Oh boy. We'll see how Johan fares in the old bandbox.

But this is exactly what I'm talking about, with the consistency and the still figuring out what to think business. Did the Mets study for this coming test? We shall see.

(Image courtesy www.lightrailnow.org)

In-game blogger, MLB Gameday style

2008-04-10T19:44:00.010-04:00

One problem with the fact that I won't be back in New York for another three weeks is my somewhat-diminished credibility when I talk about the Mets in the early going. I can refer to all the initial indicators for this season and look for any positive or negative signs in the Mets' play in these first few games, but ultimately, I still haven't had the chance to watch a game, and I won't for another couple of weeks. Perhaps if I was going to be gone longer I'd invest in MLB.tv. Nahhhhh.

That said, I'm going to continue passing partially uninformed judgment for as long as I have to - gotta do whatcha gotta do, right? Tonight I'll be picking the rubber game of the Mets/Phillies series up in the top of the fourth inning, in-game blog style. I won't actually be watching a single pitch, but I'll still be able to bring you most of the action while it happens. Sort of, anyway.

MLB Gameday

For those of you who aren't familiar, the free pitch-by-pitch running scoreboard at MLB Gameday can be pretty useful in a pinch. Back in the day, a young burnsie fresh and I used to get on the computers at school and use Gameday to help track opening days and playoff games with funky start times. To the kids: just say you've got to go to the bathroom, and you've got a good ten minutes before the teacher starts to ask where you went and your classmates start making jokes.

It's only gotten more high-tech over the years. Used to be that all you had was a new window in your web browser, slow to refresh and with limited info beyond the line score, who's pitching, who's at the bat, who's on base, and other scoreboard standards...balls, strikes, outs, the whole bit. Now I can check out stuff in real time that I'd be at the mercy of the boys in the SNY truck for if I were watching this game on TV. For example, I can tell you right now that John Maine has throw 53 pitches - 34 strikes - through four innings. Four groundouts and eight flyouts; no K's yet for the Maine event. It also makes up for the lack of visuals by giving a pretty vivid description of what's going on on the field. Who writes this stuff? Do they get paid much?

Right now, John Maine just threw a fastball for a strike to Shane Victorino. That put the count to Victorino at 2-2. Since that happened, Maine threw another ball, before Victorino fouled off two pitches and took another ball for a walk. Leadoff free pass to the leadoff hitter...never good. (We're now in the top of sixth inning, by the way...quick break) It's sort of okay, because stand-in Phillies shortstop Eric Bruntlett flies out to right fielder Ryan Church for the first out of the inning just after that, before Shane Victorino is caught stealing on a throw from Brian Schneider to Jose Reyes on the following pitch. With Chase Utley batting. Now Utley's connected on a single, which will bring Ryan Howard to the plate here with a man on and two out. Full count on Howard...what does Maine do here? Foul ball on a 95 mph fastball...is Maine throwing a little harder? Utley was running with two outs and a 3-2 count.

Maine delivers more heat...another foul. Next pitch yields a walk to Howard. Not a bad idea to pitch around the big fella in this situation. Here comes Pat Burrell. Another walk, and the bases are loaded (yikes) for Geoff Jenkins (Not so bad). Good thing Brian Schneider's got a solid arm.

One thing about Gameday is that I have no sense of what any of these at-bats look like. I can see the outcome, but I can't watch how the Maine event is going after these Phillies hitters right now. You take what you can get...ahhh beautiful. Geoff Jenkins grounds out to first to end the inning; Maine's out of trouble.

I should note that the Mets took a 2-0 lead in the fourth inning on a two-run single by Ryan Church. Angel Pagan (continues to impress) singled to lead off, before Carlos Beltran walked and Carlos Delgado did something useless. Actually, I guess he advanced the runners with a groundout: that's how Church was able to single home both Pagan and Beltran. At least he hit a weak, slow, non-double play groundball, I suppose.

Angel Pagan has just doubled on a line drive to left fielder Pat Burrell. David Wright's struggling a bit; he followed with a groundout, though it did advance Pagan to third.

All I know right now is in play-run(s), but in Gameday jargon, that's always good news if the Mets are up. More to come.

Beltran singled to right, scoring Pagan. He's on first now, still with one out. Pickoff attempt 1B fails. A few pitches and some weak swings by the Met first baseman later, Carlos Delgado strikes out swinging. Ryan Church to the dish. It's just a 1-1 count, but Carlos Beltran is caught stealing second. And a good day to you, Chris Coste (Phillies catcher - I hadn't heard of him either). Church will lead off the seventh.

This break in the action provides a nice opportunity to hail Mike Pelfrey for a solid effort last night. He only pitched five innings, but he was solid, and most of all, he didn't look like a loser on the mound the way he often did last season. He did all he had to do, and gave up just two runs to hold the Phillie offense at bay while four Phightin' errors helped the Mets pound out eight runs. Go Big Pelf. I actually saw game highlights on Baseball Tonight while I was out last night, and they helped put me in quite a good mood.

Here come the Phillies in the seventh: after a leadoff homer by Pedro Feliz and a double by the aforementioned Coste (he's the Phillies' catcher, by the way), Maine gets the hook in favor of Pedro Feliciano, who's now is facing Jayson Werth with Coste still on second. Walk to Werth. Jesus Christ.

Shane Victorino strikes out swinging for the first out. The potential inning-ending double play is set up right now, with Eric Bruntlett up. Just sayin'.

Eric Bruntlett's out on strikes. Looking. It's Utley time. Come on now, Pedro (the other one). 2-2 on Utley aaaaandd STRIKE THREE, inning over! Feliciano does it again. Stretch time.

This whole Gameday thing is actually working out alright. If I'm doing an in-game blog, my take is already coming secondhand. No different with Gameday: I can still give a delayed, fractured play-by-play. Like I said, my context just isn't quite as good without, you know, getting to watch the game.

But Gameday still does a pretty solid job picking up the slack. Brian Schneider lines out softly to second baseman Chase Utley. Two out. Marlon Anderson at the plate. Damion Easley is on second base after hitting a double following a lead-off flyout by Ryan Church.

Eight pitch at-bat going to Marlon Anderson. He's a gritty, tenacious, player - part of a solid bench for the Mets, in my view at least. According to MLB Gameday, he's really working Ryan Madson right now, fouling a lot of pitches off. I'm glad he's on the Mets. Nine pitches. Groundout to second. Oh well. End of the seventh.

Aaron Heilman gives up another gopher ball - this one to Ryan Howard to close the gap to 3-2. Jeeeez. Pat Burrell then walks, nobody's out and Geoff Jenkins is at the plate.

Aaron Heilman, you suck

Heilman got out of trouble in the eighth without giving the Phillies the lead, but he still managed to single-handedly screw things up and allow the Phils to tie the game. After the Howard homer (I didn't know this, but Gameday DOES have a video component and the title of the video was "Howard Kills Baseball"...christ) and the walk, a single by Jenkins and a groundout scored the always dangerous So Taguchi, who was running for Burrell. Heilman managed to retire the next two hitters on a K and groundout, but not before the damage had been done. Aaron Heilman, you suck. The Mets may want to consider finding, you know, a real set-up man. I wonder what Willie will have to say about Heilman after the game tonight, particularly if the Mets go on to lose.

...Billy Wagner's on in the ninth after the Mets failed to score in the bottom of the eighth...I really hope the Mets find a way to win this game...

Two quick outs in the ninth, but Chase Utley just worked out a walk to conclude an eight pitch at-bat. Howard at the plate. Glad Aaron Heilman's not pitching.

AHHHH SUCKA SUCKA. Wagner strikes out Howard, inning over. Even though he's an idiot, you've gotta love Billy Wagner - contrast that with my profound feelings of disgust whenever I see Heilman's stupid expression after giving up a late home run in a key spot. That's three now in 8 games on the year.

Even when he succeeds, he still kind of reacts like a loser

Ryan Church leads off the bottom of the ninth for the Mets. Come on now, L Millz...damn. Swinging strikeout. Brad Lidge is on his game tonight?

Damion Easley grounds out softly, 2 outs. Thanks Gameday.

Wouldn't it be something if Brian Schneider cranked a walk-off shot off Brad Lidge right now? You know, Albert Pujols in the '05 NLCS style...I know you've got it in you, Brian...aaaand it's a two-out walk for the Schneid. Gotta start somewhere I guess. Endy at the bat, pinch hitting for Wagner.

We're going to extras, as Endy lines out to Eric "vaseline hands" Bruntlett. Joe Smith comes on for the tenth inning.

Smith's out of the tenth, working around a walk and getting Chris Coste (who?) to line out to first to end the inning...top of the order's coming up in the bottom of the tenth. Come on, now...

For all the talk about Jose Reyes getting his crap together during the off-season, he's really played like a chump this year. He's called out on strikes to start the tenth, in just the situation where the Mets probably could have used a leadoff baserunner. Angel Pagan pops to short for out number two. Bruntlett manages to hold onto the ball.

David Wright walks, then steals second with Carlos Beltran at the plate. We already know he's got his head on much straighter than Reyes, but that's exactly what Jose needed to do and didn't to lead off the inning. 1-2 count now to Beltran. 3-2.

Strike three, as a key Mets player fails once again to get a big hit in a big spot. You only get so many chances...on to the 11th.

Leadoff single for Jayson Werth, followed by a "single" by Cole Hamels on a soft bunt ground ball to catcher Brian Schneider. Eric Bruntlett fails to lay one down, and it's a foul bunt strikeout. Scott Schoeneweis (gulp) is on to replace Joe Smith.

That's also not necessarily fair. I might have more confidence in Schoeneweis than Heilman at this point; that's not saying much but the Scho pitched his worst in his first few months in blue and orange.

Four 88 mile-an-hour fastballs later, Scho's got a 2-2 count on Chase Utley...another foul. Still 2-2. 2 on, 1 out. AH YES - Utley hits into a double play to end the inning. Scott Schoeneweis will grow on me if he can do this sort of thing with relative regularity. He pitched big in a big spot there. Now let's hope the Met offense can take up the cue...it's on you, Carlos Delgado.

It's on you, Ryan Church. Carlos "I'm still worthless" Delgado just struck out swinging...MLB Gameday won't tell me this, but I'll BET it was on a high inside fastball. Lord have mercy.

Ryan Church is also out on a swinging strikeout. Tom Gordon, just mowin' em down. Christ have mercy. Here's Damion Easley...1-2-3 go the Mets in the eleventh inning as Easley flies out to center.

...It's sort of funny, because the ebb and flow of checking and refreshing MLB Gameday is allowing me to blog, while reading the New York Times online at the same time. I'm alternating between reading calmly about politics and reacting emotionally when I come back to the Gameday page...

Scott Schoeneweis is now out of the game; he got two quick outs and should have been out of the inning but Geoff Jenkins was allowed to reach base on an error by Damion Easley. Where's Anderson Hernandez when you need him?

Jorge Sosa is on to replace Schoeneweis, and gets Pedro Feliz to ground into a fielder's choice to end the inning. The bottom of the twelfth inning beckons.

Two quick outs by Brian Schneider and Brady Clark - Jose Reyes is up, looking to stay above the Mendoza line with a hit, potentially. We'll see. A walk would also prevent any further slippage in his batting average. YES. Jose's on second base after hitting a double on a fly ball to center fielder Jayson Werth. Way, Jose.

WOW! THE METS FINALLY GET IT DONE, AS ANGEL PAGAN COMES THROUGH IN THE CLUTCH ONCE AGAIN AND SCORES JOSE REYES ON A SINGLE TO CENTER FIELD.

METS WIN!

Where did this guy (Pagan) come from? I don't know, but he's getting it done.

*************************************

This was an important game for the Mets to win. A really really really important game for the Mets to win. In September 2007 and home opening day 2008-like fashion, they blew a late lead to the Phillies - this one was three runs, and that's bad - and if they had lost, it would have reinforced some really negative vibes that, like a bad cold, or something worse maybe, might linger, stubbornly, with the wrong combination of circumstances. Like blowing leads and losing in really painful and avoidable fashion. Those kinds of circumstances.

Add to the blown lead the fact that the Mets blew a few opportunities after giving up the lead, but with some clutch pitching in the ninth (Wagner) and in extras (Smith, Schoeneweis, Sosa) were able to hold the Phightins best asset (offense) back long enough to take advantage of their greatest weakness (pitching). And they came away with a victory in the game tonight - important, sure - but less important than the bigger picture series win that they grinded out tonight after that ugly home opener on Tuesday.

In other news, Jose Reyes was totally out at home plate. A little luck can certainly go a long way, and this was, once again, a huge, huge win for the Mets.

Great stuff. Bring on the Brewers...

(Photos courtesy jerseysandhockeylove.com, mlb.com)

Opening Nightmare

2008-04-09T18:43:00.004-04:00

The Mets lost to the Phillies yesterday, blowing a late lead on a costly error in the seventh inning before letting the game slip further away in the eighth and limping to a 5-2 loss - their third straight.

Wait, did I just recycle that sentence from last September?

If the Mets blow this season in April, at least they can just waste the whole damn thing instead of building up painfully false expectations. What's worse? Maybe we won't have to find out.

With the Mets in need of a win, Mike Pelfrey will take the hill tonight against Kyle Kendrick. Thi is a good opportunity for Pelfrey to show whether he is indeed major league material, or whether he's a tall goofy chump who the Mets should have traded to the Twins instead of Phil Humber. In his brief career, he's thus far showed an inclination toward the latter (tall goofy chump). If he has any stones at all he'll at least turn in a nice effort tonight and not pitch like a loser.

All eyes will be on tongue-boy in his '08 debut

I'm off to go take my mind off of baseball and see some live brass bands tear it up in Lafayette Square. I'll have more on the Mets home opening series, and the proper status of Willie Randolph's job, tomorrow night when I have a bit more time - the tone of that post should reflect the news I come home to tonight.

Until then...

(Image courtesy mets.com)

Manufactured Anxiety

2008-04-07T19:59:00.005-04:00

The Mets concluded an awkward, rain-shortened two game series against the Braves yesterday, walking away from Turner Field with two irritating losses and a dent in the collective early-season confidence of Mets fans, which had been riding high after Wednesday night's 13-0 exclamation mark on our season-opening series win against the Marlins.

John Maine just didn't have it on Saturday - it took the Maine event 96 pitches to get 12 outs, and he put the Mets in an early 4-1 hole against Tim Hudson. The Mets closed to within 4-3, the Braves pushed it to 5-3; it was 5-3 in the seventh until Jorge Sosa came on and loaded the bases before giving up a grand slam to Kelly Johnson which pretty much put the game out of reach.

Not too many smiles for Maine in his first start

On Sunday, Johan Santana threw seven stellar innings, giving up just one run on seven hits. As usual, the Mets had a hard time figuring out John Smoltz, but the game was within reach at 1-0 until Aaron Heilman gave up a two-run homer to Mark Teixiera in the 8th which proved to be the difference. Down 3-0, the Mets tried to rally in the ninth, but a line drive by Brian Schneider went right to Teixiera, who's also a gold glove first baseman and was playing the line.

I don't think 2007 is going to go away this year. I don't mean that to sound like a depressed, doomsday lament or anything like that. I just think that even if we're doing well, the comparisons between the prototypical team of talented under-achievers (last year) and a talented team that lives up to its potential (this year, hopefully) will be irresistible. This spring, any visitor to my blog knows that in most of my posts I've been unable to avoid sizing up this year's team and looking for any indication that now we've got our head screwed on straight and this season might be different. Then there's also the simple truth (Regis Courtemanche of metsblog wrote about this today) that every loss - every tough loss, in particular - will probably remind us of those last two painful weeks of September '07, where the Mets found every conceivable way to lose and our relievers (Jorge Sosa and Aaron Heilman in particular) gave up late inning home runs in big spots with regularity.

So we Mets fans - understandably - are all freaked out after the Mets failed their first early season aptitude test. What if the Braves are back? What if we get swept by the Phillies this week, at home? What if we suck this year, even with Santana?

It's going to be like this all year, I think - another reason why we won't escape 2007 until we either make the playoffs or, and this is an even shakier bet, just as far as the odds for any team go - advance to the NLCS or World Series.

But we've got to keep things in perspective, or we're just going to drive ourselves crazy. This morning metsblog linked up these comments from the blog It's Mets for Me:

Get the feeling that John Smoltz would rise up from a molten grave to choke the life out of the Mets, like a Turner-ator? Smoltz was his typical Satanic Majesty and the Br*ves ruined Johan Santana's Atlanta debut. Poopeyface emerged on cue to serve up his usual BPSGB (big pressure situation gopher ball) and the world was again much like we remember it before 2006. No one is conceding anything, but I sometimes still scan the Mets dugout for Art Howe involuntarily. And if it wasn't clear before, the Br*ves more often then not beat the Mets in Turner Crypt because their stars, Smoltz and Larry Jones, simply want it more than our stars do. You can see it in their oily baby eating grins as they congratulate each other in the dugout each time they finish dispatching the Mets. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

So it counts for nothing that in a month (last September) where the Mets did all they could to send their season go to hell - ultimately succeeding - they won 5 out of 6, against magical, mystical, Atlanta? That included a sweep in Turner Field, by the way. Woooooo...the Braves! Oh my god!

And of course, we didn't basically finish off the Braves in '06 with a late-July sweep in Turner. Nothing has changed since the late 90s and early 2000s...nothing at all. And of course, a couple rough performances in our fourth and fifth games of the season mean that their stars want it more. Chipper Jones and John Smoltz wanted it more at the end of last year, too, right? Last I checked it was the Phillies - not the Braves - who took advantage of the collapse and backed into the 2007 NL East title.

Not every loss against the Braves can or should be chalked up to the same "Brave mystique" bs. At this point, Met fans who continue this ass-kissing tomahawk rattling are only tossing up a red herring for any of the team's actual troubles. As fans, we're only psyching ourselves out when we build up this unbeatable foe from Atlanta who the Mets always find a way to screw up against. Frankly, I think Mets fans believe this crap more than our players do. But still - when we sit in our seats at Shea and groan when David Wright makes a throwing error in the third inning of a game against the Braves, and say it's all because of some sort of predisposition for the Mets to lose to Atlanta, at what point does that attitude trickle down to the players, so this whole mumbo jumbo becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy?

I'd prefer to think that Aaron Heilman served up a gopher ball in a key spot yesterday because he's got a dangerous knack to do that sort of thing. Maybe we shouldn't trust him so much in the 8th inning. Do we have a choice? And I'd prefer to see Angel Pagan's misplay on Yunel Escobar's RBI double early in yesterday's game as a bad play, that he may have unfortunately made against anyone on any other sunny Sunday afternoon. The Mets played sloppily over the weekend. There's no excuse for that, but it didn't happen because they played the Braves.

If I'm worried about anything, it's that they'll play that way against the Phillies this week, and the Brewers this coming weekend, and the Nationals next week. To succeed this year, they'll have to be a little sharper than that, and Saturday's start by John Maine will have to have been an abberation, and the Mets will have to put up some runs when Johan Santana pitches valiantly without his best stuff and gives up just one run over seven innings.

We Met fans are going to drive ourselves crazy this year, one way or the other. I stated recently that I was more embarassed than scarred over the way last season ended, but '07 has left us so on edge as a fan base that we're prone to over-analyzing and getting worked up about every loss. As important as every game is (last year demonstrated this) we need to balance our sense of urgency as fans with the knowledge that we also need to give it a couple weeks before we can get a real accurate gauge on where the Mets are this year, at least in the early going. Really.

And it is hard. But let's first watch the home opener tomorrow, and maybe we'll forget about this first unfortunate trip to Atlanta in the same brief amount of time it took us to get all worked up. Or maybe not. But if we're going to take each game as seriously as we have so far, (a good thing, even it does make us nuts) then let's focus real hard on helping the Amazins' give Shea a final opening day to remember.

Go Mets.

I'm gonna miss the old ballpark

(Photos courtesy blog.ny.com, the-hud.com)

Slaughter in South Florida

2008-04-03T19:58:00.007-04:00

The Mets annihilated the Marlins last night, winning 13-0 behind six scoreless innings from Oliver Perez (8 Ks, 5 hits and just one walk) and home runs by David Wright, Carlos Beltran, and Ryan Church.

I'm still in New Orleans, so I won't really be able to watch any games until I get back to New York in about three weeks or so. Maybe I'll try to make it out to a Zephyrs game while I'm down here...who knows. Maybe I'd try harder if the Mets' best prospects weren't all playing in Binghamton this year.

Anyway - my point is that my only frames of reference for these first few games have been MLB gameday, metsblog, and ESPN highlights (if I'm lucky). This was apparent the other day, when I talked about how great it was that Luis Castillo stole a base and was close to 100% healthy. I had no clue that he loafed around the bases in the first inning after a Carlos Beltran bloop double and cost the Mets an early run, while Willie Randolph attempted to justify his lack of hustle by claiming Castillo was "still a little banged up."

Speaking of Randolph: okay, he's a good manager. I'll give him that. He really wet the leadership bed last September, when he tried to guide the Mets through the collapse by continuing to insist that a fundamentally flawed and under-motivated team would eventually "sip a little champagne," before tearing up about the whole ordeal and acting surprised when the you-know-what finally hit the fan and the Mets really did blow a seven game lead in the last two-and-a-half weeks of the season. But I can still give him his props. Not a whole lot of managers have a deeper knowledge of the game of baseball - save managing a bullpen, maybe, but really - and he, along with everyone in the Mets organization, seems to have profoundly realized exactly what went wrong last year and seems like he's right on the ball as far as correcting the error of his, and the team's, ways. I hope. But the signs are good. Willie matching his realizations to action will be key to the Mets' success this year.

But I digress. My point: win or lose, it's a little bit funny because he's such a cornball. I think if the Mets have a good 2008, the dog days of summer will be prime time to just laugh at Willie and, in particular, his bizarre way of speaking to the media. While the Mets were playing sub-.500 baseball for all of last summer, it would irritate the hell out of me to hear Willie endlessly talk about "his guys" and how Guillermo Mota was one of them. Winning really changes everything though. If the Mets do well this summer, I think Willie will turn into that kind of weird but endearing character that, as fans, we all somehow come to appreciate, even it takes a while to get there. Not necessarily because he's that cool or anything, but, I dunno, think Tom Coughlin. Couldn't stand him, really, until the playoffs - now I love him, his rosy cheeks, and the '07-'08 unlikeliest of unlikely Super Bowl championships he helped bring home for Big Blue.

Maybe I'll do a longer post on Willie later this season, with my perspective varying depending on how things look to be turning out. For the meantime, here he is talking last night about Pedro's injury (more to come on that):

“We don’t trip on stuff like that, ya know. We’ve been a solid team, a together-team, ever since I’ve been here. These guys believe in each other. We love to play and get after it. If you’re here with us and join the party, that’s great. We’ll invite you, you’re there…That’s why I love this group. They don’t make excuses, they just play.”

I'd love to party with Willie Randolph.

****

BUZZ KILL!

Pedro Martinez is going to be out 4-6 weeks with what the Mets are calling a "strained left hamstring." 4-6 sounds like a pretty bad strain. This just sucks, pretty much.

But to piggyback on what Willie was saying, I don't think it will dampen the Mets' spirits too much. I was really looking forward to having Pedro around this season - and he talked during Spring Training about taking a more active clubhouse leadership role, which I was also very excited about. That was missing last year.

Now we've got a mini-situation of what happened last year, where the Mets will play it out and be waiting on Pedro again. For a shorter amount of time - if it is, indeed, only 4-6 weeks (crossing my fingers) - but still, he's not around now for a bit.

This year's set up to potentially be a little different though. We've got Johan Santana instead of Tom Glavine. In general, the team seems a lot more juiced up (that's NOT a reference to the Mitchell report) and a lot more equipped to hold it's own and not whine about Pedro being hurt and "missing Pedro" and playing aimlessly the entire season waiting for one player to come back from injury. I'm confident that we'll deal with Pedro being gone a little better.

Remember, this is what the Red Sox did for each of the last three years or so that Martinez spent in a Boston uniform. Pedro's hurt? The dude weighs like 20 pounds, big surprise...

It's all about how you work with the cards you've been dealt, and I think this year's orange and blue poker face is a lot more encouraging.

****

MEL ROJAS, ARMANDO BENITEZ, BRADEN LOOPER, JORGE JULIO, GUILLERMO MOTA, MATT WISE?

Matt Wise has made two appearances so far this year. In his first, he gave up two hits and recorded just one out in the eighth inning of a 7-2 ball game, before being bailed out by Scott Schoeneweis and Jorge Sosa. In his second, he struck out two hitters in the tenth inning of a tie game but then couldn't hold his liquor against Robert Andino - who? - and Andino hit a Wise fastball about nine miles or so to win the game for the Marlins.

Every team seems to have one - he's usually a relief pitcher, and you usually cringe when he enters the game. Actually you don't even cringe. His very appearance inspires profound feelings of...disgust, irritation, you feel like throwing something against a wall...hatred? Is that too strong?

Maybe every team doesn't have one, but the Mets ALWAYS seem to have that one reliever who you just have absolutely no faith in, ever. And that reliever usually does something on a somewhat regular basis to justify those feelings. Is Matt Wise this year's Guillermo Mota? If so, there could be a direct correlation between Willie Randolph's confidence in Wise and the greater successes and failures of the Met bullpen this season. We shall see.

****

Next up is the Braves tomorrow night. John Maine goes against Tim Hudson - should be a good match-up. On paper, at least, I fear the Braves more than the Phillies...it's early in the season but these next two series should give us a nice beginning gauge of where the Mets are really at so far this year. As the headline on mets.com points out, "Mets-Braves series to set tone in East." Yeah that sounds about right.

I'll try to dissect this early season showdown after Tom Glavine pitches on Saturday. These games are in Turner Field, but what I really can't wait for is Tommy's Shea homecoming...

Todd Zeile went out a bit more gracefully

(Photos courtesy virtualtourist.com, baseballchurch.blogspot.com, cnnsi.net)

Great Success!

2008-03-31T19:39:00.008-04:00

The Mets opened powerfully and convincingly today, pushing aside the Marlins 7-2 on one of those days when everything seemed to follow the proper script. I didn't see the game, but in reading the recap and looking at the box score, it seemed that the Mets opened playing in a way that will carry them a long way this season if they can internalize what they did today and make it something of a routine.

The picture you've been waiting for...and this one wasn't even photoshopped

Some positive and particularly illustrative highlights, I think:

Johan Santana gave up two runs on just three hits and one walk in seven innings. He struck out eight. That's just a downright good game, and starts like this on a regular basis by are what makes a pitcher like Santana the ace of a staff. You could never really count on Tom Glavine to deliver anything like that when he took the mound.
Jose Reyes went 2-4. Luis Castillo went 1-3 with two walks and stole a base - that's all the more impressive considering the fact that both David Wright and Jose Reyes got caught stealing today. I'm looking forward to watching a healthy Castillo do his thing. A lot of people wanted the Mets to bring in a power hitting second baseman and/or no. 2 hitter this offseason, but Castillo is the type of classic, prototypical 2 guy who can really help energize a lineup. If his knees hold up, him and Reyes could produce a double leadoff combo that will really wear down opponents.
David Wright went 2-4 with 2 doubles, and was a major player in the Mets first big rally, a six-run sixth where Wright drove in three with the first of those two hits. That's the type of game that makes Wright look more and more like the emerging on-field leader that he started to be towards the end of last season.
Carlos Delgado had no hits. Big surprise! I'm going to be hard on him this year.
Although Matt Wise gave up two hits, Scott Schoenweis and Jorge Sosa bailed him out and Aaron Heilman pitched a hitless ninth while recording two strikeouts as the bullpen backed up Santana's solid start and looked good.
The Mets committed no errors.

I'll probably stop talking about last year eventually, and it really hasn't left any lasting scars or anything. I was thinking today about how it was a totally embarrassing way to end the season, but it didn't really hurt the same way as watching your star center fielder look at strike three to end the NLCS. Besides, it wasn't meant to be in 2007. Think the Mets would have beaten the fired up Rockies in the Division Series? I rest my case.

Anyway, where I'm going with this is that the Mets played the type of game that they never really got used to playing last year. In a season of maddening inconsistency, they often won in spite of themselves but rarely just played well. Today was a downright good game, and made me even more excited for the season ahead.

Plus the Phillies lost (at home) after Jimmy Rollins hit a game-tying home run in the seventh, only to watch Tom Gordon give up six runs to blow it in the ninth. Haha. Ha. Ahahahahahahaha. I hope the Braves aren't good this year.

And I'm out.

(Photo courtesy mets.com)

OPENING DAY?!

2008-03-30T19:19:00.006-04:00

Warning Track Power is currently in New Orleans building houses; I've been down here for about a week and I'll be here for another two. I've been somewhat out of the loop and it's easy to lose track of time down here.

Three days passed without me checking realclearpolitics.com for the latest on the Obama/Hillary slugfest.

Until about 10 minutes ago I hadn't been on metsblog since last Tuesday.

Spring Training is long, too, though it doesn't feel quite as long as NFL training camp. Much like the hot stove season, you get sick of hearing the same things over and over again. It must get hard after a while to be a beat writer during Spring Training. If you're Marty Noble, by the end of March you're probably up late at night making tally marks on your arm to count down the days until Opening Day, all while being forced to write something along the lines of:

Carlos Beltran walked all the way around the Mets spring training complex today, shmoozing with some of the Mets minor league coaches, who apparently were happy to see the star center fielder.

Or,

John Maine said he's sick of Port St. Lucie today. Somebody help me.

Or,

David Wright ate ribs for dinner tonight.

There's been some news to keep up on, mostly perennial spring training stuff. Roster this, roster that...there's a competition for the fifth starter's spot every year it seems. We had a bunch of injuries, but it looks like we're going north sans only Orlando Hernandez, Ramon Castro, and Duaner Sanchez, who all have relatively minor injuries, or are almost fully recovered from a freak taxi cab accident, and should be in New York fairly soon.

Anyway, I've actually been on the road for the entirety of Spring Training this year. I'm doing some traveling and Spring Training is kind of an interesting gauge, I guess, for how long I've been away from home. I've covered the whole thing pretty loosely, and fairly or unfairly haven't made much time for the more frequent posts I try to write during the season. That's how I've covered most of the offseason; with so much of the same stuff over and over again, I've tried to give my perspective on the big events and write something random yet hopefully poignant every once in a while. January was a good chance for me to write about the incredible road to a Super Bowl championship traversed by my other favorite New York sports team, those football Giants.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that Opening Day has NEVER snuck up on me like this before. As excited as I am about this season, I honestly thought we had another week. But this is soooo much better. The Mets are already in Miami, and will take on the Marlins tomorrow at 4 before having one of those bizarre Tuesday off-days we get every beginning of the season and then really getting into the swing. I won't be able to live blog the game, but I'll see if I can get up with a fresh post either tomorrow night or Tuesday.

With the season starting, I'll be trying to get back to the 3 to 4 posts a week I wrote last summer, transitioning like every one else from offseason life to the rhythm of another baseball season. As Mets fans, we've got to be excited right now. One thing I did write about a couple times this spring was the confidence level in Spring camp, I get the sense that the Mets really want to do something special to usher out Shea and atone for the giant heap of (unprintable) dumped on the fan base at the end of 2007. I'm withholding judgment, trying to eliminate all expectations, and after last year's let down just generally looking to take it one day at a time. But I still feel good. I think that one way or another, this is going to be a fun season. It's amazing how the acquisition of one star pitcher can really lift everyone's spirits.

Look for Jose to bounce back this year from the roughest of ends to 2007. We hope.

So here we go. Isn't baseball season great? It's one way to tell that spring is here, even if the April weather in Flushing doesn't always cooperate. Baseball season also signals the coming of my birthday (April 13 in case ya'll are interested); this year I'll be 20. Isn't that cool?

Before I check out, here's the lineup for tomorrow:

Leading off and playing shortstop: Jose Reyes

Second, at second: Luis Castillo

Hitting third, playing third base: David Wright

Cleaning up, in centerfield: Carlos Beltran

At first, batting fifth: Carlos Delgado

In left field, hitting sixth: Angel "my name is contradictory" Pagan

Followed by, in right: Ryan "L Millz" Church

And batting eighth, behind the dish: Brian Schneider

Starting on the mound for the Mets is the man of the hour, Johan Santana.

Keep it real, stay fresh, and here's to the 2008 Mets. Happy New Year everyone!

(Photos courtesy about.com, lovefilm.com, cnn.net)

Unease About Delgado

2008-03-13T15:37:00.004-04:00

Since returning to action this spring from a lingering hip injury, Carlos Delgado is 0-9, with five strikeouts.

Everyone is certainly aware of Delgado's struggles last year, to the tune of home run and RBI totals 14 and 33 below his career average, respectively.

Delgado didn't just drop off randomly; he was hurt. He denied it, and such speculation was generally dismissed by many people in the Mets organization, but his ongoing recovery from off-season hand surgery clearly hampered him, particularly when he tried to get around on high, inside fastballs. This was a visible problem all year. Delgado came through with a big hit now and then, and his numbers were fairly respectable for a Major League first baseman, but league average was a steep drop for Delgado from the dominant force he was at times in 2006, and he basically became a mistake hitter. I'm not sure I remember Delgado hitting any "pitcher's pitches" last year, and any smart reliever in the late innings knew that all he had to do was throw Delgado a belt-high fastball on the inside corner and Carlos was sure to choke. In short, even while finishing the year with 20 plus home runs and nearly 100 RBI, Delgado felt like a liability because he consistently failed to come through in the clutch and he was a shadow of his former self.

And every time he got into any sort of groove, it seemed like he got hurt again. Last September, he was heating up when the same hip injury that kept him out for the beginning of the spring sidelined him just as the Mets were beginning their tailspin into oblivion.

Delgado is well on his way to losing it as a hitter, primarily because his body is breaking down. He's always been streaky; he slumped miserably through parts of 2006 even as he hit 38 home runs and drove in 114. But right now it honestly feels like he's reached the point of no return.

Throughout the past few months Delgado and Willie Randolph continued to insist that last year was a total aberration for Carlos and had nothing to do with him being hurt. In one interview, Willie waxed poetic about how the majority of his struggles had to do with a lack of an ability to take control in the batter's box. Delgado was playing the pitcher's game, not his - always dangerous for any major league hitter. And Delgado, without addressing Willie's opinion, talked about how hard he's been working this off-season to come back strong in '08.

But a good deal of Delgado's inability to "take control in the batter's box" would seem to come back to his inability to get around on a high inside fastball. If a pitcher knows exactly what pitch is sure to get a given hitter out in absolutely every situation, that hitter is going to have a hard time "taking control in the batter's box" from at-bat to at-bat, game to game, series to series.

Delgado didn't finish an at-bat this spring without striking out until his four hitless at-bats today. By many accounts, Delgado '08 looked a lot like Delgado '07 through those first five at-bats, struggling with - you said it - the high, inside fastball.

The league is on notice. He's going to get even more of these pitches this year than he did last year. And whether he's hurt, or just old, or whatever, Carlos Delgado will continue to deteriorate as long as he keeps getting the high inside fastball and can't hit it. By all indications, it's going to be another long, frustrating year for Carlos, and for Mets fans watching him - especially if he continues to be hurt while maintaining that he's fully healthy.

Delgado looks to be in a state of irrevocable decline. The Mets would be wise to trade him if they could, but they're not going to find a taker, and they probably won't try to find one either. What might be more realistic, and would thus be especially prudent under the circumstances, would be for the Mets to find a credible reinforcement at first. Marlon Anderson and Damion Easley are nice utility players, but they probably won't be able to pick up the slack. Neither will Jose Valentin, if he makes the team. Omar Minaya's been good the past few years at finding the type of guy the Mets now need to back up first base; perhaps he'll be able to pull something off now.

2008 looks promising, but the Mets are in sort of a first base quandary. Feel free to post your thoughts in the comments section for what you think Omar and Willie should do to manage a situation that looks like it might end up being a chronic problem.

(Picture courtesy nycsportsnews.com)

Johan

2008-03-07T12:44:00.002-05:00

Watching SportsCenter the other night, I happened to catch some highlights from the Mets 3-2 victory over the Dodgers in St. Lucie. Johan Santana pitched three innings and struck out four, while yielding one run on two hits.

Nice suit

It's only the spring, but there was something special about that highlight. SportsCenter incorporated all four strikeouts into the highlight, three of which Santana registered with a downright filthy circle change.

We've had Pedro for a few years, but you have to go back slightly beyond my lifetime as a Mets fan to recall a time when the Mets had a dominant pitcher in his prime. I never really got to see Doc Gooden pitch; I was born in '88 and didn't start watching the Mets until '92 or '93.

I've known this, of course, ever since the trade for Santana and subsequent signing went through, and I've been excited to have a chance to watch a bona fide ace who works as hard as anyone do his thing. But something about actually seeing Santana pitch for the first time, even in spring, just made me feel good. I'm so pumped for this season - now if Carlos Beltran, Duaner Sanchez, Ryan Church, Marlon Anderson, Moises Alou, El Duque, Carlos Delgado, Endy Chavez, Jose Valentin, Ruben Gotay, Michel Abreu, and Brian Schneider can all only get nice and healthy for Opening Day, we'll be in business. Who's our trainer?

(Photo courtesy brucekphoto.com)

Staying Grounded

2008-02-19T12:55:00.008-05:00

As I mentioned the other day, the Mets are slowly trickling into Port St. Lucie and the mood seems to be pretty upbeat. Everybody's confident after the Johan Santana acquisition, and it seems like the players are just as serious as the fans are about coming back with a vengeance this year and destroying the rest of the National League again, a la 2006. That's refreshing.

We've even got players making Jimmy Rollins-like guarantees. Carlos Beltran, over the weekend, on the Mets' chances this year in light of the Santana deal:

“With him, I have no doubt we’re going to win our division. I have no doubt about that…So, this year, tell Jimmy Rollins we are the team to beat.” (metsblog)

I'm not sure if Beltran, normally a quiet, just-goes-about-his-business type, wanted to stir up some controversy or was just trying to sound cool. But here's Endy Chavez, in the New York Post yesterday:

The Mets' recent trade for ace left-hander Johan Santana is "a guarantee for us to make the playoffs," Chavez excitedly told The Post yesterday after reporting to camp early. (NYP)

If you read the entire article, it sounds less like Endy wanted to send anyone a message, and more like he's just excited about the Mets' having a great pitcher on their staff. Endy seems like he's more Carlos Beltran than Jose Reyes, and fourth outfielders - even legendary fourth outfielders - don't usually make these sorts of predictions. Here's the rest of his quote:

"[Even] if he has a bad year, we're going to get 15 wins out of it," the backup outfielder added. "I mean, he's unbelievable. If he stays healthy, we're going to be in for a great season."

Two things at work here. Number one: aghhhhhhh. After we were doomed in 2007 by complacency and over-confidence, the last thing we need right now is anything that will breed more complacency and over-confidence. We should be confident - we just added the best pitcher in baseball to an already solid roster. And we need to regain some of the '06 swagger that was lost last year. But this confidence needs to be of the quiet, "we're going to beat you and we know it but we're not going to say anything about it" sort, as opposed to the "we're going to beat you and we know it so we're going to broadcast it and end up looking stupid in the end" sort.

Secondly, I'm a little concerned that the Mets' players might be expecting a little bit too much from Santana. Not that he's not likely to win at least 15 games - especially in the National League. But the rest of the Mets cannot let themselves see him as some all-powerful, messianic savior, similar to the kid in CYO basketball who scores all the points.

Johan Santana is an awesome acquisition, obviously; and the Mets definitely know that having a bona fide ace at the top of the rotation is going to be huge this year. But our team and fanbase also need to remember that 25 players win games, series, divisions, and championships, and that Santana is just a piece of the greater puzzle.

Especially after being supremely cut down to size just four months ago, I trust the Mets to stay grounded and not get too far ahead of themselves. Then again, I trusted the Mets to rise above mediocrity for about four months last season and it never happened. This year, though, the last thing anyone wants is another colossal embarrassment. Here's Carlos Delgado, he of the "sometimes I just think we get a little bored" comments at the end of last season:

"You can talk all you want, you can say all you want, but at the end of the day, all that matters is what happens between the two white lines," Delgado said. "I think the addition of Santana is a big key for us. I think we got the best team. It's just a matter of going out there and executing." (newsday)

It's fine to think you're the best, but you have to go out and back it up on the field. The Mets have the right attitude going into Spring Training. Fulfilling this season's potential will be about maintaining proper focus and discipline, and if Willie Randolph is good for anything he should be able to help foster the right approaches to taking back the National League East. The Mets know that they're in solid position to be a juggernaut this season, but for this to happen they also must understand the importance of keeping both feet on the ground.

(Picture courtesy nytimes.com)

Pitchers and Catchers

2008-02-16T19:48:00.005-05:00

Pitchers and Catchers have reported to Mets camp, as another baseball season slowly comes upon us.

The four-month slog from early fall to mid-February seemed like even more of an eternity this year. After the way last season ended, the only story for most of this off-season was the tragic irony of the Mets' need for an ace and perceived impotence in the hot stove market. In a year where we as Mets fans are more eager than ever to turn the page, there was little to look up about for most of the winter as the Phillies and Braves made small but significant upgrades, while the haters and the naysayers dumped on the Mets and said we were nothing more than a third place team.

The thing about perceptions is that they can do a pretty effective job of influencing reality. Coming to camp with virtually the same team as the one that collapsed last September probably would have put us in contention, but we'd be hearing it from those haters and naysayers and the entire season would have been played under an asphyxiating cloud of uncertainty and doubt.

There's nothing in baseball, or life, like a fresh start, and instead of doom and gloom the narrative going into Spring Training reads much more optimistically. The biggest thing the Johan Santana deal did was re-establish the Mets as the team to beat in the NL East - sorry Jimmy Rollins. With their dominance in 2006 and position atop the division for most of last season, for the first time since the late 80s the Mets were the team everyone tried extra hard to beat - that made it harder to halt the collapse once it started. The sense, of course, was eventually lost at the end of last year, but now it's back.

For all of the renewal associated with the Mets and being a Mets fan since Willie and Omar took over, the team still hasn't climbed the big hump. We've been competitive, fun to watch, and our games have been well-attended again. But the final hurdle still hasn't been cleared, and in that sense getting Johan Santana almost makes the start of this Spring Training feel like Spring Training in '06.

Spring Training

Back then we had made several major off-season acquisitions, and as the season got underway, Mets fans most of all were cautiously optimistic. We knew we had a good team, but the Braves had still won 14 straight division titles, and we didn't quite make it the year before.

This year, we're humbled by the collapse but also aware that our team just got lucky and acquired the best pitcher in baseball to emphatically fill the hole at the top of our rotation. We had a good team to begin with, better than the haters and naysayers would have given us credit for, but now we don't have to hear about our lack of an ace or marketable prospects. As fans, we're cautiously optimistic yet again, this time that the new buzz generated by bringing in Johan Santana will help us kick out all of last year's demons and own the National League again.

You'd rather have a buzz surrounding your team in mid-February than dark, ominous clouds, and the buzz this season is as bright and sunny as the Port St. Lucie sky. It's a different buzz than last year, when everyone was excited because we almost made the World Series the year before, but there wasn't as much substance behind it because we hadn't really done much to tangibly improve our team.

And the gigantic tease that was last season followed the same script of all talk and no substance. The Mets talked like champions and played like losers when it counted. Now we have the opportunity to make up for it. The sense around Mets camp, so far at least, seems promising. It will be all about making good on this year's late winter buzz.

(Pictures courtesy metsblog, springtrainingonline.com)

2007-2008 Super Bowl Champions

2008-02-04T10:38:00.002-05:00

An extended commentary on Johan Santana and the Mets vastly enhanced prospects for 2008 is forthcoming. In Omar We Trust.

But it's necessary first for us to pay homage to the extraordinary Super Bowl Champion New York Giants. Quite honestly I wasn't sure when I was ever going to say that. The Super Bowl Champion New York Giants.

I've written a few times in this space about the Giants and Eli Manning, Spagnuolo's D and the sense I had after they beat the Cowboys that they had nothing else to prove to me. I'm devoted to no sports team more than I am to the Mets, but this is the greatest season I've ever watched. I've been following the Giants, too, since I was five years old. I cried during the waning moments of Super Bowl XXXV, have the 41-0 win over the Vikings on tape, remember the brutal loss in 2003 (the '02 season) to the 49ers, was there when Danny Kanell and co. blew it in '97, and have watched the end of the last two seasons with the same disgust as every die-hard Giants fan. In short, the Mets play for only six months every year. I depend on the Giants to get me through at least 4 of those off-months, and anticipate the first week in September with the same excitement (well, almost) as the first week in April.

This has to be considered one of the greatest Super Bowls ever, one of the greatest Super Bowl upsets ever, one of the greatest upsets - period - ever, and one of the greatest seasons in NFL history. For the Giants, this was the true perfect season.

Not measured in an undefeated record, all-time scoring marks, or having a supermodel-dating quarterback who threw 50 touchdown passes in the regular season. Not measured by the genius of a coach going for a record-tying fourth Super Bowl with an unmatched year of icing on the cake.

No, the 2007-2008 Giants, the little team that could, told they couldn't by the sports pundits, kept alive by the right arm of the quintessential little brother, the Mama's boy who finally found himself, treated their fans to a roller-coaster month of victories against football's best. Over the Cowboys, their playboy quarterback, and their 12 pro-bowlers in Dallas. Over the legendary Brett Favre against the legendary Packers in legendary Lambeau Field in conditions that could be described as nothing less than epic and legendary. Over the New England Patriots, inevitable champions, penciled in at 19-0 since mid-October. 18-1.

You can't help but feel good for Eli Manning

The Giants can't be seen as anything short of a team of destiny. A team that had to fight to even make the playoffs, who lost several big games in the regular season, becomes just the second team in NFL history to win a Super Bowl without having played a home playoff game. (The Steelers set the standard two years ago) This is a team that went just 10-6 in the regular season, but moved past all the uncertainty, began to believe in itself at the right time, and did its thing with grit, guts, moxie, and determination. They stayed in every playoff game - in each they trailed at some point in the second half, but always were within striking distance - and then were carried over the top in the end by the right combination of good luck and outstanding individual and group performances.

When I was younger, I would look at the lines in the paper, having no clue what they represented, and root for the underdog because it always sounded cooler than "favorite." Since I've been a fan, the Mets and Giants have certainly been "underdogs" quite frequently. But these games, the climax of this season, turned into the kind of thing I'll tell my kids about. As I've grown up, I've developed a stronger and stronger appreciation for those times when I can tell I'm witnessing history. This season, culminating in a dramatic Super Bowl upset of an undefeated team, the perpetual underdogs wrote a mythic underdog story. That catch by David Tyree, after Eli Manning somehow didn't get sacked. This whole thing would make a great movie.

David Tyree celebrated his touchdown score, then made one of the great plays in Super Bowl history

It's funny because this game was kind of like the win that started this entire Patriots dynasty, or whatever you want to call it. In Super Bowl XXXVI, no one gave the Pats a chance, with their rookie quarterback and team of nobody's. The Rams were 14 point favorites - a bigger spread, even, than last night's (the Pats were favored by 12). In Super Bowl XLII, the "all-Joes," in the words of Antonio Pierce, prevailed in another sensational ending to another awesome game. Once again, David won. But this game is even bigger just for the gravity of the circumstances going in. Undefeated vs. 10-6. Victory against the most impossible odds.

It's essential that we appreciate these moments, as sports fans or even as casual observers. There are so many more underdogs than favorites in life, much more rugged scrappiness than so-called perfection from person to person. I would appreciate nothing if I were a Patriots fan today. Sorry, New England, I know this sucks. These circumstances notwithstanding, however, you just have to feel good for the Giants right now. The rag tag bunch with the good guy QB and the defense that was literally dropping to the ground in exhaustion in the 4th quarter from trying to stop the Patriots' offensive juggernaut all night are champions this morning. They pulled it off, and if that doesn't speak to the best feelings and values in most of us, I don't know what does.

There will be a parade for the ages in New York City tomorrow. The Super Bowl Champions will celebrate on Super Tuesday, so I'll be up here trying to get out the vote for Barack Obama, but I'm sure it's going to be just as epic, just as legendary, as the end to this Giants season. Soak it up, fellow Giants fans. We've just witnessed a great run to end maybe the greatest year in our team's history. Our season just came.

(Pictures courtesy giants.com, citizen.co.za, newsday.com. Video courtesy bttwtopteam.com)

Don't Get Too Excited, But...

2008-01-29T17:33:00.002-05:00

...Metsblog has it that Johan Santana is headed to Queens, pending a physical and the Mets working out a contract extension with Santana and his agent, Peter Greenberg.

If everything goes down like it's supposed to, the Mets will give up Carlos Gomez, Phil Humber, Kevin Mulvey, and Deolis Guerra. And?

That's right, no Fernando Martinez or Mike Pelfrey. Pelfrey looks like a bit of a chump out there on the mound sometimes, but it appears that the Twins either wanted Humber more or the Mets withheld Pelfrey when it became apparent that the Twins had to get a deal done and both the Yankees and Red Sox backed down.

That certainly appears to be what happened with Martinez, who reports over the last couple of weeks had indicated would have to be a part of any deal.

The story, which broke initially with usatoday.com, has now been corroborated by ESPN, the Daily News, and Mets.com, which says the Mets have a reached a "tentative deal" with the Twins for Santana. Sources say that the Mets negotiating window for a contract extension is anywhere between 48 and 72 hours. Santana has been reported to be seeking a contract in the range of 7 years and $140 million dollars.

I'm not jumping for joy yet. There's still 72 hours for this whole thing to turn into a pretty big disappointment.

Pony up, Wilpons!

Stay tuned.

(Picture courtesy mets.com)

Your Season Has Come

2008-01-14T18:04:00.001-05:00

Yesterday's Giants' win over the Cowboys was one of the great things that's ever happened to me as a sports fan. My team, the battered, bruised, long-shot underdogs - the "all-Joes" - went on the road and played their hearts out against the team with 12 pro-bowlers. Shortly after Tony Romo's final pass sailed into the waiting arms of R.W. McQuarters, the G-Men had officially turned back their top-seeded and hated 13-3 division rivals, wiping the smile off Romo's face in the process and advancing to the NFC championship game in a hard-fought test of true strength and will. It was something to make a movie out of. I could have just as easily been watching "Any Given Sunday."

It's interesting how the 2007 Giants are everything the 2007 Mets weren't. Where the Mets treated the regular season as a formality and paid for it, the Giants battled back from an 0-2 start to make the playoffs as a wild card. Where the Mets spent most of the season acting like they had too much talent to pay attention, the Giants will send only one player to the pro bowl and have spent most of their season making the most out of the talent they do have. Where the Mets lacked heart, let themselves get thrown at, and got pushed around by umpires, the Giants come out talking trash and have thus far backed it up when its counted most.

Suddenly, Eli Manning isn't throwing stupid interceptions. Instead, he's engineering drives that go 71 yards in under a minute before the half and score ballsy game-tying touchdowns. If you cross Brandon Jacobs, he'll straight up fight you. Well-dressed Amani Toomer is the savvy veteran who will take advantage of sloppy pass defense to turn a 12-yard buttonhook route into a 51 yard game-opening touchdown. Who the hell is Ahmad Bradshaw? And from that first win in Washington all the way through week 19, the Giants' defense keeps playing big in big spots.

As much focus as we die-hard fans put on winning and losing, it's a special thing when your favorite team so far exceeds expectations that you can claim victory after a second-round playoff game and feel like your squad has nothing more to prove. These are the moments that keep us going. When we're reminded every once in a while that good things do occasionally happen in sports, we find a way to get it together when our other favorite team blows a 7 game lead with 17 games to play and misses the playoffs (but that's just a hypothetical, of course).

Whatever happens to the Giants in these next weeks is OK by me. Brett Favre is playing for keeps. I know that the tough task of beating Favre and the Packers, at Lambeau, in January, will only be eclipsed, should we even make it that far, by a tougher match-up in the Super Bowl with either the 18-0 Patriots or the team that will have just knocked off the 17-0 Patriots. Anything else the Giants give me this season is a bonus at this point.

Speaking of tough tasks, imagine getting anyone outside of New York or San Diego to watch a Giants/Chargers Super Bowl...ouch.

See you next week. And Happy New Year, too.

(Pictures courtesy getty images, giants.com)

2007: Year in Review or, The State of the Mets

2007-12-30T17:33:00.000-05:00

The year 2007 can't really be chalked up as anything more than a huge disappointment for fans of the New York Metropolitans. Our team followed up a breakthrough season with a big step back, we enter 2008 with more questions than reliable starting pitchers, and it generally remains to be seen whether or not the sustained period of long-term success the Mets looked like they were set to enter at the beginning of 2007 will turn out to be nothing more than a sick illusion.

For all the good vibes coming out of the 2006 season, it's not as if the year 2007 got off to a particularly good start. After we lost out on Barry Zito to an unreasonably large contract offer from the San Francisco Giants - which this blogger is happy we didn't match - we spent January, February, and March hearing about how unstable our starting rotation was and how much Jimmy Rollins was going to completely own us this season.

In the end, I guess those predictions may have ended up being pretty accurate.

After a horrid spring training, though, 2007 the season did get off to a good start. We swept the Cardinals, in St. Louis. Jimmy Rollins booted an easy groundball to spark a comeback rally in our home opener. John Maine and Oliver Perez made the Cards and Braves look silly in their respective debuts. If the 2007 season had been a video game, the night we boosted our record to 4-0 would have been a good time to hit SIM and let the computer take care of the rest.

Unfortunately, autopilot doesn't work in real baseball, and after the Mets - already "bored," perhaps - hit cruise control, in real life that first Friday night in April was probably the high point of 2007.

This season, and this year, were underwhelming in just about every way. We didn't have Zito. The crowd at Shea sucked. Jose Reyes wasn't as good as he was in 2006. After we outscored the Cardinals and Braves by a combined 31-3 in those first four games and it looked like we might be in for a special season, the next 158 games were a story of failed sweeps and wasted momentum, blown opportunities and not a single winning streak longer than four games until the beginning of that fateful month of September. So far this offseason, we've heard about Dan Haren, Erik Bedard, and Johan Santana, but we never had a chance for Haren or Bedard and we'll be extremely lucky if lightning somehow strikes and we get Santana.

It's hard to know what to expect from the year 2008. On the one hand, we bring back a still-talented roster that will include Wright and Reyes, Pedro, Maine and Perez, Carlos Beltran and Billy Wagner. In a perfect world we'll have a hungry team, determined to right the wrongs of 2007, that will scratch and claw its way back to the top of the division. The fans that show up at Shea next season, 20% more expensive tickets in tow, will rabidly usher the old ballpark out in style.

On the other hand, we're crossing our fingers praying for the health of Pedro's rebuilt arm over a full season. We're nervously hedging our bets on two somewhat-unstable young pitchers to do what they did last year. We're hoping that the end of 2007 was mostly an aberration for Jose Reyes. Likewise with Carlos Delgado. This will a season of reckoning for Willie Randolph and Omar Minaya.

So we'll see. 2007 was not a good year in Mets history. We had some exciting moments, some good wins, but ultimately we couldn't sustain anything good and any positives were overshadowed in the overall narrative by the collapse.

And in the first few months of 2008, things aren't likely to look any better. The trade/free agent market probably won't yield anything better than Bartolo Colon. We'll be picked to finish either second or third in the NL East next season, and won't stop hearing about how far we've fallen in the last year.

But keep things in perspective. Remember the fact that three years ago at this time, the Mets hadn't had a winning season in 3 years. We had just ushered out the Art Howe era. We had just traded Scott Kazmir. Now, we enter a new year where we'd be defending consecutive division titles if we hadn't gift-wrapped the East for the Phillies last September. We've got some question marks, but overall, even without any more roster moves, we're at least in pretty decent shape. David Wright, David Wright, Citi Field, David Wright.

In a year where it will take 11 months for America to choose a new President, it will be close to that long before we have a sincere read on the true state of the Mets. Viva 2008!

Happy New Year

(Pictures courtesy nytimes.com, nycvp.com, flikr.com)

Ticket Prices, Transactions, T Shirts

2007-12-21T13:29:00.002-05:00

Isn't it amazing? The season ends and we fans wait patiently for the hot stove to start heating up, only to tire very quickly when it feels like all the rumbling, grumblings, and rumors never actually come to fruition but are still reported and rehashed all the way to spring training. This year's Winter Meetings came and went, nothing happened, the Mets still don't have attractive prospects, or an ace pitcher. Bo-ring.

If you trusted new ticket prices as an indicator of offseason activity, though, you might swear that the Mets had found a way to acquire both Johan Santana and Erik Bedard in a three way trade while collectively giving up only Jorge Sosa, a personalized brick at CitiField, the choreography to a Jose Reyes home run dance, and 3 fungo bats.

I'm referring, of course, to the 20% increase in 2008 Shea Stadium ticket prices, announced by the Mets last week. Dave Howard, Mets' executive vice president of business operations, on the increase:

“We considered where we were in the marketplace. Our average ticket price is still the lowest among the nine major pro sports teams in the New York area. Our payroll is among the highest in baseball. We put our resources back into the team.”

Everyone else is doing it, and look, look, we just got Matt Wise!

So despite a collapse of epic proportions and marginal improvement (depending on how you see the Milledge trade, really) to the ballclub this winter, the Mets can still justify raising prices, further forcing the average fan and middle income family to watch from home.

Metsblog has a post today pointing out that at least 12 other teams are raising ticket prices by at least 15 percent for next year. So this seems like an across-the-board type thing, which is an excellent justification for the Mets raising ticket prices for 2008 in the face of an ugly 2007.

Everyone else is doing it!

Or it's just another depressing indictment of the power of money in sports right now. Sports has become such an enterprise, ESPN such a caricature of itself, that the Mets 5-year business model says it makes sense to raise prices this year, despite the fact in a real, ethical world still guided by a sense of right and wrong it's like rubbing salt on the still-open wounds of most Mets fans.

And Major League Baseball can continue making money out the wazoo while half of it's other teams raise their ticket prices, despite the fact that in a real, ethical world guided by a sense of right and wrong baseball should have it's tail much further between its legs in the wake of an investigative report that just named more than 60 of its current and former players as users of performance-enhancing drugs while also speaking to its own culpability in this whole mess.

There is no level-headed reasoning here. Raising ticket prices on Mets fans next year just isn't right. At least we'll be ready for CitiField.

***

20%, incidentally, is also the percentage of money I took home after fellow Knicks die-hard Ivan Cash and I stood outside Madison Square Garden Wednesday night selling t-shirts with a sound, socially-conscious message for the holidays:

Admittedly, the Knicks are my third team in New York. But it's a strong third. Watching fans pour in and out of Madison Square Garden on Wednesday - to watch a horrible team - only served as a strong reaffirmation that there's nothing in New York quite like when the Knicks are good. That underdog finals run in '99 remains at the top of my list of most cherished sports memories.

So Ivan and I stood outside the Garden, voices hoarse from shouting "love the franchise, hate the coach...with a hand-crafted, original t-shirt!," among other sales pitches, all in our own for-profit attempt to build further outrage toward the mess that is the New York Knickerbockers.

Ivan designed and printed these shirts himself, and at $20 apiece we sold all 30 shirts that we brought with us. It was a pretty good night. Even fans who didn't want a hand-crafted, original t-shirt signaled their support. ABC eyewitness news, CW11 news at 10, NBC, and a freelance writer for the New York Times all asked what brought us out to the main entrance of Madison Square Garden to voice our opposition to Isiah Thomas and the Knick regime.

Bad move after bad move, no defense, sexual harrassment, a franchise in disarray, no end in sight. That's what.

Earlier Wednesday, dozens of other fans gathered outside MSG to protest the state of the Knicks and sign a giant pink slip for Isiah, which also received attention from the local network news media. So perhaps "FI-RE I-SI-AH!" is finally reaching a critical mass.

We can only hope. In the meantime, hate the coach.

(Images courtesy sayhey.files.wordpress.com, cnn.com, ivancash.com)

Sell the Farm?

2007-12-11T22:02:00.001-05:00

If a Johan Santana-to-the-Mets deal actually ends up going down, it will probably look a little something like this:

BLOCKBUSTER TRADE

Mets get - Johan Santana
Twins get - Entire Mets farm system

Alas, the great dilemma. And upon hearing the news that other teams do actually think highly of their team's prospects - one in particular who happens to be looking to trade a 28-year old 2-time Cy Young award winner - Mets fans are tied in all sorts of knots and aren't quite sure what to think.

Yes, the Twins like our prospects. They like them so much that they're demanding at least 5, it looks like, in return for their ace pitcher. Metsblog added the following tidbit this afternoon, via Jon Heyman of Sports Illustrated:

‘The Mets offered different packages of prospects that included either outfielder Carlos Gomez or outfield prospect Fernando Martinez but not both, declining to include the one extra prospect the Twins requested to clinch the deal according to people familiar with those talks.’

With a package including only Gomez, the Twins reportedly want 4 pitchers. No word on specific players, but you can bet that the four would most likely consist of the Twins' choice between Mike Pelfrey, Philip Humber, Kevin Mulvey, Joe Smith, Aaron Heilman, and Deolis Guerra.

Essentially, it looks like we either give up both of our remaining outfield prospects, or 65% of our young pitchers of value who are anywhere near being major-league ready. It's a decision to make.

Which is why I'm not screaming at Omar Minaya for not getting this deal done. I think that if this trade is possible, it needs to be made and we need to give Johan Santana every dollar that he requests, but there's a big decision to make here that's not necessarily easy.

Imagine a core for the foreseeable future of Santana, John Maine, and Oliver Perez in the starting rotation, with David Wright, Jose Reyes, and Carlos Beltran in the everyday lineup. That's only a hair over 1/5 of a full team, but it's a pretty formidable core. That's the type of core that, filling the blanks in with people who need only be able to throw and catch, pretty much makes you good no matter what. Think this year's Boston Celtics.

And we're 5/6 of the way there. But Santana's a pretty key part of that equation.

On the flipside, what happens if we need a 5th starter at any point this season. It's Lima time, baby!

What happens when our bullpen sucks again and Joe Smith is pitching lights out for Minnesota?

What happens when Fernando Martinez and Carlos Gomez form the core of the Twins young outfield in their new ballpark, Gomez is stealing 60 bases, F-Mart's having his breakout year, and all the currently premature Sammy Sosa/Juan Gonzalez comparisons are coming true?

The Twins are high on Gomez

Uhhh....we got Johan Santana?

It doesn't matter though. And the Celtics are actually a really good example of why this trade needs to happen, for either of the packages the Mets and Twins are mulling right now.

Boston traded like 7 young promising players over the summer for Kevin Garnett. It was obviously a sacrifice to make, but the Celtics determined it was worth it, because they would be putting a determined KG on a team with a determined Ray Allen and a determined Paul Pierce, all of them still at least somewhat in their prime. The rest of the team now looks kind of thin on paper, but the Celtics made an executive decision to put the core in place and worry about everything else later, because everything else would inevitably end up being less of a big deal than getting that strong core set. Rajon Rondo is running the point for the Celts. But what's their record?

That's right, it's 17-2, and the Celtics are going to coast to the playoffs as a top seed. What happens after that is anyone's guess, but it's pretty clear that they've built a juggernaut.

Restocking a depleted farm system isn't as hard as it used to be. Between the shorter times that players are spending in the minor leagues and the increase in attention and hype surrounding young players at all levels of a farm system, it's not hard to completely turn your farm around. Look at our own team in 2001. Alex Escobar? Within 2 years, the same system produced Jose Reyes; within 3 David Wright came up.

Look at the Yankees in '04-'05, at the height of their spend first, ask questions later phase. Within 2 years they have two promising pitching prospects, (Kennedy and Hughes) one young phenom, (Chamberlain) and a couple of outfield prospects who are probably overrated but are regarded highly.

Look at the Red Sox, who's farm was pretty barren after the first World Series title in '04. Notice how I said the first World Series title, as opposed to that second one where the youngsters played a starring role - and they also have the chips to acquire Santana if they wanted him as badly as the Mets do.

So with three first round picks this spring, a good draft gets the Mets right back on track. Add that to the potential infusion of rapidly-developing Latin talent that could come with a lot of the kids Omar's signed in the last couple of years beginning to grow up (literally). Add that to the fact that you never know when a minor-league player begins to show some strong latent skills. Add that to the fact that with a solid enough core, the chances of us really lamenting a lack of top-flight talent in triple-A for the next two years are pretty slim.

Sign Livan Hernandez to pitch out of the fifth spot in the rotation and give us innings. Find a market-value replacement for Moises Alou next year. Worry about the bullpen on a year-in, year-out basis, because that's all you can really do anyway. We can probably make this whole thing work for a couple of years until our system comes back.

And it's much easier to make the whole thing work when you've got a top-notch top 3 in your starting rotation with three top hitters in your lineup. Think Boston Celtics. If it stays on the table, this move needs to get made.

(Pics courtesy johansantana.net, nypost.com)

John Maine Likes Women's Clothing

2007-12-04T22:06:00.000-05:00

...According the the New York Post's PageSix.com at least. It looks like Maine's having a nice offseason:

The Virginia-born ball-hurler later approached PageSix.com and asked to test-drive our frock as well. "I'm John Maine. I pitch for the Mets! I'm a hot piece of a*s!" he kept repeating. He said that he was on his way to a drag party later that night. "Come on, I'll give you $200 to try on your dress," he begged. "Just to take a picture. It'll be fun."

Apparently this all went down at the grand opening of Touch Nightclub last Thursday night - and no, according to the story Maine did not get what he wanted. But it sounds like our young starter, who usually speaks in short, generic sentences with the media, does indeed walk on the wild side every so often. It's always the quiet ones.

Does Maine not remind you a little bit of Nuke LaLoosh? (That's a Bull Durham reference, for you ignint people out there) You wonder how Maine would fare with Kevin Costner behind the plate telling him to keep his fastball down. I'm pretty sure he's a bachelor - what kind of role is Susan Sarandon playing in his life? Anyway, my point here is that like Nuke LaLoosh, Maine can sometimes lose focus on the mound and seems to at least have the part down about wearing women's clothing. Women's underwear, under his uniform possibly? Who knows.

"Whaddid I do last night?"

Mets Pitcher is a Drag (Page Six)
John Maine Loves the Little Black Dress (Deadspin)

(Image courtesy pagesix.com)

Eli Steps Up, Giants Win Key Game

2007-12-02T20:10:00.000-05:00

Eli Manning doesn't play for the Mets. And the New York Football Giants don't play baseball.

Huge win today for Eli and my Giants though, as they top the Bears to show they're not totally imploding, again. 21-16 after 14 unanswered in the 4th quarter, key defensive stand to preserve the victory...this one kind of followed the same arc as that season-changing win over the Redskins earlier in the year. Eli didn't rebound so well in the first half from last week's debacle - he was terrible, actually, with a fumble and two interceptions, one in the end zone - but came on strong in that 4th quarter, tossing a TD and leading the go-ahead drive, all in the last 8 or so minutes of the game.

It almost seems like you can reduce an Eli Manning season to a simple breakdown of three different types of performances:

There's the total stinker, which he's usually good for about 2 or 3 of. Last week falls into this category, along with the 2005 game against the Vikings where he also threw 4 picks. The December performance against Philly last year, where at the end of an already rough game, on a critical drive in the 4th quarter he threw one of his signature gets-blindsided-and-tosses-up-a-pathetic-floater-of-a-pass interceptions, watched it get returned for an Eagles touchdown, then followed it up with the dopiest of dopey Eli faces, falls into this category. Watch out, because one of these games might just come in the Wild Card playoff at home against the Carolina Panthers - and no we can't let that one go yet, actually, because even when young Eli plays well he still looks like at any moment he could turn into the quarterback that completely embarrassed himself and the Giants franchise on that cool January day. These games, obviously, are extremely frustrating - often unwatchable, actually - but can sometimes be offset by

The really really good performance, in complete contrast to the total stinker, where he looks like, you know, the genuinely elite NFL quarterback #1 draft picks are supposed to turn into. He takes control of a game, looks a little like Peyton, and throws four touchdowns. The Dallas game on opening night this year would fall into this category, in addition to the Atlanta game in October on Monday night. 1 to 3 of these games each season give Giants fans hope that their team didn't totally screw them in the '04 draft, but more often than not Eli Manning just looks like

Ordinary Eli. He'll be so-so, probably won't win or lose you the game, but might have a chance to win it for you with a 4th quarter surge. He can also totally suck for three quarters before the 4th quarter surge comes around, which bumps his performance up from total stinker to ordinary Eli - see today's game. He seems to have a knack for these random 4th quarter surges, which is certainly a quality you look for in your quarterback, but at the same it's never something you can count on. Often times the way he looks on the field is indistinguishable during these games from the way he looks during the total stinker, but the results are somehow different. The Denver game that he won on that lucky pass to Toomer a couple years back falls into this category. So does the one in Seattle later in the same season where he threw the tying score and set up the game-winning field goal three times but Jay Feely had some trouble ridding his throat of whatever it was he kept choking on. On the losing end, we saw ordinary Eli during the second Dallas game this year, the Dallas loss last year, and the wild-card playoff loss against Philly last year. You can never really predict how a Giants game will turn out during an ordinary Eli performance, as it will almost always depend on how the other parts of the team either prop Eli up or bring him down. One way or the other it never seems to look like he's totally in his element during those sudden 4th quarter bursts, and if he succeeds it's usually on some sort of lucky break, like the Toomer catch two years ago.

And there you have it. The Eli Ratio, taken in the same order as the list of common Eli performances (total stinker:really really good game:ordinary Eli) I just generated, has in Eli's brief career hovered around 2:3:11 or so over the course of a season. It's a crapshoot as to how the playoffs will pan out, but you can count on Eli probably being good enough for a decent team around him to win 10 games year in and year out, last year notwithstanding. You figure if the ratio ever moves to about 2:5:9 or even 2:4:10 the Giants might be able to beat the reinvigorated Dallas Cowboys. 1:5:10 or even 1:4:11 could conceivably get them through to an NFC championship game, but until the middle number increases significantly and the first number goes away all together it will be hard to predict with confidence how Eli will be able to carry his regular season numbers into the playoffs and respond to January football. Thus we can't really get a read on when, if ever, Eli Manning is ready to lead the Giants to a Super Bowl. We'll just have to wait and see.

Eli Manning has to become Phil Simms before he can even think about becoming Peyton

It's always interesting to look at Eli, though, because his arrival has kind of coincided with the emergence of Wright/Reyes, and the resurgence of the Mets. Fortunes have kind of coincided as well - Eli, and by association the Giants, have showed enough promise, but crapped out in crunch time in each of the last two seasons. Just like the Mets! Jose Reyes played the baseball version of Eli Manning down the stretch this season.

Wright and Reyes are different players though, as Wright contends for MVP awards and Jose's given us at least some evidence to suggest that September '07 was an unfortunate fluke. With Eli, you're just not sure if he's ever going to make it over that hump. It could really go either way.

I cheer for Eli, but in just about anything except football I think I'd take Wright or Reyes just about any day, across the board. Eli looks like kind of a sissy, so I'd rather let either one of Wright/Reyes have my back in a fight. Eli doesn't really look like he has much game, so I'd probably prefer to go out with Wright or Reyes. You can tell D Wright has that corny-white-boy-turned-Cliff Floyd's-bachelor-prodigy thing working for him - kind of like Sinbad and the President's son in "First Kid" - and Jose's skills in that realm seem to speak for themselves. But Eli? The McLovin of the Giants, maybe...

I guess things did turn out well for Fogell in the end. I'm sure Eli does just fine for himself. If he's half as adept at using bad pick-up lines to talk to girls as he is at using trite cliches to talk to the media, do you have a map? I just keep getting lost in your eyes... probably works out a decent amount of the time for him.

And that's not to say I wouldn't party with Eli Manning, if given the chance.

Eli Manning walks into a crowded kitchen at Amani Toomer's house party. He slides in between Brandon Jacobs and Plaxico Burress, who look annoyed and suck their teeth as Eli passes and moves for the cooler. "Who wants to watch the E-Mann take a funnel..."

But I digress. Ordinary Eli helped the Giants pull out a very important win today. We're 8-4, and back in control of the NFC wild card playoff picture.

And we'll wait with bated breath to see which Eli shows up next week in a key divisional game at Philly. Be rootin' for ya, kiddo...

Eli Bounces Back, Lifts Giants Past Bears (msnbc.com)

(Pics courtesy msnbc.com, louisvillesports.org, rwdmag.com)

Day Two, Still Angry

2007-12-01T11:31:00.000-05:00

Ryan Church and Brian Schneider aren't going to be horrible players to have on our team next season.

When that's the best thing you can say about a trade on day two, it probably wasn't too great.

We won't hate Church, or Schneider. RY Chizzle (nope) will figure in a few rallies, get a big hit or two, make a couple nice plays in the outfield, and we'll warm up to him. He'll look stoned most of the time, with his "laid back California demeanor," making it a certainty that he and John Maine will be fast friends. Schneider will be an effective platoon-partner with Ramon Castro, and while getting the majority of starts may just show the world that it is possible for a Mets catcher to throw out more than 25% of would-be base stealers.

You know what? I think I'm kind of going to like these new players. They'll each have a nice little 2 or 3 year run in Queens, which is convenient, because by then Lastings Milledge should be just about entering his prime and showing the Mets how badly they got fleeced long-term with this deal.

This isn't as horrendous as Kazmir/Zambrano, as some fans are suggesting, because in all likelihood Ryan Church and Brian Schneider aren't going to totally suck for parts of roughly a season before running off the field in unbearable pain.

What irks me more than anything else about this trade, though, is how uncreative Omar Minaya was in making it. It's being billed by it's proponents and the Mets' PR department (roughly the same crowd on this one) as a move granting the Mets "additional roster flexibility," a real need-filler.

But, and I pointed this out yesterday, Omar Minaya couldn't have demanded a Jon Rauch in this deal? Really? We just traded our former top prospect and we couldn't have squeezed even Ray King out of it?

Oh yeah, that's right, we got Brian Stokes and his 7.whatever ERA from those pesky Rays. Bullpen problems: solved.

If this move had included a middle reliever, I might just be in support of it. Former top prospect with diminished value who will probably turn around and exceed unrealistically low expectations for three solid, mid-level major leaguers who address immediate needs on our team? Not bad, creative. Omar's trying to make things happen.

But instead Omar just made things happen by letting Jim Bowden take him out to dinner and a movie and never call him again.

****

Scene: Two office settings, one in Washington, DC, one on a Mets team private jet, en route to New York from the Domincan Republic, where Omar Minaya has just spent the past 2 weeks watching 17-year olds learn to hit curveballs. Minaya calls up old friend Jim Bowden, who's been salivating for weeks at the chance to steal Lastings Milledge from the Mets in exchange for two players the Nationals have determined they can live without. Jim's expecting Omar's call. The phone begins to ring in Bowden's office.

"This is Jim Bowden."

"Hi Jim, it's Omar."

"Omar! My man! The Big O! The Minayanator! What can I do for ya?"

"Well, I was wondering if perhaps you might be ready to do that deal we talked about..."

"Ahh, you're finally ready to pull the trigger on Milledge, eh? L Millz, as the kids are calling him these days. Knew you'd come around eventually. He'll fit right in in DC. Now, who did you want?"

"Well, I know we talked about Church and Schneider, but I wanted to ask if it might be possible to include a middle reliever. Rauch, maybe? Ray King? I know you're not going to give us Chad Cordero, sorry for asking last time. But anyone you might be able to offer would be greatly appreciated. It's just that we really need bullpen help and, and, we're a little thin in that department, and Duaner Sanchez is kind of lazy so he's no sure thing and, and...you know what I'm sayin'?"

"Yeah, of course Omar. I know what you're saying. And I'd love to help you out. I just don't know if that's possible right now. We do want Milledge, but I'm not sure if we're willing to part with anything else. Quite frankly, you're lucky I even threw Church into that offer. But I know how much you like him and all..."

"Well, when do you think you'll know? Billy Wagner's angry. I need to do something quickly."

"Let me get back to you Omar. I have to talk it over with Jesus Flores - sorry. And Manny Acta - okay, I'll stop. Can I give you a call back later today?"

"You know Jim, I'd really like to do this right now. Give me Schneider and Church and it's cool."

"You sure Omar? I don't want to take advantage of you or anything..."

"Really Jim, it's okay. The fans are going to love me. They love everything I do."

"Okay, man. It's your job..."

****

And that's how the Mets got Brian Schneider and Ryan Church. Two average major leaguers in exchange for a former top prospect who's still got a high ceiling despite some manufactured "character issues."

Really? We couldn't have gotten Jon Rauch? Really?

(Pictures courtesy media.philly.com, cantstopthebleeding.com)

Mets Trade L Millz, Matt Gets Angry

2007-11-30T17:27:00.000-05:00

A brief quiz:

The Mets today traded 22-year old outfielder and former first round pick Lastings Milledge. The trade involved one of the following four teams:

a) The Oakland A's, keepers of Dan Haren
b) The Minnesota Twins, keepers of Johan Santana
c) The Baltimore Orioles, keepers of Erik Bedard
d) The Washington Nationals, who have acquired Milledge in exchange for...

Brian Schneider and Ryan Church? Not exactly the ace we were looking for.

Ryan Church: Just what the doctor ordered

And by that I mean, our General Manager just made a very shrewd deal that, while "helping to make us better offensively and defensively," (Omar's words) involved sending a 22-year old top young player away to a division rival in exchange for an above average outfielder pushing 30 and a "big on defensive" catcher who can't hit.

Paging Mike DiFelice...you couldn't have kindly reminded Omar Minaya that getting such a catcher wouldn't cost one of our premier trading chips?

Paging Lastings Milledge...it's really a bummer that the chance you'll be given to prove you too can hit .270 over a full season will be granted with a team not named the Mets.

I'm no fan of "win-now" moves, to begin with. I think that winning now and taking the future into account can almost always be compatible. And if you do make a win-now move, it better be for Manny Ramirez, or Barry Zito circa 2006, or Dan Haren last winter, (yeah, we probably could have made that move a year ago) or any of the other players Lastings Milledge's name has been tossed around in connection with. This was a win-now move, and we got, well, Brian Schneider and Ryan Church, for a player who could have produced at an acceptable level this year, and who could have quickly turned into another young anchor for these Mets within the next few years. Now we can watch him turn into a young anchor for the Nats, paying us back 19 times every year alongside Ryan Zimmerman, Nook Logan and the rest of the gang as they move into a new ballpark of their own.

The more optimistic fan right now will suggest that we not view this trade in a vacuum; "Omar's got somethin' up his sleeve! Let him work his magic!"

I will suggest that we stop viewing our General Manager as some bizarre magician wizard person, all-knowing and ready to spin Ryan Church around as the answer to our need for an ace. We don't have that ace right now. We have Ryan Church. When you trade one of your top young players for a couple of so-so 30-year olds, the trade should be viewed in a vacuum unless something better happens. If it does, I'll give credit where credit is due.

The luster's worn off, Omar Minaya. This move just makes no sense. If this was all Lastings Milledge, formerly one of the most coveted young players in the game, could get you right now, in November 2007, why wasn't it worth it to just let him play next season? For the third time, he couldn't have put up Ryan Church-like numbers? If nothing else, he couldn't have played himself into being as a more valuable trading chip for next July? For the third time, Brian Schneider and Ryan Church? You couldn't have demanded a middle reliever out of that deal?

I'm just trying to take away any positives I can find right now. Marty Noble seems to like the trade, which has only made finding a justification for it that much harder.

Right now, there's not a whole lot else to say. Peace up, young Lastings.

R.I.P.

(Photos courtesy mets.com, thecrockedpot.com)

Don't Let The Door Hit You On The Way Out

2007-11-27T21:08:00.000-05:00

That's right - I'm talking to you, Tom McCarthy. You were 2006 and 2007's radio play-by-play guy for the Mets, and you're now going back to Philadelphia to call Phillies games again. Peace out, kid. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

The name Tom McCarthy certainly didn't mean anything to me when in late 2005 the Mets announced the replacement they had selected for Gary Cohen, who at the time was preparing for his first season in the Mets TV booth during what was then going to be SNY's inaugural season. For all the heartbreak, the Mets - Fran Healy and Ted Robinson excluded - have at least always had good broadcasters, so I figured that the team had done it's homework and found an acceptable replacement for Gary Cohen, also known as the God of all things play-by-play.

Tom McCarthy even looks like a knock-off version of this guy

Tom McCarthy was okay. Nothing more, nothing less, just okay. He kind of sounded like Gary Cohen, except crappier. His home run call was particularly crappy. All in all he was like a poor man's Gary Cohen, with a Michael Kay home run call.

All the while the Mets TV broadcasts, a weak point in the FSNY/MSG/Matt Laughlin days, have in the past two years been as good as, if not better than, anyone else in the business. Gary, Ron, and Keith have become somewhat of a trademark, and as I've mentioned previously on this blog the Mets are fortunate to have put together such a great TV announcing team.

But the WFAN/Mets relationship is perhaps as significant as that of any radio station/baseball team combo. 660 am WFAN is THE flagship station for New York sports, where WCBS 880 is just another corporate news station, doing games for the corporate Yankees. And it's carried Mets games for the entirety of its 20-year existence. Lets Go Mets! F-A-N! (doo doo doo) Anyone who's ever listened to a Mets game on the radio knows what I'm talking about. Plus they play "Meet the Mets" at the beginning of every broadcast. Mets extra.

Mets baseball on the FAN, most always preceded or followed by the sweet voice of Met fan Steve Somers, has always been a first class production. And for the most part, the broadcasts have always had first class commentators calling the game. Bob Murphy. Bob Murphy and Gary Cohen. Gary Cohen and Eddie Coleman. Gary Cohen and Howie Rose. Howie Rose and Eddie Coleman. Howie Rose and Tom McCarthy? It was just kind of a downer.

Plus Tom McCarthy is a total Phillies fan. He did their games, plus the pre and post-game shows, for the 5 seasons preceding his arrival in the Shea broadcast booth, and now he's going back there, under his own volition. He issued the following statement with regard to his most recent career move:

“I’m excited to be back in Philadelphia. I enjoyed my two years with WFAN and the Mets. Both are first-class, as are the Phillies. I’m looking forward to returning and can’t wait for spring training to get here.” (metsblog, via Phillies team press release)

Personally, I'm of the school of thought that team announcers should be partisan. Incredibly partisan. I want the people calling Mets games for the Mets TV network and the Mets radio network to be passionate Mets fans. Now, it's different for a Joe Buck, or a Tim McCarver, where the former is a Cardinals fan, the latter still has an axe to grind with the Mets, and the two of them make up Fox's - and in turn baseball's - premier announcing duo. National television announcers should at least not be blatantly slanted.

But Bob Murphy (RIP), Gary Cohen, Howie Rose - these guys all love(d) the Mets. They're not unreasonable, and they're fair in their commentary - unlike John Sterling, or anyone else who's ever called a Yankee game - but at the same time you can hear that extra note of excitement in their voice when something good is happening for the Mets. And when any one game gets out of hand you can usually catch a few old Mets fan-related anecdotes from these guys about their longstanding allegiance to the orange and blue.

Some commenter on metsblog said Tom McCarthy grew up a Mets fan. BS. If that were the case he would not have had the stones to turn around and do Phillies games for 5 years before finally getting his Mets gig. I understand that broadcasting jobs are hard to come by, but I would consider that an irreconcilable difference.

The point is that Tom McCarthy shouldn't have been with the Mets, and the Mets shouldn't have gone for Tom McCarthy. He did a decent job, but he certainly wasn't good enough for the Mets to have given a former Phillies broadcaster, who at the very least had just compromised his Mets fanhood for the previous 5 years, their top radio broadcasting spot.

So peace out, Tom. Take your generic video-game voice with you back down to Philly and enjoy yourself. Hopefully the Mets and WFAN can find a first class replacement for a second class announcer.

(Pictures courtesy mets.com, sports.gearlive.com)

Omar Minaya Makes Lemonade

2007-11-21T12:50:00.000-05:00

This hot stove season, young as it may be, has already been frustrating for us Mets fans.

I think that may just come with the territory of cheering for a team that, traditionally down on it's luck, blew a 7 game lead in the last month of a season in which they were supposed to go to the World Series, but what do I know? I'm only speculating here.

My point is that we want to see something. We're irrational. We want results - now. Where's Johan Santana? Weren't we supposed to get A Rod? And Miguel Cabrera? Why didn't we trade for Brad Lidge?

And we forget that the free agent signing period is only 8 days old, and that the World Series has only been over for three weeks, and we're hard on Omar Minaya because we all placed varying degrees of blame on him for the debacle that was 2007, and he almost gave Yorvit Torrealba 15 million dollars, and he treated Paul Lo Duca like crap.

And we forget that it's not as simple as just "getting" Johan, or Eric Bedard, or Scott Kazmir. We forget that signing A Rod might not have been the best idea (I still think giving a 32 year-old a 10-year contract is unwise. While the treatment of Paul Lo Duca has certainly been shameful, in making Paulie Walnuts a martyr we conveniently ignore the fact that a 36-year old catcher made an initial contract demand of 3 years and upwards of $20 million. He can say all he wants how badly he wanted to stay, but a reasonable deal for Paul Lo Duca would have taken an awful lot of downward negotiation to actually work out. The man was slimed, but from a baseball standpoint it might have made good sense in the end to say "thanks for the memories, Paulie."

After the Torrealba deal did fall through, though, we were left in a bit of a catching quandary, to say the least. Despite the signings of Ramon Castro and Luis Castillo, taking care of two of our immediate priorities, we still had a need that had to be filled and could have potentially detracted from the all-important search for pitching. Who wants Michael Barrett? Jason Kendall? Gerald Laird? Whoopee! Ramon Hernandez and Bengie Molina are going to be hard to pry away from their respective teams, methinks.

So instead Omar made a very shrewd deal, getting another serviceable, mid-range talent catcher in Johnny Estrada (who we didn't have to sign for 3 years and $15 million, and who can be non-tendered in December if something better comes along) for...

We won't be seeing this next year

Guillermo Mota! That's right, I didn't misspeak and mean to say Carlos Gomez. Or Phil Humber, or Kevin Mulvey. Guillermo Mota - the late lead-blowing former steroid user and weakest link from last year's atrocious bullpen. Not a top prospect. Not anything remotely valuable. Omar traded Guillermo Mota, and swindled the Brewers into giving us an acceptable, switch-hitting catching option to platoon with Ramon Castro when they could have held firm and parted with nothing more than a bag of balls, which quite frankly many Mets fans probably would have been okay with.

Yeah, we all want an ace. We want to see marked improvement in our Metsies before '08 begins. But give it time. You don't think our GM with a zeal for flair and pulling off the big deal isn't trying to make that happen, if not for the sake of the team, then certainly for his own self-preservation?

We often lose sight of the fact that we no longer have a complete moron as our GM. We forget that having a GM who understands the value of not making a move just for the sake of making a move is a very good thing, and a fresh departure from years past. In our own passion for winning, and outrage at the way this season ended, we forget how lucky we are for a change to have some very good, or at least remotely able, minds at the top of our organization.

Omar was able to bend the book on conventional wisdom, and dealt from a weakness to fill a need - that is brilliant, and so un-Steve Phillips it's got to put a smile on your face.

The jury's still out on just how good a hot stove season this will end up being, but give credit where credit is due. You're pretty happy right now. This small move was enormously encouraging.

(Photos courtesy images.orblogs.com, thefeed.blogs.com)

Yorvit Torre-Not Gonna Play For the Mets Next Year

2007-11-18T20:01:00.000-05:00

The Mets flirted with Yorvit Torrealba, took him out for a second date, asked him to marry them, and were all set to walk down the aisle, while jealous and heartbroken ex-girlfriend Paul Lo Duca sat on the sidelines, watching it all unfold in front of his sad, tear-soaked face. Ramon Castro was the bridesmaid, and there was a good chance he might just get in on a little bit of the post-wedding reception, no-longer-premarital action.

It was a match made in heaven...well, not really

But before Yorvit could make it to the altar, the Mets entertained some serious second thoughts. They wanted true love. They feared a short-lived, tumultuous marriage, even though they longed for someone to grow old with. They took a gander towards the wedding party and saw Yorvit's mother, who time had not been kind to.

In the end, they just couldn't go through with it. Before you could say ".250 career hitter," they were out of there.

Outside the world of metaphors, the Mets did get cold feet with regard to Yorvit Torrealba this weekend, and the free agent catcher will not be playing in Queens for 3 years and $14.4 million of the Wilpon family fortune. As I indicated at the end of my last post, while I still favored bringing back Lo Duca, I had come to terms with the deal, and even supported it a little bit. Metsblog dug up more positive commentary from Rockies fans toward the end of last week about the uniquely-named backstop, and a little Torrealba/Castro platoon was looking okay. The support, though, never left the "I'm cool with this because it's going to happen either way and I'm going to convince myself it's okay because there's nothing I can do about it" realm.

So I'm not too disappointed - my emotions, to be sure, are not in as poor shape as the Mets catching situation. What do we do now? Paulie may have really wanted us, but you've got to think he's a little too proud to let us go crawling back to him at this point.

Because apparently every single Mets failure over the last 2 years was completely the fault of Paul Lo Duca. Metstradamus sums this up pretty well, so there's no need to say the same thing twice, but Lo Duca is being made a total scapegoat. It's clear that he was never Omar Minaya's first choice, and apparently he didn't come around enough to Salsa music over the course of the last two years to make Omar, Tony Bernazard and co. view him in a more positive light.

Look, I like Omar Minaya, but he absolutely wins d-bag of the month of November for this one. Say you're not interested in bringing back Paul Lo Duca because he's a 36 year old catcher and could break down over the life of his new deal. Come up with some other excuse. Or just do as your grandmother always said and don't say anything, if you don't have anything nice to say. But instead the Met front office just threw Lo Duca under the bus so they could to justify giving a career .250 hitter three years and $15 million.

And now, because Torrealba failed a physical, or was part of the Mitchell investigation, or whatever, we have no catcher. And we don't even deserve a 36 year old catcher who could break down over the life of his next contract, and won't get him, although it now really looks like he's the best option at this point.

Because we need to use our trading chips for pitching, and the free agent market is now officially void of viable regular catching options. My vote is to let Ramon Castro, who's deal didn't collapse - if you will - start and pray it works. Find him a decent backup and hope he and Castro outperform the Alberto Castillo/Tim Spehr pre-Mike Piazza platoon from 1998.

We're going on three years since the start of the Pedro/Beltran era, two since Billy Wagner and Carlos Delgado joined the party. New Yorkers have short memories and an even smaller degree of collective patience. Go get some good pitching, Omar, and prove you're still worth anything.

(Pics courtesy angrychicken.typepad.com, superbweddings.com)

Not Such a Head-Scratcher?

2007-11-14T21:10:00.000-05:00

Reports from metsblog, which is good enough for me, but which apparently originated through David Lennon and Ken Davidoff in Newsday, seem to be matching the Mets with free agent catcher Yorvit Torrealba. My first reaction?

Omar, what the hell are you thinking?!?

Why?

To begin with, the rumors have the Mets signing Torrealba at 3 years and $15 million. This is 1 year and $9 million more than the Rockies (who Torrealba played for this year) offered, which for one seems unnecessary. That's New York Knicks right there. Allan Houston. Tim Thomas. Overpay for marginal talent.

Last year, Yorvit (he does have a cool first name) hit .251 with 8 homers and 47 RBI in what was considered a "career year," but away from Coors Field that came out to just .212 with 2 home runs. Torrealba is apparently solid behind the plate, but threw out just 19% of baserunners, so as far as throwing out base stealers, he wouldn't be too much of an upgrade over Paul Lo Duca and his 23% rate. The move really doesn't seem to make sense because even while paying no attention to Yorvit's ridiculous Coors Field/road ballpark splits, Lo Duca, on a down year, still outperformed him in nearly every major offensive category (.272/9/54).

So what's up here? Apparently the Mets are tepid about resigning Lo Duca, especially on his agent's terms, which are reportedly higher than what the Mets would like to offer. Despite the energy and leadership Lo Duca brings to the team, Omar Minaya seems to see Paulie Walnuts and his Italian temper in a different, "Lo Duca's a nuisance and I don't want him back"-type light.

And thus, we move in a different direction. Minaya doesn't want to get a Gerald Laird, Ronny Paulino (Ramon Castro, v. 2.0 - not as good as the original), or Ramon Hernandez because they would all have to be acquired via trade. Such a trade would have probably involved one of the Mets few valuable prospects, which we obviously need if we're going to make any meaningful adjustments to the pitching staff beyond Carlos Silva or Livan Hernandez. As far as free agent catchers go, we lost out on giving 37 year-old Jorge Posada a 5 year deal (sweet Jesus, thank you God) so it's not too difficult to see how Omar came to the conclusion that Yorvit Torrealba was our best option.

Process of elimination, baby. Apparently Torrealba won't be signed to serve in the same capacity Lo Duca would have; who knows who will start on Opening Day, but with Ramon Castro working out a deal as well the plan is supposedly for Castro and Torrealba to split time behind the plate next season.

Which is odd, again, because reports have us going 3 and $15 million for a part-time player. Castro's contract is supposed to be somewhere in the range of 2 years and $4 million.

So, on the face of it, Omar Minaya has certainly taken a turn toward trying to lose his job. Until you consider what lies beneath, if you will. From Troy Renck of the Denver Post:

“Torrealba’s main value is that he has passion, he has leadership qualities and he worked wonders with their pitchers. He knew when to give them a pat on the back or a kick in the butt…"

Renck goes on to add, regarding Yorvit's media-savviness:

“He was very accessible to me, I had a great relationship with him and I found him to be very open, very candid and very insightful. He didn’t try to butter everything up. When a guy pitched poorly he explained to me why he pitched poorly without ripping him. If he felt like he called the wrong pitches he took credit for that…

In the playoffs he loved the attention, he gravitated towards the spotlight. He held court at his locker at several times…Now, how he’ll deal with 10 or 15 reporters, during like what the Mets went through last year, that I don’t know. I mean, he can be a little moody, but, to me, it’s a by-product of his passion…

He cares deeply about winning. So, sometimes when he gets upset, it’s not to be a jerk, it’s because he is genuinely upset and he doesn’t want to say the wrong thing, because he cares so much about winning – and I think that’s what his teammates respond so much to.”

So a reporter from Torrealba's hometown paper paints him as a solid teammate who's passionate, is good with the media, can lead, works well with pitchers despite his struggles throwing runners out, and relishes the postseason stage. Sounds good to me.

What to make of this? Personally, I'd like to see the Mets just bite the bullet and bring Lo Duca back. I've always liked the guy; I wrote this in his defense over the summer when he was taking some heat. While his stock has certainly dropped since then, and I no longer think it would be a "grave mistake" or whatever it was I said at the time to let him go, why not take advantage of the fact that he really wants to keep playing with us, negotiate him down, and give him like 2 more years? His numbers weren't so hot this past year, but for Christ's sake he's a frigging catcher. He's cool, he's kind of a throwback, there to be gritty and provide leadership, mainly, which he certainly is and which he certainly does.

But it sounds like Torrealba does the same things. At the same time you don't really lose all that much production-wise, he's 7 years younger, and this move allows Ramon Castro to move into an expanded role, something many fans were clamoring for this past year.

Gonna miss this

If we're over-paying for Yorvit Torrealba I hate to think what we'd offer A-Rod if we wanted him and he wasn't on the verge of going back to the Yankees (c'est tres bizarre, that whole saga). Still, I guess the bottom line here is that we're not bringing Paul Lo Duca back, which is sad but not criminal, and this turnaround move makes the most sense for a variety of reasons. I'm warming up to it.

In an interesting twist, the Rockies are supposedly one of the teams looking to bring in Lo Duca if the Mets don't retain him (metsblog). If nothing else, how gambling, 18 year-old girl chasing Paul Lo Duca fits into the Christian Coalition's good character clubhouse next season should be an entertaining storyline to keep an eye on.

(Photos courtesy mlb.com, cnn.com)

Time To Get Creative

2007-11-08T22:00:00.000-05:00

I have no idea what to think about this offseason. I certainly don't know what the Mets are going to do. I don't have much of a read on what's possible, beyond what metsblog tells me at least, and I'm really not quite sure what I think should be done.

The Mets are in an interesting spot. I don't agree with the alarmists who predict a 4th-place finish next year and a near future full of mediocrity; some people are stupid, and with no moves we return a very good team next year, which will hopefully be pretty pissed about what happened at the end of this year. We've got a solid foundation.

Let us not be mistaken, however: that doesn't mean we don't need to make moves. Once again, Atlanta's always in the rear-view and Philly will be formidable; nothing will be easy in '08. And I think it's definitely true in this day and age that part of getting a team to play with fire is generating the right buzz to spark that fire. A lot of the right buzz can be generated with the right offseason moves - look no further than the 2006 season, where the Mets came in hungry after adding Billy Wagner, Carlos Delgado, and Duaner Sanchez to a team that had won 83 games the year before.

So, it's on you Omar. Know what I'm sayin'? Time to get creative.

Johan Santana might be out of our reach, or is he? Word on the street is the Twins need hitting and are willing to part with pitching. We might not have the prospects to get it done, but what if we send our three best prospects (Milledge, Humber, Pelfrey...apparently the Twins have some interest in Carlos Gomez as well) along with Carlos Delgado - of whose salary we would pay a significant chunk - in exchange for Santana?

He might have more value than we think

Is it likely? Probably not. Could it happen? Sure. Carlos Delgado looks a lot better on an AL team right now, maybe he pushes that deal over the top.

Supposedly the Padres are willing to trade Jake Peavy. God knows why they'd shop a cheap ace in the middle of his contract, but hey, that's their problem. The Yankees offered Melky Cabrera and Phil Hughes, which is laughable considering the fact that L Millz, RBIs aside, posted similar numbers in just 59 games (7 HR, 29 RBI, .272 avg. versus 8, 73, .273 for Cabrera) to what the Melk man put up for the full year.

Lastings Milledge already has a few cool nicknames. And a rap album. Melky Cabrera has a stupid first name, and an even dumber nickname. With no rap album. Suck on that, John Sterling.

Phil Hughes might be more highly regarded than Mike Pelfrey, but the extent of his big league work has so far been just as disappointing without being much more, well, extensive. And how would San Diego feel about getting two pitchers who may be a notch below Hughes (Humber/Pelfrey) but still have similar upside in addition to Milledge and a proven major leaguer. Heilman? I'm just speculating here.

We can trade with the Twins and not get Santana. Like I said, the Twins like Carlos Gomez, and apparently stud youngsters Kevin Slowey and Matt Garza are available. The Indians are open to trading embattled lefty with good stuff Cliff Lee (hmmm...where has that idea worked out before), while embattled righty with good stuff (5-15 with a 5.72 ERA last year, but he's highly regarded for a reason I guess) Edwin Jackson is also apparently available from the Devil Rays...sorry, the Rays. Speaking of the Rays, maybe, in looking for some semblance of buzz in the Tropicana Dome, they want an all expenses paid two years of Carlos Delgado, plus prospects, for, well, you know who I'm talking about. And, mystifyingly, apparently he's available too.

This guy - you might remember him - who we included in a stupid trade a few years back, but could apparently have back for the right price.

Or we could always just re-up Lo Duca and Castillo, grab a couple of arms for the bullpen, (the Nats like Kevin Mulvey and I like Jon Rauch) sign Carlos Silva, Livan Hernandez, or someone else to throw 200 innings out of the rotation, and go to work. I'd be okay with that. David Wright is going to hit at least one big home run off of Brad Lidge next year, so screw you Phillies fans.

We shouldn't sign A Rod. There, I said it. We don't need him and we can not only succeed but get much better without him. Let's forget about moving David Wright, committing $300 million, and get on with it. There are other battles we can fight, and don't come at me with that "losing attitude" crap. We don't need A Rod.

There's an offseason full of other potential options on the table, though. Time to get creative.

(Images courtesy blog.nj.com, thecrockedpot.com, tampabay.rays.mlb.com)

Shea-Rod?

2007-11-06T21:03:00.001-05:00

Rampant speculation, entirely baseless rumors. Outlandish trade and free agent proposals aplenty, from every armchair GM calling into WFAN or writing their own blog. Welcome to the hot stove - it's only one month until the Winter Meetings.

A Rod talk has been widespread and deafening, and its only been a week since his untimely opt-out announcement. Of course, the Mets already have a third baseman, and a shortstop for that matter, but that hasn't stopped fans, baseball pundits, anyone really, from counting the Mets as a legitimate part of the Rodriguez mix. My own most recent post before this one considers the possibility of one big A Rod-related move the Mets could make this winter.

And make no mistake, readers of Warning Track Power, few and far between as you may be: I'm an idiot. There is no way the Mets should trade Jose Reyes. Even for Johan Santana, even if Alex Rodriguez would be his replacement. He is one of two Met players on the current left side of the infield that make up a star fundamental and homegrown core to be built upon, not leveraged...you've heard the argument, but that doesn't make it any less valid. If the Mets are indeed going to pursue Santana, it should be with their current prospects, i.e. Gomez/Milledge/Humber/Pelfrey, or they should just hope he makes it to free agency next winter. If not, we should find a way to win without him (Santana); I'm sure it can be done.

Don't trade Jose Reyes. Ever.

As for A Rod, I also said I wouldn't favor an acquisition of this year's presumptive MVP if it didn't in turn mean Reyes for Santana. Once again, I lied. If the Mets do go after A Rod, it should and should only be with a three-way commitment to him, David Wright, and Jose Reyes. This would require a position switch for one of David or Jose, but if it's feasible to move Wright to first and trade Carlos "I'm bored" Delgado, (the only position switch that should possibly accommodate an A Rod signing) going after Rodriguez under these terms at least seems worthy of consideration.

There are several reasons for going either way on this. At the end of the day, I have no gut feeling. I'm torn. Consider that:

An infield with Wright, Reyes, and A Rod would be monstrous. Wright might be better suited for first base anyway, that infield would put up absurd offensive numbers. Reyes, Wright, A Rod, and Carlos Beltran in 4 of the first 5 spots in the batting order would be a pretty sweet offensive core for the next several years. A Rod would break several MLB records in a Mets uniform and there would be a good chance that one of the greatest players in the history of the game would go into the Hall of Fame wearing a Mets hat. I've never liked A Rod, but this all might just be a manifestation of the really-hot-girl-who-you-don't-like effect. She starts to seem a lot more likeable when you find out you might have a chance with her.

Like Amanda Peet in "Saving Silverman"...kind of

On the flipside: 10 years, $300 million. We can afford it sure, but A Rod is 32 right now. That means he will be between the ages of 37-42 for entire second half of his contract. 42 is old. That's the downside of his career. $150 million would be going to a player on the downside of his career putting up declining numbers.

This deal would look really good for a few years, but what about after that? A Rod would probably break the home run record in our uniform, while also passing Pete Rose's career hits mark in those last 5 years. Is that worth $150 million? That's the $300 million question.

To me, it's also the only serious reason why signing A Rod would be a bad idea. Make no mistake, it's a big consideration, but as far as moving David Wright, I don't think it's such a bad plan. Kevin Youkilis, Albert Pujols, and Craig Biggio all serve as counterpoints to any arguments about position switches and their negative impacts. And for all the fuss about A Rod's ego, potential to be a cancer in the clubhouse, and postseason failures, I have a feeling a lot of the problems with him are going to go away with him leaving the Yankees. I think the financial question will be a huge question for whoever A Rod's next team ends up being, but as far as the other "issues" go, I really don't think they're that big of a deal and I think they were exacerbated by the competing arrogance and total lack of support that met A Rod's arrival in the Bronx.

In the end, though, I guess I would rather spend that $30 million per season elsewhere. A Rod would be the big splash move that's not going to come regarding the pitching staff this offseason, because our prospects aren't good enough to get Johan Santana - even Scott Kazmir - and, well, we've been through the other scenario and why it should never happen. Omar Minaya might be feeling pressure to make that big splash, but I'm just not sure it's worth that amount of money. We have a left side of the infield. David Wright just won a gold glove. We need pitching.

But oh that tricky catch-22: there's not any non-overpriced, better-than-mediocre pitching out there that's legitimately available to us this offseason. Should we do what we can and save the money for the impressive crop of free agent pitchers hitting the market next year? Maybe we can get any of those overpriced, mediocre pitchers we need while also signing A Rod. I don't know.

I know I could still end up going either way on this, which is good, because it's going to take forever to play out. Screw you, Scott Boras.

(Pictures courtesy usatoday.com, celebopedia.com)

The Nuclear Option

2007-10-28T22:10:00.001-04:00

I've vacillated on this point and turned it over in my head, considered the possibility and agonized over how it would make me feel. I've thought at length about what it would mean for the Mets, in '08 and going forward.

The idea's been referenced - brought up in the blogs, on the message boards, in the daily way-too-early off-season conversations and thoughts of many a Mets fan. I'm hardly the first person to think of it; really it's not an altogether ridiculous or unrealistic proposition, and while it's not completely obvious the idea certainly doesn't come out of left field - switching up our metaphors, maybe we could say it comes out of the left side of the Mets infield, which would be dramatically altered if...

You'd think, given A Rod's millions, that, you know...Cynthia Rodriquez?!?

We signed Alex Rodriguez to play short, then traded Jose Reyes to the Minnesota Twins for Johan Santana.

The scary part, as I mentioned, is that the Mets could probably make it happen if they wanted to. SNY, Citi Field and all, they're certainly one of the few teams right now who could afford A Rod, regardless of whether they were to then turn around and use Reyes to acquire Santana. (If they just signed A Rod, a move by itself that would be considerably less likely in my opinion, David Wright would probably move to 2nd or 1st) As far as trading Reyes for Santana, we all know the scenario with Johan. He's the best pitcher on the planet, he hits free agency next year, the Twins won't be able to afford him, many people think he's getting dealt this offseason one way or another. You're telling me the Twins don't take a 24 year-old shortstop who, absent a terrible September, is still the most electrifying player in the game, blah blah his contract for the next four years is far below market value?

This move (the two would have to be a package deal for me to consider either of them) would obviously blow up the look of the Mets. One of the two best homegrown Mets players since Doc and Darryl would be gone. David Wright would hit his prime in A Rod's shadow; that could be a good thing or a bad thing but he's a team player and I think he blossoms into the Mets' unquestionable leader over the next 10-15 years regardless of who's playing around him. We would obviously only make the move with Minnesota if we were granted a window to negotiate with Santana, and knew we could sign him (though I can't substantiate this, I've heard Johan Santana has expressed a desire to pitch in New York, for the Mets, and would presumably be eager to sign with us long term for the right price). Johan Santana would obviously demand an A Rod-like contract of his own, and at the end of the day, without going into Yankee territory payroll-wise we'd basically become the Red Sox, i.e. big-market club who hovers around $100 million for a long time before biting the bullet and going up to around $140 million because the money's there and it's just a question of being willing to spend it. Make no mistake - with Carlos Delgado ($16 million), Pedro ($11 million), Orlando Hernandez (6.5 million), even Guillermo Mota ($3.2 million, aye) coming off the books after next year, along with the aforementioned new ballpark and on-the-up-and-up cable network (one needn't look further than the YES network for an accurate model of yearly revenue growth for a sports team-oriented cable TV station in a big market), the Mets have the ability to afford Johan Santana and Alex Rodriguez.

There's a laundry list of reasons why signing A Rod and trading Reyes for Santana might be a bad idea, certainly why it's unnecessary. Build around your homegrown and existing talent - just look at three out of the four teams in the two League Championship Series this year; that's also what made the Mets successful last year. But homegrown talent is just as valuable if it's dealt in the right moves for the right players on other teams. Perhaps a package to the Twins lands Joe Nathan too and helps solve our bullpen issues.

Look, you can make arguments either way on this. We might be selling our soul, we might be making the right move for the sake of the franchise. I love Jose Reyes; I think he's coming back strong next year. And I think that no matter what happens this off-season we've got the talent regardless to go back to the playoffs in '08.

Interesting to see, though, if we pursue the nuclear option.

(Photos courtesy atomicarchive.com, msnbcmedia.com, cnn.net, emlbhome.com)

Fighting With Your Family

2007-10-25T20:02:00.001-04:00

I lied, I'm not going to write about Joe Torre. The one-week window for writing about current events has come and gone, and I've been far too lazy on my off-season, pre-hot stove blogging schedule to put something up about a story I really don't care about all that much.

I will say this: imagine you have this job, right, where even though you've been given all the tools to be good at it, you've still had nothing but success. Even while you've had such unchecked success, your boss won't stop looking over your shoulder, criticizing you at nearly everything that resembles a wrong turn. Even though your boss is a jerk, you still continue to be successful. When it comes time to renew your contract, though, you're offered less money.

If the Yankees wanted to fire Joe Torre, they should have just come out and done it. On the classiness meter, what the Yankees did do was kind of like the old "it's not you, it's me" excuse for breaking up with someone. You're too afraid to be straightforward, so you employ some backhanded method that still achieves your ultimate goal. Brilliant!

But like I said, I don't really care about Torre. As long as he stays away from the Mets, and as long as Mets fans stop suggesting that the Mets bring him to Queens along with Jorge Posada to catch, Andy Pettite for the starting rotation, and Mariano Rivera to turn 37, 38, 39, and 40 while blowing more and more saves over the length of the 4 yrs. and 40 million it would take to get him.

From Marty Noble's weekly mailbag on mets.com:

Just so happens that a general manager candidate has become available. He's a winner and is well respected; he knows the Mets manager, works well under pressure and he probably would be able to add a left-handed starting pitcher, a switch-hitting catcher and a closer. Is Joe Torre's future with the Mets? Would adding him and at least three players with 12 rings help the Mets?
-- Frank S., Queens Villge, N.Y.

I used to feel like Marty Noble was disrespectful to the people who submitted questions to his mailbag. To be honest, he's always come off as a smug jackass who, while admittedly a very good and engaging writer, can't stop shoving his knowledge of the Mets down your throat. It's in this case, though, that I wish he would be more like the smug jackass and less like whatever kind of writer gives stupid questions anything more than stupid answers.

Margaret from Jackson, NJ, sent in this query:
What's your opinion -- Torre for the Mets' general manager? Maybe with him there Willie Randolph will be allowed to manage the team.
Whaho, that's clever Margaret! Throw in a jab about how Omar is overbearing because he feels like he should have a say in choosing coaches, while also proposing the brilliant idea of bringing in over-the-hill Yankees and their old ex-managers to solve our problems and reinforce our already deep New York inferiority complex.

I say "Fighting With Your Family" because it's so disappointing to read this crap coming out of the mouths (off the fingers?) of fellow Mets fans. Maybe the internet is ultimately a bad thing, at least for sports fans, because by reading stuff like this we're torn apart by each other's unpleasantly surprising stupidity, where in the good old days we'd just go to the ballpark, cheer, and be blissfully ignorant of how dumb significant chunks of each of our team's fanbases can be. Last week Juan G sent this in...

Don't you think that Omar Minaya is the person primarily responsible for the Mets collapse? He was told last year that he needed to improve the pitching. Instead of going after some big-name pitchers, he said that he was not going to do that. Then, he still did nothing when the July trade deadline came and went. What was the result of his not doing anything about the pitching? One of the most disastrous collapses in Major League history. Don't you believe that he is primarily responsible?

...which isn't stupid, so much as just completely ignorant. Big-name pitchers like Barry Zito, right? Who Minaya went after, hard, but didn't offer $127 million over 7 years to because he's really not that good. Maybe Barry's 11-13, 4.53 line this year could have stopped the collapse. Or maybe we should have gotten Gagne at the deadline? Because Eric Gagne, the Canadian version of Guillermo Mota, wouldn't have sucked as much as everyone else in the bullpen - curious that for the most part he's been conspicuously absent from Boston's postseason bullpen mix - and wouldn't have cost us two or more of our four prospects/young players who are worth anything right now (Milledge, Pelfrey, Humber, Gomez).

Criticize Omar for trading Heath Bell, or Matt Lindstrom, or whatever. Not without their appropriate reasoning at the time, but still moves that didn't pan out. But dammit I'm sick of this "didn't get a big name" crap. The pitching market last Winter said Jeff Suppan was a big name, but Omar stayed away because he's not an idiot. And questionable bullpen moves last offseason aside, the team that Omar Minaya put on the field this year should have won 92-95 games and gone back to the playoffs as two-time NL East champs. The majority of the screwing up was done in the dugout, on the field, but certainly not in the front office.

I'm not the first Mets blogger to write about the mailbag. And there's probably someone out there who thinks I'm dumb, along with "the Sip." (Big shouts to Yankees2000, my favorite Mets blog out there) But it's just so infuriating when members of your family say stupid things.

Are the winter meetings here yet?

(Photos courtesy newsday.com, sny.tv)

Blue and Orange Envy

2007-10-21T23:57:00.000-04:00

Not gonna lie, a part of me has always been jealous of the Red Sox, even before they started winning. The history, ballpark, united devotion to one team of not just a city, but an entire geographical region...it's always been somewhat of a cause for envy.

Then I watched them win a World Series while still waiting on the Mets. Then I watched them come back from 3-1 to win another AL pennant just three short weeks after the Amazins' completed the most amazin' 17-game collapse in baseball history.

I root for the Red Sox when the Mets are out of it. I was born in Massachusetts, I loved the Red Sox in the '04 postseason as if they were my own. I'm happy for the Sox right now and I'll be going for them in the World Series, even against Kaz Matsui's hard-not-to-like Rockies, and several friends of mine who call Colorado home and have never known a winning baseball team until now. But at the same time I know that they are not my own. I'd of course be ten times happier if it were the Mets who were headed to the World Series. Any joy I feel for the Boston Red Sox in the god-fatherly sense; perhaps more accurately it's like the feeling you get when your best friend starts dating a beautiful girl.

I love my Metsies and I can't wait for '08. And as happy as I am for my #2 right now, I'm still jealous.

Congratulations Red Sox. More to come on Joe Torre and fighting with your family.

(Photo courtesy espn.com)

Warning Track Power

2007-10-15T22:33:00.000-04:00

Perhaps you noticed the name change. After deciding that "Bleeding Blue and Orange" had to go, (it's not original...touche, "Steph") I spent about a month trying to decide on a new name. If you've read my blog, you may have noticed that despite no change in the URL, the name for the last week or so has been "Foul Territory." Well I don't like that either. So from now on it's going to be "Warning Track Power." Thought of it just now. Seriously, I did. Good right?

That's it, Warning Track Power. Throwin' that out there. If somebody else has this name already I don't give a damn. My blog is better.

My blog, which in case you were unclear, is henceforth going to be called Warning Track Power. Consider yourself warned.

Monday Night

2007-10-15T22:05:00.000-04:00

Lots of good TV tonight. Just finished watching "Heroes"...that show is nuts. It's really the only show on TV that I make any sort of commitment to so I get pretty into it.

There was Heroes, there's Red Sox/Indians on FOX, my Giants are currently taking on the Michael Vickless Falcons in Atlanta. And oh yeah, there's another League Championship Series, too. Up 3-0 in the NLCS, the Colorado Rockies will play for a World Series berth in just a little bit.

Speaking of the Rox, how scared are you of Colorado right now if you're the Red Sox or Indians? In what was once again supposed to be an AL year, the team that's one game away from representing the National League in the World Series has won 20 out of their last 21 games. Everything's going right for those dudes from Denver, with Kaz Matsui leading the charge.

Sorry I haven't written in a while. I'm kind of taking it easy while there's no real Mets news to speak of. The Phillies still suck. And how about those Yankees?!? You know about that already though. Stay tuned the next couple days while all the boss' men decide Joe Torre's fate. I'm so glad I'm not a Yankee fan; I like my soul.

Bear with me while I get back on it. Don't know how much Mets I'll be talking until the Hot Stove starts, but before too much longer I'll launch into some additional analysis of where the Mets stand right now and what we'll need if we're to even think about preparing for glory in '08.

So much better than "your season has come"

Giants up 21-10 at the half. Eli's gone for 208 yards and 2 TDs so far. Good for that soul of mine, and the old fantasy team.

(Pics courtesy about.com, cbc.ca)

Hate Mail

2007-10-07T23:49:00.000-04:00

I'm not laughing. Really, I'm not. The fact the Phillies lost in the first round of the playoffs and couldn't win a single game isn't remotely funny. Not funny at all. Hehe. He. AHHHHHHH who am I kidding it's hilarious!

Hey knock knock? (who's there) THE PHILLIES GOT SWEPT OUT OF THE FIRST ROUND ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha! (credit to Martin Ruane "burnsiefresh" Burns for the joke) No, really though, what's funny about October 7, 2007?

The Phillies lost ahhhhhahahahahahah!

I've been over this before. It's funny when the Phillies lose because it happens so often, yet their fans, their entire team attitude, is so incredibly cocky. So much for class, so much for humility. I got this email on Monday afternoon from an address I didn't recognize:

Matt,

Your blog has been a great source of entertainment over the past few weeks. I came accross your site by accident but it did not dissapoint. At least the better team won in the end. So which was better , the quick and painlfull death in the 2006 NLCS or the slow prolonged agonizing variety of 2007 ?

Attached to the email were four pictures of the Phillies celebrating their division title. I'm pretty sure that's the first time I've gotten a response via my email address being posted at the bottom of Bleeding Blue and Orange's main page, but it shed some interesting light nonetheless on what a division title apparently meant to the Phillies.

How much do these fans actually care about their team? Obviously, it hurts for them when they lose and the fans of Philadelphia (who aren't busy preparing for the next Eagles game) rejoice when they win. But are Phillies fans happy when their team wins a division only because it means the Mets didn't? I got this email on Tuesday:

Hi Matt,

I couldn't help but chuckle while reading your June 30th blog titled "Twin Killing".

Once again a "maddening pathetic losing stretch" by your "laughably pathetic" Metropolitans has reasserted Jimmy Rollins' pre-season claim that the Fightin' Phillies are the team to beat in the NL East. Have a wonderful off season you cocky little s***face.

Ever so smugly,
Your younger Philadelphia Brother,
"The Muffinman"

Nice to hear from ya, Muffinman. Glad you're so happy about the Mets losing.

My responses to both emails were similar; they involved references to the Phillies' own end-of-year collapses the past 4 years and, by extension, how I now know how it must feel to root for the Phillies. It's good, it's nice and very instructive to be able to put yourself in your enemies' shoes. I pointed out the Phillies 1 world championship in 125 years, while the Mets, futility-riddled history of their own, have at least won 2 in 45. I told both anonymous and "Muffinman" that possibly the '07 Phillies could bring the city of Philadelphia it's first world championship since Rocky Balboa's heavyweight title against Clubber Lang.

But I guess it's too late for you, Philly. Postseason ended before it even began. Was this even worth it for you guys? Good to see you guys were able to take advantage of your invitation into the playoffs as a result of the worst collapse in baseball history.

When the Mets broke the Braves' string of 14 consecutive division titles last year, we didn't rub it in anyone's face. We were happy for ourselves, and we celebrated. But we didn't feel the need to shove it down anyone else's throat. Apparently they do things a little differently down in Philadelphia.

Regardless, it looks like the 2007 season for the 89-win division champion Philadelphia Phillies has come to an end. Nicely done, Jimmy Rollins and co. Congratulations, team to beat. You earned this.

See ya next year.

(Photos courtesy cache.boston.com, media.philly.com, hotstovenewyork.com)

Why Am I A Mets Fan?

2007-10-04T21:13:00.001-04:00

Had some downtime at work today and cruised over to metsblog, because that's what I do when I have downtime anywhere and happen to be sitting in front of a computer. I came across this article, which was written by Mike Novara, of ESPN radio, and posted at the top of metsblog's main page.

In case you don't click on that link, the article is called "A History of Heartbreak," and pretty much details every depressing reason why the idea of being a Mets fan must suck to any reasonable person. In my lifetime, we've sucked it up for the majority of the 1990s, were good for like three years in the heart of the Mike Piazza era and then sucked again for a few. We brought in Omar and Willie in 2005, D Wright and Reyes came into their own and we added some other guys, but only for Mets fans everywhere to have their hearts broken once again in successive years when we really thought we would win it all.

Going back to the 80s, we won a World Series and another division title, but underachieved on the whole and didn't accomplish the dynastic success we were capable of. In the 70s, we had one good year. The 60s gave Mets fans of that generation the Miracle Mets but also the worst team in the history of baseball. And don't get me started on the trades. Ohhh the trades!

Nolan Ryan...Tom Seaver...Scott Kazmir...the list goes on. Novara goes into all of it in depth - I'd really recommend reading his article. It accomplishes the difficult task of putting into words the difficulty, the devastation, the scorn from across town...and certainly does it much better than I believe I could. Have a look if you haven't already.

Anyway, so I read it. I relived all the misery that's occurred since 1991, or approximately the time at which I officially became a fan. Since 1993, when I saw the last game the worst team money could buy played that year in my first ever trip to Shea Stadium. Since '94, when Jeff Kent ignored my autograph request and I watched John Franco blow a 9th inning lead from the front rows of the Mezzanine section at Shea. I relived it all, and soaked up some additional information about the Mets teams that I'll never have a firsthand clue about.

And it got me thinking. Why am I a Mets fan? Why do I deal with this? I'm probably taking years off of my life just by writing this. Why do I put up with the frustration, the agony? With as much time and money as being a sports fan in the modern world requires you to invest in your team, why do I continue to make my team the Mets? Since I realize this, why am I so stupid?

Why couldn't I just switch to the Yankees as an 8-year old in '96, when they won the first of those four late 20th-century World Series titles? That's early enough, right? That wouldn't have been immoral, would it? Why did I endure the ongoing drone of Yankees won the World Series taunts from my 3-4 class, when I could have just become one of them and gotten around it all?

I always thought Butch Huskey looked like that security guard from Little Big League. Maybe?

Why didn't the last straw come when Butch Huskey was our first baseman in '96? Why didn't it come in '98, when, as Novara points out in his article, the Mets had to win one game at Turner Field in the last weekend of September to clinch the Wild Card, and lost all three? Why wasn't the fact that I waited until I was 10 years old for the Mets to even come realistically close to qualifying for the playoffs a louder alarm bell?

Why wasn't Robbie Alomar the last straw? Or Mo Vaughn. Or Jeremy Burnitz, take two. Or Shawn Estes insuring that my team failed to get revenge on Roger Clemens when it had the chance, two years after Roger hit Piazza and threw a splintered bat at him.

And why am I as excited as ever for next season, when my Mets are the laughing stock right now of baseball, tshirthell.com, and pretty much every other credible staple of society. Why isn't this the last straw? Shouldn't the fact that I'm talking right now about how painful it is to root for the Mets be a louder alarm bell?

When I was in high school and I'd do something stupid, my Mom would yell at me primarily for giving myself unnecessary trouble. "Why do you do this," she'd ask, "why can't you just make it easier on yourself?" I wonder why she never told me not to root for the Mets. Why can't I just make things easier on myself?

Because being a Mets fan isn't about making things easier on yourself. Being a sports fan shouldn't be. In his fabulously penned, (keyed?) comprehensive "Manifesto" following the Mets' loss on Sunday, the outstanding Mets blogger Metstradamus offered this description of the fan experience:

You (blindly) invest your time, money, and faith in a group of men who don't know you from Adam, but you know way too much about them. And you support them. You support them with your money...with your time...and with your allegiance. You support them because you hope that one day they'll give you that feeling of exhilaration that makes you feel like you're actually one of them.

But why wouldn't I want to feel that more often? Shouldn't I just root for the Yankees so that I'll be successful in pursuit of that feeling? Why don't I just do what my friend does in football and follow a player (he follows TO) so that I don't have to deal with all this fan allegiance crap?

It wouldn't mean anything then. It wouldn't mean anything for the Mets even to have basically won their first division title in my lifetime last year. Front-running means rooting for a team for all the wrong reasons. When you root for a team just because they win, you're not in search of that feeling, you're just looking to cheer superficially.

As a Mets fan, you take the good with the bad. The name Mo Vaughn means as much as the name David Wright, 2002 means as much as 2006. The entire team getting busted for pot, at the end of a disappointing high-payroll, low-result season, the scene complete with the image on the cover of the New York Post of one of the club's young relief pitchers smoking a joint, is funny. The name Todd Hundley means something - not because his visage is in Monument Park, but because he was a gritty bastard of a catcher, hit home runs, looked cool, his teammates called him Hot Rod, and he was your boyhood hero anyway even if he never played in the postseason and drank too much.

The point is, you wait for that feeling, and it doesn't come and doesn't come and you feel the exact opposite feeling over and over again, but you maintain faith that one day it will. And when it comes, you hope that another day it comes again. You live and die with your team because as much as dying sucks, living is so nice.

One day this will all come to bear. One day it will seem worth it to a more objective observer. Maybe not. Maybe that day will never come. But being a fan is about the undying, blind, and at many times irrational belief that one day it will. One day I will actually sip a little champagne.

I love the Mets. I have no shame in saying it. My baseball team is one of my favorite things in the world. I get pumped for April like no other time of the year. And I rely on September to ease the transition back to business after the end of a long summer. The Mets are a permanent part of me, of my persona. And I wouldn't have it any other way.

I've been getting crap from Phillies fans the past few days, crap from Yankee fans, I've watched fellow fans defect, I even lost (again) a $10 dollar double or nothing bet from last year with my Uncle that the Mets would win the World Series. (PS, Adam Sommers - if you ever read this - it's okay, don't let the door hit you on the way out. You have the same feelings as every Mets fan right now and instead of taking them like a man you're running away like the wimp you are)

It's hard out here for a Mets fan. But give me pitchers and catchers, right now. Give me opening day. Give me next June 1, the beginning of this year's end. It can't come soon enough.

And regardless of what happens, I'll be here, just as loyal, and I'll be standing tall, because it's not only about loyalty - it's about duty, honor, and the sense of pride I get when I see a little kid with a Mets shirt. It's about the sense of camaraderie, of brotherhood, of common purpose in life that I get when I can say "nice hat" or "go Mets" to an older fan on the street. When I go to Shea and join 50,000 other people in the best rallying cry in baseball:

Lets go Mets, baby.

(Pictures courtesy looptvandfilm.com, dailynews.com, allthewrightstuff.mlblogs.com, bbc.co.uk, tshirthell.com)