Monthly Archives: February 2010

Items of note

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I’d guess anytime between now and Mardi Gras next week would be a good time to visit New Orleans. I got a great tip for Big Easy traveling once: Pace yourself. Stay above the buzz line, but never get all-out drunk. That way you avoid the crashes, and maximize your time seeing all the awesome things there are to see.

Barry Bonds can’t play baseball, probably won’t make the Hall of Fame on his first ballot, and can’t even get chicken and waffles in peace.

Joel Sherman asks some questions about the Mets’ offseason.

“For a dinosaur scientist, this is like the birth of color TV.”

Where I went

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My apologies for the sudden disappearance and relative lack of posts here yesterday, and the forthcoming lack of posts this weekend. I’m in our national’s capital for the weekend to catch the Georgetown-Villanova game, and I ended up leaving work in a huff in a (successful) effort to beat the blizzard that ultimately pelted this area.

Turns out I actually made my best-ever time on a New York to DC trip, just under four hours. No idea how that happened.

There’s lots of snow on the ground here now, and DC completely panics and bails whenever that happens. The trek to the Verizon Center should be awesome.

I’ll be back with a full head of steam on Monday. Until then, geaux Saints.

My second favorite sport

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Yesterday at Big League Stew, ‘Duk asked:

If you were on ‘Jeopardy!’ and the final category was baseball, how confident would you be in making your wager?

I think about stuff like this all the time. I watch Jeopardy! every night, and most nights I pause the DVR when the Final Jeopardy! category comes up to determine the smartest possible wager for the three contestants. I’m convinced there must be some way to devise a sabermetric-style approach to playing the game, making the strategic decisions at each turn mathematically shown to best improve your chances of winning, but I’m not smart enough to pull that off. I imagine it would require a lot of observation, and still come down to some vague way of rating your own confidence in the category.

As for ‘Duk’s baseball question, his point is a great one: All the sports questions on Jeopardy! are, to an actual sports fan, incredibly easy. I have noticed this myself, and always hoped to take advantage of it should I ever get picked to be on the show.

But I could never bring myself to make a Cliff Claven wager on a Final Jeopardy! clue in a baseball category, just from fearing the professional and social embarrassment I would face if I blew it. ‘Duk’s post passes along the 10 most recent final answers with “baseball” in their category, and indeed, I missed one of them — I had no idea the Cubs trained in Catalina.

I would certainly bet aggressively, though, and I would definitely start with the $800 or $1600 choices if there were a baseball category in the opening or Double Jeopardy! round, as contestants sometimes do. It seems like control of the board is a very important, underrated aspect of winning Jeopardy, and starting with the more difficult questions in a category would be a good way to avoid ceding control to an opponent who might get the $200 question and move to a different category.

Because the last thing you want to do if there’s a baseball category is leave the most expensive answers up on the board. That’s free money for you.

There was an episode last February in which there were categories titled “Cy Young Award Winners” and “Can I Buy You A Sandwich?” Needless to say, as a current baseball writer and a former longtime deli employee, I knew all the questions in both. The latter featured a Daily Double.

I cursed fate for not having put me on that episode. Especially because I realized how hilarious it would have been to hold a commanding lead, but regardless boldly “make it a true Daily Double” in the sandwich category.

I’ve since taken the online Jeopardy! test, but I fear this was not my year. Those questions come fast, and there weren’t nearly enough about baseball or sandwiches.

Items of note

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This plan for proposed experiments at a National Baseball Laboratory is cool, and I have an addition: a team full of cloned Mark McGwires.

Here’s a joint review I wrote with Zoe Rice of the Lost season premiere at the Perpetual Post. Some of the language is NSFW.

I know a lot of smart Knicks fans who will defend Donnie Walsh for the Jordan Hill pick, but man, it sure seems like they missed a good one in Brandon Jennings, especially considering his oft-awesome hair.

This is all the excuse I need to post this:

Chinese demography

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The Times had a great article today about Brian Cashman’s trip to China to show off the Yanks’ World Championship trophy:

M.L.B.’s goal is to build a base in China like the N.B.A.’s. It broadcasts games to more than 50 Chinese television stations and reaps tens of millions of dollars in revenue from Chinese fans. But baseball has a long way to go: four million people play baseball in China, according to Xinhua, the state news agency, and the country has a relatively meager professional league. By comparison, China has a nationwide basketball league, and 300 million Chinese are said to play the sport regularly.

That sounds about right — basketball is absolutely everywhere in China. I spent a month there in the summer of 2007, and spotted hoops in the Forbidden City and at the foot of the Great Wall. A student I spoke to asked me to “detail the extent of Yao Ming’s genius.”

It makes sense for Major League Baseball to be doing outreach to China. Even one marketable Chinese star could mean a huge boost in revenue and a massive expansion of the international-recruiting base, assuming the country takes to the sport anything like it has to basketball, which it probably would, since baseball’s awesome.

Anyway, here’s what I wrote from a Chinese Internet cafe in 2007. (Incidentally, the Chinese word for Internet cafe is pronounced “wangba.” But “wangba dan” means “turtle egg,” which, in Chinese slang, means “son of a bastard.”) I was oversimplifying things a ton, but I was all gussied up on grad school at the time. I really just wanted to reprint it here because I liked the Colonel Sanders line.

And there’s little or no sign of [baseball] in China.

Still, there’s hope on the horizon. Though the intricacies of baseball can appeal to high-minded audiences and the spectacle can appeal to more lowbrow fans, baseball is undeniably a middle-class fascination. In a nation that exerted so much effort squashing out class distinctions and so-called bourgeois behavior for so long, it makes perfect sense that baseball — like many sports — hasn’t entered the hearts and minds of the Chinese population. It’s one of those ‘opiate of the masses’ things that Karl Marx railed against.

(Little known fact: Marx’s quote on religion is about as frequently taken out of context as any maxim there is. Marx himself was a recreational opium smoker, so his stance on religion wasn’t nearly as harsh as it sounds today. I find baseball, in reasonable quantities, to be a pleasant, healthy alternative to opium for taking the minds of the people off their fettered working conditions.)

But though president Hu Jintao and most of the Chinese government are still technically part of the Chinese Communist Party, capitalism now dominates Shanghai and most of the urban parts of China I’ve seen. Retail shopping permeates every inch of storefront and sidewalk space, and the ominous Big Brother stare of Chairman Mao has been replaced by the perhaps equally ominous stare of Colonel Sanders — there’s a KFC on every corner, it seems.

And stadiums are under construction everywhere I turn. None of them look to be dedicated to baseball, but it seems like only a matter of time before the growing fascination with sports in China — spearheaded by the excitement surrounding the 2008 Beijing Olympics — leads the giant nation to baseball.

More of the same?

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Murray Chass wrote an interesting blog post today about the Mets’ offseason process:

But more than one agent cited the Mets’ inability to deal with more than one free agent at a time as the primary reason they lost out on free agents. “We’re interested in your guy,” more than one agent recalled the Mets saying, “but we have to deal with this other guy first.”

In one instance, the Mets were a player’s first choice, an agent said, but he was one or two down on the Mets’ pecking order – a phrase used by another agent – and the player and the agent weren’t going to wait for the Mets to deal with them. They went elsewhere….

Another agent called the process frustrating. I have other names for it: foolish, wasteful, destructive, irresponsible, to suggest a few. Surely, a general manager is capable of talking to more than one agent simultaneously, working on parallel tracks, even if one signing depends on another.

I’ve used this space to rip Chass a bit in the past, but getting on the horn with agents to dig up dirt on the Mets is definitely the type of thing he spent a long time training to do, and everything he writes here seems to fit with everything we’ve already heard about the Mets this offseason.

But what I don’t get is why so anybody’s acting like this is an altogether new problem. Remember that last year Omar Minaya said, on the record, “we’re not in the position-player market, we’re in the starting-pitcher market.”

It’s certainly possible — and entirely likely — that the issues have been amplified by the rumored hedges on Minaya’s power that might now be in place, but it doesn’t seem like operating with a narrow and myopic focus is exclusive to the 2010 version of the Mets’ front office.

Pascucci heroics in Japan

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This is another clip from Takashi, in which Val Pascucci hits a game-winning pinch-hit home run for Bobby Valentine’s Marines. Now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure Pascucci himself described to me the way the Pascucci cheer went on all at-bat long, but I guess I never really considered how strange that would sound until I actually saw it on video. To be honest, it seems like it would be distracting, but it’s awesome regardless:

Items of note

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I’m certainly not here to hate on breaded and fried pork, but I don’t know how anyone could even begin to compare the cuisine of Indianapolis with the cuisine of New Orleans. Non-starter.

WAR, huh? What is it good for? Predicting the Mets to suck.

Hey look, it’s Anthony Tao. Last time I saw this guy, I was trying to hire him to write for SNY.tv, and he was all, “I’d love to, but I’m moving to China.” Guess he did. Awesome story on Stephon Marbury, some language NSFW.

Does the coin toss matter?

ALERT! BREAKING NEWS: Shinjo shaves head

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Big thanks to Takashi to pointing me to this massive developing story out of Japan. Tsuyoshi Shinjo has apparently shaved his head. Check it out:

I can’t say I’m 100 percent in favor of the decision. I realize I should know better than to doubt Shinjo’s fashion choices, but man, he had some good hair, and I can’t help but think its absence is society’s loss. Still, maybe Shinjo’s just so far ahead of the fashion curve that I can’t even comprehend how stylish his newly shaved head is, and soon I’ll come to realize how good he looks.

That said, even he looks like he’s still getting used to it.

Things to remember about Fernando Martinez

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Fernando Martinez spoke to Jesse Sanchez of MLB.com at the Caribbean Series, and some of his comments lit the Mets blogosphere on fire:

“When [Carlos] Beltran had surgery, I thought I had a chance, and maybe they would give me a chance at center,” Martinez said. “But they get [Gary] Matthews Jr., and now I’m not sure where I am. I just can’t give up.”

“I know I’m a big league player, and I can perform at a high level,” Martinez said. “It’s in my hands, so I have to keep working hard and maybe earn a spot. Maybe I make it to the big leagues with the Mets or maybe another team, but I know I can do it. I just have to keep working and waiting for my opportunity.”

I’m not going to read too much into the quotes, because they read to me like, pretty simply, a confident 21-year-old speaking honestly about his situation. Would anyone prefer it if Fernando Martinez was all, “Did you see me last year? I suck! I don’t deserve to be anywhere near the big-league roster”?

Judging from Mets fan reaction, it seems like many see the comments as just that — appropriate confidence — while others have used them to deem him “the next Lastings Milledge” and other such expletives.

Either way, here are a couple of important things to remember about Fernando Martinez:

He’s still very, very young: We’ve been hearing about him forever, so it feels like it’s put-up-or-shut-up time for the outfielder. But in truth, Martinez was the youngest position player in the Majors in his stint last season, and has been the youngest or among the youngest at his level in every one of his Minor League campaigns. I’d guess a big part of the reason he hasn’t put up huge numbers on the farm is that the Mets have — for better or worse — promoted him so aggressively. A .772 OPS in Double-A, like Martinez posted in 2008, is nothing to write home about. It is for a 19-year-old, though. As John Sickels has pointed out, Martinez would have been a college sophomore last year.

100 Major League plate appearances are not an adequate sample: Sample size. Sample size, sample size, sample size. Now I’m not saying Martinez is certainly ready to produce at the big-league level, but his failures there in 2009 should not be taken to mean much of anything. They’re not a good sign, granted, but they fell so far below his expected Major League equivalency that it’s almost certain he would’ve picked it up at the plate with a little more experience.

Clearly, the biggest concern with the Fernanchise is his inability to stay healthy to this point in his career, not only because it could be a harbinger of more injuries to come, but because, as Keith Law (subscriber-only) points out, it may have already hindered his development by limiting his at-bats.

And I’m not arguing that Martinez shouldn’t spend more time in Triple-A. He almost certainly should. Plus, I’m not sure why I’m bothering to argue against the small contingent of Mets fans who seem to have given up on the guy when I know that, if and when he starts putting up Minor League numbers again, everyone will go back to overrating him as a prospect — as is customary.

But it’s a slow news day and I sometimes feel like I’m the last guy in New York still excited about the kid’s chances. And I’m psyched that, in an offseason that was practically begging the Mets to go out and trade a bunch of prospects in some myopic move, they didn’t.