I should note before I get into this that there are two people commenting under the username “Ryan,” much as there are about 40 different users named Chris. One Ryan has been posting regularly on this blog since February and took care to distinguish himself from the Ryan whose comments are published below, who commented for the first time yesterday.
Anyway, he responded to my post about bias and the media with this:
Pretty hacky stuff here Ted. Everyone knows Matt is a complete hack who never criticizes the team for anything because of his connection with SNY.
When you sell out (look yourself in the mirror) you lose the privilege to write defensive columns like the one above.
I replied:
Ryan, I look myself in the mirror all the time. It’s hard to pull my eyes away from a face like this one.
Seriously, though, you can call me anything you want, and I know you have no real reason to trust me, but I never, ever publish anything I don’t believe.
And if you think an affiliation with SNY prevents someone from criticizing the Mets, you must have missed the columns/posts where I called for Minaya’s head, blasted the process behind the Francoeur deal, implied the team lacked understanding of basic microeconomics, suggested that the Mets’ entire front-office was asleep at the wheel, and compared Minaya and Adam Rubin to howler monkeys bellowing nonsense.
Ryan:
Ahh, the always controversial opinion about the Jeff Francouer trade, the most boring trade in American history. And the always appreciated Mets company line that Omar was wrong but so was Rubin. Nice work Ted.
Ted, how about that none of your SNY blogs, even the flagship has even touched the Mets dropping payroll $22 million this offseason. No, lets not touch that one. That is not relevant to Mets fans, that is not a complete slap in the face. That’s the hackiness element, that’s the sellout who can’t write what he feels or thinks because his paycheck comes from the team he is covering.
Why also does Matt write like this…maybe it allows him to hedge his opinions…saying something without saying anything…so he doesn’t look access…maybe i dont know….maybe access to interview Kevin Burkhardt….the always hard-hitting Kevin Burkhardt…so that he can ask him…why Alex Cora…does all the little things right? …..Maybe I don’t know….
Me:
http://www.tedquarters.net/2010/02/10/all-sorts-of-mets-stuff-from-sny-tv/
Ryan:
The article you linked below, why? You don’t mention Mets payroll at all. You certainly do not mention 22 MILLION DOLLARS. In fact the article stems from yourself being criticized for not being critical. Which is my point.
Me:
In that post, I linked and responded to an article that said the Mets have no money left, which pretty clearly relates to the Mets’ payroll. I didn’t mention 22 MILLION DOLLARS because it was February and I had no way of knowing if the Mets were done spending. Since I rarely obtain any inside, anonymous-source type information, I had no way to know whether the Mets’ decline in payroll was due to bureaucratic inefficiency or an actual lack of money. I still don’t.
Ryan (here comes my favorite part!):
To this day, Ted nor Matt have commented on the EXTREME amount of drop in payroll which is suspicious. Downright suspicious. Other Metscentric blogs have. SNY Sponsored Blogs have not.
Your article is not relevant to the conversation and it was not a good article anyway.
I am a big fan of SNY Mets broadcasts. The Big 3 can be very critical of this organization, which is great, and which they should be. There has not been a bigger disgrace of organization management in baseball than the New York Mets (Randolph Firing to Present) Metsblog and Tedquarters has not been critical, at all. They would rather talk (along with Burkhardt) about how Alex Cora does the little things well and Fernando Tatis provides veteran latino presence, all the while the team and the organization is imploding and frankly a joke to the rest of the league.
Me:
“They would rather talk (along with Burkhardt) about how Alex Cora does the little things well and Fernando Tatis provides veteran latino presence.”
And with that, I feel no obligation to respond to anything else you say since you’ve obviously never read this blog before.
I didn’t re-post the exchange here out of pettiness, though I am admittedly petty. I just think the irony is rich, considering the original post: Ryan entered this conversation with a strong bias. He was certain that me and Matt Cerrone and everyone writing about the Mets on the SNY.tv family of sites are shills for the team, even though he has since made it abundantly clear that he just hasn’t read a whole lot of my writing.
In that post, I wrote, “We see stories develop and we want them to be true, so we draw inferences and connect dots and work to confirm them as reality.” And here, Ryan has found one particular factoid on which I did not directly criticize the Mets and latched onto it as proof that I am a mouthpiece for the team without considering that I might just have missed the fact or glossed over it while I was busy ripping Alex Cora’s contract for most of the offseason.
Anyway, in case you’re curious, and I guess for posterity, the 2010 Mets do indeed have a payroll about $23 million less than it was last year, according to Cot’s. I don’t know why. I have heard team officials say they have the flexibility to add payroll in a salary dump trade at the deadline, and I could even argue that waiting to see how the 2010 Mets fared before bringing on high-priced players on multiple-year deals was a reasonable strategy, given all the uncertainty on the Opening Day roster. But I don’t know if that was the actual motivation.
And I could add that it hardly seems suspicious that a team coming off such a miserable year in a rough economy would struggle to match the previous season’s payroll, since it would presumably be much harder to sell tickets, advertisements and merchandise. I don’t know the exact details of the Mets’ budget, though, so spending too much time on it would amount to uninformed speculation.
What I do know for sure, though, is that $126 million — like $149 million or $137 million — in the hands of a capable front office should be plenty to field a competitive team. The problem has never been the Mets’ payroll, but the appropriation thereof.
Tedquarters 
Ted, why does your blog neglect to mention Taco Bell’s new 79 cent cheesy nachos? They are nachos and cheese but served on a platter and for 30 cents less than the bag of nachos and cheese.
WHOA, because I hadn’t heard of them yet, at all! I even went to an amazing standalone Taco Bell in New Rochelle the other day while car-shopping, and I didn’t see anything that mentioned a new product. How did this slip past me? When did they introduce them?
I believe they’re saving the money because they’re about to experience significant pay raises for much of the established stars on the team. That coupled with the fact that there were few other free agents worth spending the money on. And on top of all that, who the hell cares that they are spending 22 million dollars less? The Rays don’t even top 80 mil and they’re far and away the best team in baseball!
I have found that spelling your name backwards leaves it pretty much to you.
Ticket sales are down some pretty substantial number, like close to 20%. Dumb as the Wilpons can be in so many ways, they do appear to be successful business people. Maybe they made a reasonable calculation that sales would be not so great this year, and decided on a payroll accordingly. With, perhaps, the hope that if the team can hang in, they can boost payroll mid-season to go along with better ticket sales.
I think a lot of people (me included) have supposed that they would routinely spend up to the luxury tax, but maybe that’s not the whole of their calculation. Perhaps they have a metric based on expected sales, with the tax level as a cap.
Good points all. And I always figured you were just paying tribute to the obscure Egyptian goddess.
Tina eh? I just figured with a name like Anit, you were Indian like me!
Hey Ryan,
Smarten up. Grab some nachos and relax.
You’re right about the nachos, and excellent choice of username.
Seriously. Stop giving the name Ryan a bad rap. I rarely comment but even so, I had to change my screen name because of you.
On the plus side:
Ryan Braun, Ryan Miller, Ryan Reynolds, Ryan Adams. Also Nolan Ryan, Buddy Ryan, Rex Ryan, and Jack Ryan.
On the minus side:
Ryan Leaf, Ryan Seacrest, Ryan O’Neal, Ryan Phillipe.
No comment:
Ryan Howard and Ryan Church
Ryan Stiles.
My two cents… engaging the guy… probably a waste of energy. If not at first… then fairly quickly. I’ve heard a rumor… the internets are rife with opinions… and devoid of brains.
(Yes… I reused my joke…from the other thread…in retrospect…totally worth it…)
Hey Berg!
How come you never mention how Lastings Milledge never really came good on his promising rap career? You shill!
I’m sick of coming on here and reading about how awesome Francoeur’s personality is and how Mejias the new Mo Riveira.
(obviously joking, keep up the good work!)
For what it’s worth, I was the biggest Milledge fan in the world and I thought Bend Ya Knees straight-up sucked. And not because of the offensive lyrics so much as the pitiful excuse for a backing track without any reasonable semblance of a bass line.
This is the second queue of interesting responses on a provocative topic. Clearly the issue is hitting home (or a homer) with readers. Good job, Ted!
Ryan Thompson?
Don’t feed the trolls, dude.
For what it’s worth, I’d be very surprised if you did not seem reasonably independent (and certainly less biased than a large number of print journalists I can name) to a reasonably intelligent observer.
That Ryan guy was great, he immediatley put up the 2 biggest red flags to signal that he is in the top 1% or d-bag, clueless Mets fans.
Those red flags are “Payroll” and “Latinos”. Those are pretty much the industry standard fallbacks when internet troll Mets fans are in a corner. When all else fails start yelling about Payroll and Latinos.
You forgot my joke about Elmer Dessens drinking milk shakes. It was too good for your snappy review of our conversation.
Well, I guess my work here is done.
Nice post.
By the way, the $22 million drop that Ryan references is incorrect according to the Cot’s website you linked to. Click on the spreadsheets under 2009 and 2010. In 2009, the $149 million in payroll is assuming the Mets paid the whole $14 million to Gary Sheffield. In you click on the spreadsheet, you’ll see that the net payroll was actually $139.6 million. So they really only dropped payroll by $13 million. Still a significantly drop, but way lower than the 22 million you often hear cited.
Man, if you only want to read negative stuff about the Mets, just follow Heyman on SI
Both Carlos Delgado ($12M) and Billy Wagner ($10.5M) came off the books…which pretty much accounts for the $23M being discussed.
And have the Mets really missed their contributions this year as compared to last? Ike Davis at 0.6 WAR has already contributed more to the Mets this year than Delgado last year at 0.4 WAR. Yeah some of that might be luck and maybe Ike is playing over his head, however, he has made positive contributions to the team and at league minimum salary to boot.
And as far as Wagner goes, does anyone want to spend that kind of money for a set up man? Set up men should be paid like set up men…even the Yankees with their enormous resources have realized this. They no longer give guys like Farnsworth $5M to set Rivera up.
And Teddy’s totally on the ball here, it’s not about how much you spend, it’s how you allocate the money you are spending. Throwing big money at free agents for the sake of throwing big money at free agents gets you no where. I’d rather spend $2M on a guy who will produce 2.5 WAR than $10M on a guy who will produce 3.0 WAR. It’s a waste of resources…and the Mets have been guilty of this way too often throughout their history (Bonilla, Vaughn, Alomar, Foster…).
I’m still hoping Francessa comes out and admits he trolls metsblog and tedquarters as this Ryan fella… that would totally make my week.