Author Archives: Ted Berg

Sandy Claus bringing Mets coal

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Makes some of our contracts look pretty good. That’s a long time and a lot of money. I thought they were trying to reduce the deficit in Washington.

– Sandy Alderson, on Jayson Werth’s seven-year, $126 million deal with the Nats

Badumching, heyooo!

I don’t want to belabor the terms of the Werth deal too much here because based on the Internet’s reaction it doesn’t have a whole lot of supporters. Straight up: It would be at least vaguely defensible to commit that much money and years to a 31-year-old corner outfielder if your team hoped to contend with in the next years. If the Red Sox or Yankees signed him they could say, “Well, he’ll produce excellent numbers for the next few years while we compete for championships, and we realize we’ll have to shoulder the back end of his contract when he’s declining.”

But since the Nationals appear unlikely to contend with or without Werth in 2011, since Stephen Strasburg likely won’t be back until at least the middle of the season and since their best pitcher in 2010 was Livan Hernandez, giving Werth that much money now merits the hefty snark from Alderson. Even if the Nats can compete in two years, they’ll likely have to do so with Werth’s contract entering its albatross phase.

It seems like a perennial loser like the Nats has to overpay just to get a free agent of Werth’s caliber in the door, but that’s the thing: They should first work to make the team a legit contender so they can then woo top free agents without ridiculous terms.

Anyway, it seems like most Mets fans think Alderson’s comments are awesome and hilarious. There’s some tiny fraction of the fanbase that has pointed to them as indicative of Alderson’s small-market approach, and chastised him for not himself chasing Werth.

Those people are probably incapable of being convinced that Alderson’s prudence this offseason is what’s best — and perhaps all that’s feasible — for the franchise. They do not want to hear that the Mets will still very much be spending like a big-market club in 2010. The team will probably enter the season with a payroll around $140 million. It’s not Alderson’s fault that much of it will be allocated to dreck.

So to those few impatient Mets fans, and perhaps to the Mets themselves for abiding such lavish and irresponsible spending the past few years, Alderson will bring nothing but coal and a couple of scrap-heap pickups for Christmas. Frankly, it’s what they deserve. Advocating for or consenting to giant contracts and big splashes and a wholesale lack of foresight puts you on the naughty list in baseball.

For the rest of us, we get some of the greatest gifts a fan could wish for: hope, promise, reason. But to stay on the nice list, we must continue to be patient. We must withstand the onslaught of nonsense from the winter meetings and shoulder the idiotic rantings of the angry “small-market Sandy” set. And we must spend the offseason remembering that though the Mets likely won’t be making any exciting moves, the most exciting thing of all is a front office that’s committed to and perhaps capable of creating a long-term sustainable winner.

Sandwich of the Week

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I had heard of the Momofuku restaurants many times before I finally ate at one last week. I really don’t know why. I suspect that they were, for a time, quite trendy, because now when I hear snobby New Yorkers mention them it’s usually with a dismissive snicker, as if they’re somehow not cool now because they were too cool for too long or something.

Whatever. Because I don’t pay much attention one way or the other, I’m not sure that’s the case. My only standard for coolness in eateries is delicious food.

The following sandwich is that, so I will hereby deem the Momofuku Milk Bar incredibly cool. Just a very hip place to hang out if you’re someone that appreciates pork. And a big hat tip to fellow pork enthusiast Alex Belth for dragging me there, and for filling me in with all sorts of inside knowledge about the pork.

The sandwich: Pork buns from Momofuku Milk Bar, 2nd Ave. and 13th St. in Manhattan. I’m told the pork buns are also available in at least one of the other Momofuku restaurants, which are mostly in the same neighborhood.

The construction: Pork belly on a steamed bun with scallions, pickles and hoisin sauce. I added sriracha.

Important background information: These are nothing like the pork buns I had in China, though both are good. Those looked more like dinner rolls, only they had delicious pork stuffed inside. I was sort of expecting that when I heard the term “pork bun” bandied about so often, but, like I said, it worked out OK.

Apropos of almost nothing, in the course of a month in China I learned how to say all of six things in Mandarin Chinese. One of them was roujiamo, or meat sandwich — knowledge that obviously came in handy with street vendors, but took part in a silly exchange with a young Chinese woman in a bar. She smiled at me so I figured I’d try my hand at flirting, and it went something like this (only, you know, in Chinese):

Me: “Hello. I am Ted.”

Her: (Something in Chinese I can’t understand.)

Me: “I am a student.”

Her: (Smiles, more Chinese.)

Me: “Internet cafe.”

Her: (Clear international look of confusion.)

Me: “Meat sandwich.”

Her: (Blank stare.)

Me: “Thank you.”

What it looks like:


How it tastes: Oh, lordy.

You stand up to eat at the Milk Bar, and I had to brace myself on the table after taking a bite out of the first one. Holy hell, that’s good.

And for the second straight week, the amazing sandwich was highlighted by amazing pork. This time it the pork didn’t even need to be breaded and fried — just roasted, and without a lot of seasonings either. I’ve never tasted pork like this before — it was so fatty and tender that in terms of texture it almost seemed like duck. But then it was bursting with amazing pork flavor.

Belth tells me that the pork comes from special, extra-fatty super-pigs bred from other famous amazing pork pigs. Apparently the swine are so coddled that they can distinguish between organic and non-organic feed and refuse to eat the latter. I love that: stubborn, uppity pigs. And I get the last laugh!

The rest of the sandwich is good too: The bun is spongy, sweet and moist, but strong enough to hold the ingredients and preserve sandwich integrity. The pickles aren’t overwhelmingly pickly — more like slightly tangy cucumbers, really. But that’s fine. They add a note of flavor and don’t take away from the pork, which is clearly the prize here.

The hoisin added some sweet flavor and a little additional moisture, though, honestly, I think I could have eaten the pieces of pork on their own and they would have been plenty moist. The scallions were only barely noticeable, but they brought a little more pungency and depth to the whole thing. I went light on the sriracha — especially on my second bun — because I didn’t want it to overwhelm the pork, so it served mostly to make the tastes linger in my mouth a little longer, which was welcome.

But again, it’s all about the pork. I need to meet some of these pigs. I want to go pet them and coddle them myself and show them how much I appreciate what they’ve done for me. Outstanding.

What it’s worth: If you can convince Belth to buy — and he’s a pretty obliging dude — they’ll run you only the cost of subway fare. Otherwise, they’re $9 for an order of two, but you’ll probably want at least three for a meal. Not the world’s cheapest sandwich, but you can tell you’re paying for quality.

How it rates: 95 out of 100. Inner circle Hall of Fame sandwich.

Ahead of my time, behind on my rent

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But to me, the biggest contingency plan for the 2010 Mets is the 2011 Mets. Because if things go horribly awry this season — and after 2009, we’d be foolish to dismiss that possibility — the team at least won’t have to look far to see the future. Top prospects Ike Davis, Fernando Martinez, Josh Thole and Jon Niese — should he not earn the fifth starter’s role in Spring Training — should all start the year in Triple-A….

And so I’m hoping that the Mets’ biggest failure this offseason was not in roster construction, but merely in communication when they threw around terms like “unacceptable” and “change” and “spend” and “trade.” Maybe they would’ve been better off starting with the slogan I suggested back in September:

“The 2010 Mets: Please Be Patient While We Get Our S@#$ Together”

– Me, here, Feb. 10, 2010.

I’m wrong about enough stuff that it doesn’t really pay to start going back and quoting myself. Heck, I was hardly right about everything in that post — little did I realize the Mets were about to turn their top starting-pitching prospect into a middle reliever.

I just stumbled onto it today and thought it was funny how my proposed slogan for last offseason seems to be pretty close to the actual slogan for this offseason. So that part of the post, at least, appears prescient.

I was probably wrong, though, in assuming that one year of development time for the Mets’ crop of upper-level prospects would be enough to return the Mets to contention in 2011. Yes, Ike Davis, Jon Niese and to a lesser extent Josh Thole seem primed to be (and continue being) valuable and cost-effective Major League contributors. But I was probably at least a bit guilty of the standard fan practice of overrating prospects. Clearly 2010 did not go as we would have hoped for Martinez, Reese Havens, Brad Holt or Jenrry Mejia.

James Kannengieser at Amazin’ Avenue recently took a stab at projecting the 2011 Mets’ win totals based on the current roster. He based the post on WAR and took an admittedly conservative approach, assuming that none of Jose Reyes, Carlos Beltran and David Wright return to the forms they showed from 2006-2008 and that neither Davis nor Thole provides more to the club in 2011 than he did in 2010.

Still, despite all that, Kannengieser puts the Mets — these Mets, without any offseason additions — at 79 wins. With some reasonable, inexpensive roster tweaking, a couple of high-upside plays that pay off, a return to peak form from at least one of the stars, and some improvement from Davis, Thole and Niese, it’s not too hard to imagine an 87-89 win team.

Maybe that’s hoping for a lot of things to go right. The new front office would have to make the right upside plays, for one thing, or at least enough of them to have some of them work out. For another, we’d have to hope the young players improve instead of suffering regression in their sophomore seasons.

But a well-managed team with a solid crop of young contributors can turn things around mighty quickly. And a win total in the high 80s should put the Mets at least on the fringes of contention.

So while yes, this offseason is a winter for the Mets’ getting their proverbial s#@$ together, it could also feasibly be one in which they scrap together enough small moves to field a competitive team in 2011. We shall see, I suppose. At the very least an Opening Day lineup with some promising young homegrown players should be more palatable than one with Gary Matthews Jr., Alex Cora and Mike Jacobs in it.

Also, for what it’s worth: That headline is a Rhymefest reference. I’m not actually ahead of my time or behind in my rent, though the latter is mostly because my wife is a vigilant bill-payer, for which I am thankful.