Author Archives: Ted Berg

Dear Prudence

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How’s this for a suggestion? How about not spending anything, and keeping the roster mostly intact?

Let me clarify. While the Mets will surely not bring everybody back, with some trades and signings likely to happen, they should not invest much money into the 2011 roster….

By 2012, the Mets, with a year under a new GM and manager, will get an idea of the direction their franchise is heading. By then the Mets will have a concrete idea of where they should allocate their money.

– metfandan74, Mets360.

Let’s get this out of the way first: metfandan74, you f#@$ing shill! Obviously the Wilpons put you up to this, poisoning the minds of the fanbase into thinking saving their money this offseason is a good idea. CLIFF LEE OR BUST!

Sorry.

Seriously, though, I’m glad this came up at Mets360 first because I’ve been trying to come up with a reasonable way to suggest something similar here. We’ll have plenty of time to delve into this during the proper offseason and obviously the first concern is hiring a GM. But the Phillies will return basically their whole club save Jayson Werth in 2011, and its hard to imagine any reasonable series of moves that would guarantee the Mets could contend in the NL East next season without the full health and productivity of the guys already on the team and without seriously jeopardizing their future.

There will be plenty of minor moves and roster tweaks to improve the team that should help the Mets’ chances in 2011 so I don’t think they should sit idly by all winter. We know enough about baseball’s whims to understand that every once in a while, everything just sort of falls right for well-constructed teams and squads that look great on paper break down, so there’s no sense throwing in the towel on next season before it even starts.

But the Mets, with so many contracts coming off the books after next season, will not only be in a much better position to spend come next winter, they’ll also have a much stronger sense of where they need to allocate their resources. Will Johan Santana ever return to being anything like Johan Santana? Will Jason Bay hit home runs again? Are any or all of Josh Thole, Ruben Tejada, Daniel Murphy, Lucas Duda, Dillon Gee and Bobby Parnell viable Major League contributors?

As it currently stands, the Mets look set for 2011 at first base, third base and shortstop. Bay’s contract means he’ll be slated to return in left field, even if the nature of his injury murks things up a bit. Angel Pagan should be back. Carlos Beltran we’ve discussed.

Mike Pelfrey, Jon Niese and R.A. Dickey earned spots in the 2011 rotation with their performances in 2010, even if Niese faded down the stretch. The bullpen will need help, but when doesn’t a Major League bullpen need help?

Thole’s first 90 Major League games have been good enough to earn him the benefit of the doubt for 2011, but the Mets would be wise to sign a catching complement good and healthy enough to play regularly if Thole falters.

They will certainly need at least one middle infielder capable of starting at second base while the club determines if one of Tejada, Murphy, Reese Havens, Justin Turner and Josh Satin could eventually man the position in the bigs.

And they’ll need starting pitching, too — someone to eat innings and take strain off the bullpen and depth to ensure that the last rotation spots are earned, not pre-ordained.

But none of those acquisitions should require the type of imprudent, big-ticket expenditure that fans will inevitably begin clamoring for the day after the new GM is named.

It’s not about rebuilding or retooling or re-whatevering. Don’t worry about labels. It’s just about doing what’s best to create a sustainable winner as swiftly as possible. And the way to do that, as we’ve seen, is not always to try to win as swiftly as possible.

Cold-weather Wipeout in the works

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I <3 Wipeout. Last year I wrote: “ABC’s obstacle-course show Wipeout is the most amazing television program I’ve seen in years. It captures exactly what everyone loved about America’s Funniest Home Videos but cranks up the all-important ratio of projectiles-to-the-crotch per minute (PtC/M). It’s essentially the apotheosis of The Simpsons‘ classic “Man Getting Hit By Football,” and proves once again that there’s nothing more entertaining than watching people endure hilarious agony.”

The end of the Rays?

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Rebuilding the bullpen will be a tough nut for Andrew Friedman, but I don’t mean to be overly blasé about that when I say that bullpens come and bullpens go and the Rays have just as much of a chance of having a good one next year with a new cast as they do having it fall apart altogether—there is very little science in the collection of relievers.The Rays have pitchers in their system, including hard-throwing Tommy John recovery case Jake McGee (who can start but made it up to the pen this year) and can probably cobble something together out of minor leaguers and inexpensive free agents.

That leaves the arbitration-eligible players, whom the team might chose to non-tender rather than risk going to the mats. Jason Bartlett, B.J. Upton, and Matt Garza are due for insta-raises this winter. Reid Brignac, a better offensive and defensive player, can replace Bartlett without the team suffering at all. Losing Garza would hurt, but if the team can deal James Shields, that would leave some room to absorb his increased salary and slip the promising Jeremy Hellickson into the rotation. Failing that, Hellickson replaces Garza and the team prays for a Shields recovery.

– Steven Goldman, Pinstriped Bible.

Goldman makes a series of great points here about the Rays’ chances of competing again next year, most notably: That they probably will. Carlos Pena, like he points out, appears eminently replaceable. They’ll need to revamp their bullpen, but Goldman argues the case I’ve made here at least a dozen times — bullpens are fickle, and good ones can be constructed of flotsam.

The big loss, obviously, is Carl Crawford, an excellent player coming off a career year. The Rays will look to replace him with Desmond Jennings, a top prospect unlikely to produce anywhere near Crawford’s level for at least a couple of seasons.

The Rays might make up the difference by improving in the starting rotation, though, with top pitching prospect Jeremy Hellickson ready to replace one of their five starters, former top pitching prospect Jake McGee waiting in the wings, and pending top pitching prospect Matthew Moore primed to move quickly after striking out 12.9 batters per nine innings in High A ball.

The interesting thing about that for Mets fans is that the Rays will very likely part ways with one starter or another this offseason. Goldman suggests they might either non-tender Garza to save money or trade Shields.

Though I have no idea what it would take to get either — Garza in free agency or Shields via trade — the Mets’ next GM should be intrigued by whichever pitcher becomes available. Both are still reasonably young and both are dependable for 200+ innings, and both should stand to benefit from leaving the AL East.

Joba stuff

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But beyond the next few weeks, you have to wonder where this is all heading for Chamberlain. Even though Joba still occasionally cranked up his fastball to 95-96 mph this season, Yankee people privately admit that since injuring his shoulder in 2008, he hasn’t had the same life on his heater or the same bite on his once-unhittable slider.

It doesn’t mean Chamberlain can’t be effective. He finished the season with a 4.40 ERA, but that was due mostly to some blow-up innings in the first half. As Girardi said Tuesday, “He had hiccups just like everyone else, but his hiccups were usually a little bigger, lasted a little longer.”

Chamberlain was better in the second half, posting a 2.15 ERA over his final 30 appearances.

– John Harper, N.Y. Daily News.

You can’t really blame Joe Girardi for slotting Kerry Wood above Joba Chamberlain on the Yanks’ postseason bullpen depth chart. After all, Wood posted a 0.69 ERA in 26 innings after joining the Yanks. Sure, he probably enjoyed a little bit of luck — he struck out an impressive 31 batters in that stretch but walked 18 — but it’s hard to argue with those results.

And I’ll add that, though Chamberlain’s average fastball velocity isn’t far off his mark from 2008 — it was 95.0 then and 94.6 in 2010 — as Harper asserts, there’s a chance that shoulder troubles have impacted its movement and effectiveness. Neither his fastball nor his slider rates as well as it did in 2007 or 2008, and he induces fewer swinging strikes.

But all that said, Chamberlain is still a good pitcher and there’s a whole lot of evidence to suggest he suffered a great deal of misfortune this season. He struck out more than a batter per inning and walked only 22 guys in 71 2/3 frames, and his FIP, xFIP and tERA were all more than a run lower than his ERA. And it’s easy to forget that he’s still only 25.

If the Yankees are silly enough to have devalued Chamberlain because of a rough season ERA-wise, some team would be wise to make a move for him this winter, expecting he’ll return to form. The Yankees usually don’t work like that, though.

Rise of the robot cars

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The car is a project of Google, which has been working in secret but in plain view on vehicles that can drive themselves, using artificial-intelligence software that can sense anything near the car and mimic the decisions made by a human driver.

With someone behind the wheel to take control if something goes awry and a technician in the passenger seat to monitor the navigation system, seven test cars have driven 1,000 miles without human intervention and more than 140,000 miles with only occasional human control. One even drove itself down Lombard Street in San Francisco, one of the steepest and curviest streets in the nation. The only accident, engineers said, was when one Google car was rear-ended while stopped at a traffic light.

Autonomous cars are years from mass production, but technologists who have long dreamed of them believe that they can transform society as profoundly as the Internet has.

– John Markoff, N.Y. Times.

OK, a lot of stuff here. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’m pretty much terrified of Google, for a variety of reasons. Their corporate mantra, after all, says, “Don’t Be Evil,” which suggests they’ve at least considered being evil. So I’m a little concerned to hear they’re testing debatably legal robot cars in secret on the streets of San Francisco. Believe me, the last thing we want is Google partnering with the machines this early in the game.

Second, I happen to love driving, but I’ve endured the particularly harrowing trek from New York to D.C. enough times to have considered at length the possibility of a self-driving car.

And it strikes me that it’s not really worth putting one on the road unless it is absolutely foolproof and requires almost no human interaction beyond initial directional programming. It will be far too tempting to sleep, eat, text, drink — whatever — in a self-driving car, so it seems like the first step is entirely eliminating the need for an alert driver. Especially since once we all get used to having our cars drive themselves — and new drivers come of age never knowing any different — our skills behind the wheel will atrophy.

My friend Charlie and I once envisioned some sort of motorized track along the side of interstates — sort of a glorified version of the car-wash thing — to let drivers coast along at 40 mph or so while they snoozed in their seats overnight. But then we never came up with a good plan for how you get on or off that thing, or how to avoid the inevitable pileups at the end.

Not a good idea

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Or more to the point, the so-called home-field advantage in the postseason is just that — so-called. So far this postseason it’s been proven to be completely false. Three out of the four American League playoff teams, the Yankees, Rays and Rangers, are a combined 6-0 on the road while, in the National League, the Phillies clinched their series against the Reds with a sweep-completing victory in Cincinnati and the Giants closed out their series with the Braves by winning twice in Atlanta.

Which brings us back to that nagging question, which commissioner Bud Selig has been loathe to address until just recently: With home-field advantage clearly not that much of an advantage, doesn’t there need to be more of an incentive not to settle for the wild card? I’m not sure if Girardi and the Yankees’ seemingly cavalier attitude about trying to win the division — and then winning their two games in Minnesota — was what finally prompted the commissioner to admit he’s taking another look at the postseason format. I only know when Selig says he’s going to consider adding two more wild cards to the process, to create a playoff between them to advance in the postseason, you can pretty much go to the bank on it happening. Soon. As in next year.

– Bill Madden, NY Daily News.

Ugh. First off, it would take hundreds of games to prove that home-field advantage doesn’t exist in the playoffs and not, like, ten. Look at the league splits this year: Home teams boasted a .559 winning percentage. Last year? .549. 2008? .556. 2007? .542. And so on.

Second, while adding a second Wild Card team in each league would have made this year’s boring AL pennant stretch a bit more exciting — adding an all-Sox battle to the mix and providing the Yanks with incentive to take the division — it also would have severely cheapened the end-of-season drama on the other coast in the Senior Circuit, allowing the Giants, Braves and Padres into the postseason instead of forcing the three teams to compete for two open spots.

And creating a system wherein Wild Card teams had to square off in either sudden death or best-of-three series to advance to the division series would only make the entire process significantly less fair.

In the case of this season, it would mean the Yankees — who compiled the second-best record in the American League while playing an unbalanced schedule in the toughest division in baseball — might see their world-championship hopes vanquished at the hands of an inferior team because of the whims of a short series or, even more ridiculous, a single game.

And then, from that point, it really wouldn’t be any safe bet that said inferior team didn’t go on to itself win the World Series, as — like Madden mentions — Wild Card teams sometimes do.

That’s what Madden is missing here. A five- or seven-game series among two good baseball teams is not nearly long enough to distinguish the clearly better club, and so the playoffs often come down to the whims of randomness — which team gets hot, who gets a few good breaks, what week Jeff Weaver decides to pitch like Cy Young.

That’s fine. It’s exciting, and it’s part of why we watch October baseball. But the 162-game schedule is a huge part of what makes the Major Leagues so awesome — it’s almost always long enough to firmly establish which teams deserve to continue playing into the postseason. Extending the playoffs to more teams would cheapen the first six months of baseball and only increase the likelihood that a less-deserving champion emerges at season’s end.