Author Archives: Ted Berg

The Godfather

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I didn’t eat the Frito Pie last night. Toby pointed me toward the Godfather, and I couldn’t resist. Though at delis all over the New York area “The Godfather” refers to an Italian hero, at Grayson stadium it’s an Italian sausage covered with Philly cheesesteak and chicken-steak. (Is that an oxymoron? You know what I mean, like the chicken equivalent of Philly cheesesteak.) I got mine with jalapenos, because I’m like that.

Here is what the Godfather looks like. There’s an Italian sausage under there. The ketchup was my own addition:

What did it taste like? Exactly how you’d expect: Amazing. I still have a little bit of a grease headache just thinking about it, but worth it nonetheless. This needs to catch on.

Minor Leagues FTW

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In the bottom of the 8th inning in tonight’s tilt between the Savannah Sand Gnats and Lexington Legends, Lexington catcher Jonathan Fixler bobbled a pitch and Savannah right fielder Cesar Puello broke to steal third base.

Fixler made a perfect throw to third that had Puello beat by 20 feet. Puello stood to be only the second runner caught stealing in the game after something like a million had already stolen bases successfully.

But Puello turned back from whence he came, so Lexington third baseman Jonathan Meyer threw toward second. Only Meyer’s throw glanced off Puello’s back and into center field. Puello again switched directions, this time reaching third safely. Meyer was charged with the Legends’ fourth error of the game.

Puello would later score on the Legends’ fifth error of the game.

The official scorer, sitting next to me in the press box, spent a good ten minutes on the phone trying to explain what happened. It’s all reflected now in the box score.

Oh, and Wilmer Flores crushed a home run in his first at-bat, on the second pitch he saw. More on that to certainly follow.

Savannah pre-game braindump

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Holy crap, Savannah is beautiful. I’ve been here twice before, but maybe I was too young to fully appreciate it, or maybe the weather wasn’t quite this nice. Whatever the case, I had to drive a radius of the city to get to my hotel. It seemed like every house was architecturally interesting — from a wide varieties of styles and eras, too — and they’re all under a canopy of big old oak trees draped with Spanish moss. Gorgeous. I regret not taking photos, but I was driving.

I’m here at the ballpark — Historic Grayson Stadium, just 84 years young — perched in the “trailer in the sky” of a press box, as Toby Hyde describes it. The catwalk to get up here was just a tiny bit terrifying:

I spoke to the Sand Gnats’ manager, Pedro Lopez, and the Mets’ Minor League Field Coordinator Terry Collins. Segments of those conversations should be posted in a video for SNY.tv sometime after I get back and our video editors chop ’em up, but we talked a lot about expectations for this level, the need to balance results and development, and, of course, Wilmer Flores.

Lopez raved about Flores’ makeup, and said his two-strike approach is outstanding for a player his age. He said Flores needs reps, more than anything, defensively.

Collins stressed that there’s no rush to move Flores along, but expects he’ll advance at some point this summer. He said he’d like to see Flores be a little more patient at the plate.

Soon will be time to watch some South Atlantic League baseball. It’s a brilliant night for a ballgame, so I don’t expect I’ll stay in the press box long. Plus I want to chat up a few fans. Survey the scene and all. Also, that $3.50 Frito Pie has my name all over it.

Don’t tell me where I can’t sit!

Bobby Cox says Jason Heyward takes too many pitches

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Bobby Cox says Braves rookie Jason Heyward is taking far too many hittable strikes and limiting his chances by continually falling behind in counts….

“We’re going to talk to him,” Cox said. “He’s taking way too many pitches for strikes. [As a result] he’s getting one pitch to swing at right now.”

– Dave O’Brien, Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

As Aaron Gleeman points out, the Heymaker has swung at the fourth fewest percentage of pitches inside the strike zone of any Major League qualifier, so Cox is probably onto something, all snark aside.

That said, if he’s looking for a right fielder who won’t take too many pitches…

We’re All-Stars now in the dope show

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I hate to deploy the Slippery Slope Argument … but where does this end?

In less than a decade, they’ve now added eight more All-Stars per season?

You really have to wonder if there’s any real limit. Will there be 35 players on each roster next year? Will the players try to get 40 players per roster when negotiating the next Collective Bargaining Agreement?

– Rob Neyer, SweetSpot.

Neyer, decrying the near-constant growth of All-Star rosters in recent years, makes a series of good points about how the expansion stems from negotiations between the players and owners.

But he misses, or at least neglects to mention the obvious one: Duh. The less exclusive the game becomes, the less anyone will care who is or isn’t an All-Star. If we continue down the slippery slope and the league is soon suiting 40 guys per side for All-Star uniforms, then at some point we’ll be seeing unexciting or downright pedestrian matchups late in Midsummer Classics. And that defeats the whole purpose.

Because to me, the only thing that’s exciting about the All-Star Game is the opportunity to see the greatest pitchers in the game square off with the greatest hitters in the game. It’s been cheapened a bit by interleague play, I think, and I could honestly care less that “THIS TIME IT COUNTS.” I watch the All-Star Game to see stuff like Pedro Martinez striking out three members of the 400-home run club (plus Barry Larkin and Larry Walker) in two innings.

And while I understand and support the owners’ desire to protect pitchers for the games that actually matter, there’s no real point in constantly adding bodies to the margins of the rosters. It’s the all-star game. I want all stars, dammit. GET OFF MY LAWN!

I’m out y’all

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The Mets have now won nine of their last 10 games. That makes it tough to leave the New York area, realizing I likely won’t see most of the upcoming series with the Phillies — even with the Internet and my iPhone and all that — and knowing that things almost certainly won’t seem this awesome by the time I return.

But it’s nice to take off on such a series of good notes, and I can’t say I’m not psyched for this road trip. Come tomorrow afternoon I’ll be in Savannah, filming some stuff for SNY.tv, chatting up Toby Hyde, and watching Wilmer Flores hit baseballs.

From there, it’s a winding trek through the American south. If all goes according to plan, I’ll take in two Single-A games, three Double-A games, a Triple-A game, and three Major League games.

And I’ll do my best to keep the content flowing here as best as I can throughout.

It will be different, of course — probably more a haphazard baseball travelogue and series of photos of ridiculous Southern food than a standard Mets/Taco Bell/nonsense blog — but it seems disingenuous at best to continue trying to cover the intricacies of the Amazins when you all know I’m not paying them all that much attention.

Plus, once I leave Savannah, it’s my vacation and all. A busman’s holiday, for sure, but those are a lot more appealing when the bus is baseball games.

So in other words: The posts here may be spotty and the content will definitely be atypical for the next week and a half. I hope you keep clicking anyway, because maybe I’ll see some hilarious stuff on the side of the road that you don’t want to miss. Or maybe I’ll post some video of myself setting off the fireworks I inevitably purchase. And fireworks are awesome.

Kind of like James Brown:

Great lede, or the greatest lede?

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Once feared extinct, the giant Palouse earthworm, reputed to grow up to three feet long and smell like lilies, has been found alive.

It turns out though, experts say, the worm is not a giant, nor does it have a lilylike scent.

– Jim Robbins, New York Times.

Well, if it’s not a huge, flowery-smelling worm, then I really don’t care that it still exists. I mean, no offense to the Palouse earthworm or whatever, and I guess given the choice I’d rather it not be extinct, but since I never knew it existed before today I could really care less if some stupid worm is still around in very limited numbers in Montana.

Also, for what it’s worth, I would hardly call a three-foot worm a “giant.” When I think “giant worm,” I think Tremors, the 1990 film in which monstrous underground worm-creatures torture Kevin Bacon.

Incidentally, thanks to that movie one of my friends growing up thought “tremors” actually referred to giant, carnivorous worms until at least middle school. So when he’d hear reports of “tremors outside Los Angeles” or whatever, he thought there were underground monsters. I spent a whole lot of time preventing people from teaching him otherwise.

All things awesome

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In the half-hour window between games in the Mets’ doubleheader with the Dodgers on Tuesday, I stood in the Caesar’s Club talking with some friends who, like hundreds of other Mets fans, had retreated to the lounge to escape the chill.

After a meandering conversation that touched on just about every topic we might discuss besides baseball, one of the club’s televisions reminded us of the next game’s pitching matchup: Oliver Perez vs. Charlie Haeger. Perez, set to brave the Dodgers’ lineup without any semblance of accuracy or velocity, versus Haeger, an unfamiliar knuckleballer pitching on a windy night.

The Mets had just won their fifth straight game and their seventh in eight contests, but the outlook appeared dim.

“There’s just no way the Mets are going to win this game, is there?” one guy in the group asked.

No one answered. Even though everyone involved had just watched the team soundly beat the Dodgers to move a half game back of the Phillies for first place — first place! — in the division, and even though we had all seen Jason Bay finally homer and David Wright show signs of breaking out of his slump and Jeff Francoeur earn his first base on balls of the homestand, none of us dared suggest a way the Mets could win the nightcap.

Maybe no one wanted to jinx it. That’s perfectly plausible.

Or maybe these Mets, in the past few years, have bred in their fans a distinct variety of skepticism, a chronic paranoia. Maybe we’re jaded, and we know nothing can ever remain perfect for a team that has exposed itself as so thoroughly imperfect. Maybe being a Mets fan when they’re winning, these days, just feels like a perpetual state of waiting for the other shoe to drop.

It didn’t Tuesday night. The Mets weathered a shaky performance from Perez and enjoyed a stellar one from Hisanori Takahashi, and the team’s offense exploded for 10 runs on 11 hits and took advantage of Haeger’s wildness and the Dodgers’ defensive miscues.

In the sixth inning Wright, booed so recently by the Citi Faithful, crushed a George Sherrill fastball to right-center field: a beautiful, slicing drive that split the Dodgers outfielders, cleared the loaded bases, and reminded everyone in the park what David Wright does when he’s hitting, which is more often than not.

He finished the night with three hits. The Mets finished the night atop the N.L. East.

For the moment, everything is good.

That won’t always be the case, of course. Teams can only endure so many games in which their starters walk a batter an inning, and at some point Jerry Manuel’s use of the bullpen will catch up to him, and probably the Mets will run into some teams that actually play good defense.

But that the Mets won eight of nine like they did, especially without much production from their two best hitters for most of that stretch, that’s plain awesome. Ugly wins, stolen wins, lucky wins and wins handed away by opponents all just look like wins in the standings in September.

And they provide hope in April. Granted, hope doesn’t help Oliver Perez throw strikes or prevent Jeff Francoeur from swinging at balls, but it makes being a Mets fan just a little more pleasant. Hope helps us — or at least me — forget some of the offseason outrage and early season vitriol and return to enjoying baseball games and simply rooting for the Mets to win, all the ancillary stuff be damned.

Hope brings out the naive little-kid Mets fan inside me that really believes they can keep going like this, and keep winning a ton — especially now with the lineup firing on all cylinders. To hell with PECOTA; Ollie and Maine will start performing or be replaced by someone who can, and Ike Davis will hit like this all season, and once Beltran gets back…

Amazing what a winning streak will do to a Mets fan, is all.

James Franco’s portal to nowhere

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James Franco was a no-show at the premiere of his latest flick, “William Vincent,” on Sunday night, but certainly had a good reason….

“They’re shooting in the middle of nowhere, quite literally,” says a source on the set of the flick.

– Gatecrasher, the N.Y. Daily News.

Whoa. Wrap your minds around that one. James Franco is filming a movie quite literally in the middle of nowhere.

James Franco, who by all accounts has mass, has somehow negotiated his way to the center of the absence of space. I cannot even begin to conceive what that means. Thankfully, James Franco is documenting this for us.

I’ve long held that James Franco is stealthily one of our most awesome handsome-guy actors. That’s based mostly on his role in Pineapple Express, his amazing turn in 30 Rock and the time he joined the cast of General Hospital and called it “performance art.”

But now, perhaps the best evidence yet that James Franco is cool: He has uncovered a portal to nowhere. Not just anywhere in nowhere, mind you. The middle. Color me as impressed as I am confused.