Mets Hot Stove starts tonight at 7 p.m. on SNY, and there’s a poll up on the Mets Hot Stove web page that you can vote on. It asks which position you think the Mets should focus on this offseason, and starting pitching is thus far winning in a landslide.
OK, so I recognize that the first two installments of Culture Jammin’ have now focused on Aerosmith, but whatever. That’s not the plan for this series, but I’ll stop writing about Aerosmith when Aerosmith stops being hilarious.
They’re back together, by the way. Or maybe not. Whatever.
The reason I bring up Aerosmith is that I wanted to talk about the Cryin’ video that featured Alicia Silverstone (plus a young Josh Holloway, better known as Sawyer from Lost) a little more.
It was all over MTV for like two years and I’m certain it won a bunch of MTV Video Awards, but man, who thought it was a good idea? I would have loved to have sat in on that prod meeting between Steven Tyler and Joe Perry, who I just assume make all of Aerosmith’s aesthetic decisions.
“OK, so we’ll have this hot chick, and she has all these problems with her boyfriend. Get it, like she’s ‘Cryin”, like the name of the song?”
“Yeah, that works — and then at the end, she kills herself!”
“No, dude. That’s too heavy. Too real. How ’bout we just make it look like she kills herself, but then, ahh… what could we have her do?”
“Oh, DUDE! She jumps off a bridge, but then it turns out she’s just bungee jumping!”
“Perfect! Oh my god, it’s so ironic I can’t stand it! And then… then she’ll give the guy the finger!”
“Aerosmith f@#$ing rules!”
When did Alicia Silverstone put on the bungee-jumping harness in this video? It’s not even clear she’s got one on when she’s first standing on the bridge. And how’s she going to get back up? And why did she… oh, nevermind.
Chris asked for an explanation on a couple of stats in the comments for the last post, and I started responding there, but the post got really long and I figured I’d throw it in the main feed here instead.
Anyway, Fangraphs.com and baseball-reference.com have pretty extensive glossaries, so I urge you to read (way, way) more about the subject there.
I normally use stats to inform my writing more than drive them, but the stats Chris asked for all might very well come up here, so here goes:
Briefly: WAR stands for Wins Above Replacement, and uses both offense and defensive stats in an attempt to determine precisely how many wins a player is worth to his team above the replacement-level player at his position (think Alex Cora).
WAR relies on UZR, or Ultimate Zone Rating, to measure a player’s defense. UZR is a pretty complicated metric, but it essentially tracks how many outs a player converts on balls hit within his “zone of responsibility.” A 7.6 UZR would mean a player saved his team 7.6 runs defensively over the replacement defender at his position over the course of a season.
OPS+ and ERA+ are just versions of OPS and ERA that are scaled a bit differently. Essentially, they’re park- and league-adjusted to better compair players of different eras and ballparks, and they’re weighted so the average is 100 and higher numbers are better. So a player with a 160 OPS+ hit 60 percent better than the average hitter would in his same situation.
The good general point of reference those two stats — and they’re two of my favorites, since they’re quick and easy but still fair for comparisons — are SAT scores, since they’re weighted the same way and the range is usually about the same. The worst players in the league will score around 60 and the best around 160, though there are always a few outliers.
BABIP refers to batting average on balls in play. It is mostly used to measure luck, because a player’s BABIP usually remains around the same level across his career, and years in which it is abnormally high or low might signify good or bad luck. It’s a bit more complex than that, of course, because BABIP corresponds pretty closely to line-drive rate and a player might be getting more hits on balls in play because he’s actually hitting the ball harder.
In the comments section for my notes on free-agent second basemen yesterday, Tom wrote:
Felipe Lopez is not the answer. There are reasons why he keeps getting moved.
I’m not trying to go after Tom here because I’m certainly not in any position to alienate readers of this site. Plus I’m not entirely certain what Tom was getting at. Perhaps he has specific reasons in mind, though he didn’t elaborate.
I mention because I’m often faced with similar rhetoric from readers when I wonder about a player I perceive to be undervalued or overlooked.
“If Player X is so good,” they write, “then how come nobody wants him?’
Often the e-mails or comments or whatever are tagged with nasty insults about how there are also reasons I’m not a Major League GM or professional baseball player and how I clearly do not know what I’m talking about. I won’t argue those.
As for the other thing, though, well, yeah. In every case, there probably are reasons nobody wants a player. And maybe some of them are good reasons. But maybe some of them are bad, too, and I don’t have nearly enough faith in the system to assume that every decision made by a Major League front office is a good one.
That doesn’t just go for baseball, either. I don’t know that I’ve ever worked in any level at any job and been able to say confidently that the people in charge were consistently making the best decisions. And most of those businesses were run by very, very smart people.
But they’re people, and one of the main things about people is that they screw things up all the time.
I’m not saying I don’t, obviously. I’ve said it before: If my actions and decisions were monitored and documented as closely as those of a Major League player or general manager, I’d be booed on the streets of Manhattan.
And to some extent, I do believe in baseball front offices, because it’s pretty impressive that all 30 clubs, operating with various budgets, can routinely put together teams that win at least 40 percent of their games against big-league opponents. Certainly some front offices are better at compiling winning teams than others, but no team completely embarrasses itself year-in and year-out.
Still, if you blindly believe that every decision made by every Major League club is the correct one, you’ve probably come to the wrong place. I’m not going to discourage you from reading, because I appreciate your time and traffic, but you’re not going to be happy with a lot of what you read here.
So yes, there probably are a lot of reasons teams keep moving Felipe Lopez. But this site is for trying to figure out exactly what those reasons are, and, more importantly, whether they are enough to account for the difference between what Lopez and Orlando Hudson will eventually get paid.
Given the way things have gone for both the Mets and Venezuela in 2009, I’d say it’d be a good call to bring Josh Thole home. There are other winter-ball leagues, and Thole is hitting .419 with a .538 OBP down there, so they might as well find someplace safer where he could be challenged more.
Everything Chad Ochocinco does is art. Marvin Lewis needs to get on board or stand aside.
Alex Belth at Bronx Banter aggregates some of sportswriting’s greatest ledes. Ahh, Belth? You forgot “Val Pascucci exists.”
James at Amazin’ Avenue elucidates how much better Matt Holliday is than Jason Bay at playing the outfield. But James, he took one in the junk the one time I happened to take notice of his defense!
Derek Jeter’s next contract negotiation, whenever it may come, will be an interesting one. His defense was much better than normal this year statistically, but at some point he’s not going to be able to play shortstop anymore, and I suspect Brian Cashman realizes that. It’ll be very interesting to see how that plays out.
Carlos Beltran will appear on the season premiere of Mets Hot Stove tomorrow at 7 p.m. on SNY.
Kevin Burkhardt will be back as host of the show. He’ll be joined by Newsday’s David Lennon, WFAN’s Ed Coleman, and Jon Heyman.
The series premiere of Mets Yearbook will follow at 7:30, featuring the Mets’ 1971 season in review. The show contains Old Timers’ Day footage of Satchel Paige pitching, which I’m guessing is awesome.
Video from Mets Hot Stove will be available shortly after the show on SNY.tv.
A lot of the offseason hubbub so far has suggested that the Mets will pursue free-agent second basemen, assuming, of course, they can find a taker for Luis Castillo.
That’s fine, I suppose, though I wonder if signing Orlando Hudson to a multi-year deal would be more akin to repeating the Luis Castillo mistake than undoing it.
There’s also talk the Mets could pursue Chone Figgins partly because of his ability to play second base, but though Figgins is a tremendous defensive third baseman, he hasn’t played more than nine games at second in a season since 2005 and even back then, in a small sample, he wasn’t overwhelmingly good at it.
And paying Figgins the rate he deserves as a Gold Glove-caliber third baseman just to move him to a corner outfield position, where his bat would be below-average, would be a blisteringly bad decision. He’s a good player, but a lot of his value is wrapped up in his versatility and strong defense at third. Planting him in left field absorbs most of that value.
The most baffling thing, I think, is that I have yet to see a single journalist link the Mets to Felipe Lopez. Maybe I’m missing something, but Lopez was actually better than Hudson this year and is two and a half years younger.
He’s been inconsistent across his career, which could scare the Mets off, but his only really terrible year at the plate came in 2007, when his BABIP was .036 below his career average. That means he was probably a bit unlucky.
I’m not advocating Lopez for the Mets, I’m just noting how surprising it is that his name hasn’t come up. If they actually can part with Castillo and Lopez’s demands are lower than Hudson’s, he seems — on the surface, at least — like a smarter pickup.
The Mets are reportedly pursuing John Lackey. This, of course, follows reports that the Mets won’t pursue John Lackey and confirms reports that the hot-stove season is a giant typhoon of nonsense and we shouldn’t believe anything we read.
Scott Boras says, “Chronological age does not have anything to do with a player of [Johnny Damon’s] genetics.” R. Kelly agrees, “Age ain’t nothing but a number.”
Sammy Sosa says his new skin tone is due to a European moisturizer. European, huh? Likely story. Early returns on retired Sammy Sosa suggest we can look forward to a lot more weirdness.
A slimmed-down Eddy Curry showed up at Knicks practice yesterday. It remains to be seen whether he’ll be any good at basketball, or at least good enough to be traded to clear cap space.
Stephon Johnson and Jessica Bader debate whether anyone cares about the Yankees’ 27th title at the Perpetual Post. Howard Megdal and I had a similar discussion on Perpetual Post radio on Monday.
And speaking of the Perpetual Post, Akie Bermiss, Zoe Rice and I discussed one of my heroes, Norm MacDonald, earlier this week.
It’s all quite meta. From the Wikipedia: The Wikipedia
The Wikipedia was founded in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and was originally intended only to complement the Nupedia, a free online encyclopedia of the more traditional form.
Articles to the site can be added and edited by any user, though certain controversial pages are limited to established users and site administrators.
The Wikipedia was available in 18 different languages by the end of 2001, 161 by the end of 2004 and is now available in 240 languages. The English-language edition has over two million entries, making it the largest encyclopedia ever compiled.
Needless to say, the Wikipedia’s Wikipedia page is rife with information about the Wikipedia. It includes criticisms of the Wikipedia and reports of various studies on the Wikipedia’s reliability.
I happen to think the Wikipedia is our greatest cultural achievement. How crazy is it to think that, when I was growing up, we had to take time out of our regular classes in school to go to the library and learn how to use reference materials? Do kids still have those sessions, or do they just learn how to search the Wikipedia, which takes about 10 seconds?
My parents had a Funk and Wagnalls encyclopedia, and we relied on it for nearly everything, even though it was from the early 1980s and perpetually thought the Soviet Union remained intact and the Berlin Wall upright.
We don’t need any of those things anymore, because we have the Wikipedia. And sure, maybe there are some errors, but those real encyclopedias, it turned out, had some errors too. And they didn’t have millions of users policing them all the time and editing out the most egregious of the mistakes.
The Wikipedia does, and it’s pretty damn accurate. I figured this out when I asked a doctor about a prescription medication I was taking and he went to its Wikipedia page to find out more. My wife is in med school now, and everyone there apparently relies on the Wikipedia for everything. At the very least, it can point people to more “legitimate” sources in the citations.
I have an iPhone now, which means I have access to the Wikipedia almost always. This has been, without a doubt, the best part about having an iPhone, and probably the best thing about technology ever. Unless I’m in a subway tunnel, I can get whatever information I want whenever I want it. It’s crazy, and it’s part of the reason the Wikipedia is the best thing humans have created.
In a related story, I co-founded a Taco Bell wiki a while back, and it sits mostly unedited. Get on it, Internet.
Adam Rubin wrote today that the Mets hope to re-sign Alex Cora, a player who probably inspires five times as much debate around this office as anyone else.
This debate, I should mention, almost always features me.
So much was made about what Alex Cora brought to the Mets’ clubhouse this year, and I’m not going to argue otherwise. By all accounts, he’s a nice guy and a smart player and will make a great coach someday.
The problem is he’s not very good at baseball anymore.
Cora played much of 2009 with torn ligaments in his thumbs, which might excuse the .630 OPS he posted in over 300 plate appearances. The problem is, that line is not really that far off Cora’s career .658 mark, and unsurprising given the expected decline of a 33-year-old player.
Moreover, depending on which metric you prefer, Cora played somewhere between average and below-average defense at second base and shortstop. To the eye, he demonstrated a lack of range that likely affected the Mets’ groundball pitchers like Mike Pelfrey and Sean Green.
The co-worker with whom I usually engage in this debate argues that Cora’s deficiencies on the field are more than made up for by his additions to the clubhouse, and claims that to build a winning team, the Mets need more character guys like Alex Cora.
Far be it for me to say a team doesn’t need character guys, but if it does, it should be able to acquire ones who are above replacement-level. And Cora isn’t.
I like to believe that, on a good and successful ballclub, character guys will surface and in nearly any group dynamic, leaders will emerge. In other words, I don’t think a team should be in the business of acquiring leaders or clubhouse guys. I think the team should focus on acquiring the 25 best players it can to fill out its roster rather than building a team on what Theo Epstein might call “psychobabble.”
If Alex Cora could be had at the league minimum, then sure, why not? He could be a helpful guy to have around during Spring Training and if he could prove he merited a spot on the roster, great.
But Alex Cora will not be had at the league minimum, and that’s the problem. Cora cost the Mets $2 million last season, and the Mets — as Rubin points out — are operating with a finite budget.
Every time I post this criticism, someone jumps down my throat and argues that $2 million is a drop in the Mets’ payroll bucket and should not be the difference between signing a bigger-name free agent or not.
Maybe that’s so, but consistently dropping $2 million on players of Cora’s caliber, ones that could by definition be replaced by someone earning the league minimum, adds up. It does. I know we all want the Mets to be able to spend like the Yankees, but until they do, we need to root for them to spend more efficiently.
Finally, with Jose Reyes still something of a question mark moving forward, the Mets should have a backup plan in place that’s better than Alex Cora.
Certainly the best-case scenario for the club would have Reyes playing 150 games at shortstop like he did every year from 2005 to 2008. But though Reyes is supposedly on the mend, his injuries have beguiled the Mets before, and it would behoove the team to have a backup in house who could at least defend the position well, if not also hit a little bit.
If the Mets are so gung-ho on Cora returning to their clubhouse, there’s a bench coach position still waiting to be filled.
Tedquarters 