Category Archives: Baseball

Twitter Q&A type thing, part 2

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I am on the road today. Here’s the second part of a Twitter Q&A.

Wait do you mean have dinner with people from history or in history? Because if I could have dinner with three people in history, I’d bring three of my buddies back to the Jurassic with some sort of large firearm and feast on some dinosaur.

But then I guess that’s pre-history, plus I’m being a jackass. I know what you mean, and despite how often I’ve heard this question asked I’m not sure I’ve ever come up with a set answer. So let’s think about this.

For one thing, if this isn’t just about bragging rights (I had dinner with Moses, bro!) and I want the conversation to be at all interesting, everyone at that table is going to have to speak modern English. That narrows the field.

Plus it’s a big guessing game, basically picking people based on their public legacies without having known them privately. Little did you know before you sat down for a meal with him that Abe Lincoln had an atrocious, uncontrollable gas problem. It could be!

So with that caveat stated, I’ll say Charles Darwin, Miles Davis and Kurt Vonnegut. How could that be boring? Worse came to worse we could talk about Darwin’s beard.

Well, duh. Especially, Colbert even if he doesn’t know as much about the Mets or baseball. But R.A. Dickey being interviewed by just about anybody is awesome to watch. The guy has interesting things to say.

Twitter Q&A type thing, part 1

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I don’t hate prospects; I really don’t. (Jeff’s kidding when he calls me a jerk, btw. At least I hope he is.) In fact I am en route to Binghamton to talk to prospects as we speak.

It is undoubtedly important for teams to develop deep farm systems and build from within. It’s the best way to build a sustainable winner in baseball.

What annoys me is the impatience with which fans seem to track prospects and the authority with which they purport to scout them. Even for baseball teams armed with legions of professional scouts, predicting which young players will turn out good and which will suck is a game of educated guesswork.

It seems sometimes fans lose sight of how difficult the road to the Majors can be, how unlikely young players are to ever become superstars, and how much more valuable a Major League contributor is to his team than some teenager that shows promise for three years down the road. I do it myself all the time.

I wrote more about this back in May.

Fun fact: On a windy day in July, my wife and I drove out to the Hamptons, where my sister was staying for the weekend. I brought a kite my parents had given me for some occasion a few years ago. I hoped it would be a fun thing to do with my three-year-old nephew.

I put the kite together and took it out to the beach, then proceeded to run around like a goon for the next hour trying to get it airborne. There was plenty of wind, too.

Then to make matters worse, some smug bastard in a linen shirt came out onto the beach with a kite of his own and got it flying without any effort whatsoever, then paraded past me with his kite in the air, pretending he was just nonchalantly flying a kite even though he was clearly showing off.

Long story short, if kite flying becomes a professional sport around here don’t look for me on the leaderboards anytime soon. I maintain that the kite was defective.

Anyway, in terms of popular Thai sports, I much prefer sepak takraw:

Mets sign a bunch of guys

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Last night was the MLB deadline to sign draft picks, which is now apparently a big Twitter deal. The Mets signed a bunch of draft picks, several of them to bonuses above the recommended slot figure. Toby Hyde calls this “a good day to be a Mets fan” and I’m inclined to agree. I don’t know a damn thing about the particular young players involved, but it seems like the process was good, and that’s the best we can really hope for.

Here comes that Dude again

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Lucas Duda hit another home run last night. It looked sort of like this — not exactly like this, but since I can’t show you last night’s for a couple of days, I’ll just embed this one again:

Look at that. Watch it again. Revel in Lucas Duda’s grandeur.

When the Mets called up Ike Davis last season (was it really just last season?), Jerry Manuel praised his “easy power.” I liked that.

Duda appears to have the easiest power of any young player we’ve seen in Flushing in years, with a big uppercut swing as uncomplicated as his public persona. He is 6’4″ and 255 pounds and capable of smashing 450-foot home runs, but in interviews, he is almost bashful. His teammates joke about his reticence. Fans, broadcasters, bloggers and beat reporters seem eager to give him a nickname: The Dude, the Big Lebowski, the Lumberjack, the Liger.

He has all the makings of a folk hero. But will it last?

Plugging Duda’s remarkable Triple-A totals from 2010 and 2011 into the Minor League equivalency calculator yields a Major League line of .257/.334/.480, not terribly far off his .260/.328/.454 career mark in the bigs. And his small sample of at-bats in Buffalo in 2011 run through the same tool turn out a .248/.348/.467 mark, distinct mostly in batting average from his .287/.358/.472 stint with the Mets this season.

Obviously any estimator like that paints in broad strokes; I mean only to point out that there’s plenty of precedent in Duda’s Minor League resume for the production we’re now seeing.

He’s 25, so he’s likely still got a bit of improvement ahead of him. And if you want to be nice about it, you might cut him some slack for his awful first handful of games in the Majors and bump up his career OPS a tick.

In any case, if the bat’s really this good, it plays just about anywhere. Problem is, in the coming years the Mets likely won’t have much room for Duda at first base — his natural position and the one he has been playing every night of late.

Davis plays first, is a year younger than Duda and has done more than Duda to show he belongs in the Majors. There has long been talk that Davis could move to right field, but that move seems unlikely to happen anytime soon given the ankle injury that ended his 2011 season. Provided he is healthy, Davis should be back at first for the Mets in 2012 and beyond.

Terry Collins admitted last night that he had to consider using Duda in right field moving forward because Duda will likely be competing for time in that spot next spring. Might as well get to it. You can find someone else to play first. Nick Evans is still on the team, right?

It’s reasonable to doubt whether Duda could handle right field defensively, but there’s no time like right now to figure out if he can. The ability to pencil in Duda’s bat to the Mets’ 2012 lineup would give Sandy Alderson more flexibility with his offseason resources, and give Mets fans the promise of more awesome moonshots to come.

What’s unrealistic

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I don’t want to spend too much time on anything Mike Pelfrey said this weekend, or even the way it was presented or the fallout that followed. To belabor the relatively benign quotes and perpetuate the conversation about them is to do exactly what the New York Post hopes will happen when it makes them the focus of its game recap and publishes them under an inflammatory headline.

It’s not even a bad thing or something for which we should fault the paper or journalist responsible, it is only one more example of a business model that is as old as daily newspapers themselves. If you find it tiresome, upsetting or misleading, the best way to combat it is to understand the context and/or ignore it.

The rest of the quotes from Pelfrey in the same story, paragraphs beneath the weighty lead, present not only his confidence in the Mets’ front office but his willingness to shoulder responsibility for the club’s sub-.500 record in 2011. The most incendiary comment in the article comes from an anonymous teammate, who was likely reacting to only one small fraction of Pelfrey’s conversation with the reporter — just as countless Mets fans have.

For some reason, many people — including Pelfrey, apparently — decided that because Pelfrey pitched on Opening Day for the Mets in 2011, he should perform like the lauded True No. 1 Ace. It was never going to happen; Pelfrey does not have an effective enough arsenal of pitches to be more than the league-average innings-eater he has been since joining the Mets’ rotation full time in 2008.

He has suffered through a rough season, as pitchers who yield lots of contact sometimes do. And in the absence of obvious targets Oliver Perez and Luis Castillo, down-year Pelfrey makes for as good a bugaboo as any.

But it’s silly to punish a guy for some harmless, realistic comments and your own unrealistic expectations for his performance. If he pitched the the way he has pitched but said he thought the Mets were going to win the World Series in 2011, people would want to run him out of town for being delusional.

Ahhh…

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Marshall, the former Dodgers outfielder now managing the Chico Outlaws of the independent North American Baseball League, was suspended three games for fighting Monday with Tony Phillips.

Yep, that Tony Phillips, the one who played in the major leagues for 18 seasons. And is still playing for the independent Yuma Scorpions — managed by Jose Canseco….

Marshall may regrettably be best remembered as the player who sat out a game for “general soreness” and dated Go-Go’s lead singer Belinda Carlisle.

– Steve Dilbeck, L.A. Times.

Ahhh… Wait, no. First of all… No, no, first of all — OK, OK…

Yeah, there’s just nothing I can add.

How much are flights to Yuma these days?