Category Archives: Baseball

Elevated to absurdity

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I like this sequence from 30 Rock. A mildly funny joke followed by a better joke building off the first one, then elevated to absurdity by the third, all across 20 seconds.

I thought of it yesterday while watching the Mets lose to the Braves from the second deck in right at Citi Field, and not just because Excelsior sounds like a name Jack Donaghy would choose for a level in his stadium.

Something about the rapid-fire one-upsmanship during the game reminded me of the scene, with bad news replacing Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin — first Willie Harris pinch-hitting for Jose Reyes, then Daniel Murphy hopping out to short right field and collapsing with a season-ending knee injury, culminating in the ridiculous sight of David Wright playing shortstop and then, when it seemed like being a Mets fan couldn’t get any more depressing and silly, the game’s ultimate punchline: Chipper Jones lining the game-winning hit.

The metaphor fails because 30 Rock is funny and injuries to Reyes and Murphy are nothing like that, except I suppose in some grim, rock-bottom way.

Murphy was to date the team’s third-best hitter. Carlos Beltran, debatably the team’s first-best hitter, plays for the San Francisco Giants now. We await word on how long this hamstring tweak will sideline Jose Reyes, the other side of that debate. And that’s not to mention Ike Davis, who had been hitting better than all of them when he went down with the ankle injury that appears to have ended his season.

This sucks. It’s a damn-near miracle that the Mets can shoulder so many losses and still field a lineup of mostly not-embarrassing Major Leaguers, but a lineup of David Wright and a bunch of mostly not-embarrassing Major Leaguers isn’t going to score nearly as many runs as one with Wright, Murphy and Reyes, with a couple extra not-embarrassing Major Leaguers on the bench. Obviously.

I guess a more appropriate simile would be to say Sunday’s game hit like a flurry of punches from Mike Tyson in his prime, jabs and hooks and crosses and uppercuts, leaving us dazed and on the ropes. Something like that.

Whatever. Who cares what it’s like? It is what it is: Two of the Mets’ best players and best reasons to keep watching for the rest of 2011 getting hurt within the course of a few innings. Reyes may be back soon. Murphy won’t.

The upshot is we’ll probably see Lucas Duda in the lineup just about every day from here on out, and maybe more of Nick Evans too. We won’t get any better sense of if Murphy can play second in the future, though if you’re playing at home that makes two straight seasons for Murph ended by knee injuries sustained at the keystone, for whatever that’s worth.

Brutal. At least there’s still David Wright, playing shortstop or anyplace else. And Jason Bay… oh, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Tilting at windmills

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The question then becomes how long a wild-card series should be. Costas predicted the adoption of a one-and-done playoff over a three-game series because that would be television’s preference — ensuring two games every season modeled on the storied playoff game of 1978 (Yankees-Red Sox) as opposed to the three-game version of 1951 (Giants-Dodgers).

“Here’s the difference,” Costas said. “Those games came after 162 games and were the result of a dead heat. They were not contrived like these would be.”

A best-of-three series would also require the survivor to extend its pitching staff by having to play at least twice, thereby making it that much more challenging for a wild-card team to win the World Series. Under those terms, this weekend’s series in Boston would be well worth the hype.

– Harvey Araton, N.Y. Times.

It sure sounds like Major League Baseball’s going to add a second Wild Card, so this feels a bit like tilting at windmills now. Plus I should add that even as a teenager I disliked the idea of a grand change to baseball’s playoff system in 1994. For all my pretense toward open-mindedness, I’m pretty stodgy at heart.

But indulge me. Say for the sake of argument that there were a second Wild Card and a one-game playoff in 2011, and season ended with the teams in the exact positions they are right now.

In the American League, the Yankees would be rewarded for being eight games better than the Angels over a 162-game season by having to beat the Angels in a one- or three-game series. Nevermind that the Yankees play in the toughest division in baseball and are seven games better than the AL West-leading Rangers and 9.5 up on the AL Central-leading Tigers, it doesn’t seem at all fair to force them to assert their dominance over the Angels in a short series (or single game!) that could easily be decided by randomness when they’ve already shown it over the much larger sample.

Granted, since the start of divisional play there are tons of examples where teams with better records have been excluded from the playoffs in favor of those that managed only to be better than the dreck in their division, plus it’s not like a full seven-game series is enough to show for sure that one team is superior to another.

And I guess the most important thing to keep in mind is that it’s not really about fairness. Not to sound cynical, but presumably Bud Selig has at his disposal an army of accountants showing the ways in which adding a Wild Card would be financially best for the teams and the game.

This is happening whether I like it or not, so I suppose it’s time I get used to the idea. I imagine in time there’ll be seasons made more exciting by the change and seasons made less exciting, it’ll all balance out and eventually I’ll just accept it as the way it is instead of focusing so much on the way it once was.

Your thoughts?

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Why it kind of matters

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Maybe Alex Rodriguez played in a card game where poker pros and Hollywood big shots had fist fights over $500,000 debts while snorting cocaine off of their chip stacks.

Maybe he didn’t.

Either way, who cares?

– Jim Rich, N.Y. Daily News.

I get what Rich is saying here, and I understand all the bluster over Major League Baseball investigating this after not reacting particularly strongly to the rash of drunk-driving arrests that plagued the sport in the Spring. Drunk driving puts innocent lives at risk, and playing poker risks only money.

But keep in mind that all A-Rod has endured so far for his poker playing is a bit of media sanctimony (plus whatever losses he took at the hands of shrewd cardsharks like Tobey Maguire). The league absolutely should investigate its players’ participation in high-stakes gambling, because it’s the league’s job to maintain the integrity of the sport.

Poker is a fun hobby for many of us, and apparently for A-Rod too. And lord knows he has the type of resources to cover pretty substantial losses without resorting to anything nefarious. But if he’s really involved with the type of people who send “thugs” to games to shake down players, MLB needs to at least look into it — if not for fear that A-Rod would end up intentionally altering on-field outcomes, then to put out the ol’ Marlo Stanfield my-name-is-my-name message to players around the league.

And I know it sounds almost ridiculous to think that players could throw games in this day and age, but gambling is a massive and still-shady industry and it allegedly impacted the NBA as recently as four years ago.

Pascucci Watch 2K11 continues quietly

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Hey Ted, how’s the Pascucci watch 2011 coming? It looks like he’s having another great year. Anything you can blog about?

– Wayne, via email.

I hoped the departure of Carlos Beltran was going to mean a big-league call for Val Pascucci, in what would have to be the most bittersweet TedQuarters moment imaginable. Nearly every position player the Mets had in Triple-A who was on the 40-man roster was either hurt or still within a 10-day window of being sent down, and the team has room on the 40-man and can make more by moving Ike Davis to the 60-day DL.

But alas, they called on the only position player in Triple-A who was healthy, on the 40-man and eligible to come up: catcher Mike Nickeas.

Meanwhile, Pascucci just keeps crushing the ball. The 6’6″ masher is rocking a .282/.393/.515 line, alarmingly similar to his career Triple-A mark of .277/.396/.515. The guy is as regular as… I don’t know, a quartz clock? Someone with an extremely high fiber diet?

So yeah, Wayne: Pascucci Watch continues. But I don’t know what more anyone has to see. The guy destroys Triple-A pitching, and no one seems eager to find out if he can do the same in the Majors. He apparently isn’t much one for defense, he strikes out a bunch, and he’s 32. Soon enough, the window will close.

September is coming, and the Mets don’t have many obvious candidates for call-ups that aren’t already on the 40-man. Throw the guy a bone, huh?

If it says it in the SkyMall, it’s so

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Jordan Zakarin passes along word that the following is available for sale in SkyMall, America’s most essential in-flight catalog:

SkyMall has really outdone itself this time. Among pages upon pages of ridiculous, unnecessary products, perhaps most absurd of all: Jeff Francoeur, Clutch Hitter.

If you’re playing at home, Francoeur’s career line in high-leverage situations is a hefty .252/.301/.384, meaning he is a clutch hitter in roughly the same way that Yuniesky Betancourt is a hitter, in that both men are often charged with the task regardless of if they are up to it.

In fact, since Francoeur’s career rates in medium- and low-leverage situations are well higher than in those highly pressured spots, one might even argue that Jeff Francoeur is a decidedly unclutch hitter if one believed such a thing exists at the Major League level.

But then SkyMall says otherwise, and SkyMall sells the Litter Robot.