Category Archives: Baseball

Houstonites urged to stop doing hot-dog dance, acquiring pants to enjoy free sandwiches

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Via Joe Budd at Amazin’ Avenue comes news that Minute Maid Park is giving away free sandwiches today and tomorrow.

Problem is, I just can’t think of a way it’s worth it to travel to Houston for a sandwich, even if the sandwich is free, price of gas being what it is. Too bad though, because the sandwiches sound pretty good:

1. Hill Country Pork Hoagie: Slow Roasted Pulled Pork with Garlic, Red Pepper & Herbs, Spicy Chiptole Aioli, Sweet Vinegar Slaw on a Sourdough Hoagie with a side of Kettle Chips and a pickle spear.

2. Texas Tom Turkey Sandwich: Roasted Turkey Breast, Pepper Jack Cheese, Spicy Chipotle Aioli, Lettuce, Corn Salsa on a Jalapeno-Cheddar Kaiser with a side of Kettle Chips and a pickle.

Why we can’t have nice things: Josh Thole quits Twitter

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Word leaked out last night that Josh Thole shut down his Twitter account. Thole was not a particularly active or interesting Twitterer, and, to be honest, I’m not sure I can remember a single thing he Tweeted. But he was notable as one of the few Mets who Tweeted in a language I can read (though I know enough Spanish to figure out that this means Johan Santana saw Fast Five, which is awesome).

Anyway, Thole told reporters he grew sick of seeing his inbox flooded with “ruthless” comments from Mets fans after bad games. He said he received at least one actual death wish, and he just didn’t want to deal with it anymore.

Now you might expect Twitter would take Thole’s departure as a cue for some quiet introspection, a moment to look in the mirror and consider the perpetual 140-character negativity. You’d be wrong though:

Yes, it has long been theorized that maintaining a Twitter account requires a good deal of mental toughness, what with macho handles like “OG” and “the Bull” and all. And indeed, after Thole let reporters know about his decision, tweets questioning the catcher’s backbone flooded timelines everywhere.

But inquisitive journalist and social-media guru that I am, I endeavored some very scientific research on the matter. I surveyed a significant sample of humanity on its Twitter habits as well as a litany of things that indicate mental toughness. Check out this graph:

As so often happens, science disproves popular belief. It turns out for the large majority of humanity, there is no relationship between Twitter usage and mental toughness. There are a bunch of mentally weak people using Twitter and a bunch of mentally weak people not using Twitter. The only time you see any change is when you get to the very extreme end of the mental toughness spectrum. Really ridiculously tough people don’t use Twitter because they need their hands to do things like wrestle bears and defuse bombs, and many of them don’t have smartphones.

Sometimes Josh Thole has 95 mile-an-hour fastballs fouled off his facemask. Then he leans back in to to do it again. If you want to call that guy mentally weak because he doesn’t want to put up with a bunch of b.s. from fans on Twitter, go to town, bro, but smart money says he doesn’t really care much one way or the other.

It’s classic self-important talk-radio Benigno thinking to latch on to any example you can find of a player reacting in some small way to outside pressure and cite it as evidence that he can’t handle the city or the media, when in truth — if I had to guess, at least — if the player is paying any attention whatsoever he sees it only as some sort of macabre sideshow.

Baseball players have tons of stuff to occupy their attention, what with the scouting meetings and the traveling and the charity work and the actually playing baseball games and everything else. In Spring Training, Thole found a little extra time and decided to try out Twitter. People, as they so often do, behaved like animals, so he bailed. All that means about his character is he’s reasonable.

Oh, speaking of reasonable: If you’re on Twitter and you’re interested in maintaining the ability to directly interact with baseball players — the great value of Twitter — I suggest you follow our man Glenn’s lead and say nice things to Justin Turner.

Lenny Dykstra still going

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The New York Post has given Lenny Dykstra a platform, and I suppose if I were in a different mood I could have a good deal of fun with it. But honestly — and like a lot of the content in the Post, I suppose — it reads a bit like something off a crazy person’s hand-scrawled placard. It’s easy to make Dykstra into a punchline because we once knew him as the hard-partying dirty-uniform ballplayer, and I’m sure if anyone asked him he’d curse me and say he didn’t want my sympathy, but man… what a sad, sad dude.

Say it ain’t so, Matt Harvey

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Harvey, 22, does not want to just win. He wants to dominate. He is never satisfied. In that way, it is fitting that his favorite player is Paul O’Neill.

“I play the game to win, I play the game hard, the way it should be played,” Harvey told The Post. “I want to be great, and I’ll do whatever I can to make that happen. I’m never satisfied.

“I loved Paul O’Neill’s approach and the way he would get so mad at himself. He felt that he needed to be perfect every time, and I loved that.”

– Kevin Kernan, N.Y. Post.

Oh c’mon, really? Paul O’Neill? I thought you were cool, Matt Harvey.

Kernan takes in Harvey’s start against the Bradenton Marauders in Port Charlotte, Fla. and describes the prospect’s “easy gas”* and “hard determination.”

With Jenrry Mejia set for Tommy John surgery, Mets fans are understandably pinning most of their hopes on Harvey. But I urge you to temper your expectations. Yes, he’s pitching extremely well in Single-A, but it’s Single-A and, well, he’s pitching. I’m not trying to be Debbie Downer and I’m as excited for Harvey as I am for anyone in the Mets’ system, but a lot can go wrong for the young man before he reaches the big leagues.

Remember: Mike Pelfrey was also once a huge prospect who dominated A-ball (and Double-A ball, for that matter) in his first season out of college. Just saying. And I know they’re very different pitchers and supposedly Harvey’s secondary stuff is a lot better, but recall that there were tons of scouts and baseball-person types heralding Pelfrey’s frontline-starter stuff when he first broke in.

Also, remember that Jesse Foppert and Paul Wilson and Brien Taylor and countless other forgotten hopefuls were future aces too. You could do a hell of a lot worse than Mike Pelfrey.

*- If easy gas makes for a promising pitching prospect, just… oh, this one’s practically an alley-oop.

Well that’s no good

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Terry Collins thinks David Wright’s struggles at the plate are related to injuring his upper back/neck area making a diving tag on Houston’s Carlos Lee on April 19.

– Adam Rubin, ESPN.com.

Well that’s no good. If Wright’s hurt, he’s not saying anything about it, which is kind of his bag. He hasn’t been outright terrible mostly because he’s still walking a bunch; I was just sort of figuring it was a month-and-a-half of underwhelming performance, a sample-size blip type thing. But I suppose across the course of a 162-game season, minor injuries are often exactly the type of thing that create valleys in performance over smallish samples.

Wright apparently hates days off. But tomorrow, a day game after a night game with Ubaldo Jimenez on the mound, might be a nice day to get him one.

Twitter Q&A-type thing

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Well technically I said “everything hurts” and not “Everybody Hurts,” but I’ll confess I sort of have a soft spot for R.E.M.

I guess really there’s no spot anyone has for R.E.M. that’s not soft, is the thing. What I’m saying is I don’t hate them as much as some of my contemporaries do, mostly because I think the song “Stand” is hilarious and it makes me happy every time I hear it. That’s at least partly because it was the theme song for the amazing Chris Elliot show Get A Life, but also because I love singing along with the “NOW FACE NORTH!” background vocal parts.

And furthermore, “Everybody Hurts” would make for hilarious closer music. I’ve been through that before though.

Oh man, that’s such a good question, and one for which the answer would inevitably change every time I attempted it. Thing is, in an actual desert-island scenario I’d probably try to go with a good mix of genres so I had something for every possible mood. But let me start with the obvious ones and see where it goes.

First, Dark Side. Maybe that’s a cliched choice or whatever, but there’s just no way I could imagine life without having access to the last five-song sequence there, which might be the pinnacle of human achievement. And it sucks that it’s such a short album because if I can only choose five I feel like I’m giving up some music then, but you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. I like to think of what it must have looked like when Pink Floyd first sat down and listened to that album all the way through, with the ridiculously triumphant ending and everything. “OK, yeah, I think we’re good bro.”

Second, James Brown’s Love Power Peace live album. There are going to be some funky times on this island, and I can think of no one better to provide the soundtrack than the Godfather of Soul, Mr. Please Please himself. I like James Brown’s live stuff better than his studio recordings, and this incarnation of the JBs features Bootsy and Catfish Collins and funk trombone hero Fred Wesley. No Maceo, sadly.

OK now it gets really hard. No way I can get by without something from the Beatles, though, which means I’ll take Abbey Road.

Man, that gives me nothing after 1973, and, truth be told, none of the albums I actually listen to most on the day-to-day. I’m panicking now. I gotta choose between Dr. Dre and the Wu-Tang Clan? I guess I’ll go with Enter the Wu-Tang because East Coast and everything. After that… I don’t know.

My 7th grade self would be disappointed in me if it wasn’t Nevermind, my 10th grade self would be disappointed if it wasn’t Punk in Drublic, my 12th grade self would be disappointed if it wasn’t Odelay, and various incarnations of me would want the eponymous Rage Against the Machine album. Punk in Drublic, though, contains “Jeff Wears Birkenstocks,” which is one of the few songs absolutely guaranteed to make me happy, so that might give it an edge. But a bunch of CAKE albums need to be considered too.

How about a little optimism? I’ll go with yes. Is that Mets-fan Polyannaism? Maybe. But as I’ve written countless times, Sandy Alderson should be able to see the value in Reyes, since Reyes is an elite 28-year-old shortstop. I think the whole not-a-Moneyball-player talk is overblown by people who either didn’t read or didn’t really understand the point of Moneyball.

The Mets have a ton of money coming off the books and, as a big market baseball franchise with a television network, have a steady stream of money coming in. They should have no problem finding the money to re-sign Reyes, especially if they can find a part-owner to increase their financial flexibility. The decision should come down not to if they can but if they should, and given how infrequently players like Reyes become free agents and how slim the pickings at shortstop will be otherwise, it seems like re-signing him will be a smart move.

Hu has been brutal, and since Justin Turner can back up shortstop in a pinch it doesn’t seem like there’s much need for him on the team.

But are people really down on Lucas Duda already? And look: I know I can’t go killing Hu because of 18 at-bats then screaming about small sample size with Duda, but there’s actually evidence that Duda can hit — which doesn’t exist with Hu. Duda has suffered from a brutal .205 batting average on balls in play in the Majors (compare to a career Minor League rate well over .300). Even before his power explosion in 2010, Duda got on base at every level in the Minors. He should eventually do so in the Majors too. He just needs more than 115 plate appearances to prove that.

The Mets’ offense is not bad

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As of today, the Mets have a collective 102 OPS+. That stat, which is adjusted for park and league factors, ranks theirs as the third-best offense in the National League so far in 2011.

They have the fifth-best on-base percentage in the National League in 2011. They have the sixth-best slugging in the National League in 2011, and they are fifth in OPS.

If you see an article that suggests the Mets’ offense is bad — and I have seen news articles, not even columns, say as much — that article is incorrect. The Mets’ offense has not been bad. The Mets’ pitching has been bad. The Mets’ offense has been just fine.

Will that continue? Probably. Jose Reyes, Carlos Beltran and Ike Davis have all exceeded expectations so far. But even if Beltran needs more time off and Reyes and Davis regress a bit, David Wright, Jason Bay and Josh Thole should hit better than they have in the early goings. And though Jason Pridie can’t be expected to keep up his torrid pace, the team’s bench almost has to get better, and Angel Pagan will provide a lift whenever he returns from his oblique injury.