Vaguely inappropriate for younger readers:
Brian Wilson exceptionally weird
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Category Archives: Baseball
The Baseball Player Name Hall of Fame
Nice work by Jon Bois at SBNation.com rifling through the baseball-reference archives for the funniest names. He’s got my personal favorite — Bris Robotham Lord, the Human Eyeball — but he left out Buzz McWeeny. Also, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that Emma Span’s been unearthing great baseball player names for years, at Bronx Banter and elsewhere.
Is this a weird thing to speculate about?
There was a lot of snickering — by me, among others — after the Mets’ announcement that they’d hold a press conference to introduce Chin-Lung Hu. But Adam Rubin suggested, accurately I imagine, that a press conference to accommodate the Taiwanese media made sense.
Anyway, this vaguely brings me back to something I got at earlier this offseason: I wonder if there is any advantage, in picking between two all-field no-hit utility infielders, in picking the one from Taiwan instead of the one from California (or the Dominican Republic or anyplace else that typically produces Major Leaguers).
Could Hu’s presence have any impact on the team financially? I believe revenue from international broadcasts and merchandise sales are shared among the MLB teams, but will members of the Taiwanese community in New York be so much more inclined to show up to Mets games to have a noticeable affect on ticket sales? Did anyone chart turnout by demographic at Chien-Ming Wang’s starts?
Does it benefit the team’s “brand” internationally, and does that matter at all? Does it help them with amateur scouting in Taiwan?
Obviously, like Alderson says, it must be first and foremost a baseball move. But is it weird to wonder if there’s any real, identifiable added value derived from Hu being Taiwanese? Has any of this been studied? Should I just keep asking open-ended speculative questions?
Mets’ farm system ranked 26th of 30
Earth to Fred Wilpon: This is what a strict adherence to slot recommendations will buy you. Parsimony has its price.
– Keith Law, ESPN.com (insider only).
Obviously the Mets’ adherence to slot recommendations has cost their farm system; I wouldn’t dispute that. But I’ll add that it probably doesn’t help that they graduated Ike Davis, Josh Thole and Jon Niese to the pros in 2010 and that all look like viable Major League contributors.
The other bad news, for Mets fans, is that the Braves’ system is ranked third and the Phillies’ is fifth. The Braves, in particular, seem like they could be on the brink of another dynasty. Jason Heyward, Freddie Freeman, not-terribly old Bryan McCann, cousin-of-Hanson Tommy Hanson, and a bunch of young arms coming up the pike.
But there’s a small glimmer of sunshine peeking through the clouds that you can only see if you really stare and squint at it: The Mets, I’ve heard, secured the 2013 All-Star Game at Citi Field. If it was really ownership preventing the team from drafting over-slot and not simply mismanagement and misallocation of resources, then the upcoming Midsummer Classic presents hope it could change soon.
My understanding is that selection of the All-Star Game venue, for better or worse, is one of MLB’s best items of leverage to coerce big-market teams into drafting to slot. I don’t know how often it actually works — the Yankees got an All-Star Game despite frequently spending overslot — or if that really has anything to do with why the Mets would play nice with the league, but it should no longer be a concern either way.
Maybe that’s nonsense though. Not about the Mets securing the game — that part I’m almost positive is true and done and will be announced soon — but about MLB using it as leverage for the slot system and the Mets caring and all that. Seems vaguely like a conspiracy theory, and there are a lot of moving parts in play.
Du it
Free-agent right-hander Justin Duchscherer, considered one of the best starting pitchers still on the market, said on Tuesday evening that physically he feels “pretty much 100 percent” and shot down the notion that his previous depression issues would prevent him from playing in New York….
“For me, it’s black and white. I want to start; that’s the whole mind-set I have. I haven’t even thought of being a reliever. I want a team that’s going to be honest with me and say, ‘If you’re healthy, you are going to start.'”
Duchscherer has thrown two full bullpen sessions off the mound already this winter, with favorable results, and is quick to point out that despite his “injury-prone” label, his arm has proven to be durable.
It’s going to be hard to shake that “injury-prone” label when you haven’t had a fully healthy season since 2005, but injury concerns aside, Duchscherer is a guy the Mets should probably consider taking a flyer on. I’ve had a number of readers email me suggesting as much, and they’ve got good points: Duchscherer has pretty much always been good whenever he’s been on a Major League mound.
Unlike Chris Capuano and Chris Young — both of whom finished 2010 in their teams’ rotations — Duchscherer’s five starts in 2010 came at the beginning of the season. He’s coming off hip surgery now, which I imagine means he’s less likely to be fully healthy and full-strength by Opening Day.
Still, if by some chance he is healthy and can stay so, he’s probably as likely as anyone on the Mets’ staff to pitch like the ace everyone’s clamoring for: Duchscherer has a career 139 ERA+ (a number, granted, likely aided by his time working a relief role).
Point is, pitchers get injured. Some — like Justin Duchscherer, for example — do a lot more often than others. But it’s not really possible to have too much starting pitching depth. Starters that can’t crack the rotation can count on an opportunity when one of their teammates gets hurt or proves ineffective, and usually can serve valuable roles in the bullpen in the interim.
Provided the Mets don’t know something we don’t about Duchscherer’s current health, if he can be had on a cost-effective and incentive-laden contract like the deals for Capuano and Young, he seems like a good risk to take.
Link via Aaron Gleeman.
Tim Lincecum exonerates Ryan Howard for his appreciation of the Cranberries
Wow.
Curtis Granderson eats various sausages
Granderson does a pretty good job eating and describing these sausages, and I am intrigued by the corn dog with the sauce already inside the corn batter. I am skeptical, though, that a non-deep-fried corn dog could hold up to the high standards I have for corn dogs*.
What’s most disappointing about the video is that he doesn’t sample the Swirldog, which is advertised right in front of his face. It’s hard to make it out but it looks like the sign says, “A sausage with a twist that sends all others green with envy!”
That doesn’t even make sense, but it makes me want to eat it for sure. WHAT’S THE TWIST?
*- I wrote something about corn dogs in a Live Journal post in 2004 that I still think is kind of funny. For some reason I used to have a thing for purple Fruit Stripe gum. I don’t want to link to that site because rather profane, so I’ll just excerpt the important part here:
I had a corn dog today; I got it from a guy selling them on a street corner. Imagine that — the corn dog man. It seems like five years ago when I came into the city, it was strictly a hot dog/pretzel/knish thing. Now they’ve got everything on the street corner. It’s like, “Hey, I’m going down to the corner to pick up something from the Lobster guy, you want anything?” “Nah, I got food from the 16-Ounce Porterhouse Steak cart earlier.”
Anyway corn dogs are [expletive] awesome. I like how there’s an element of mystery to them. Like you can’t see the meat, so you really don’t know what’s in there ’til you bite it. And hot dogs are pretty sketchy as far as meat goes to begin with, so you’re really taking your chances biting into that corn dog. But it’s worth the risk. A good corn dog is about as rewarding a food as you’re going to find this side of purple Fruit Stripe gum.
I think it has something to do with the meat being on a stick. There’s something very primal about eating meat on a stick, something that harkens back to medievil days when knights would come galloping into the castle only to be rewarded with huge hunks of meat on sticks. I think this might explain my affinity for shish kebab as well. I hate veggie kebab. Sissies.
Write this down: When I die, I don’t want to be buried or cremated or put into one of those Native American spiritual mounds, which I guess counts as buried except that you’re technically above ground. I want to be battered in corn meal and deep fried. Ram a stick up my [expletive], too, if need be. That way, everyone who comes to my wake will be forced to make the same decision I made today before biting into my corn dog. “He looks delicious… shall I bite him?”
Yes, eat of me what you want, I’m a delicious corn-dog cadaver.
Release the McCracken
Jeff Passan tells the roller-coaster story of Voros McCracken, the sabermetrician who conceived DIPS theory. Really good read.
Brian Cashman gone off
This is getting really weird. He has got to be looking for a job elsewhere, right? I can’t come up with any more reasonable explanation.
Just how awesome will R.A. Dickey be?
After the coming out party that was last season, expecting him to come back to Earth would be extremely reasonable, akin to a rookie whom the rest of the league had finally gotten a winter to read the scouting report on. But R.A. Dickey is no rookie.
He is, despite his relatively brief time in the Majors, a mature pitcher. Having started his career as a power thrower who converted only because of a missing ligament in his arm, he has become adept at evolving to keep ahead of the hitters. He changes speeds, with knuckleballs that can vary within a 15-20 MPH range and throwing an occasional fastball that still peaks in the 80’s. Most important to his development is that he believes that he is still learning his pitch, that there are more changes he can make to improve his game. He feels that teams won’t have a full scouting report on him because he is not done writing it yet.
– Kieran Flemming, Mets Fever.
We know R.A. Dickey’s going to be awesome in 2011 because he’s presumably still going to be throwing knuckleballs and reading Faulkner and using big words in postgame interviews and everything else. And all those things are cool. But just how awesome can we expect R.A. Dickey to be?
Flemming argues that we shouldn’t expect a so-called “sophomore slump” from Dickey because he’s a mature pitcher willing to adjust his game, and perhaps that’s reasonable.
But will Dickey regress toward the mean? Was he perhaps the beneficiary of some good luck and did he pitch a bit above his head last season? It’s hard to say because Dickey is an outlier in so many ways. He has been getting progressively better since becoming a full-time knuckleballer, and he throws the hardest knuckleball I’ve ever seen — and mixes speeds with it.
Still, baseball is a game of perpetual adjustment. Certainly next season opposing hitters will have more experience against and more video of Dickey, and more knowledge of his tendencies, and Dickey will have to adjust in turn. But it doesn’t seem at all likely to me that he’ll continue pitching at the level he did last season.
Again, I have no solid evidence upon which to base that, just the knowledge that a 138 ERA+ at the Major League level is really, really difficult to sustain. For what it’s worth, Tim Wakefield threw 13 awesome starts for the Pirates when he first came up in 1992 and then enjoyed a career year when he first switched leagues in 1995, and both times he regressed thereafter.
That doesn’t mean Dickey won’t be useful or valuable or awesome, of course.
Tedquarters 