Category Archives: Baseball

Subtle savvy

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One of the overlooked stories concerning the impact Sandy Alderson has already had on the Mets’ roster concerns the values he’s managed to pick up. Saving money at the margins is vital, and quite different from failing to address issues of secondary talent and depth. Indeed, spending less for the same player affords a team the chance to add both depth and a big-ticket item worth signing when one hits the market.

So let’s compare Matt Guerrier, who agreed to a three-year, $12 million deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers, and D.J. Carrasco, who Alderson signed for two years, $2.5 million last week.

– Howard Megdal, New York Baseball Digest.

Howard makes some good points here. Guerrier has been a very good reliever in five of the last six seasons and Carrasco has only been doing it for two and a half, so certainly the Dodgers paid for certainty. But given the deals given out to Guerrier and Jesse Crain this week, Carrasco looks like a bargain.

I think for now, optimistic Mets fans like Howard and myself will have to point to Sandy Alderson’s more subtle savvy moves. I spent the last several years bleating on about the way in which the Mets were wasting money and roster spots at the margins of their roster, with the Marlon Andersons and Julio Francos and Abraham Nunezes of the world.

But, as I was discussing with Will Davidian this morning, Alderson has an opportunity to create a pretty fearsome bench on the cheap if he uses the right mix of in-house options and free agents. Ronny Paulino gives the Mets a backup catcher that’s actually a useful hitter against lefties. Likely Brad Emaus or Justin Turner (or perhaps both) will be on the squad, reserve middle infielders that might get on base now and then.

If the Mets pursue and acquire Fred Lewis, with whom they were linked earlier this offseason, they’d have a useful fourth outfielder that wouldn’t be a hole in the lineup when one of the starters needed a rest. Throw in a one or two of the Mets’ young power hitters and corner players from the Minors — Lucas Duda and/or Nick Evans, say — and you’ve got a bench full of guys that present real offensive value. And they’re guys that, unlike Alex Cora and Gary Matthews Jr., show at least some promise that they can be more than bench guys if everything falls in their favor.

So there’s that. They’re still going to need some guys to start games though.

Well there goes that

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Craig Calcaterra points out that rumors of Pedro Martinez’s comeback were probably just rumors, as Pedro sure sounds like a happily retired man.

Too bad.

My 200-word post about why I think the Mets should sign Pedro Martinez inspired a shocking amount of vitriol, considering the content. I thought I explained pretty explicitly how the Mets don’t make a ton of sense for Pedro and Pedro doesn’t make a ton of sense for the Mets, and that I just really like Pedro Martinez so I want to see him back. It’s an emotional thing, not a rational thing.

When Pedro was Pedro — from his last year with the Expos through his first year with the Mets — his performance was about as special as anything we’ll ever see on a baseball field in our lifetimes. Do you remember it? Lineups of meatheaded mashers, muscles testing the constraints of their uniforms, terrified at the hands of a tiny little jheri-curled righty.

It was nuts. He put any pitch anywhere he wanted it. Guys ducked out of the way of his curveball before it fell into the zone. They couldn’t catch his fastball and couldn’t wait on his changeup. Crazytime. It looked unfair.

And Pedro brought a certain joy to his dominance, or at least I read it that way. Not just the weird and hilarious off-the-field stuff. Even when he was staring guys down, posturing like he did, there was something in his countenance that suggested he knew exactly the magnitude of his accomplishment. You can see the same thing in Orson Welles if you watch Citizen Kane close enough, like he was thinking throughout the filming, “I am absolutely killing this s@#!.”

That’s why I want Pedro back on the Mets; I want to watch him pitch again, and to try to remember how amazing it was to watch the first time.

Here is a photo of Mo Vaughn with a giant sandwich

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I’ve got meetings today. You’ve got Mo Vaughn with a giant sandwich:

Hat tip to Tino, who asks me if I could ever take on the challenge of reviewing something like the “Mo-Licious” seen here. The answer: I could try and at some point I probably will, but no chance I could eat that whole thing. Because I love food, I shy away from eating challenges that reward volume. If I ate that whole thing, I wouldn’t enjoy lunchmeat for a long time. And that would suck.

I did once win a lemon-eating contest, but that’s obviously a different skill. Actually, the attribute that won the challenge (and Amazon.com gift certificate) for me was my deftness in peeling citrus fruits.

Terry Collins on managing a bullpen

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Obviously with stuff like this it’s a lot easier to say the right things than actually do the right things with the game on the line, but it bodes well that the first thing Collins mentions about bullpen management is the pitcher’s workload. Probably also a good sign that he was himself once a bullpen coach.

The Mets should sign Pedro Martinez

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Yeah, I said it.

Rumor says Pedro is open to pitching again in the 2011 season. I have no idea how much he’ll cost, and last time he pulled this all the reports said he was prohibitively expensive. Plus if he’s coming back he’s probably going to want to come back to a team likely to win, and that conservatively puts about 10-15 teams in better position than the Mets. Also, he’s 39 now and hasn’t pitched a full season since his first in Flushing in 2005. And he doesn’t seem any more apt to stay healthy and contribute to the Mets in 2011 than Jeff Francis or Chris Young.

But every single time Pedro makes noise about a comeback, I will argue that the Mets should oblige him. Pedro Martinez is one of my favorite pitchers and humans of all time, and though I recognize that any future Major League incarnation of Pedro would likely appear a shell of his former self, I’d be thrilled to watch the shell again.

Plus, not for nothing, he was pretty good in his small-sample return for the Phillies in 2009, and it’s not like the Mets have a glut of starting pitching.

Apparently Carlos Beltran owns a restaurant

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The Mets have been using their @NewYorkMets Twitter account to have players answer questions from fans, which is awesome. Carlos Beltran participated today, and this was the most interesting interaction:

My favorite restaurant is Sofrito on E 57th. I am a part owner. The food is delicious. RT @rhongolf Carlos , Where do you like to eat?

As a fan of Carlos Beltran and food, I was surprised I hadn’t heard of this. Turns out there was a N.Y. Post item about it in August, and to Beltran’s credit, the Post wrote that he bought a share of the restaurant because he liked it so much. So he’s probably not just shilling for the place he owns in the above Tweet.

Sofrito is on the extreme East side of Manhattan, between 1st ave. and Sutton. The good gets pretty good reviews on MenuPages. Anyone ever been?

DC-area Papa John’s offering 10 free toppings because Ryan Torain rushed for 121 yards in a quarter

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No, I can’t find the rhyme or reason either. For a while, DC-area Domino’s offered one dollar off per pizza per Redskins touchdown, which was nuts when they scored six touchdowns that one time. Do chain pizza places in New York offer deals like this after Jets and Giants games? Could it ever be enough to prompt you to order from a chain pizza place in New York?

Fun fact: Someone in my office building today ordered Domino’s. In Manhattan. It was weird.

And furthermore, are there 10 toppings you’d want on a pizza, together, from Papa John’s? Former roommate Ted Burke suggests “10 times the regular amount of cheese,” which seems reasonable. Looking at the menu, I guess I could go pepperoni, ham, spicy sausage, regular sausage, beef (this is a topping?), bacon, canadian bacon, extra cheese, green peppers and jalapeno peppers. That might be a decent pizza.

Hold it together

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Fun fact: If you asked me yesterday to predict the 2011 NL East winner, I would have said the Braves. They have a bunch of good young hitters and a strong, durable front of the rotation.

Then last night, the Phillies signed Cliff Lee to a reported five-year, $120 million deal with a vesting option. Today, the Phillies stand as the obvious favorites to repeat as division champs. And I hate the Phillies even more than I hate the Braves, so that sucks.

On Twitter this morning, someone asked me if I still thought the Mets shouldn’t have pursued Lee this offseason.

What? Of course I still think that. As a Mets fan, my foremost concern is that the Mets get better for the short- and long-term, and if I didn’t believe signing Lee was the best way for the team to do that yesterday or in September I’m not about to change my mind just because the Phillies signed him. That’d be some weird, Freudian approach to roster construction, and not a good one.

Besides, if Cliff Lee supposedly rejected the Yankees’ six-year, $132 million offer with a vesting option for the seventh year, that means the Mets would have had to beat that to lock up Lee. And I mean, hey, it’s not my money. But it sure seems like handing a 32-year-old pitcher $140 million over six years is a great way to get the Mets right back into the inflexible mess they’re in right now.

And just on a plain visceral level, do you really want a guy who apparently loves Philadelphia so much? What type of judgment is that? C’mon.

The Phillies will be awesome next year. They’ll have Lee, Roy Halladay, Roy Oswalt and Cole Hamels in their rotation. That’s unreal. Unreal. You can pencil them into the playoffs for 2011. Even if one of those fellows goes down, they’ll have the best starting pitching in baseball.

They’ll also be one of the very oldest teams in baseball, quite likely the oldest. They were the oldest team in baseball last year, and now they’re all a year older — you probably know how that works. Chase Utley missed 40-odd games with injuries. Ryan Howard suffered the lowest OPS of his career. Jimmy Rollins hasn’t been good since 2008.

As Mets fans, we think of the Phillies as invincible because the Phillies are the bad guys, and the ones that so often victimize our favorite team. But the cracks are starting to show. Probably not enough to slow them in 2011, but don’t go writing off 2012 for the Mets. Have you been watching baseball? Do you not realize how quickly things can go south for old players?

For a variety of reasons, the Mets could not sign Cliff Lee. They didn’t have the money and he didn’t seem particularly eager to pitch in New York. That’s fine, because the Mets should not have signed Cliff Lee. The Phillies’ decision is perhaps defensible since they’ve got an old team and an opportunity to win now and flags fly forever. They can worry about how they’ve got $80 million committed in 2013 to four players who are 33 and older in 2013.

And Mets fans, what we need to worry about most is that the Mets do the right things to make the Mets better. The Mets seem to be doing that. Hold it together.