Category Archives: Baseball

Stop caring about the Gold Glove award

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Yes, Derek Jeter won the Gold Glove again. No, he didn’t deserve it.

Yes, the awards are more based on reputation than evidence. They also, for some reason — perhaps laziness on the part of the voters — seem to unfairly reward incumbents. And there’s no doubt that there’s an offensive component at play, even though they theoretically reward defense.

But really, who cares? Does anyone that knows anything about baseball still really think the Gold Gloves always go to the best fielders at every position? They’ve been a meaningless pageant for years, maybe always. They’re a joke. Use them for jokes if that’s your thing, or just stop paying them any mind.

There are much better ways to determine good fielders, and even better-researched awards.

DePo conference call live-blog

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The Mets are introducing Paul DePodesta via conference call this afternoon, and since Matt Cerrone’s a bit sick, I’m live-blogging it for him at MetsBlog. Check it out, if live-blogged conference calls are your thing. Also, if live-blogged conference calls are your thing, maybe take up table tennis or something.

A potential fit?

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I saw this post on MLB Trade Rumors, about how Edgar Renteria would be willing to move to second base, and it got me thinking.

The Mets would be wise to sign a middle infielder of some sort this offseason. We know this. None of the various in-house options at second base — Ruben Tejada, Daniel Murphy, Justin Turner, Reese Havens, and, lest we forget, Luis Castillo — is yet appealing enough to merit a place in the Opening Day lineup.

And not only will they need to find someone who is, they’ll also need to make sure they’ve got a solid backup to Jose Reyes at shortstop.

So I got to thinking maybe Renteria could fill both the team’s needs. He could open the season at second base and be the backup shortstop, provided Murphy is on the Major League roster somewhere and deemed capable of filling in at second.

Renteria got $10 million dollars for his efforts in San Francisco in 2010, a sum befitting a postseason hero but hardly appropriate for an injury-plagued middle infielder who played in only 72 games. I have no idea what Renteria will cost moving forward, though I’m near-certain it’ll be way, way less than $10 million.

Renteria is hardly a good hitter at this point, but he’s not terrible for a middle infielder, either. His .707 OPS in 2010 fell just shy of the league average for second basemen, though it marked his best season in three.

He would likely make up for his hitting at least a bit with his defense. He can still capably cover shortstop, the toughest position on the field, so presumably he could more than handle second base.

The ideal fit for the Mets would be a guy that would be willing and able to assume a full-time bench role if and when one of the young internal candidates proves worthy of playing every day. I don’t know Edgar Renteria personally so I have no idea if he fits that description, but I know he has a reputation as a great clubhouse guy and that he considered retiring after the 2010 campaign due to his various aches and pains.

So if the cost isn’t prohibitive, Renteria might make a nice option for the Mets’ 2010 middle infield.

Incidentally, Renteria is indisputably the all-time best of the nine Major League players to ever hail from Colombia. It’s sort of amazing how Renteria is just a bit better than fellow Colombian shortstop Orlando Cabrera in just about every category: Renteria has a .287/.344/.400 career line, Cabrera’s is .274/.320/.395; Renteria has 2252 hits, 135 home runs, 887 RBIs and 290 steals, Cabrera has 1948, 118, 803 and 208; and now Renteria has played for two World Series winners, Cabrera only one.

But perhaps Cabrera takes solace in his dominance in the sacrifice-fly category. Oddly, Cabrera has been in the top 10 of his league in sacrifice flies in each of the last five seasons, and led the American League in the category in 2006, 2007 and 2009.

Oddly mesmerizing high-school Spanish project

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Hat tip to Mets Police for pointing out this high-school Spanish project puppet show, featuring a Mike Piazza bobblehead as the narrator.

Oddly, in my junior year of high school, two friends and I also videotaped a puppet show for Spanish class using paper-bag puppets. It was an alternate ending to a short story we read called “El Arbol De Oro,” and all I’ll say is that our teacher deemed it “muy pornografico.”

Is this really happening?

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Baseball is a results business.

So is just about every other business, incidentally. I think the term “results business” might even be redundant. Is there any business that’s not a results business? Like can I find a paying job somewhere where my boss won’t care about my performance or the bottom line, but about how much fun I have or how much I learn from the experience?

For what it’s worth, if you Google “is not a results business” — in quotes like that — you only get five results, and they’re all about soccer.

But that’s not the point. What I’m trying to say is that I should temper my enthusiasm, since the Mets’ new front office hasn’t won anything yet. Hell, as a team, Sandy Alderson, J.P. Ricciardi and Paul DePodesta haven’t even done anything yet outside of letting Hisanori Takahashi walk.

Still, after six seasons of Omar Minaya — and Steve Phillips and Jim Duquette before him — it’s hard not to get excited for a front office that appears primed to evaluate players objectively and work to build a sustainable winner from within. These are the things I’ve been bleating about since I started writing for SNY.tv in 2006.

And now, it seems, it’s really happening. Is this really happening?

I’m getting ahead of myself. And despite all my attempts at rationality, the perpetual reminders here that the Mets are not cursed or jinxed or otherwise damned mostly aim to quiet my own ingrained Mets-fan dread. This must go wrong. Right?

I know that’s not true. I know that, in the right hands, it shouldn’t be too difficult to create a regular winner on a $130 million payroll.

But, you know, results business and all. So I will proceed with cautious optimism.