Category Archives: Baseball

Jeff Franceour and Bengie Molina, champions

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All I know is Mets fans blast Frenchy and Molina on Twitter, but these guys are contributing to a team on verge of WS. Who is the real joke?

– Mike Silva, via Twitter.

Food metaphor:

Anyone remember the SNL parody commercials for the KFC Shredder? I can’t find the video online, but the gag was that KFC was selling — and marketing — a big heap of shredded iceberg lettuce and mayo, served in a bag. Hilarious stuff.

What Mike is saying in the Tweet above is sort of like suggesting that you shouldn’t laugh at the Shredder commercials if you enjoy any other food that incorporates iceberg lettuce and mayonnaise.

Neither iceberg lettuce nor mayonnaise is a particularly valuable ingredient, but iceberg lettuce can add a little crunch to a sandwich and mayonnaise provides the foundation for many tasty dressings.

Plenty of good meals include iceberg lettuce and mayonnaise, but the idea of a meal of just iceberg lettuce and mayonnaise is still laughable. You see where this is going, right?

I am a Mets fan sometimes known to blast Jeff Francoeur and Bengie Molina on Twitter, but I certainly never suggested that Francoeur and Molina can’t be on a good team — only that teams looking to win ballgames could do better than to serve up the pair as featured players.

When I blast Francoeur, it is partly because the Mets gave him 400 at-bats as their everyday right-fielder (and mostly because of his press), never because the Rangers used him as a right-handed platoon bat and defensive replacement — a role he’s much better suited to fill — in 15 games in the stretch run.

And when I argued against the Mets giving Bengie Molina the two-year deal he sought last offseason, I never said that having Bengie Molina and winning games are mutually exclusive, only that smart teams would stand to win more games by not giving Molina a multi-year deal. Neither the Rangers nor the Giants — two teams that featured Bengie Molina this season — felt it was appropriate to lock him up through 2011. The Mets didn’t either, thankfully.

The Rangers can include Frenchy and Molina — the iceberg lettuce and mayonnaise of baseball players — on their World Series menu because the rest of their roster is stocked with steak, lobster and Cliff Lee.

UPDATE: Josh found the video. Here it is:

Look, it’s Pedro Martinez and he’s (maybe slated to be) doing stuff

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Rob Castellano notes in his winter league update for Amazin’ Avenue that Pedro Martinez is on the Licey roster in the Dominican Winter League. I thought maybe this was big news and I missed it entirely, but the only Google News return on a search for “Pedro Martinez Licey” is this article, which, at least by the Babelfish translation, makes it sound like Pedro will be given the opportunity to prove himself. If anyone who can actually read Spanish wants to clarify, I’d appreciate it. But please refer to shortstops as “torpedo boats,” as the auto-translator does.

Wither the Phillies?

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Optimistic Mets fans everywhere, this one included, spent all day Sunday considering the symbolic value of Ryan Howard’s caught-looking strikeout that ended the Phillies’ 2010 World Series hopes. “Just like Beltran,” we said, hoping Howard and the hated Phils would suffer the same fate Beltran and the Mets did after the 2006 NLCS.

The Situations were far from identical, of course. The Phillies won the World Series in 2008 and got back there in 2009. Howard earned the love of the Philadelphia fanbase with three home runs in that series, and — though these things can turn quickly — probably will not soon suffer the same nonsensical and misdirected hostility from the fans and media that Beltran endured.

Many Mets fans tend to overrate the Phillies’ intangibles (underrating at the same time their very-tangibles). The Phillies have been the bad guys in the N.L. East for four seasons now, so we look at them like they’re 25 T-1000s, ignoring their humanity and trumpeting their apparent inability to be destroyed, citing their arrogance and their will and their remarkable capacity to overcome injuries.

But no team is invincible in a five- or seven-game series, and though Brian Wilson hardly cast the Phillies into a vat of molten steel, that 3-2 slider on the low-outside corner reminded everyone that the Phillies might not be so mighty after all, and inspired columns like this one and this one examining wounds in their mechanism that might not heal themselves instantly.

(OK, enough of that metaphor. </terminator2>, if you will.)

Truth is, the Phillies will still have Roy Halladay, Roy Oswalt and Cole Hamels at the front of their rotation next year, and a trio that good makes them unlikely to collapse completely. And if we — me — here at TedQuarters are unwilling to accept that Beltran and the Mets became magically unclutch and weak-willed upon the Wainwright curveball, we must recognize that the same will be true for the Phillies.

But since we’re in a celebratory mood, we can look down the road with rose-colored glasses on and find more important similarities between those Mets and these Phillies.

Those Mets locked up a ton of payroll in some longterm deals that rendered them financially inflexible. These Phillies already have $143 million spent for 2011 and and $89 million committed to seven players in 2012. Both clubs thinned their organizational ranks with a series of trades aimed to help at the Major League level. Injuries, you already know, took their toll on those Mets teams. Jimmy Rollins and Chase Utley, both on the long side of 30, both missed time with injury this year.

So though it’s probably silly to expect the Phillies to fall apart as dramatically as the Mets did in 2009, it is certainly reasonable to expect that they won’t be able to dominate the division much longer.

The Braves, I am concerned, could be a problem.

This

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Excellent interview with Alderson from DuckSnorts in 2008. Obviously it’s a lot easier to say the right things than to actually put them in practice while running a baseball team, but kudos to Alderson for saying just about all the right things. 

Mets narrow search

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We are bringing back Josh Byrnes and Sandy Alderson for a second round of interviews with Fred, Saul and me. Josh is scheduled for Monday and Sandy for Tuesday as we continue our search for the next General Manager of the Mets.

John Ricco and I spoke personally with Allard Baird, Rick Hahn, Logan White and Dana Brown earlier today to thank them for their interest and taking the time to interview with us.

– Jeff Wilpon, Mets press release.

First of all: Cool. Byrnes’ record in Arizona isn’t perfect, but he seems like a better choice than, well, Allard Baird. This article from 2008 provides some background.

Second: Is it weird that we keep hearing every detail of the Mets’ GM search directly from the Mets? Do other teams do stuff like this?

From strictly the blogging perspective, it’s a hell of a lot better this way than sorting out endless anonymously sourced rumors and speculation, I suppose.