The Braves lost to the Phillies last night, but platoon-bat extraordinaire Matt Diaz made headlines by tripping up a rogue Phillies fan (redundant, I know) that ventured onto the field in a red spandex jumpsuit and eluded security.
Enjoy the video while you can.
Presumably the fan was left-handed or Diaz would not have made contact.
Hey-yo.
Seems like a nice dude:
Let’s give Jeff Wilpon the benefit of the doubt here for a moment.
Let’s say he is not short-tempered. Tone deaf. A credit seeker. An accountability deflector. A micro-manager. A second-guesser. A less-than-deep thinker. And bad at self-awareness.
Fine, he’s none of these things. But here is the problem: This is his perception in the industry as the Mets try yet again to fix their baseball operations department.
Look: I’m not here to write a whole post defending Jeff Wilpon because everyone would just question my motivations and I’d have to deal with that whole thing again, and I’m just not in the mood.
And the truth is, I have no idea how business goes down in the Mets’ front office. I see what happens — the decisions not to eat sunk cost or invest in the draft, the pervasive inefficiency and misallocation of resources — but I have no idea who is responsible. Actually, it baffles me how so many other writers and bloggers could have such a firm grip on the precise inner workings of the Mets’ bureaucracy while I’m out here in the dark.
What I’m certain of is this, though: The media and fanbase love a bugaboo. When things go wrong like things have gone wrong for the Mets these last couple of years, we tend to oversimplify and identify a single problem in place of the much more complicated truth. So instead of acknowledging that the Mets have been mismanaged at almost all levels for the past several years, we say, “Jeff Wilpon! This is Jeff Wilpon’s fault! We must somehow get rid of Jeff Wilpon!”
But I seem to remember not long ago that it was all Tony Bernazard’s fault. And now Tony Bernazard is gone, receding shirtless into the sunset, and yet the Mets are still 15 games out of first place, two games under .500, playing meaningless games in September. Tony Bernazard, it turned out, was not the problem.
Smart money says Jeff Wilpon is not the problem either. For all I know he may be part of the problem, and hell, as the Mets’ COO he is the one ultimately responsible for the problem, but it likely took a lot more than one man to put together back-to-back losing teams with payrolls over $125 million. And a smart, strong, savvy GM — should the Mets find one — should have the ability to stand up to a meddling owner and politely advise against poor decisions.
One other thing: I’ve seen it written multiple places that Mets’ ownership lacks the motivation to put out a winning team because of the profitability of this network. Think that through. That logic assumes that the Wilpons see the Mets and SNY as businesses for generating profit, but that they somehow don’t realize that a winning team would generate more profit through ticket sales, ad revenue and television ratings.
Even if you’re certain Mets’ ownership is just about making money, winning is the best way to make money. The Mets have just been going about winning in all the wrong ways.
Jason from It’s About the Money, Stupid examines the terrifying thing that happened to Tyler Colvin yesterday and how it could have been prevented. I don’t know much about this stuff, but it’s no secret that maple bats shatter in more dangerous fashion than ash bats and something should be done to prevent another incident like that — or worse — from happening again.
Just brutal to watch. And heroic, in some terribly pathetic way.
I mentioned this on Twitter, but Hernandez isn’t the first Mets’ middle infielder to suffer a season-ending injury on a home run. On Aug. 14, 1993, Tim Bogar injured his wrist sliding into home on an inside-the-park home run and was done for the year. It had been the game of Bogar’s life, incidentally — the inside-the-park job capped a two-double, two-homer day for the weak-hitting utility player.
Well, obviously the folks at Amazin’ Avenue don’t appreciate art. But go vote for JoshNY or kendynamo, not only because their entries are awesome, but because they both comment here sometimes and so I’m completely biased.
R.A. Dickey, May-July: 7-4, 2.32 ERA, 14 GS, 93 IP, 62 K, 24 BB, 5 HR
R.A. Dickey, Aug.-Sept.: 4-3, 3.74 ERA, 10 GS, 67 1/3 IP, 33 K, 15 BB, 7 HR
OK, lots of things at play here. First of all, pretty arbitrary endpoints, and I don’t think anyone reasonably expected Dickey to be as good going forward as he was in the first two and a half months of his Mets career.
Plus since we’re dealing in 14- and 10-start samples, all the trappings of small sample size are in play. It’s really hard to draw any firm conclusions from any of the information above.
But it does look as though Dickey is regressing a bit with exposure, which probably could be expected. Again, it’s not a perfect comparison because they’re hardly identical knuckleballers, but Dickey’s initial run of enormous success bears some resemblance to Tim Wakefield’s in his first time through the National League in 1992 and then the American League in 1995.
Obviously Wakefield settled into a nice career as a solid Major League innings-eater, which Dickey certainly seems fit to become as long as he can control his knuckleball and yield a ton of groundballs.
Plus he has the funny pitching face and the love of literature and all that, which is cool.
At the game last night, my mom pointed out that there were really no players left on the Braves that you’d identify with the Braves teams that won so many damn division titles. Tim Hudson and Brian McCann played on the last of ’em, and, of course, there’s Chipper on the DL. Sounds from this interview like we haven’t heard the last of Larry Jones.
Weston writes for BaltimoreSportsReport.com.
Tulsa-born Tommy Hanson starts for the Braves against the Mets tonight, so I figured I’d seize the opportunity to remind everyone that he may or may not be first cousins with the pride of Tulsa and his namesake, the band Hanson.
More evidence of their relation surfaced recently on the Internet in the form of this photo, of the pitcher Hanson showing off his prized catch to the band Hanson on the set of the Adam Carolla show:
The resemblance is nearly as eerie as the phantom hand on Taylor Hanson’s shoulder.
Tedquarters 