<3 Angel Pagan. Someone needs to have a long talk with Carlos Beltran this offseason about playing right field in 2011. It’s hard to imagine Beltran can’t see why.
Remember when Angel Pagan did this?
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Category Archives: Baseball
Jenrry Mejia’s shoulder: Perhaps less sucky than we previously thought
You’ve probably already heard this by now, but the MRI on Jenrry Mejia revealed a rhomboid strain in his right shoulder, which — though I am no doctor — doesn’t seem to contain such awful harbingers as “labrum” or “tear” or “rotator cuff.”
According to SNY producer Carly Lindsay, Mejia spoke to reporters before the game today and said he still hopes to pitch in winter ball and the injury is not the same as the one he suffered in Binghamton.
It’s still not good, mind you, but I think given the wide array of possibilities that come to mind when a 20-year-old leaves the mound holding his shoulder, this doesn’t sound like the worst one.
But we shall see, then. Medical diagnoses are often hazy and difficult things.
Most awkward conversation
We were shooting some interviews for the Baseball Show yesterday and we cornered Chris Carter to ask him about his at-bat music, Hulk Hogan’s old ring-approach song, “Real American.”
Carter was happy to oblige. He said he liked Hogan growing up and that the song got him pumped up. Nothing really groundbreaking.
But I’m a jackass and these pieces are supposed to be entertaining, so I pushed it. Playing off the lyrics, I asked him if he fought for what’s right and fought for his life or something stupid like that — I’m pretty sure I even botched the lyrics a bit and screwed up the joke.
Carter tensed up a bit and I soon realized why.
“I, ahh, I don’t know about that question,” he said, “but I really support what our troops do and, ahh…”
I stopped him and he looked relieved. I said I was just playing off the lyrics and that we wouldn’t use that part. He was cool about it and even said we could include it in the show for laughs — we won’t — but I think it’s an interesting example of how careful these guys have to be. The whole Walter Reed thing is apparently fresh in everyone’s mind but mine, and Carter was obviously being cautious — overly cautious, maybe — about walking into any traps.
And don’t get me wrong, knowing how to deal with stuff like that is part (albeit a small fraction) of what baseball players, as public figures, get paid to do.
But — and this won’t win me any favors with some of my colleagues — since there are certain members of the press ready to spin every word out of an athlete’s mouth into something shocking or sensational, you understand why some players clearly think it’s easier to clam up or turn into cliche machines than to actually say what they’re thinking.
I wasn’t out to make Carter look bad and he figured that out pretty quickly, but he doesn’t know me from any of the 30-odd reporters slouching around the clubhouse.
And so though it might have seemed a bit odd to me, he was probably right to protect himself when I asked him a stupid question about fighting for his life. For all he knew, I could have seized the opportunity to excoriate him for hating America, as is trendy these days. There’s Web traffic in that, I’m sure.
Baseball Show with Adam Wogan
The Hunt for Purple Rocktober is on
Lots of lists today as I get my head above water. Actual posts with cohestive text coming as soon as I finish up some stuff at the studio.
Reasons I’m rooting for the Rockies to make the playoffs and, should they get there, win the division series and NLCS (if they end up squaring off with the Rays in the World Series I’ll have a lot of considering to do):
1. Quietly well-run organization that develops a ton of good players from within.
2. They’re not the Phillies or Braves.
3. Support for my long-suffering friends at Rockiescast.
4. Troy Tulowitzki’s amazing mullet, ability.
5. Everything about this:
Carlos Gonzalez has your tacos right here.
Calcaterra: Re-awarding the MVP Awards may be the dumbest thing ever
Craig Calcaterra tees off on a USA Today column suggesting we do just that. And he’s right, you know. Not just for the reasons stated in his piece, but also for this big one: All the home runs every steroid user hit still counted. Regardless of how we feel about him morally, Barry Bonds was still immensely valuable to the Giants from 2001-2004 (also before and after that). It’s not the Roberto Clemente Award or the press’ “Good Guy” award or whatever.
This Derek Jeter thing
I saw the video of the Derek Jeter acting thing from last night but I haven’t yet seen the way the Internet or newspapers are taking to it. Put me down for thinking it’s pretty awesome, though.
Look: It’s downright silly, and certainly something for which Jeter deserves to be taunted mercilessly by opposing fans. But he exploited the situation to gain a competitive advantage. Is that cheating? Kind of, but if you’re going to get bent out of shape every time a player tries to mislead an umpire you’re going to have a whole lot of blustering to do. It just so happens that this example was particularly egregious, the evidence proving it nonsensical particularly strong, and Jeter’s reaction particularly absurd.
But what matters most is, like he said, that he got to first base. And it’s cool that he recognized the opportunity, and that he appropriately values that chance. Probably realizing how important it is to reach first base and seizing every opportunity you have to do so is a big part of the mindset that makes you become Derek Jeter.
The doubling over felt a little unnecessary though.
Another thing I want to reiterate, since this is coming up all over again now: It really amazes me that so many people can be so certain that the quality of Major League umpiring has gotten worse in some tangible way. This strikes me as a combination of confirmation bias — there are lots of stories of how the umpiring is bad, so we’re seeing a normal amount of bad calls and every time thinking, “yup, more bad umpiring!” — and new technologies that allow us to better assess umpiring.
I imagine if we could watch back every game from the 60s, 70s and 80s in high definition with ultra-mo replay and a billion camera angles like we have today, we’d spot thousands of blown calls at first and a hundred gaffes like Jeter’s last night that just got shrugged off by fans and media in the past because they appeared too close to contend with.
Baseball-reference updates park factors; Mets offense sucks ever-so-slightly less
Between the nine runs last night and the adjustment in park factor from a 98 to a 96, this team’s starting to look like a powerhouse!
Everybody hurts
Major-league players have combined for 448 disabled-list trips so far this season, good for an average of nearly 15 per team. While this figure falls in line with the past couple seasons, the number of injury stints has been on the rise for the past quarter century. From 1984-89, baseball teams averaged 9.3 DL stints a year. That number rose to 12.2 in the 1990s and has reached 14.8 since 2000….
While the primary theory for the injury spike is better testing and diagnostics, players might have been better off when the winter workout consisted of lifting six packs and hot dogs. New York Mets medical director Dr. David Altchek of the Hospital for Special Surgery in Manhattan believes today’s player may be too committed to his craft. “The modern player, in trying to constantly improve, may not be getting the necessary rest and recovery time,” Dr. Altchek says. “This year, we decided that the Mets would reduce time spent in off-field workouts by two-thirds. The result thus far in 2010, knock on wood, is that DL days have been cut in half.”
– Michael Salfino, Wall Street Journal.
Interesting facts from Salfino on the increasing rate of DL stints over the past 25 years. I imagine at least some of it has to do with something not mentioned in the article — players make a lot more money these days, so teams are less willing to take risks with their investments.
And so I’d also be interested in seeing an exhaustive study that would be impossible to undertake — the relative length of careers now and then, plus how many fewer careers were shortened by permanent injury and stuff along those lines. In other words: Does more careful treatment of players benefit them in the long run? I would guess yes, but then I’m no doctor.
Nick Evans: Guy?
With few fans on hand at Citi Field last night and presumably few people watching on TV, in a meaningless game against a terrible team, Nick Evans seized his opportunity for some rare Major League playing time and smacked a home run. It looked like this:
I bleat on about this endlessly: Too often under this regime, the Mets have overpaid free agents to fill out the margins of their roster instead of developing in-house options to fill useful, albeit unheralded, roster roles. It appears that in 2011, more out of necessity than design, they will not be able to repeat that.
Evans is 24 now and will be 25 when Spring Training rolls around, and it sure doesn’t seem like the team considers him much of a prospect anymore. But before he gets cast into a Mike Hessman mold, some Minor League masher doomed to dominate Triple-A pitching for the next decade, perhaps the Mets will provide him an opportunity to serve a valuable role as a righty corner bench bat in the bigs.
Evans, after all, crushed pitching at the two upper levels of the Minors to the tune of a .317/.371/.536 line this season, and boasts a career Minor League split of .314/.391/.572 against left-handed pitching.
At this point, it doesn’t seem like carrying Evans on the Major League level — even with limited at-bats — would amount to hindering his development much. Though for some reason the Mets didn’t let him play the outfield spots this season, he can man all four corners and provide a bit of pop, as a few of us saw last night.
In short, Nick Evans is probably ready to be a Major League guy for several years on the cheap, and the Mets could use those.
Tedquarters 