Category Archives: Baseball

What of the Fernanchise?

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Since 2007, he’s moved down on Baseball America’s Top 100 list from the 20th to 30th to 77th position. Now, according an e-mail from BA editor Jim Callis, he’s off the list. All this has happened before Martinez’s 22nd birthday. Is it him, or is it a curse of expectations that became too high?

Martinez has spent this season with Triple-A Buffalo. A recent surge, after Callis sent his e-mail, has his average up to .256. He has struck out 59 times and walked just 17, a ratio the sabermetricians hate. But he has 12 homers in 258 at-bats with an isolated slugging (batting average minus slugging average) above .200. That’s at the level of most developing sluggers.

– Mike Salfino, SNY.tv.

I would argue that it’s totally fair to cut down Fernando Martinez’s prospect status based on his inability to stay healthy for any great length of time. Though there have certainly been examples of injury-prone players turning into mostly healthy ones once they grow into their bodies, Martinez’s propensity for injury is troublesome and makes it pretty hard to remain bullish about his future.

I agree with Mike, though, that it’s still hard to dock Martinez too many spots based on performance. He’s 21 and was rushed through the farm system. As Salfino points out, it feels like he’s past prospect age because we’ve been hearing about him for so long, but is younger than the average player on the Brooklyn Cyclones.

Martinez is more than a year younger than Kirk Nieuwenhuis, the man recently anointed the Mets’ new best outfield prospect (replacing Martinez). Nieuwenhuis steals bases and reportedly plays center field pretty well so they’re not exactly comparable players, but Martinez’s .825 career Triple-A OPS isn’t terribly far off Captain Kirk’s .869 Double-A line across a similar sample size.

Does that mean Martinez should still be considered a top prospect? I don’t know. Jim Callis knows way more about ranking prospects than I do.

I’m just not ready to count out a 21-year-old with some — albeit limited — success at the Minors’ highest level.

Mets fans cling to semantics

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New York Mets principal owner Fred Wilpon said Thursday that Omar Minaya will remain GM beyond this season.

While in East Hartford, Conn., for an announcement of a partnership between the Wilpon-owned SNY network and University of Connecticut athletics, the Mets owner rhetorically asked “Is the sun going to come up tomorrow?” in response to a New York Post inquiry about Minaya remaining GM in 2011.

– Adam Rubin, ESPN.com.

I mean, you know, technically the sun’s not going to come up tomorrow. Really the earth is going to rotate to create the illusion of the sun coming up tomorrow. Maybe Fred Wilpon’s being super cagey.

Or maybe, and more likely, he was peppered with questions as he got into a car and provided some throwaway answers. I doubt that, given the situation, he’s going to be all, “hell no! That guy’s toast!”

Obviously I don’t know the truth one way or the other, and considering the Mets’ reluctance to cut bait on sunk cost it’s entirely possible Minaya will be back as the Mets’ GM in 2011. At some point, though, it should become clear to the team’s ownership that it can likely earn back more than Minaya’s salary with a championship club, and that Minaya is apparently not the man to construct one.

Yu Darvish introduces “gyro-cutter,” Greek restaurant employees unimpressed

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Yu Darvish unveiled a new pitch called the “gyro-cutter” in his All-Star appearance this year. According to the linked article, he had just shown it in practice on the 21st. Said Darvish: “it’s the first time I used it in a game. It’s one type of cut fastball. Just the trajectory is different from what we’ve had until now.”

– Patrick Newman, NPBTracker.com.

Hat tip to Tommy Bennett for the link. Patrick’s got video of the pitch up on his site if you’re interested in its, ahh, gyrations. Obviously I’m no expert in the workings of the gyroball or Darvish’s new gyro-cutter, but it’s definitely cool that a 24-year-old who has been dominating the NPB for four seasons is inventing new pitches and honing his game.

I know Darvish has said he’d like to stay in Japan, and to some extent I think that’s pretty awesome. But on a selfish level I want to see this guy pitch more often and that’s not going to happen until if and when he comes stateside. Plus, you know, top competition and all that.

Meanwhile, this guy doesn’t see what’s so novel about a gyro-cutter:

On refs, dinosaurs, sandwiches and McGwires

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Whoa, OK. Getting my head above water, sort of.

Anyway, I want to thank the guest posters who kept this site moving while I was away. And while I’m at it, I should respond to what they had to say.

(I believe there is still one guest post forthcoming, from a Ted bad at reading calendars.)

Here we go.

Tom Boorstein on officiating: Tom is not kidding. Outside of perhaps Brendon Desrochers, Tom cares more about sports officiating than anyone I’ve ever met. When Tom, Brendon and I worked in the same room at MLBAM, I would sometimes enter to find the two of them passionately discussing a call that had been made the previous night. I’d put my headphones on and get to work, and then 45 minutes later get up to go to the bathroom and they’d still be going. Unbelievable.

Anyway, I have a spotty history with officiating. As a freshman in college — in my younger, angrier days — I got kicked out of intramural football for punching a ref in the first game. I maintain that he completely deserved it and there was no way I was holding. But whatever.

My relationship with referees was only slightly less violent when I coached JV football years later. In my own high-school football days I generally avoided interaction with the refs, mostly because I didn’t want to draw any attention to myself since I was undoubtedly the dirtiest player on the field.

I umped Little League baseball games for a little extra cash while I was in high school. For some reason the kid assigned to be my partner was really into it and would actually show up with his own chest protector and beg to be the home-plate ump.

That meant I got to stand out between first and second base to take care of calls in the field, which rarely even happen in Little League. Basically I just got $15 to watch Little League games. One time the partner guy appealed to me on a check-swing. I didn’t have a particularly good angle and I wasn’t paying much attention, but I rung the kid up anyway because a) let’s move this game along, bro and b) how often was I going to get that opportunity?

Chris Wilcox on the triceratops travesty: I agree with nearly everything Chris says here. I mean, look, we know dinosaurs existed for real, but they mostly exist in our imaginations anyway. I want the triceratops to be pretty badass and its horns to be sharp and pointy. Not going to let science get in the way. Also, I mean, we’re kind of talking about semantics anyway. You’re telling me the triceratops is only a young torosaurus? Screw that. I’m maintaining that the torosaurus is just an old triceratops.

Incidentally, I feel its worth noting that our whole species has only been around for about 200,000 years, and dinosaurs dominated the earth for over 160 million years. Dinosaurs were around nearly a million times as long as homo sapiens have been. That’s nuts.

Eric Simon on National Ice Cream Sandwich Day: Eric did a great service to the world in alerting us all to National Ice Cream Sandwich Day, but he also touched upon an important topic I plan to cover in Saturday’s Sandwich of the Week post: What constitutes a sandwich? Mull that over while I do. I will attempt to reach some sort of comprehensive definition by the weekend.

Patrick Flood on the Army of McGwires: Hilarious and fascinating. So the McGwires would be good enough to be a really good baseball team, but not good enough to completely dominate? That seems to pass the smell test.

The further discussion in the comments section covers a lot of the ground I would have here, and sort of begs the question: Should the player best-suited to winning a clone tournament be considered the greatest player ever? Also, I’d be interested to see how different types of players would fare in clone tournaments.

Would 25 Ozzie Smiths prevent so many runs to make up for their lack of offense? How would 25 Joe Morgans fare if they had to be managed by another Joe Morgan? Would 25 A-Rods suffer because of terrible clubhouse chemistry, or the inability to create a 24+1 environment when every guy on the team is the +1?

Flood’s answer to my question really just opens us up to more questions. The only real way to solve all this is to get on with some cloning.

Rick Reed on Alex Rodriguez

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Of course, I just went and brought it up. But the Daily News’ coverage of A-Rod’s 600th home run was so brutal — from the back cover reading “Congrats* (on your tainted milestone)” to Mike Lupica’s moralistic second-person screed — that I wanted to highlight the quote from Reed, the voice of reason.

Middling

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For some reason, people labeled last night’s Mets-Braves game a “must-win” for the Flushing Nine. I’m not sure why. Over the course of a 162-game season, there is seldom a true must-win. Must-win games are ones like the Mets’ losses on the final days of the 2007 and 2008 seasons. A victory in last night’s affair would have earned the Mets a series win over the first-place Braves, but ultimately would have meant only one more notch in the season’s win column.

It didn’t, of course. It was a miserable loss, a brutal gut-punch. If last night’s game was any man in the whole damn town, it would have been Leroy Brown. The baddest. And not bad in the hip jazzman sense. Bad like Jeff Francoeur’s approach at the plate and Luis Castillo’s range and Jerry Manuel’s bullpen management. Godawful.

But one game is one game. Last night’s game won’t cost the Mets their shot at contention. Their roster probably will. And that shouldn’t be too big a surprise.

The Mets sit at .500, 54-54. If he hadn’t thrown himself off a cliff when he couldn’t find a rational square root of 2*, Pythagoras would say the Mets have been a tiny bit unlucky and should be something more like 56-52 since they’ve outscored their opponents by 18 runs. Whatever.

They are who we thought they were, like the fella said. Like many Mets fans, I fell victim to the inherent whims of a .500 ballclub, got excited and hopeful about the way the team teased us a couple months ago, started thinking they were better than I thought at the season’s outset. Turns out they’re not.

Some players have been better than we hoped, some have been worse. These things happen. Optimists never would have guessed that Jason Bay would struggle for so long or that Francoeur would revert to being Francoeur. Pessimists would have expected David Wright to repeat his weak 2009 and Angel Pagan to turn back into a fourth outfielder.

Whatever. I’m struggling to muster too much emotion one way or the other. Like the Mets, I am middling.

There’s hope on the horizon, for sure — the Mets seem to have a crop of decent young players, guys who can develop into the complementary and cost-controlled contributors for whom we’ve pined. But then they’re still stubbornly clinging to sunk costs, still being operated by the same crew that gave Gary Matthews Jr. starts over Pagan, and gave Alex Cora a vesting option and all that.

Maybe something will happen. Maybe last night’s sloppy play and team’s recent struggles will spell the end Jerry Manuel — rightfully or otherwise — and the Mets will flourish under a new skipper. Probably not. My suspicion is that these are your 2010 Mets.

The Army of McGwires

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“In 1998, after watching McGwire hit two home runs in a double-header at Shea, my friend Eric and I were chilling on his back porch discussing McGwire’s awesomeness.

We agreed that he was the best hitter imaginable, but I argued that his talents were mitigated at least a bit by the fact that he couldn’t even capably defend first base, at least not to the eye.

From there, we speculated on how a team would fare if you could somehow clone Mark McGwire and field an entire team of Mark McGwires. Would nine Mark McGwires score enough runs on offense to compensate for their awful defense and pitching?

It’s an interesting question, but one that can’t be answered.”

Howdy, Tedheads. I’m Patrick “Ted” Flood. I’m temporarily commandeering TedQuarters for this guest post in an attempt to answer the above question.

As a personal aside, I remember my father taking me to the double-header Ted Berg was talking about there. McGwire hit his 50th home run of the season in the day game, his 51st home run in the nightcap. I still have the scorecard — Met greats Hideo Nomo and Masato Yoshii are on the cover . . .

Anyway, I disagree with Ted’s assertion that the McGwire question cannot be answered. Not only do I think we can come up with an answer for how a team of twenty-five Mark McGwires would fare — maybe not a perfect answer, but a decent estimate — but I also believe that we must come up with an answer. I believe it to be the essential question of our time.

So with this guest post to TedQuarters — you’ll need to click through to read so I don’t suck up the entire frontpage — I’m going to try to come up with that answer. About how many games would a team of cloned Mark McGwires (in 1998) win? Continue reading →

Ahh, Philadelphia

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Clemmens pleaded guilty in May to charges of assault, harassment and disorderly conduct. He admitted he stuck his fingers down his throat and vomited on Vangelo and Mikayla at a Phillies-Nationals game on April 14.

Clemmens was sentenced to one to three months in jail, two years of probation and 50 hours of community service, which Dougherty suggested be served at Citizens Bank Park. The maximum penalty was two years in jail. Public defender Richard Hark asked for probation…

Clemmens and his friend were cursing and heckling the Vangelo family from the first inning. Vangelo’s 15-year-old daughter asked them to stop the profanity around her younger sister, prompting more heckling and cursing. The family was doused with beer when they rose to cheer a Phillies home run, and Vangelo eventually complained to security that Clemmens’ friend was spitting, which hit his younger daughter’s jacket and seat.

After the friend was ejected, Clemmens was sitting alone when he answered his cell phone and said: ”I need to do what I need to do. I’m going to get sick,” prosecutors said.

He then put his fingers down his throat and ”projectile vomited,” Vangelo said. He also punched Vangelo several times, causing his ear to bleed, before being tackled by other spectators and arrested.

– Joann Loviglio, Associated Press.

Assault, harassment and disorderly conduct: The Holy Trinity of Philadelphia residency.

I think I might have figured out that city’s problem, for what it’s worth.

Philadelphia was like the biggest thing the U.S. had to offer in the late 18th century. It hosted the Continental Congress, it was the state capital of Pennsylvania, the temporary capital of the fledging nation and the largest city in the country.

In 1799, the state and federal governments packed up and left town, and early in the next century New York surpassed Philadelphia in population.

So I suspect that the entire Philadelphia culture developed with a huge chip on its shoulder. Oh, you had it, Philadelphia! You had it, but you lost it! That’s got to sting, right? Stings so bad you just want to vomit on children.