I hate to deploy the Slippery Slope Argument … but where does this end?

In less than a decade, they’ve now added eight more All-Stars per season?

You really have to wonder if there’s any real limit. Will there be 35 players on each roster next year? Will the players try to get 40 players per roster when negotiating the next Collective Bargaining Agreement?

– Rob Neyer, SweetSpot.

Neyer, decrying the near-constant growth of All-Star rosters in recent years, makes a series of good points about how the expansion stems from negotiations between the players and owners.

But he misses, or at least neglects to mention the obvious one: Duh. The less exclusive the game becomes, the less anyone will care who is or isn’t an All-Star. If we continue down the slippery slope and the league is soon suiting 40 guys per side for All-Star uniforms, then at some point we’ll be seeing unexciting or downright pedestrian matchups late in Midsummer Classics. And that defeats the whole purpose.

Because to me, the only thing that’s exciting about the All-Star Game is the opportunity to see the greatest pitchers in the game square off with the greatest hitters in the game. It’s been cheapened a bit by interleague play, I think, and I could honestly care less that “THIS TIME IT COUNTS.” I watch the All-Star Game to see stuff like Pedro Martinez striking out three members of the 400-home run club (plus Barry Larkin and Larry Walker) in two innings.

And while I understand and support the owners’ desire to protect pitchers for the games that actually matter, there’s no real point in constantly adding bodies to the margins of the rosters. It’s the all-star game. I want all stars, dammit. GET OFF MY LAWN!

The Mets have now won nine of their last 10 games. That makes it tough to leave the New York area, realizing I likely won’t see most of the upcoming series with the Phillies — even with the Internet and my iPhone and all that — and knowing that things almost certainly won’t seem this awesome by the time I return.

But it’s nice to take off on such a series of good notes, and I can’t say I’m not psyched for this road trip. Come tomorrow afternoon I’ll be in Savannah, filming some stuff for SNY.tv, chatting up Toby Hyde, and watching Wilmer Flores hit baseballs.

From there, it’s a winding trek through the American south. If all goes according to plan, I’ll take in two Single-A games, three Double-A games, a Triple-A game, and three Major League games.

And I’ll do my best to keep the content flowing here as best as I can throughout.

It will be different, of course — probably more a haphazard baseball travelogue and series of photos of ridiculous Southern food than a standard Mets/Taco Bell/nonsense blog — but it seems disingenuous at best to continue trying to cover the intricacies of the Amazins when you all know I’m not paying them all that much attention.

Plus, once I leave Savannah, it’s my vacation and all. A busman’s holiday, for sure, but those are a lot more appealing when the bus is baseball games.

So in other words: The posts here may be spotty and the content will definitely be atypical for the next week and a half. I hope you keep clicking anyway, because maybe I’ll see some hilarious stuff on the side of the road that you don’t want to miss. Or maybe I’ll post some video of myself setting off the fireworks I inevitably purchase. And fireworks are awesome.

Kind of like James Brown:

Sometimes, doing interviews, I get a little Chris Farley Show on guys and just want to be remind the people I’m talking to about the awesome things they’ve done in the past.

I basically just did that with Don Mattingly. I brought up the Simpsons episode, but I had absolutely nothing to actually ask about it, other than, essentially, “remember that time you were on the Simpsons?”

So look out for that tomorrow.

The Phillies have been making strange decisions since Amaro took over as GM, some of which worked out – Raul Ibanez – and the Phillies are still the best team in the NL East, but they’re old, and this contract and the weird departure of Cliff Lee do not bode well for the team’s decision making process – it’s become suspiciously Metsian.

In one way, the Ryan Howard deal isn’t good news for the Mets, because Ryan Howard is really good at baseball, and is going to be playing for the Phillies for a while. But, in another way, it is good news for the Mets, because Ryan Howard isn’t THAT good at baseball, and the Phillies decision making appears to be shaky.

– Patrick Flood, Exile on 126th St.

This, as they say. And I wouldn’t call the Ibanez deal a win just yet. While he played well last season, he slumped down the stretch, there are still two years left on his contract, and he’s going to be 38 in June.

Moreover, between Howard, Roy Halladay and Chase Utley — tremendous players, no doubt — the Phillies have $55 million in payroll already locked up for the 2012 and 2013 seasons. Utley’s one of the best players in baseball and could still be a bargain at $15 million at age 33 in 2012.

Halladay’s certainly among the best pitchers in the game now, but will be 35 for most of 2012.

Presumably Amaro knows more about the Phillies’ finances than I do, and maybe he doesn’t expect the team to be hamstrung by $55 million in salary committed to three players on the backside of their primes. That’s a lot of money, though.

I was a guest of my buddies Scott and Ted on last night’s Rockiescast to forward my longstanding and mostly baseless theory that the Marlins are baseball’s most hilarious bro squad.

You can listen, but the funny part about the Marlins mostly focuses on their efforts against Dodgers’ knuckleballer Charlie Haeger a couple weeks ago. Though the Fish ultimately won the game, Haeger struck out 12 Marlins in six innings. And while Haeger is obviously his own unique snowflake and all, you rarely see knuckeballers whiff batters at that rate.

In fact, Tim Wakefield has fanned 12 batters — his career high — in precisely one of his 424 starts, and it took him eight innings to do it. He’s only cracked double digits five times. Charlie Hough whiffed a career-high 13 in a complete-game win over the Royals in 1987, but he only thrice managed to strike out 10 or more batters in 440 starts.

So it seems at least mildly notable that the knuckleballing Haeger managed to whiff so many in only his fifth career start, especially considering his 6.3 career K/9 rate in the Minors. And it makes me laugh to consider that fact in light of my supbrosition about the Marlins.

“BRO! WHAT THE F@#$ WAS THAT?”

“I dunno, bro… we better swing harder.”

Anyway, before we even got to that point we meandered onto a tangent about pitch counts, specifically in regards to Ubaldo Jimenez throwing 121 yesterday coming off his 128-pitch no-hitter on Saturday. I questioned Jim Tracy’s logic bringing Jimenez back out for the eighth inning after he was already up well over 100 pitches, then went off on my standard Nolan Ryan spiel (though I got some of the details of his ridiculous 1974 start wrong).

I expressed my skepticism that 100 pitches should be the magic number for every pitcher, since it almost seems too perfect, and since, presumably, all arms are different.

Then today I stumbled onto this massively interesting graph from Sabernomics charting the median and range of pitch counts for starting pitchers since 1988, when STATS first started tracking pitch counts. Turns out 100 has pretty much been the median MLB pitch count for the past 22 years, it’s just that the range has gotten significantly narrower.

And according to The Book Blog, Dodgers starters were averaging right around 100 pitches per start back in the late 50s and early 60s.

Clearly there are a ton of elements to the whole pitch-count conversation I haven’t touched on, but my point is this:

Maybe the next time I run on about how no team will ever find the next Nolan Ryan if everyone keeps limiting pitchers, I will consider just how special Ryan was, in his time or any. Obviously.

And while I can lament that we may never see another pitcher throw a 13-inning, 19-strikeout, 10-walk outing, I should recognize that pitchers are limited for the sake of prolonging their careers.

So maybe we won’t ever find out if Ubaldo Jimenez has the capacity to do what Ryan used to do, but we should remember that we’re sacrificing that knowledge for a better chance of seeing Jimenez pitch every fifth day for the next 10 seasons. That seems like a tradeoff worth making.

Mike Fast at The Hardball Times reacts to a comment from Rob Neyer about pitchers losing velocity when throwing from the stretch and concludes that it’s not really true.

Fast’s analysis is worth a read, but the most entertaining thing in the post is the graph plotting average fastball velocities of Major League pitchers.

That red dot all the way on the bottom left? That’s Jamie Moyer.

Moyer, according to Fangraphs, has not averaged more than 82 miles per hour with his fastball since 2002 (when he was only 39).

Obviously I knew Moyer doesn’t throw hard, but it’s pretty amazing to see it plotted out like that, and to see just how not-hard he throws in comparison to the rest of the league.

And it makes me wonder whether Moyer is some massive outlier who manages to get Major League hitters out with guile and an 81-mph fastball in a way no other pitcher knows how, or if there’s a huge selection bias at play here, and pitchers with 81-mph fastballs simply don’t stick around professional baseball long enough to make the Major Leagues (and learn whatever they need to learn to get guys out without heat) even if they can be effective.

A little from column A, a little from column B, I’d bet.

Rays’ manager Joe Maddon likes to wear a hoodie over his jersey — or more likely, over a t-shirt in lieu of a jersey. Major League Baseball has put the kibosh on that, however, telling him that the hoodie is not approved for on-field wear. Maddon said he’ll stop wearing the hoodie….

I think managers should be able to wear anything they want to. Maybe we’d get some style out of these guys.

– Craig Calcaterra, Hardball Talk.

When I read the top, newsy part of this story, I figured I’d link to it as an excuse to make the point that managers should be able to wear anything they want. Then I read to the bottom and found that Calcaterra said just that.

But I mean, duh. I guess I can sort of abide having the base coaches wear uniforms, since they’re on-field personnel and all. But baseball pants really aren’t very flattering, and I imagine Razor Shines could come up with something still a little more dashing — but still appropriate for on-field use — if left to his own devices.

And managers? The tradition dates back to player-managers, but at this point there’s really no good reason for the manager to be in uniform. Let’s see some seersucker suits.