Busy day here means heavy video day on TedQuarters. Matt and I follow up on the question I asked here last week about whether the Mets seem to be in better or worse shape than they were last year at this time. Also, Matt hasn’t hit nearly as many home runs as Ralph Kiner.
Easter egg: My socks
I was trying my best to avoid buying into Lucas Duda’s absurd destruction of Triple-A pitching, but since it simply hasn’t stopped, it’s probably time the Mets call him up and see what he’s about.
Apparently there’s a subscriber-only piece about Duda up at Baseball America that explains how he’s finally changed his approach back to pulling the ball after breaking his wrist in 2005. Something like that.
Who knows? Duda has a .322/.394/.643 line in Buffalo and a .307/.401/.586 line for the season. At 24, he’s hardly a baby, but he’s still clinging on to prospect age.
Duda is not on the Mets’ 40-man roster, but the club could, I believe, make room for him by moving John Maine to the 60-day DL or parting ways with Extra-Base Omir Santos.
From last night’s Bisons game on SNY. Nick the Stick:
And Captain Kirk:
Good guest because he actually gets specific about the differences between Low-A ball and Double-A. I guess he has a pretty good sense of it because he made a direct jump.
Matt Cerrone mentioned Johan Santana’s run of bad luck on MetsBlog earlier today, which is funny to me because earlier in the season, sabermetricians everywhere were rapping about Santana’s run of good luck.
Remember when Santana was walking more batters than he was striking out, yet somehow keeping his ERA down, and everyone was all, “Johan Santana sucks now, the results are illusory,” and waiting for the other shoe to drop?
Well something different happened: Santana seems to have returned to being Santana. Granted, his rates for the season are still atypical due to his performance for most of the year. His K/9 is way below his career average.
But in five starts in August, Santana has struck out 43 batters in 39 1/3 innings while walking nine. He has allowed five home runs — more in line with his normal rate than the low total he allowed earlier in the season — but has a 2.29 ERA over that stretch.
It’s a very small sample, for sure. And maybe I’m grasping at a reasonably arbitrary set of starts to try to prove to myself that a once-great pitcher still under lucrative contract for several more seasons with my favorite team has a lot left in the tank.
Or maybe Santana is still building up arm strength after offseason surgery or fixing some mechanical hiccup or not tipping pitches anymore. I don’t know.
All I know is that, in a season when the Mets’ wins and losses don’t really matter a hell of a lot anymore, I care a lot more about seeing Santana right, striking out lots of batters and dominating opponents, than I do about his win-loss record. (Which is not to say Matt doesn’t.)
Sure, it’d be nice if the Mets could win some more games, but a strong finish for Santana could help convince everyone that landing a No. 1 starting pitcher doesn’t have to be the No. 1 priority this offseason.
Just for posterity, I suppose. You’ve probably already heard that the Dodgers claimed Rod Barajas off waivers from the Mets, the Mets let him go, and now Barajas is starting games for the Dodgers.
I’m fine with how the whole Rod Barajas thing played out. The Mets needed a catcher this Spring because the world’s longest, dumbest game of chicken ended with Bengie Molina back in San Francisco. They signed Barajas. He hit a bunch of home runs early on, but, as so often happens, proved to be Rod Barajas in the long run.
Probably the Mets could have cut bait on Barajas a bit sooner, but they were still winning during the first part of his slump I suppose. Anyway, I think I might have had more patience with Barajas than I should have because of his awesome choices for at-bat music.
Anyway, seems like now it works out best for everyone. Barajas goes home to California and gets regular playing time. The Mets and their fans get to see Josh Thole play more often to determine if he’s ready to be an everyday Major League catcher.
Low Rider and California Love will be missed.
So reports about our forthcoming web series involving old clips of Kiner’s Korner are blowing up the Internet, but I’ve seen a bunch of people extrapolating the reports in all sorts of different ways so I figured I’d clarify:
The series, which I’m very excited about, does indeed include clips from the original Kiner’s Korner. But the original clips will only make up a short portion of each “episode.” The rest will be Ralph reflecting back on that clip, with me sitting next to him like a slack-jawed goon.
We used every scrap of original footage we could find for the shows, but there’s really not much of it out there — we are by no means re-airing entire original episodes of Kiner’s Korner, as I’ve seen a couple of blogs suggest. We would if we could, but those have been, sadly, presumably long since been taped over by now-defunct networks of yesteryear.
Ralph is awesome. He has an unbelievable take on the game, a remarkable memory and a lifetime full of incredible baseball anecdotes, so the show will be worth watching. This is the culmination of the awesomeness I wrote about a few months ago, and hanging out with Ralph for these videos was, like I said, completely amazing.
Excellent photoshopping from commenter/Colt .45 spokesperson BillyDeeWilliams. I haven’t seen the movie in question yet — it’s behind The Expendables and The Other Guys on my list and it seems like the most rentable of the three.
Tedquarters 