Over at Fangraphs, Eno Sarris takes a stab at projecting what Yu Darvish will produce in terms of dollar value over the length of his first Major League contract. It is, as Eno admits, “dirty math… full of conjecture,” but it’s a good read nonetheless. Pretty psyched to see how Darvish performs stateside, assuming he does wind up here.
Yeah so maybe I spent some of this afternoon trying to track Rey Ordonez.
Turns out Rey Ordonez’s son Rey Jr. is committed to FIU to play baseball and is expected to be drafted in June. Here he is being interviewed in April by Rene Pedrosa of La Ley:
Here’s a band called The Isotopes playing a song about Rey Ordonez:
Here’s Rey Ordonez on a leather couch being interviewed in Spanish by three beautiful women. Anyone who speaks more Spanish than I do can feel free to chime in with what’s going on here:
NL MVP, awesome baseball player and awful t-shirt kingpin Ryan Braun tested positive for PEDs. He claims it’s BS. Some sportswriters want to re-vote for the MVP award, as if they can undo Braun’s contributions to the 2011 Brewers and deem them less valuable if they were tainted, as if Braun — if the test is upheld despite his appeal — will not be punished enough by the 50-game suspension mandated by Major League Baseball as fair retribution for failing a test and the career’s worth of scorn and sanctimony and suggested asterisks he’ll suffer for his indiscretion.
And we could again go through how weird and pathetic and desperate a guy like Braun must be to jeopardize his long-term health to attempt to make himself ever-so-slightly more awesome at baseball, but at this point I’m certain every single baseball fan in the world is firm in his or her opinions about steroids. People still seem to care a whole lot, but I’m finding it difficult. It sucks, but mostly it sucks to have to think about and listen to anymore.
In Denver, the Broncos won their sixth straight game and their seventh in eight since Tim Tebow was named their starting quarterback. Most of these games have featured late-game comebacks, in large part because Tebow cannot complete a pass in the first three quarters of a football game.
This particular game seemed to have more to do with Matt Prater’s blessed leg than any Tebow-inspired miracles, and it strikes me that the Broncos might save themselves a hell of a lot of anxiety if they could do any type of scoring earlier in games. But it is becoming more and more difficult to ignore the possibility that there exists some sort of actual Magic of Tebow, as hard as that may be to believe.
It’s a topic rich with high-stakes symbolism that will inevitably be hashed out elsewhere and that I have neither the time nor the stomach to endeavor on this blog today. Count me among the hopeful skeptics: I still suspect Tim Tebow actually kind of sucks, this bizarre run will turn out to be a strange hiccup, NFL defenses will figure this all out, and years from now we’ll look back and giggle at how we all let our imaginations storm over us like, well… like a hard-charging 2011 Tim Tebow on a triumphant fourth-quarter touchdown drive.
But wouldn’t it be cool if it was real?
Albert Pujols is an Angel, and not just in my heart anymore.
Kind of sucks that we won’t get to see him face the Mets as much anymore, and that I’ll have to stay up late more often to see him hit. Really sucks for Cardinals fans. Doesn’t suck at all that he’s not on the Marlins.
And when Torres comes back next summer with the Mets, I’m going to give him a standing ovation as if he’s Willie Mays carrying Joe Montana on his shoulders after they’ve returned from the first manned mission to Mars.
– Grant Brisbee, McCoveyChronicles.com.
Brisbee writes a love letter to Torres upon the outfielder’s departure from San Francisco. As he writes, his fondness for the man is all mixed up with the Giants’ 2010 world championship, but everything I’ve read and seen in the past couple days makes Torres seem like a decent and interesting dude.
It also got me thinking about the nature of trades in sports. I recognize that it comes with the territory, and that a team’s right to trade players is one of the things it pays for when it shells out millions of dollars to those players to have them play baseball, and something players realize is a possibility when they enter into a life in professional sports.
But it’s still pretty weird on some human level, no? I can’t think of any reasonable analogy in real life. I know people get transferred at work sometimes, but it’s not the same as being traded. You’ve been traded. For whatever reason, your boss thought what you had to offer your company was less worth than what some other guy (or collection of guys) could bring to the table, so now you have to pack up your family and all your stuff and ship out, bro. Wave to that other guy as you pass him in the night, because his whole life has been uprooted too. We’ve swapped the two of you, just like you used to with baseball cards, except unlike baseball cards you’re real human men.
And I will continue to do it, but it’s pretty damn funny that we all throw it around so callously: Trade this guy. Trade for that guy. Traid. Trade him.
You ever wonder what you’d be worth on the trade market? What it’d be like if you could be traded to do your job at some similar company across the country? Maybe I’d be flattered that someone wanted me, or impressed by the package of bloggers I brought back to SNY.tv. Or maybe I’d look at their collective output and be all, “This? I’m worth less than this to you in a trade? You’re making me go through all this nonsense so you can have this?”
Luckily that can’t happen. At least I don’t think so. I don’t remember there being a no-trade clause, but I kind of assume that’s the case in most salaried positions outside of baseball.
Maybe free will really is an illusion, and all the choices we think we’re making are only the inevitable fallout of our nature and nurture: Neurons, developed through genetics and years of experience, programmed to fire certain ways in response to certain stimuli, fooling us into believing we’re in control of our decisions.
It’s one of those things we can debate and consider and turn inside out for hours without coming to any objective conclusion, and it doesn’t much matter. I believe such a thing as free will does exist, but I’m willing to amount that my belief could itself be merely the product of my own determined constitution. And again: Who cares? I’m going to go on making the decisions I think are best one way or the other.
Point is, if you wanted to or could opt out of being a Mets fan, I’m pretty sure you would have by now. You watched the Great Collapse of 2007 and the Epic Middling of 2008, and withstood the injury plague of 2009. You gasped in horrified disbelief at the 2010 Opening Day lineup. You sweated out talk of the 2011 fire sale.
And that’s just the big-picture misery. That doesn’t even consider the anecdotes: Omir Santos pinch-hitting from the bullpen, Luis Castillo dropping the pop up, Mike Pelfrey falling, Luis Hernandez hobbling around the bases, Alex Cora actually playing baseball, Daniel Murphy crumpling up in the fetal position in short left field, and too many failed and ill-conceived sacrifice bunts to remember now.
There’s the off-field stuff too, of course: Shirtless Tony Bernazard and the Binghamton Bro-down, and the he-lobby press conference that followed. Ownership’s Bernie Madoff mess, the investigations and lawsuits, the foot-in-mouth feature articles, the failed partial sale, the shrinking payroll, the $70 million loss, the empty stadium, the loans from the league, and probably a hundred other things I’m forgetting.
It’s a veritable bad-news symphony, swelling over five seasons to a frenetic crescendo, its cadence ringing out in the streets and on the airwaves and all around the Internet:
LOLMets.
And you’re still here. The day after Jose Reyes, one of the best and most exciting players the Mets ever developed, signed with a division rival over (we assume) a matter of money, you’re still here reading this purportedly Mets-focused blog. And I’m still here writing it. We’re in this deep.
I have, I think, an enormously high threshold for pain. Because pain-tolerance is also impossible to objectively understand, I can only guess this based on empirical evidence and the suggestions of a series of doctors who initially misdiagnosed various ailments due to my apparently atypical nonchalance. I once played two weeks of middle-school football with a broken rib. A gastroenterologist suggested I had acid reflux when it turned out I had Crohn’s Disease. An orthopedist once chalked up to bad posture the symptoms of Multiple Sclerosis.
I mention all that not to brag and certainly not to seek pity, but to provide context. Maybe I’m not the best person to be coaching or commiserating or doing whatever the hell this is, given the neglectful and ultimately often counterproductive way I normally approach pain. Besides, I am an employee of this network and it behooves me to have you reading this website and watching Mets games in 2012.
But it strikes me that life and fandom are a series of massive tradeoffs, ones that must come out in our favor or else we would choose not to endeavor them. They are marked by so many harsh infinitives we wish we could split: They are to suffer, to shoulder, to stomach, to endure. And we do, almost always, because the rewards – though sometimes few and too far between – are so grand as to make the neverending onslaught of awfulness worthwhile. There are fireworks and funk music and Jose Reyes rounding second. Balloon animals and fried food and the ref’s palms pressed together above his head after a safety.
Every winter 29 teams don’t land the prized free agent. Every year 29 teams don’t win the World Series. One does, and the hope for that combined with the distractions provided by all the more mundane marvels are enough to keep us plodding forward through the agony.
Jose Reyes is off to Miami, and it stings to think about Reyes hitting triples in Little Havana and firing bullets across the infield in the Marlins’ ugly-ass new uniform. And we can fret about its impact on jersey and ticket sales and the long-term ramifications for our Mets, and we can wonder about what would have happened if Reyes hit the market at a different time with the team in different circumstances. But he didn’t.
Sandy Alderson and the Mets need to do what they can to get the team back toward being a regular winner, and once that happens the asses will return to the seats and the revenue will return to the payroll, Reyes or no Reyes.
It’ll happen. Maybe not in 2012 or even 2013, but it will. Great new Mets will come along to soften the blow of Reyes’ departure and leave us only with hazy, pleasant memories of his triples and steals and smiles and dances. It sucks now, and if it sucks more than you can bear you’re welcome to join Reyes in that stupid new hat. But the upside to this — and everything — is that there’s always more awesome stuff on the way eventually.
Pedro Martinez will officially announce his retirement soon. Perhaps in the form of a party, because Pedro Martinez is a celebration.
I could rattle on for hundreds of words about Pedro’s hilarious and sometimes divisive persona, or remember his mostly underwhelming tenure with the Mets, or defend him for defending himself from a hard-charging Don Zimmer. Or I could write about the first time I talked to Pedro after a ceremony in 2007 celebrating his 3,000th strikeout, and how he told me it was his first time his mother had been on a Major League field, and how speaking to him — one of my favorite players of all time — made me so giddy I called my own mother afterward.
But while all that ancillary stuff about Pedro is undoubtedly awesome, what’s most important to remember now is the ridiculous run of dominance that marked the middle of his Major League career. I’m almost hesitant to try to describe it, knowing I could never do it justice: A slight little man joyfully toying with so many juiced-up mashers, bedazzling and baffling with a blazing fastball and biting curve and a changeup that seemed to defy physics. It sometimes looked like Pedro was playing a video game, only he was on the Rookie setting and everyone else was on All-Star.
Watch this and this and this and this, knowing it’s entirely likely we’ll never see anything like it again. Time-capsule stuff.
What a stud.
If anyone needs Pedro Martinez, he’ll be under the mango tree, being awesome.
The Cubs signed outfielder David DeJesus to a two-year deal reportedly worth $10 million with a club option for 2014.
DeJesus endured a down year in Oakland in 2011, but by all accounts it’s a good deal for the Cubs. The New York metro-area native struck out way more than he normally does last season, but suffered from a batting average on balls in play well below his typical rates that likely had something to do with career lows in batting average, on-base percentage and slugging. DeJesus plays the outfield well and has experience in all three positions, though he will be 32 on Opening Day and has not been a full-time center fielder since 2007.
As a Mets fan, I am of course more concerned with what the DeJesus deal means for Angel Pagan’s future in Flushing. DeJesus and Pagan posted remarkably similar offensive lines in 2011: DeJesus hit .240/.323/.376 in pitcher-friendly Oakland, Pagan .262/.322/.372 at Citi Field.
DeJesus’ career numbers are slightly better: He has a 106 OPS+ to Pagan’s 101, and several more seasons’ worth of consistent production.
Pagan, we all saw, struggled defensively in 2011 after an excellent season in center in 2010. But Pagan is a year and a half younger than DeJesus, and since he is eligible for arbitration, will not require a multi-year commitment.
Add that to the fact that Grady Sizemore — who was once awesome but has not been better than Pagan since 2008 — recently signed a one-year, $5 million deal with the Indians, and all signs to the Mets making the smart move and returning their center fielder for another go of it in Flushing.
This still bothers many Mets fans. But color me skeptical that all the various reports of the team’s impatience with Pagan’s supposed behavioral problems amount to anything more than offseason chatter.
Thus far the team’s front office has shown a consistent ability to defy the noise in the media and fan base in favor of prudent decisions, and since no better and less expensive options appear available on the market, Pagan still seems like the Mets’ best choice to open the season in center in 2012.
“Players get suspended for violating the policy,” said Teixeira, who will be honored as Sportsman of the Year by the March of Dimes today in Manhattan. “HGH testing should continue the pursuit of perfection. We want everybody to know we want to get all drugs out of the game.”
– George A. King III, N.Y. Post.
I’m waiting for the player quote that reads like this:
“Wait, what?” said Jimbo Ballhitter when asked about MLB’s new HGH-testing policy. “I guess, ahh, I think it’s a good thing. You know, clean up the game. Hey do you have any idea how long that stuff stays in your system?”
It’s true. Is this something I’m supposed to have a strong opinion on? Because I really don’t. Good for him, I suppose. I remain a fan of fake mustaches.
Tedquarters 