At the Braves blog Talking Chop, Martin Gandy says, “Bring BBQ to the Ted.” I’ve decided to read only the headline and draw my own conclusions as to what Ted he’s talking about. And he’s absolutely right.
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Category Archives: Other Baseball
John Kruk hits 50
Alex Remington does a nice job reminding people that before someone decided John Kruk should be poured into a suit and broadcast in high definition, he was something of a hero — Phillie or otherwise. Now he is 50. He is also probably Meat Loaf.
Unrealized stadium concepts
These are amazing. The old Pittsburgh one’s my favorite, both for its sheer awesomeness and obvious infeasibility. Cool old architectural renderings abound, too. Via Jonah Keri.
Phillies unironically considering Gary Matthews Jr.
Do it. Do it.
Catching R.A. Dickey
Jake passes along this pretty sweet video of Jim Caple catching R.A. Dickey in Mariners’ camp a couple years ago. Dickey talks about his art and physics, and we see reasonably close-up of video of the Dickey face. Watch this.
Hear me say stuff
I joined Dave Gershman on the Beyond the BoxScore podcast last night. We talked about the Mets and sandwiches. Incidentally, I have enjoyed doing a couple of podcasts lately and I’m available for all your podcasting needs. Just email me at tberg@sny.tv. Also, I can talk about more than the Mets and sandwiches. As in: Taco Bell.
The pros and cons of prospective part-owners
A number of candidates have emerged as potential suitors for the 20-to-25-percent share of the Mets the Wilpons are supposedly selling. Should Mets fans be rooting for any in particular to buy a piece of the team? Let’s investigate:
Vodka maven Martin Silver: As part-owner, Silver could be an entertaining side show in boring seasons. He has a thing for publicity stunts, which could perhaps forebode some Veeck-esque promotions at Citi Field. Another upside: He has access to an absolute ton of vodka. Plus he’s a lifelong Mets fan.
On the other hand, Silver wants a say in the day-to-day operations of the team and has previously said he would offer up decisions to Internet voting, which means we would say goodbye to all the best players on the Mets while a Joe Benigno-led junta cheered their departure because they were soft or unclutch or bad in the clubhouse. Also, Silver plastered pictures of his own daughter’s ass on Georgi ads all over city buses. That’s weird.
Vitaminwater founder Mike Repole: Repole obviously knows a thing or two about business, as he and his partners sold Vitaminwater to Coca-Cola for over $4 billion. And he loves the Mets and hates the Yankees.
But Repole has said that one of his goals in life is to be the GM of the Mets, and the Mets already have a GM that appears plenty competent. Also, another of his goals is “to win the Kentucky Derby and the Triple Crown,” and that’s redundant. Plus, he made a fortune convincing people that sugary fruit drinks are good for them. That’s shrewd by business standards but perhaps not so tempting to the Wilpons if they’re looking to avoid future dealings with those prone to chicanery.
Martin Luther King III: The upside is that King is above reproach, mostly because you’re not allowed to say anything bad about someone named “Martin Luther King.” I think that might be in the constitution. I can’t tell you the downside.
Twitter Q&A-style product
Yesterday, when stuck for topics for this blog, I asked Twitter for help with suggestions and questions. Here are two:
If you haven’t heard, Gil Meche retired rather than continue to collect way too much money from the Royals to be a subpar or injured pitcher in 2011. Though he was owed $12 million, Meche said he didn’t feel right accepting money he wasn’t going to earn, even if the Royals understood the risk when they signed him to a big contract before the 2007 season.
What Meche did sounds noble, for sure, and it is such a distant outlier in the realm of regular human behavior that it has prompted a lot of hullabaloo the last couple of weeks. Mets fans, for one, are wishing that Ollie Perez opts to do the same.
But though that would be nice, neither Perez nor Meche should have any obligation to return money to the team that signed them. I never agree when fans fault players for the size of their contracts — the player should want as much money as he can possibly make, it’s the GM’s fault if it proves to be way too much.
Meche suggested he simply didn’t feel right taking money he didn’t deserve, and I appreciate that sentiment. But did he retire with the understanding that the Royals would re-invest his salary in the team? Because giving money back to an enormously wealthy person — Royals’ owner David Glass — seems a bit weird too.
I won’t into too much boring detail, but SNY is part-owned by Comcast and technically I am a Comcast employee. When news of the NBC/Comcast deal first came down over a year ago, I got a package at my house with a letter essentially saying, basically, everything’s cool, nothing’s changing for you and we should all be excited.
Something along those lines. I didn’t really read it all that closely; I was distracted because with the letter came — as special gift celebrating the deal or something — DVDs of Kindergarten Cop and The Bourne Ultimatum.
I figured they must have just sent an army of interns down to some DVD liquidation warehouse somewhere in the bowels of NBC and had them all shove two random movies into every package. And so I thought it was pretty funny that I happened to get Kindergarten Cop and The Bourne Ultimatum, since the former is absolutely hilarious in every way and the latter is a sequel and thus a funny thing to randomly send to someone.
Then I came into work the next day and asked some of my co-workers what movies they got, and they all had Kindergarten Cop and The Bourne Ultimatum too. Why those two movies? You figure it had to be an overstock thing, right? But then does that mean they so overstocked those two movies that they had enough to send them to every Comcast employee? How many copies of Kindergarten Cop could they have possibly produced?
Brian Wilson exceptionally weird
Vaguely inappropriate for younger readers:
The Baseball Player Name Hall of Fame
Nice work by Jon Bois at SBNation.com rifling through the baseball-reference archives for the funniest names. He’s got my personal favorite — Bris Robotham Lord, the Human Eyeball — but he left out Buzz McWeeny. Also, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that Emma Span’s been unearthing great baseball player names for years, at Bronx Banter and elsewhere.
Tedquarters 