Category Archives: Words

The Dan Plan

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I am off to Citi Field. Reader Dan passed along this idea for reconfiguring the MLB playoff system, and I like it better than most I’ve seen proposed. He’s cool with me re-posting it here, so what follows is Dan’s plan. What say you, The Internet?

I offer the following as a suggestion for “fixing” the baseball playoffs, which, in my mind, have three key problems:

1. The cheapening of the division title — Winning the division used to be a championship of sorts, in and of itself. Now it is a mere footnote on a season, because of the wild card (and, of course, because one division actually has only four teams).

2. The inequity of scheduling for wild card competitors — Teams in tough divisions, like the Blue Jays, have an inherent disadvantage when compared to teams in easier divisions, like the Angels. Competition for playoff spots should be on equal terms, if at all possible.

3. The “early coasting period” for elite teams – Both the Yankees and the Red Sox are currently coasting to the playoffs, because of the division/wild-card model. In a better system, the two would still be battling for position.

I offer the following proposal:

1. Switch the Arizona Diamondbacks to the American League, and the Tampa Bay Rays to the National League.

2. Realign the league as follows:

NL East – Mets, Phillies, Braves, Marlins, Nationals, Pirates, Reds, Rays
NL West – Giants, Dodgers, Padres, Rockies, Astros, Brewers, Cubs, Cardinals

AL East – Yankees, Red Sox, Orioles, Blue Jays, White Sox, Indians, Tigers
AL West – A’s, Mariners, Rangers, Angels, Royals, Twins, Diamondbacks

3. Division winners get into the playoffs. The second and third place teams in each division play each other in a one-game playoff in the home stadium of the second place team. Winner goes to the playoffs; loser goes home. This gives you four elimination games per season. I agree with Joe Maddon’s objections to the concept of a one-game play-in — it certainly is not a fair approximation of the marathon that is a baseball season. It is the best method, though, because it reestablishes the importance and significance of the division title.

This system addresses the major problems of the current system. You can now have a fair unbalanced schedule, because teams only compete for playoff berths against their own divisions.

As far as objections, the Rays would probably not be happy to lose the nine sellouts to the Yankees, but they would gain a potential revenue stream by increasing their playoff odds as they move to the easier league. The Diamondbacks would be moving to the tougher league, but the AL West is no better than the NL West, and does not have the financial imbalance issues of the AL East.

This system also ensures that the Orioles and Blue Jays, the two teams most disadvantaged by the current system, always have a legitimate chance to get into the playoffs (as the #3 team in the AL East).

Sandwiches of Citi Field: Lobster roll

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Second straight sandwich from Catch of the Day, in right field on the field-level concourse. This review comes with help from my wife, a trusted and distinguishing sandwich source.

The lobster roll costs $17. By my standards that’s a bit steep for any meal, and certainly at a ballpark. But by lobster-roll standards it doesn’t seem that unreasonable. The in-stadium markup on lobster rolls at Citi Field seems pretty small relative to the markups on other food items, most notably hot dogs, soda and pizza.

The lady reports: “It is everything a lobster roll should be; not more or less. You get a good amount of lobster meat and it tastes surprisingly fresh, not fishy. There’s not too much mayonnaise, the celery is crisp, and the bread is soft.

I took a bite of this myself, despite my stomach’s objections. This assessment seems accurate. It’s about an average lobster roll, and an average lobster roll is very good.

And I should note that my wife and I have pretty high standards for lobster rolls, as we both grew up near (and I once worked at) Jordan Lobster Farm, a wholesale/retail lobster market locally renowned for its version of the sandwich.

Picklemeister

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I made pickles a couple weeks ago. It’s not a very good story. Our garden produces cucumbers at a way faster rate than my wife and I can eat them. I bring them to work sometimes and give them out, but I think people think I’m weird for distributing cucumbers in the office. On Saturday I gave about 15 cucumbers out to the guys I play baseball with, but by now we have a whole refrigerator drawer full of cucumbers again. It’s nuts.

Half the cucumbers we get are the type that’s good for pickling, and since pickling preserves cucumbers and pickles are totally delicious, turning our excess cucumbers into pickles seemed an obvious decision.

There are many pickle recipes on the Internet and I used one of them. I can’t find it now. It was extremely easy. I put water, vinegar, salt, sugar, dill, garlic and pickling spices in a big Tupperware container then left in our refrigerator for two weeks. I threw in a kung pao pepper from our garden too.

The hardest part by far was waiting for the pickles to pickle the first few days. But then after about a week, the container got pushed to the back of my fridge and mind and I stopped feeling the bizarre need to incessantly check on them as if anything was going to happen.

It turns out, the pickled pickles look like pickles:

Turns out they taste like pickles too. Not like overwhelmingly strong pickles, more like the big half-sour deli pickles you get at Ben’s. Pretty delicious, with a really good crispy snap to the skin and a touch of spiciness from the hot pepper.

I’m satisfied. I have successfully decreased the size of my pickle footprint. Thought you should know. I’ve got a line on a pork butt, and I’m looking forward to slicing a couple of these up and using them to top off pulled-pork sandwiches.

 

New Mostly Mets podcast

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Talking about things related to the Mets, tangentially associated with the Mets, and not at all involving the Mets with Toby Hyde and Patrick Flood. Streaming below and on iTunes here.

Feedback is welcome at MostlyMetsPodcast@gmail.com and in the comments section below. A full rundown follows the dealie-who.

Also: I make the point about how chicken is the only meat we call by the name of the animal, but I fail to note that we do the same with goat even after the long discussion about eating goat.

Opening: Monday Night was Fun
3:00 Bye-bye Murph
7:00 Is this random?
10:00 Where’s the SNY softball team?
16:00 Ted Buys a Glove
18:00 Why We Watch
28:00 Who Remembers Jeff Duncan?
30:00 Josh Satin…
38:00 What about Zobrist?
45:00 Savannah Sand Gnats Kid Promotion/Who’s roasting a Goat?
58:00 The price of being an early adopter
58:00 Picking Guys
1:00:00 Pagan Discussion
1:08:00 Can the Mets build a better bullpen?
1:10:00 What does Pedro Martinez do all day?
1:24:00 Patrick says smart things about the Mets’ path to today through 2011
1:29:00 Oliver Perez!

Murphy to the outfield?

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Before last night’s game, Terry Collins told reporters that the Mets “have to be open-minded enough to think the outfield may be a spot” for Daniel Murphy.

Presumably neither Collins nor Sandy Alderson saw much of Murph’s first go-around in the outfield in late 2008 and early 2009, when Shea Stadium’s left field seemed to expand to a hundred times its normal size: a sprawling grassland stamped flat by Murphy hustling in every direction in dogged pursuit of balls hit past him, over him and sometimes right at him.

But then maybe it’s better Alderson and Collins missed that. If Murphy can hit anything like the way he did for the Mets in 2011, his bat plays in an outfield corner — way better than it does at first base. Murphy’s .320/.362/.448 line this season and .292/.343/.441 career mark are better than the league averages in both corner outfield spots this year, and notably better than the (perhaps flukishly low) .256/.322/.404 line posted by Major League left fielders in 2011.

Gone are the days when the average left fielder had an .820 OPS. Barry Bonds, as they say, ain’t walking through that door.

And for as bad as Murphy looked in left field, it was 59 games at a brand-new position for young player in his first days in the big leagues. If the Mets find a spot for Murphy in the outfield, his first handful of games there shouldn’t deter them from trying it again.

That’s the thing, though: Where exactly does Murphy fit in the outfield? Last I checked, the Mets are committed to paying Jason Bay at least $35 million through 2013 with a vesting option for 2014. So Murphy plays right, then?

I guess the idea is that trying Murphy in the outfield again offers the club flexibility. A good left-handed bat that could play five different positions would be a pretty damn valuable thing to have, it would just mean the team would have to continue suffering some of the mistakes that come from Murphy’s defensive inexperience and expect that he’ll repay them on offense.

Since I broached the topic of Bay: Earlier in the season, when his OPS floundered below the Ordonez Line, Bay looked like one of the game’s most untradeable players. His recent torrid stretch pushed his OPS up over .700 Monday night, and those two years, $35 million and vesting option now look… well, still pretty hard to deal.

Just thinking out loud here, but is there any way Bay finishes the season hot enough to allow the Mets to get out from under his contract this offseason?

He has raised his OPS 82 points in his last 10 games. He won’t maintain this pace, but if he can even match that gain over the course of the rest of the season, he’ll finish with a well better line than this year’s awful average left fielder. If that happens, could the Mets find a taker for Bay in return for, I don’t know, a low-level prospect and some salary relief? (Depends on how much salary relief.) Would they? How much of Bay’s deal should they be willing to eat to unbury themselves from the rest of it?

These are offseason questions, and perhaps unnecessary ones; Bay has teased us before.

But neither Murphy nor Lucas Duda seem to have the arm strength typically associated with right fielders, and moving Bay would allow the Mets to employ one of their less-expensive, homegrown (and likely more productive) bats in the outfield while using whatever part of Bay’s salary they save to upgrade elsewhere. That is, if it’s at all possible.

 

Sandwiches of Citi Field: Crabcake sandwich

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My wife and I hit up Catch of the Day at Citi Field on Sunday as part of my enduring quest to eat and review every sandwich available in the stadium. She got a lobster roll, of which I took a bite. That sandwich will be reviewed here after I’ve discussed it with her at greater lengths. She is a distinguishing eater of sandwiches and trusted source on such matters.

I ordered the crabcake sandwich: A crabcake on a potato bun with tartar sauce. The Catch of the Day menu actually calls it “tarter sauce,” but I follow the Wikipedia’s American English spelling. Either way, whenever I start talking about tartar sauce I inevitably say, “Let the fools have their tar-tar sauce,” in my best C. Montgomery Burns.

The damage is $15:

Crabcake sandwiches always feel a little funny to me, since you’re putting the crabcake on bread but there’s already a lot of bread in that crabcake. No disrespect to bread, of course. And it’s not anything like as strange as shoving a perfectly portable Jamaican beef patty inside a thick hunk of coco bread (which is delicious, it turns out).

The crabcake here is good. It’s not quite as crabmeat-heavy as I’d like, but when I think about it, I’m not sure I’ve ever had a crabcake that was. Maybe they just don’t make ’em that way. And this one maintains a pretty good crab flavor.

The downside to this sandwich is that whoever put it together went very heavy on the tartar sauce, so the whole thing got pretty goopy. The tartar itself is better than the standard deli mayo-mixed-with-relish concoction, but it’s still decidedly tartar sauce: tangy, thinner mayo to complement seafood.

On the whole, this isn’t a bad sandwich. But I’d say that if I were in the mood for seafood and a) I weren’t out to review every sandwich available at Citi Field, b) I could eat a whole lobster roll without getting sick and c) I was willing to spend upwards of $15 on a sandwich at a ballpark, I’d probably opt for the lobster roll instead. The lobster roll is $17, so the markup from real-world price to stadium price seems slimmer than it is on the crabcake, plus you get a good amount of lobster meat. But more on that will follow.

Elevated to absurdity

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I like this sequence from 30 Rock. A mildly funny joke followed by a better joke building off the first one, then elevated to absurdity by the third, all across 20 seconds.

I thought of it yesterday while watching the Mets lose to the Braves from the second deck in right at Citi Field, and not just because Excelsior sounds like a name Jack Donaghy would choose for a level in his stadium.

Something about the rapid-fire one-upsmanship during the game reminded me of the scene, with bad news replacing Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin — first Willie Harris pinch-hitting for Jose Reyes, then Daniel Murphy hopping out to short right field and collapsing with a season-ending knee injury, culminating in the ridiculous sight of David Wright playing shortstop and then, when it seemed like being a Mets fan couldn’t get any more depressing and silly, the game’s ultimate punchline: Chipper Jones lining the game-winning hit.

The metaphor fails because 30 Rock is funny and injuries to Reyes and Murphy are nothing like that, except I suppose in some grim, rock-bottom way.

Murphy was to date the team’s third-best hitter. Carlos Beltran, debatably the team’s first-best hitter, plays for the San Francisco Giants now. We await word on how long this hamstring tweak will sideline Jose Reyes, the other side of that debate. And that’s not to mention Ike Davis, who had been hitting better than all of them when he went down with the ankle injury that appears to have ended his season.

This sucks. It’s a damn-near miracle that the Mets can shoulder so many losses and still field a lineup of mostly not-embarrassing Major Leaguers, but a lineup of David Wright and a bunch of mostly not-embarrassing Major Leaguers isn’t going to score nearly as many runs as one with Wright, Murphy and Reyes, with a couple extra not-embarrassing Major Leaguers on the bench. Obviously.

I guess a more appropriate simile would be to say Sunday’s game hit like a flurry of punches from Mike Tyson in his prime, jabs and hooks and crosses and uppercuts, leaving us dazed and on the ropes. Something like that.

Whatever. Who cares what it’s like? It is what it is: Two of the Mets’ best players and best reasons to keep watching for the rest of 2011 getting hurt within the course of a few innings. Reyes may be back soon. Murphy won’t.

The upshot is we’ll probably see Lucas Duda in the lineup just about every day from here on out, and maybe more of Nick Evans too. We won’t get any better sense of if Murphy can play second in the future, though if you’re playing at home that makes two straight seasons for Murph ended by knee injuries sustained at the keystone, for whatever that’s worth.

Brutal. At least there’s still David Wright, playing shortstop or anyplace else. And Jason Bay… oh, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.