Category Archives: Words

Things I entirely missed

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Here are three things I have entirely missed:

1) Harry Potter: This one I’m a bit embarrassed about, because I suspect if I read the Harry Potter books or watched the movies I’d enjoy them. But to date, I have not read a word in any of the books or seen a minute of any of the movies. I have entirely missed Harry Potter. I recognize some of the names and words associated with the series — Dumbledore, Muggles, Hermione — but I have no idea what they mean.

Thing is, the first Harry Potter book blew up when I was a senior in high school. At that time, I thought I was super awesome because I read books for leisure and not many people I knew my age did. When people started blabbing on and on about how great Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was, I assumed it was a book for people who don’t normally read books — whatever that meant — so I avoided it.

I stopped thinking like that sometime in college, but by then it seemed too late to just take up the series from the beginning. Now the last movie is the hottest ticket at the box office and I’m still out in the dark. Maybe at some point in like ten years I can start reading them, when it seems nostalgic and cool or something.

2) The Casey Anthony trial: So I went on vacation for a week, then came back to find my co-workers huddled around the TV awaiting a verdict in the Casey Anthony trial like she’s O.J. Simpson or something. Who is this lady? Is she famous? Who is Nancy Grace?

I’m not aiming to make light of the trial or the verdict. I just missed the whole buildup, so the subsequent outrage seemed really bizarre.

I will add that I learned afterward that they used Anthony’s Google searches as evidence in the trial, which is rather terrifying. I had no idea that was admissible. I hope I’m never framed for anything; I Google some messed-up stuff just out of morbid curiosity and following what auto-complete suggests.

3) Bill Simmons: Amid all the hoopla surrounding the launch of Grantland.com, I realized I had never read anything Bill Simmons had written. It was not a conscious decision. It so happens that I never worked in front of a computer in the years Simmons was first making his name on the Internet, I’m not a huge NBA guy and I have very little patience for Boston sports fans. Plus I’ve always read more in print than online and more fiction than sportswriting.

But now that I’ve come this far without having read any of his work, it seems like a neat trick to keep it up. So many of my friends and colleagues seem to, for whatever reason, have such unreasonably strong opinions about Grantland.com that my innate contrarian finds it best to maintain no opinion whatsoever.

 

The cult of Yao

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For nearly a decade, China has been enthralled by the cult of Yao spun by Communist Party propagandists and corporate sponsors: the winner, the gentle giant, the favorite son. His image was ubiquitous here, and the public basked in his glow even as other Chinese players in the N.B.A. sputtered.

Yet his retirement is forcing many Chinese to acknowledge that their country has relied on Yao alone for victory and national pride, ignoring shortcomings in the state sports system that leave China facing a future bereft of N.B.A. and Olympic basketball glory.

– Dan Levin, N.Y. Times.

I’ve probably mentioned here before that I spent a month in China in the summer of 2007 for grad school. Yao’s image was plastered everywhere, especially in his native Shanghai. One of the first Chinese guys I met asked me to “detail the extent of Yao’s genius and its influence on America.” I spotted basketball hoops inside the Forbidden City and at the base of the Great Wall at Badaling.

I should note now that I am a terrible basketball player by U.S. suburban kid standards. I’m a decent passer with a strong lower body and a good sense of physics so I’m vaguely useful grabbing rebounds, but I can’t hit a shot from outside 10 feet and I tend to dribble the ball off my feet. I never played any organized basketball at any level, and in pickup games I’m usually among the worst or the very worst player on the court.

But I played a few times with some dudes in Shanghai and felt like Allen Iverson. It was a small sample of both opponents and games, but it seemed like there was a certain baseline level of play and basketball coordination that came with growing up in the U.S. and playing regularly against better competition that made me a better player. Some of these kids clearly played pretty often. They all had better jumpshots than I did and several of them were better athletes, but even my rudimentary crossover dribbles beguiled them.

Again, it could just be that I happened upon one particularly terrible group of college-aged Chinese basketball players. But it stands to reason that if these guys grew up — according to Levin’s article — with no instruction at all, they’d hit a ceiling of sorts.

I’ll leave the sweeping discussions of Chinese economics to people who have studied them at greater lengths than I have, but in 2007, China was pretty clearly enduring frenzied change. I saw a shirtless man standing on a pile of rubble in the shadow of the Jin Mao Tower, holding a naked baby, talking on a cell phone, selling crabs out of a bucket. I don’t want to overstep my bounds as a sports and sandwich blogger, but I tend to figure once the pace of change settles a bit, that nation will come to things like youth basketball, and we’ll eventually see a huge influx of Chinese athletes in professional sports.

Huh?

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Sandy Alderson might enjoy sending Beltran, his flu and the remaining $8 million (for the moment) on his contract to the Red Sox, if only to torment the Yankees.

– Filip Bondy, N.Y. Daily News.

Wait, does anyone actually believe Sandy Alderson thinks that way? I thought the going oversimplification of Alderson is that he’s a shrewd, calculating GM who cares only about the numbers and would sell his own mother to the hated Yankees if it meant bringing back a cost-controlled contributor with a high on-base percentage.

Come to think of it, does anyone actually believe any Major League GM thinks that way? Like is there really anyone who could rise to the highest executive level in the game making vindictive moves aimed at needling perceived (but not actual) rivals, instead of, you know, moves to better his team? Maybe some talk-radio type would run a team like that if he were put at the helm, but he’d also run all the best players out of town for unclutchitude and ill effects on clubhouse chemistry, so it probably wouldn’t last.

Smart money says if Sandy Alderson trades Beltran to the Red Sox, it’s because the Red Sox presented the best offer.

Yeah, I’m picking nits on a throwaway line, and I should probably just ignore this stuff. Whatever. I’m short on sleep this morning.

Ubaldo Jimenez stuff

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The Internet is ablaze with rumors that Ubaldo Jimenez could be traded before the 2011 trade deadline, possibly to the Yankees. The talk seems to stem from a Ken Rosenthal video blog in which he mentions that the Rockies are getting calls about, but not actively shopping, their ace right-hander.

According to Cot’s, Jimenez is signed through 2012 with club options for 2013 and 2014. Assuming the Rockies exercise those options, Jimenez will cost them roughly $18 million total for the next three seasons. If you’re playing at home, that means the Rockies have locked up the next three seasons of a pitcher with 131 career ERA+ for little more than the price of one season of Jason Bay.

Plus, any team acquiring Jimenez does not acquire the right to his 2014 option. As Tim Dierkes points out, that makes him more valuable to the Rockies than any acquiring team, much in the same way David Wright is more valuable to the Mets than to any potential trade partner.

Also, excellent young pitchers on long-term team-friendly deals don’t come around very often, and clubs that find them aren’t generally that eager to move them. The Rockies may be far from contention in 2011, but they’re hardly in position to write off 2012-2014. In other words, it just doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense for them to trade Jimenez unless a) they can command a massive haul in return and/or b) they know something about him the rest of us don’t. (His diminished velocity in 2011 could speak to the latter, though his peripherals are in line with past years.)

OK, the point here is spiraling away from me. If Jimenez is both fully healthy and truly available, it makes sense for most teams — not just the Yankees — to be calling the Rockies about working out a deal. That includes the Mets.

Here’s where that whole buyer/seller I keep bringing up comes in. You’re going to say, “Oh well the Mets can’t be buyers when they’re sitting at .500 and 8.5 games back of the Wild Card,” but when the next two years of Jimenez are in play, you know, sometimes you have to get when the getting is good. The Mets need frontline starting pitching, they don’t have any on the immediate horizon in the farm system, and paying for it on the free agent market is a fool’s errand.

But like I said, I don’t think the Rockies will really trade him, plus the Mets probably don’t have the requisite chips to get that sort of deal done anyway, so it’s immaterial.

All this has meant nothing. Carry on.

Bay scalloped

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That’s nothing when you consider Bay’s quagmire of a contract, which still has another guaranteed $35 million left over the next two seasons and a vesting option for 2014 worth $17 million. Not the kind of money anyone wants to be paying a .234 hitter that Terry Collins is now considering to bench in favor of Scott Hairston.

Remember when Bay appeared to have his season turned around? Well, he’s back in a 3-for-30 skid since his two-homer night July 5 at Dodger Stadium , and yes, those are singles. His problems only deepened yesterday, when Bay went 0-for-4 and stranded five in the Mets’ 8-5 loss to the Phillies.

– David Lennon, Newsday.

Yeah, it turns out we were kidding ourselves when we were squinting hard at Jason Bay and seeing how he might be coming out of the funk he’s been in since he signed with the Mets before last season. This is brutal. He still manages to get on base every now and then, and the Mets can carry his wholesale lack of power when they’ve got Carlos Beltran and Jose Reyes in the lineup. But in these past few games with the club reduced to a star-free lineup full of pesky singles hitters, Bay’s inadequacies are more obvious.

Both David Wright and Jose Reyes appear set to return to the lineup later this week. With Ike Davis still out, it seems likely the Mets will shift Daniel Murphy to first base and use one of Justin Turner and Ruben Tejada at second base. That leaves Lucas Duda out of the mix.

But though Duda’s first 113 plate appearances this season haven’t been much to speak of, he’s a 25-year-old lefty hitter with a recent history of crushing Triple-A pitching, and a player that might contribute to the Mets in the future. If Bay were going right, he should be starting every day in the Mets’ outfield and the middle of their order; there’s still a lot more evidence that Jason Bay can be a capable Major League hitter than there is that Lucas Duda can.

As it is though, a case could be made that Duda should get playing time in left against right-handed pitching, against which Bay has been pretty much useless. Granted, the Mets aren’t paying Bay $16 million to occupy the short half of a platoon, but then that money is spent whether Bay provides any return on it or not, and the Mets might as well get about winning games the best way they can figure. The Mets’ priority should still be getting Bay on track, but since it doesn’t look like the current approach is working, they might as well try one that doesn’t involve him playing every day.

I guess I’m just sick of watching him ground out every damn time.

Slow day

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Things will again be a bit slow around here today as I try to put to bed whatever it is that has had me sick all week. Here’s me and Toby talking about stuff:


Totally self-serving link-dump post

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What better, easier way to recap the first half of the Mets’ season than to link to a bunch of stuff I’ve already written about the first half of the Mets’ season? And yeah, maybe you’ve already read some of this stuff, but maybe you’re new to this site. Or maybe you’re really bored and want to look back on what has been an interesting 91-game span of baseball and baseball-related stuff via this silly filter.

In any case, I’ve got a meeting and a bunch of stuff to attend to about the office, so here’s a trip down recent memory lane. I picked the posts based partly on popularity, partly on relevance, and partly on what would make me look smart now:

April 1: Blame Mighty Casey (season preview)
April 3: Are the Mets the best team ever?
April 12: Commence hand-wringing
April 18: Absolutely nothing
April 21: What [R.A. Dickey] said
May 2: Hey, baseball
May 11: Why we can’t have nice things: Josh Thole quits Twitter
May 13: The redemptive beauty of Carlos Beltran
May 18: No such thing
May 23: Wilpon’s curveball
June 2: Did anyone see that awesome baseball game?
June 8: The Kid
June 15: What we carry
June 28: The 2011 Mets: Not the worst team ever
June 30: Points at Jonah Hill
July 5: Following up
July 8: Curtain call

The kroddiest option

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As you know by now, the Mets traded Francisco Rodriguez and cash to the Brewers for two players to be named later. We don’t know which players yet, so it’s impossible to fully assess the trade. There has been some talk of how the Brewers gutted their system in trades in the past offseason — and that’s true — but they’ve still got guys playing games in the Minor Leagues. Obviously there’s a pretty broad range of quality there. So let’s hang tight on that one.

The good news is the deal guarantees Rodriguez’s ridiculous $17.5 million option for 2012 will not vest. This assures the Mets’ front office some much-needed financial flexibility this offseason.

Rodriguez did not pitch terribly for the Mets.  In 168 innings, he posted a 130 ERA+ and struck out more than a batter an inning. He allowed a lot of baserunners, of course, and he blew some saves and punched a man in the family room. It wasn’t always good. But no closer besides Mariano Rivera is Mariano Rivera. The Mets got what they overpaid for.

But if the first three years of Rodriguez’s pricey contract were excusable given the Mets’ position after the 2008 season, it was the fourth-year option that ushered the closer out of town.

Terry Collins and the 2011 Mets probably could have managed it better, keeping him out of  more three-run wins and six-run losses to suppress that games-finished total. But for whatever reason, they didn’t. With 34 games finished and 71 left to play, Rodriguez was careening toward that option, necessitating a deal.

Essentially, the Mets loaded up the bases in the ninth in a tight game. They worked their way out of it and now we are celebrating on the mound, perhaps a bit too brazenly.

Meh, maybe the metaphor isn’t perfect. If you listened to the podcast a couple weeks ago, you heard me insist that Alderson had something up his sleeve, and there was no chance the Mets would let that option vest. So maybe the most innocent explanation here is the correct one: The Mets were using Rodriguez as best they could to help them win as many games as possible before moving him, knowing all along they’d be able to move him.

As for what happens now: Despite the LOLtastic “news” treatment of the trade the New York Post, it is hardly the death knell for the Mets’ chances of contention in 2011. That’s still a longshot, but it’s only made slightly longer by the absence of Rodriguez. Hanging onto a guy who could financially cripple the team in the future in the name of a 46-45 team that’s 7.5 games back of the Wild Card would be downright moronic, I am sorry to say.

Bobby Parnell probably takes over as closer. In a very small sample in 2011, Parnell has been extremely similar to or slightly better than Rodriguez in just about every category.

Whoa

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The Mets traded Francisco Rodriguez and cash to the Brewers last night for two players to be named later.

He finished 34 games for the Mets in 2011, 21 shy of the 55 needed for his $17.5 million option to vest. More to follow.