Category Archives: Words

Something actually happens: Mets cut guys

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The Mets cut eight players today. Adam Rubin has the unofficial list.

No big surprises here. Dillon Gee heads to Buffalo, securing Chris Capuano’s spot as the fifth starter. Ryota Igarashi, Boof Bonser and Taylor Tankersley were three of the four longest shots in my Mets bullpen odds post, and I don’t think anyone ever seriously figured Jason Pridie, Russ Adams, Raul Chavez or Dusty Ryan for opening the season with the big-league club. In fact, depending on how the Major League roster shakes out I’m not even certain any of those guys will be everyday players in Buffalo.

The bigger news, I suppose, is the guys that weren’t cut: Oliver Perez and Luis Castillo hang on, but more importantly to this blog at this moment, our horse in the second-base race Justin Turner gets to stick around for at least another day or two. It seemed a fait accompli — at least among the team’s beat writers — that Turner would be cut this morning.

I imagine some fans and nearly all media will find it frustrating that the team hasn’t yet pared down the second-base competition, but, well, whatever. Stepping back from it, I’d rather the assorted decision-makers take their time and make the right choice than haphazardly stick Luis Hernandez in the spot because he has looked good over the past week.

So we beat on, etc.

A number of people have pointed out to me, incidentally, that since Brad Emaus is a Rule 5 guy and Turner has options, the Mets should keep Emaus around and extend his audition into the season, knowing they have Turner stashed in Triple-A as a fallback option.

I don’t think that’s a terrible plan. My case for Turner is only that his Triple-A stats from 2010 are, due to park and league factors, more impressive than Emaus’, and it doesn’t seem like most Mets fans appreciate that.

Twitter Q&A-style product

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Something to do to keep me working and not just sitting at my desk watching basketball all day:

Nuts? No. Optimistic? Probably.

I’ve liked Young since he was a stalwart for the Gary (Indiana) Templetons, my old fantasy team, in 2004. But his fastball averaged under 85 mph last year and the reports this spring have him in a similar range. He still has time to build up arm strength, but it’s hard to imagine a righty with that type of velocity and his standard 50-percent flyball rate being able to keep the ball in the park — even if it’s Citi Field — as often as Young did in his four-start stint at the end of 2010.

Still, success would not be unprecedented. Fellow righty Livan Hernandez enjoyed a decent season in 2010 while throwing an average fastballs below 84 mph. But Young has the additional hurdle in his injury history. He’s supposedly a smart pitcher and a great competitor, for whatever those are worth. (NOTE: This paragraph originally said Ted Lilly was also a soft-tossing righty. But he is a soft-tossing lefty who just got jumbled up in my head.)

Of course, speculating if Young will be the second-best pitcher on the Mets begs the question: Who will be the best pitcher on the Mets? Based on 2010, you’d have to say Dickey. But awesome though he is and with all the caveats about being relatively knew to the knuckler, Dickey only has one good season under his belt. Mike Pelfrey probably is who he is at this point: A decent but unspectacular innings-eater. Jon Niese should improve off his rookie season. To me, it’s hard to pick a clear favorite.

I have never been to In-N-Out. In fact, I have been to 40 of the 50 states, but never California. I hope to rectify both at some point this year.

That said, I’d probably say Five Guys is the best burger chain. McDonald’s is basically the definition of replacement-level: passable, inexpensive, available. White Castle I happen to love, but I know that’s a controversial stance. Plus those don’t even count as burgers to me. They’re White Castle burgers, and that’s a whole different thing.

Burger King is the worst. I recognize there’s a chance I’m biased because of a couple of particularly bad Burger Kings — most notably the atrocious one in Farmingdale, N.Y. near where my band used to practice — but every time I eat there I feel sick. Grosses me out, and I have a pretty strong stomach for these things (See: the Taco Bell tab).

There are some regional burger chains that need to be considered, though. The butter-belt staple Culver’s serves some pretty amazing burgers. And Good Times, in Colorado, is one of the best fast food places I’ve ever enjoyed.

Honestly, it’s surprisingly easy now that I feel like the team is actually being run with the goal of sustainable success in mind. And I know there’s a lot of doom-and-gloom fire-sale stuff in the papers, but I’ll believe the Mets will be forced to trade David Wright to cut payroll when I see them trade David Wright to cut payroll.

I think baseball allows most fans a healthy dose of optimism, even while remaining grounded in reality. Hell, look what happened last year: The Giants, with a lineup full of old-ass men who were never even that great to begin with, won the World Series. Yeah, they had great pitching. They also had a ton of little things fall their way. That happens sometimes.

Doesn’t mean, of course, that a team shouldn’t position itself as best it can by putting together the best possible roster. It looks like the Mets (fingers crossed) are trying to do that, hanging on to young players, managing for the near- and long-term, paying attention to the margins. On paper, are they good enough to win it all? Not really. But were the Giants last March? Were the Cardinals in 2006?

So yeah, right now I’m still holding out hope for a surprise playoff appearance. When that doesn’t happen, I’ll fall back on productive seasons from the young players that now appear to be part of the team’s next core group.

All the damn time. I’ve even spoken to a literary agent a couple of times. The biggest hold-up is I can’t come up with a suitable topic that would sustain my interest for the length of time it would require to write a book. For first-time and relatively unknown authors, publishing houses want ideas that are guaranteed to sell — the type of thing you’d get your dad on father’s day 2013. All my ideas are a bit too spacy, it seems. And I don’t want to write a book about something that doesn’t really interest me just for the sake of writing a book. I’m still thinking, though.

The other problem is I currently hunch in front of a computer all day for work. And I’ve got some pretty heavy back and neck issues. Though I’m vain as anything and I’d love to see my name on a book jacket, it’s hard to imagine coming home from work and getting right back in front of a computer for several more hours. That’s what my TV is for.

I’d put my money down on Beltran still. As frustrating as it is to follow along with the outfielder’s seemingly very slow rehab process, Santana is so far off and shoulder surgery is so very tough for pitchers to come back from. Fun fact: I’m the one who set the April 21 over-under that Matt Cerrone used for MetsBlog. It was a total guess, but it’s my total guess.

Wherefore art thou, Jeff Francoeur?

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Well here’s something vaguely interesting:

The Mets’ most experienced right fielder, by far, will start in center field on Opening Day. Angel Pagan has played 538 1/3 innings in right field over 90 Major League games, and a handful more in the Minors.

After Pagan, the Mets’ next most experienced right fielder is Willie Harris, who never played the position in the Minors but has totaled 230 1/3 innings over 45 Major League games at the spot. After that, there’s a huge dropoff.

Baseball-reference.com doesn’t list Minor League innings totals in positions, so I’ve listed the outfielders in Mets camp by professional games played — Major and Minor League — in right. Keep in mind that Harris only has 24 starts at the position, but he did play a bunch of outfield in the Minors (apparently) before people started keeping track of which outfield spots guys were playing, so he may have more time out there. Hence the asterisk. Same goes for Scott Hairston, though both players were primarily infielders in their Minor League days.

I’ve excluded Pagan and Jason Bay, since they are starting in the other outfield positions. Bay, incidentally, has one Major League game in right. His Minor League days also aren’t tracked by outfield positions, but it’s probably worth noting that he played in one game at second base.

Not really sure if this matters at all, just thought it, like I said, vaguely interesting. Citi Field’s right field is a reasonably demanding spot, and the Mets will most likely be trotting someone out there without much experience.

A lot of the talk suggests Scott Hairston will be the man if Beltran has to start the season on the DL. And though Hairston has proven a good defensive outfielder in center and left, he has not played much in right at all.

Guy Professional games in right field
Willie Harris 45*
Nick Evans 14
Lucas Duda 9
Scott Hairston 8*
Carlos Beltran 3

Is TedQuarters True SABR?

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Today my sabermetric writing lies behind me rather than ahead, and I think I am about ready to say, “Farewell to Stats.”

For a whole generation of fans and fantasy players, stats have begun to outstrip story and that seems to me a sad thing. Even the unverifiable hogwash that passed for fact or informed opinion in baseball circles not so long ago seems today wistfully enticing, for its energy if nothing else.

– John Thorn, MLB Official Historian.

I don’t get it. Why does understanding the way we quantify baseball necessarily strip the sport of its good stories? I’ll amount that I find a good deal (but certainly not all) of the extremely stat-heavy baseball writing boring. But it seems lazy, to me, to turn to “unverifiable hogwash” just because it makes for a more enjoyable story.

I generally avoid mission statements, but on this site I try to write about the things that actually happen and matter in baseball, and present them in an entertaining fashion. It is a challenge and I don’t always succeed, I know. But I would rather strive for that ideal and fail — knowing that at the very least I’m not filling readers’ heads up with fallacious nonsense — than write pretty, fluffy stories attached to nothing substantive.

Is this a sabermetric blog? I’ve never called it that, but I’ve been accused of it on Twitter for sure. And I don’t really care one way or the other, because I’m not even sure what that means. The baseball writing on this site is informed by the way I watch baseball, which is in turn informed by the stats I sometimes look up on the Internet.

 

From the Wikipedia: Burj Khalifa

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Because it exists.

From the Wikipedia: Burj Khalifa.

Burj Khalifa is a skyscraper in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. At its highest point, it is 2,717 feet tall, just shy of 1000 feet higher than the next tallest building in the world. By architectural detail (ie not including antennae), it more than twice the height of the Empire State Building. Burj Khalifa is named for UAE President Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who lent support to the project when the economy went south. It is a mixed-use building, with a hotel, residences and corporate suites.

The building opened on Jan. 4, 2010. When it did, it became the tallest skyscraper ever built, the tallest structure ever built, the tallest extant structure, the tallest freestanding structure, the building with the most floors and the building with the highest occupied floor — the 160th. Burj Khalifa can boast the world’s highest mosque, the world’s highest swimming pool, the world’s highest nightclub, the world’s highest restaurant, and, I like to imagine, the world’s highest guy, a bit lost and just sort of stumbling around all like, “bro, this is a really tall building.”

The Wikipedia says Burj Khalifa was built “to put Dubai on the map with something really sensational,” and that makes sense. Obviously this and this and this weren’t going to cut it.

The tower was designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, which is basically the Yankees of architectural firms. It is reminiscent of The Illinois, a mile-high building proposed for Chicago by Frank Lloyd Wright when he was an old-ass man and everyone figured he had lost his mind. Its design is also supposedly derived from elements of Islamic architecture and inspired by the Hymenocallis flower. Basically, Burj Khalifa is a prism through which you can see pretty much anything you want; that’s what happens when you build something so tall the human eyes and brain can’t really process it. (I assume. Man, I really need to get to Dubai.)

Obviously a building of this magnitude requires quite a feat of window-washing. Burj Khalifa has a horizontal track at levels 40, 73 and 109 that holds a bucket machine that moves horizontally and vertically. There are $8 million worth of Australian robots to clean to top 27 tiers and the glass spire. It takes 36 workers three-to-four months to clear the entire facade of Burj Khalifa.

Outside Burj Khalifa is a fountain that shoots water 490 feet into the air. There was a sweet fireworks show when Burj Khalifa opened. People like to BASE jump off Burj Khalifa.

Don Giovanni Carmazzi

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Harris is not alone in making the switch. Opera singers with a football past include Ta’u Pupu’a, a lineman drafted by the Cleveland Browns; Keith Miller, a former Arena League fullback who appeared in two bowl games with Colorado; the former Harvard players Ray Hornblower and Noah Van Niel; and Morrison Robinson, who played on the offensive line for the Citadel….

Physical training, breath control, stamina, discipline, focus, teamwork, a sense of the dramatic — all part of the sport — translate well to opera, he said.

– Karen Crouse, N.Y. Times.

Enjoyable read from the times about football players who have taken up opera singing.

The opera part of it is a little surprising, but it’s no shock to me that football players would make their way into performing after finishing with the gridiron. Football was such a huge part of my life and identity from elementary school through high school that when I stopped playing, I spent a lot of time looking for a way to fill that void. I ultimately found it — or something close, at least — playing music in college, since it required the same sort of discipline, inspired a similar camaraderie, and allowed for public performances.

Even more noise and other disturbances

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As one of the only rational Mets fans left, I just had to vent to you re: a line from Danny Knobler on sportsline.com this morning regarding the state of Mets camp: “It has been that kind of spring, a spring where most of the news is bad, and even the good news doesn’t feel that good.” Is it only me, or has the mainstream media just stopped trying? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Madoff and Johan. I get it. In my view, this spring has been overwhelmingly positive. New front office, new manager, nice young talent, low expectations.

– Greg, via email.

These are trying times for Mets fans. Pick up any paper, click to 90% of Mets blogs, listen to any sports talk radio, and everything is doom and gloom. Wilpon this, Madoff that, MLB loans, fire sales, short ticket lines, shut-down aces, looming injuries, Luis Hernandez.

Noise, noise, noise.

Thing is: How much of what we read is true? How much of it matters to the Mets’ success? Every negative story is met almost immediately with an equally negative counter-story, rendering it difficult to draw meaningful conclusions.

Do we yet have any actual evidence that the Wilpons’ finances have affected the Mets’ roster any more than the failures of the last front office did? Why would a lack of walk-up ticket sales mean anything other than that fans would rather buy online than brave the cold? How can anyone — Johan Santana included — hope to understand and accurately interpret every blip in the long, hazy timeline of recovery from major shoulder surgery? Why would a Major League Baseball team hand a starting job to a middle infielder with a career Triple-A OPS below .600?

And mostly: Who cares?

Maybe you do. Sometimes I do. Some of this stuff seems really important. But sift through the layers of nonsense and winnow out the actual incontrovertible facts and you’ll wind up unsatisfied. We love having terrors to fear and bugaboos to blame, but the most frightening thing to me is how many conclusions we draw from so little substance.

That’s because, I am almost certain, little of substance is happening. Grapefruit League results are meaningless. The Mets have one everyday position to fill, one regular with a nagging injury, and a couple of decisions to make about the pitching staff. That’s really it. They have no real reason to need to settle any of it until March 31. But there are blogs and papers and airwaves to fill, so everyone runs wild with even the tiniest morsel of information, however sketchy. And the Mets have suffered through two straight losing seasons, so all of it is interpreted as negative.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel. A shiny beaming, glistening, spectacular light. It is real, meaningful baseball, and it starts, for the Mets, on April 1.

Some of the sideshows will continue thereafter, for sure. Santana certainly will not be recovered by then, and maybe not Beltran either. The Wilpons will still be embroiled in a lawsuit.

But who knows? My bet is if the Mets actually win some games, it will be a lot easier to tune out the noise.

Polls: Not a good way to determine anything

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Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter was voted the greatest New York athlete ever, with Babe Ruth coming in a close second, according to a poll released Tuesday.

Jeter — a five-time World Series champion — earned 14 percent of the vote, while 11 percent tipped their hats to Ruth, according to the poll conducted by the Siena College Research Institute.

Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle and former Jets quarterback Joe Namath rounded out the top five.

– Clemente Lisi, N.Y. Post.

This might be a fun topic for debate if Babe Ruth didn’t do the bulk of his damage in New York. Ruth is the best baseball player ever. His stats are so sexy, his baseball-reference page is blocked by SNY’s web filter. He played in seven World Series with the Yankees and won four of them. Even though he converted to being a full-time position player before coming to New York, he randomly pitched in five games in his Yankee career and got the win in all of them.

The more interesting argument is over the second-best New York athlete of all time. Here the case for Jeter could be made, I suppose, since he plays a premium position, is the Yankees’ all-time hit leader, and has the five rings and all. But I think it’s tough to even call him the second-best Yankee; that distinction should probably go to Mickey Mantle.

Who else, though? I’d love to put a Met in the discussion but, as good as Tom Seaver was, he probably didn’t contribute as much to the Mets all told as Mantle did to the Yankees. Lawrence Taylor? I could make that case. Patrick Ewing? Mike Tyson before 1990?

SAT stuff

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So now high schoolers have to learn about Snooki and Kim Kardashian to get into Harvard or Yale.

Someone at the College Board must think so.

That would be the person who wrote the essay question for Saturday’s SAT college admissions test which, shocked students say, was, “Do we benefit from forms of entertainment that show so-called ‘reality,’ or are such shows harmful?”

Say what?

– Joanna Molloy, N.Y. Daily News.

Here’s something about me I’m not sure I’ve mentioned here: I worked as an SAT verbal and writing instructor for seven years. I started as a freshman in college at a DC-area SAT prep company called Capital Educators. After I graduated, I put up signs around my hometown and landed a few private students. One of the first — due way more to her own hard work than anything I had to say — went up 170 points from her PSAT verbal. Word got out and business blew up. I wound up with a ton of students, enough that I could schedule 12 hours of tutoring (all in my parents’ dining room) on Sunday and six straight on Monday afternoon and earn enough money to pay for my rent and food in Brooklyn.

Long story short, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the SAT. And I don’t care for it.

It’s a stupid test that puts a ton of pressure on teenagers. It’s way too long, and the results have very little to do with a student’s ability to think critically, carry on interesting conversations and function in life. The SAT tests your ability to take the SAT, and, to a lesser extent, your parents’ willingness to shell out cash for SAT prep. I understand why it exists and why colleges rely on it to guide admissions decisions, but there’s just no way you can convince me it’s a fair assessment of anything.

And the essay section is worst of all. Back when I took the test — get off my lawn! — it was only two sections, Math and Verbal, and if you wanted to test your writing you took the SAT 2 (the thrilling sequel) on some other day. For those of you my age and older: There’s now a third section of the SAT and it includes an essay. The prompt is usually something rather general and stupid. They’ll give you a maxim or a quote and you’ll have to support it or counter it using examples from history, art or life.

Presumably creative, interesting responses score well, but it’s not easy to teach an apathetic high school kid to be creative and interesting in weekly one-hour sessions. So people like me teach students to write to a very boring formula that, if grammatically clean and peppered with vocabulary words, is practically guaranteed a good score: A brief introduction restating the question, a list of the examples that will be used to make the argument, the argument itself — using one paragraph each for each of those examples — then a summarizing conclusion.

So maybe someone at the College Board got sick of reading those essays and decided to have a little fun with 1/3 of this year’s high school juniors. Put ’em on their toes, make them actually think a little.

Because to me, that question is about a billion times more interesting than 90% of the boring nonsense they trot out. Media literacy should be an important facet of today’s education, and high-school students damn well should be encouraged to think critically about the role and impact of reality TV, not to mention the now-very-gray definition of the word “reality.”

And the truth is, no matter how Joanna Molloy wants to present it, answering the question requires little more than a cursory knowledge of reality television. If you’re a reader, you could easily argue that reality TV is merely entertainment, and draw parallels to the novels of Jane Austen — many of which are thematically not terribly dissimilar from “Keeping Up with the Kardashians.” Or, if you’re into history, you could explain how basically every single new form of entertainment has brought with it protests about its decency, and point out that the cinema hasn’t yet cast the world into widespread moral turpitude.

I don’t know. Seems like there are a ton of ways to play it and very few of them demand religious dedication to watching “The Jersey Shore.” I’m guessing the bulk of the students complaining about the question are well enough aware of reality television to form a cogent, creative argument about the subject, but would much prefer to stick to a lazy formula than consider an interesting and relevant topic. And if I were running a college, that’s not really the type of student I’d be looking for.

Justin Turner needs a lobby

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The Mets are ready to shred their final four bracket and chart a different course at second base.

Disenchanted with what he has seen from Luis Castillo, Daniel Murphy, Brad Emaus and Justin Turner this spring, manager Terry Collins is preparing to name Luis Hernandez the starter at second base, a source with direct knowledge of Collins’ plans told The Post yesterday. The move will be contingent upon Collins convincing the front office to find roster space for Hernandez.

– Mike Puma, N.Y. Post.

Wait a minute, really? That Luis Hernandez? The guy with the career .302 Minor League — Minor League! — on-base percentage. All due respect to the saddest home run ever, but I’m not buying it.

For one thing, keep in mind we’ve already seen reports from MetsBlog that Brad Emaus is in the lead, from the Times that Luis Castillo is in the lead, and from the Daily News that Daniel Murphy is in the lead. So it seems unlikely to me that, out of nowhere, Hernandez has wrested the position from four competitors by March 15 and only the Post has the scoop.

Second, as Matt Cerrone just pointed out, if the Mets were interested in an all-defense, no-hit second baseman — despite all Collins’ claims that second base is an offensive position — why wouldn’t Chin-Lung Hu then be added to the mix? Hu, after all, is also an apt defender, and probably offers more offensive upside than Hernandez.

I’m going to stick with my supposition that nothing has been decided yet. Because I don’t really want to consider yet the possibility that the new front office and manager would make Luis Hernandez an everyday player. I’ll wait until there’s stronger evidence that it’s actually happening.

I will seize this opportunity to advocate for Justin Turner some more. He often seems to be the forgotten man in what was thought to be the four-horse race for the second-base job. I get the feeling some Mets fans see him as almost interchangeable with Emaus — righty hitting offensive second basemen without much in the way of a Major League pedigree. And everyone figures since Emaus is a Rule 5 guy and Turner has options, Emaus would get the nod over Turner, all things being equal.

But I’m not sure all things are equal. As I pointed out Friday, Turner’s Triple-A stats from 2010 are actually way more impressive than Emaus’ since he played in a much tougher hitting environment. Plus Turner has experience playing shortstop, for what that’s worth. I haven’t seen nearly enough of him to say how he looks defensively, plus I’m not sure I’d trust my eye anyway. I’m just saying he needs a lobby, or at the very least some reporter to come out and say he’s in the lead for the second-base job.

Oh wait, I am a reporter. Nevermind that I’ve been away from Port St. Lucie a full week now and I didn’t really talk to anyone about Turner. How should I carefully word this completely fictional scoop?

How’s this? Some Mets people have been really impressed with Justin Turner’s work in camp so far and believe he could emerge as the team’s starting second baseman by Opening Day. Run with it, Internet!