Category Archives: Words

No. 4 Top Thing of 2010: Galarraga’s imperfect game

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Baseball’s 2010 regular season featured two perfect games, but arguably the most memorable pitching performance came from 28-year-old righty Armando Galarraga.

Galarraga, you’ll recall, retired the first 26 Cleveland hitters in order on June 2. The 27th, Jason Donald, slapped a soft grounder to the right side of the infield. You know all this: Miguel Cabrera handled it cleanly and fired it to Galarraga, covering first, beating Donald by a step. Umpire Jim Joyce called Donald safe, robbing Galarraga of a perfect game.

Galarraga didn’t argue the call. He smiled instead.

Armando Galarraga is not a great pitcher by Major League standards. He’s not even a good one; he’s just a guy. He won’t make the Hall of Fame, he won’t win the Cy Young Award, and he probably won’t ever make an All-Star Team. But thanks to the whims of the sport and small sample sizes and in part to a brutal Indians lineup, Galarraga had a shot at baseball immortality.

I don’t know Galarraga personally, but I know he was signed by the Expos out of Venezuela when he was 16. And I know he spent seven years kicking around the Minor Leagues before settling in to the Tigers’ rotation in 2008. And then on June 2, he saw before his eyes the culmination of all the work he has certainly endeavored and all the physical toil he has doubtlessly endured: perfection, the ultimate single-game accomplishment for a pitcher. Then it was taken from him, and he only smiled.

Joyce, for his part, watched a replay of the call immediately after the game, admitted he blew it and apologized to Galarraga. Galarraga said he understood.

In the end, Joyce and Galarraga shared something perhaps as rare as a perfect game: Two apparently decent and reasonable human beings behaving in a civilized and understanding manner despite an awful situation.

Roy Halladay’s perfect game further confirmed my knowledge that Roy Halladay is really good. Dallas Braden’s perfect game further exposed Braden’s Happy Gilmore-esque silliness and introduced me to his smack-talking grandma. Armando Galarraga’s near-perfect game reminded me of the human capacity for dignity. It’s hard to imagine a more impressive performance on a baseball field.

No. 5 Top Thing of 2010: I meet Shaq

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I mentioned here that I was meeting Shaq, but I’m not sure I actually confirmed that I met Shaq. I did. It was awesome.

After I reviewed Shaq’s debut as an art curator, an exhibition at the FLAG Art Foundation in Chelsea, someone from FLAG called me and asked if I would come to a walk-thru of the exhibition hosted by Shaq. Duh. Of course I would. They told me the only condition was that I not ask about Shaq’s injured wrist, since he was there to talk about art.

Wait, I thought: Who the hell would ask Shaq about his injured wrist when he’s guiding a tour of his first gallery exhibition? I want to know what Shaq thinks about art!

Turns out the Big Aristotle is something of a post-modernist, and just sort of kept repeating, “Everything is art.” Because — not sure if you’ve noticed — Shaq is extremely tall and speaks in a very low voice, he is extraordinarily difficult to record on a hand-held voice recorder, so I don’t have many more direct quotes. I asked him if he had thought of an art-themed nickname for himself and he said, “Shaqasso.”

Of course, a reasonably prominent ESPN reporter did ultimately ask Shaq about his wrist injury. Though I realize the guy was just doing his job, it annoyed the crap out of me. Here’s one of the sporting world’s most interesting personalities discussing perhaps his most interesting pursuit yet, and you’re asking him a question you can be almost certain he won’t answer in anything more than vagaries. And I recognize that Shaq’s only famous for basketball and if he were just some massive dude curating an art exhibit who hadn’t been one of the top NBA players of the last 20 years I likely wouldn’t have gone. But c’mon, guy. Shaq’s talking about art. Just, c’mon.

All that said, the moment that deserves merit in the TedQuarters Top 10 Things of 2010 is not that reporter’s question, or mine, or even the walk-thru of the gallery. The No. 5 Top Thing of 2010 is stepping off the elevator into the gallery and having one of the FLAG folks say, “Shaq, this is Ted Berg,” and having Shaq shake my hand with his massive left and subwoof, “Hi, Ted, nice to meet you.”

One of the sad things about the combination of getting older and having this job, I think, is that I’ve become a bit jaded about meeting professional athletes. They’re just dudes and all, even if they’re dudes that are really awesome at sports. But because he has been an NBA star since I was 11, because he is that guy that raps and acts and actually works as a sheriff’s deputy and summons people on Twitter and conducts the Boston Pops, and because he is physically so much bigger than me, Shaq made me feel like a giddy grade-schooler. F@#!ing Shaq, bro. It was sweet.

No. 6 Top Thing of 2010: Albert Pujols’ continued existence

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In 2010, Albert Pujols led the National League in home runs, RBI and runs scored. He finished third in on-base percentage, second in slugging and second in OPS and OPS+, and placed second in the National League MVP Award voting. It was something of a down year for him.

I will keep this short because there’s little I can say about Pujols that can’t be told more eloquently by his baseball-reference page. He created some sort of stir this season by showing up at a political/religious rally, but I’m not here to quibble with or judge Albert Pujols for his beliefs. I figure if I were as good at anything as Albert Pujols is at hitting, I’d have a wildly different outlook on just about everything.

Just how good? He is tied with Mickey Mantle for sixth all time in park- and league-adjusted OPS+. The men above him? Ruth, Williams, Bonds, Gehrig, Hornsby.

Pujols will be 31 when 2011 opens, so it’s safe to argue his career rates will ultimately drop off a little bit. Frank Thomas, after all, had a 174 career OPS+ at age 30 and finished his career (some 5000 very good plate appearances later) with a still totally awesome 156 mark.

And Albert Pujols didn’t earn his way onto the TedQuarters Top 10 Things of 2010 by showing signs of his decline. Instead, he maintained his excellent and remarkably consistent level of performance. I could list stats to show the clock-like regularity with which he dominates Major League hitters — he has finished in the top 3 of MVP voting eight times, he has never hit fewer than 30 home runs or driven in fewer than 100 runs, he has only once finished a season with an on-base percentage below .400 (and it was .394) — but again, it’s easier and more effective to defer to the back of his baseball card.

Pujols is in the inner circle of greatest hitters of all time, and we are lucky to be able to enjoy his prime in thrilling HD. Historically great hitters don’t come around all that often, so though it’s safe to say we might see a couple more hitters as good as Pujols in our lifetimes, we probably won’t see a few.

No. 7 Top Thing of 2010: R.A. Dickey

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Duh.

Dickey will be the last Mets-related entry in the TedQuarters Top 10 Things of 2010. I considered including the hiring of Sandy Alderson somewhere, but it seems inappropriate to bestow such a weighty honor upon the decision (and the general manager) until we see the team Alderson constructs play some ballgames and everything.

And R.A. Dickey, certainly the shiniest bright spot in a mostly dark season for the Mets, deserves recognition here. A 35-year-old journeyman with no ulnar collateral ligament, Dickey harnessed the mesmerizing powers of the knuckleball and enjoyed a career season: He posted a 138 ERA+ in 174 1/3 innings, induced a ton of groundballs and kept runners off base. Mixing speeds with his signature pitch, He flummoxed Major League hitters from May to September.

Dickey’s on-field contributions didn’t end there. A ferocious competitor, he swiftly established himself as an excellent defensive pitcher. And at the plate, Dickey posted a .296 on-base percentage, equaling or bettering the season line of five position players in the Mets’ Opening Day lineup (!). Got the bunts down when he had to, put the ball in play when he had to, even smacked a couple of doubles. Just a good baseball player.

All of that, in sum, probably would have been enough to help Dickey crack the Top 10 Things of 2010. We like redemption stories, after all, and in a purely baseball sense his is a great one. Former first-round draft pick develops a knuckleball late in his baseball life, figures it out, dominates.

But then on top of all that, there’s R.A. Dickey the dude. Turns out the Mets’ knuckleballer himself recognizes the universal appeal of the knuckleball. He loves literature and poetry, and he reads before games. His last name is “Dickey.” He would like to be a ball boy at the U.S. Open, but he’s unwilling to part with his beard. He makes an awesome face when he throws. He is accessible to blogger and Burkhardt alike. The guy is a fan’s dream; great story, obvious dedication, interesting fellow.

Still, I’m certain that the most endearing thing about Dickey, to fans, is the outstanding performance in 2010. Moving forward, if Dickey regresses a little bit as the league catches up to him, it will be interesting to see how fans react. Naturally some of us will always have a soft spot in our hearts for a pitcher/poet, but I wonder if, at some point after two lousy starts happen to fall on consecutive outings for Dickey, we’ll have to suffer WFAN callers and incensed Tweeters demanding Dickey take his head out of his Dumas and start watching more game film, or something stupid like that.

For now, though, we can hope that never happens, and that Dickey only continues to baffle opposing hitters and enthrall adoring fans.

No. 10 Top Thing of 2010: The Walking Dead

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After The Walking Dead on AMC blew up the Nielsen ratings (relatively), there was a ton of predictable backlash. Critics pointed out that the dialogue was wooden, a lot of the acting was bad, and many of the plotlines were more or less cliched in the zombie genre. Guy wakes up from a coma in the aftermath of the zombie apocalypse? That’s 28 Days Later. Saw it. Pretty good.

All that stuff is true, but the show is still ridiculously awesome, and well deserving of the esteemed ranking of 10th best thing of 2010.

First of all, zombie drama. Just when you thought great meta-zombie movies like Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland might spell the logical conclusion to convincing and unironic zombie horror, here comes The Walking Dead to breathe new life into the genre. By stretching out many of the typical zombie plot elements into a serial drama, the show can add an emotional timbre rarely felt in the inevitable now-you-have-to-shoot-your-zombie-family scenes.

Second, zombie killing. Damn. I have no idea what the makeup and effects budget for the show must be like or how they’re pulling it off, but The Walking Dead presents some downright grisly and most awesome zombie destruction. I’ve never read the comic book upon which the show is based so I’m not if this is from the original story or just an adaptation for the TV show, but making it so the zombies are attracted to loud noises is an amazing twist. If human characters are reluctant to use guns, they have to find all sorts of more creative ways to kill zombies, like baseball bats and crossbows and shovels.

The Walking Dead also nails the appropriate level of zombie competence. The zombies are still idiots and incapable of organizing or anything like that, but their numbers are great enough and they are hungry enough to figure out a way to come get you if you give them enough time. That’s important, keeping you on the edge of your seat and everything.

And mostly, despite some issues in characterization and dialogue, the plots are good enough to force you to put yourself in the same situation, like the best episodes of Lost often did. I’ve always held that one of life’s most important moral and ethical questions is when to shoot your loved one once you know he or she has been infected by zombies. Do you do it right away, because you don’t want your girlfriend to suffer the pain of becoming a zombie and because you yourself couldn’t handle seeing her like that? Or do you wait until your father becomes a zombie, risking further zombie contact but avoiding the burden of having to shoot your dad while he’s still a breathing, functional human?

Oh, the other important element it shares with Lost is the forced group dynamic. The only thing the characters on The Walking Dead have in common is that they’re not yet zombies. But they’re forced to work together, with leaders emerging and roles in the group developing, because it’s their best way to survive.

Just about every time I get on the subway, I size up everyone else in the car and imagine my role in the group if we somehow got teleported somewhere and separated from society. Could I be the leader-guy? Who would stand in my way? Who would be my love interest? I’m pretty sure I’m not the only person who does that, so I suspect the show taps into something about the way we self-identify.

Also important: Your life before the zombie apocalypse has little bearing on your position in the group, other than the ways in which it prepared you to defend yourself from zombies. You might be a crazy backwoods white-supremacist redneck, but if you know how to operate a crossbow and cook squirrel meat then you’re a pretty valuable dude to have around. The best character on the show is Glenn, a pizza-delivery boy turned dope zombie-killing strategist. Glenn’s apparently really awesome at figuring out the best routes to get places, which is probably related to skills you’d develop delivering pizzas.

And since the show has no set end date, you know eventually if it continues long enough, Glenn’s gonna turn into a zombie. That’s going to be so messed up! Will Rick shoot Glenn? Can he shoot Glenn, after all the respect he has earned saving lives and destroying zombies?

People sometimes say that the quality of television programming is declining. That’s a blog post for another day, but it’s the furthest thing from the truth. More channels means more options means more specialized programming and more competition, which means more righteous zombie kills on Sunday nights. The end.

New comments section and Facebook stuff

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As you may have noticed, the comments section looks different. Thanks to the tireless work of Matt Cerrone, the comments on this site — as well as MetsBlog.com and SNYRangersBlog.com, and ideally a few more of our SNY.tv blogs in the coming days — are now on Disqus.

I’ve never made anyone register or log in to comment here*, and you will still be able to post as a guest in the new system. Just type your comment and hit “Post as…” and Disqus will prompt you for a name and email, same as what was here before.

But because many of the community aspects of the new system are pretty cool, I urge you to log in and comment via Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo! or Open ID, or sign up through Disqus.

That way the personified and ominous SNY can monitor your activities from smoky back rooms, petting a cat and plotting your demise. Also, you’ll be able to more easily comment on other SNY blogs (and other blogs on Disqus like MLBTradeRumors.com), and the site will keep track of how many other readers like your comments. Validation!

(Also, for the paranoid: I was kidding about the monitoring your activities thing. This change is to liven up the commenting communities on our sites and take some of the burden off our servers. You’re paranoid so you probably won’t believe me, but no one’s up to anything shady.)

Finally, you may have noticed that you now have the option to “recommend” posts on this site on Facebook and “Like” the site in general (on the top right of the page below the search bar). We’re still working on some stuff with that, but feel free to recommend and like away. There’s even this new (still in-progress) TedQuarters fan page on Facebook. You like me, right? Please, tell me you like me!

Of course, all these changes come just in time for this site to slow down for the holidays. Consider it, I don’t know, a transition period. You slowly adjust to the new comments section and to officially declaring your like for TedQuarters on Facebook while I publish 1-2 posts a day through the New Year. Then, come January, you’re fully ready to comment and like away and I’m all refreshed from vacation, and we all come out swinging in 2011.

But not swinging in the Rex Ryan way. This is not that type of web site.

Thanks, as always, for reading and commenting and everything else, and thanks for helping make this site the Internet’s second most awesome TedQuarters. The Top 10 Things of 2010 will start rolling out this afternoon.

*- Except one time, very early on, when I screwed something up in the admin. I do reserve the right to someday make you log in to comment, but I won’t do it before we enjoy some hilarious and rampant trolling.

Introducing: The TedQuarters Top 10 Things of 2010

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I’ve got about a billion overdue expense reports to file and Christmas gifts to buy in the next couple days, then I’m taking off from Thursday until the New Year.

But since I don’t want to leave this blog totally dark for the next week and a half, starting tomorrow I’ll be rolling out one post per day about the TedQuarters Top 10 Things of 2010. I’ll probably post some other stuff too as it comes up, but it will otherwise be mostly quiet around here.

What are the TedQuarters Top 10 Things of 2010? Well, you’ll have to wait and find out. But I’ll admit now that it’s a very biased list, it includes a bunch of stuff I’ve already talked about here and some things I haven’t but that all certainly fall within the normal realm of things discussed on TedQuarters.

So, you know, look out for that. You might also notice some minor changes around the site, since this blog remains the guinea pig for our SNY.tv Blog Network and we’re trying to get our act in gear for next year. I will probably mention them when they are completely functional and worth mentioning.

The Mets lineup as half-full

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Over at MetsBlog today, Matt Cerrone took issue with Ben Shpigel’s assertion that the Mets, “in all likelihood,” would not contend in 2011. I can’t fault Shpigel for the prediction — the Mets, as we all know, are coming off two sub-.500 seasons, have made few roster moves, and will start the year without Johan Santana in their rotation.

But as Matt points out, unpredictable things happen in baseball all the time. I didn’t talk to Cerrone about the post, but if I had to guess I would assume it was at least in part motivated by the sense of fatalism that seems to be growing in Mets fans, especially since the Phillies signed Cliff Lee. There’s nothing wrong with making predictions and taking stabs at what will likely happen, as Shpigel does. Writing off any team entirely before the season even starts is silly.

For what it’s worth, last winter I listed both the Reds and the Padres as “unlikely to contend” in my National League preview for the Maple Street Press Mets Annual. Captain Hindsight can look back now and identify the ways in which both clubs were primed to compete, but at the time it hardly seemed I was taking controversial positions.

Anyway, on to the point. If we’re talking optimistically and trying to figure out the things that reasonably could happen to launch the Mets into contention, I’ll point out that the Mets might have a very good offense next season.

Fangraphs currently lists two 2011 projections for most players — Bill James’ version, and their crowdsourced fan projections. In most cases, the two are reasonably similar. Because I’m trying to see the cup half-full for the sake of this post, I took the better of the two projections for everyone slated to be in the Mets’ lineup and plugged them into David Pinto’s lineup analysis tool.

I even gave Josh Thole a bit of a boost, figuring Ronny Paulino will take some at-bats away against tough lefties. Since Thole was projected at a .358 OBP and a .378 slugging by the fans, I unscientifically bumped those numbers up to .360 and .415, seeing as Paulino has a lifetime .390 OBP and .490 slugging against lefties. I’m painting in broad strokes here.

I plugged in Daniel Murphy for second base, which assumes he can capably man the position. His Bill James projection seemed so optimistic that I didn’t bother adjusting it for any sort of platoon. James’ system projects Murph to post a .339 OBP and .455 slugging in 2011, which would put him among the top handful of second basemen offensively.

Anyway, with a lineup of Jose Reyes, Angel Pagan, David Wright, Carlos Beltran, Jason Bay, Ike Davis, Murphy and Thole/Paulino all performing up to the most optimistic of reasonable projections, the Mets would score just short of five runs per game (4.959, to be exact) according to the tool.

That’s nearly a full run per game better than the Mets scored last season. It would have made them the NL’s top offensive club in 2010.

Obviously the system is not perfect for a variety of reasons. For one, it assumes all players play 162 games at their positions, which clearly won’t happen. There’s a dropoff when you start plugging in bench players for the starters, and even in full health every team needs to plug in bench players with some frequency.

But even despite the team’s impotent offense last year, I don’t think it’s crazy to expect the Mets to score a lot of runs next season. There’s no obvious gaping hole in the lineup, and amazing things can happen when you replace out machines with capable Major Leaguers. Subbing in Jeff Francoeur’s 2010 Mets line for Beltran and Rod Barajas’ for Thole/Paulino would cost the team about a half-run per game, per the tool. (Pinto’s script fails to factor in smiles and leadership.)

If the Mets could only prevent runs as well as they did last year, using the Pythagorean win expectancy formula with that lineup projection, they’d finish with right around 100 wins. So that, well, that’d be cool.

Problem is, it’s just not that likely to happen. The Mets enjoyed very good pitching last year, but they also had a healthy Santana throw 199 innings. Jon Niese and R.A. Dickey, two of the three starters penned in for the 2011 rotation, experienced lasting big-league success for the very first time in 2010. And throwing Murphy in at second base could have repercussions for the defense.

The Mets lineup, as currently constituted, probably won’t score 800 runs. But it will probably be pretty good. That is what we can hold onto until April. That and the knowledge that lots of crazy things happen in baseball.

I’d say neither of those things makes the Mets likely to contend in 2011, but together they should be enough for us to recognize that it’s not downright impossible for the Mets to contend in 2011.

Well, I compare sportswriters to totalitarian dictators

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I compare PED users to murderers — of course, it’s not the same thing. But please follow my reasoning. Lots of murderers never get caught. Yet society has no trouble punishing murders who get arrested and convicted. It’s not like a defense lawyer walks into court and says, “Thousands of murderers get away with their crimes, so you should let my client, who wiped out an entire family, go free in the interest of fair play.”

That would be absurd. It also is absurd to let McGwire or Palmeiro into the Hall just because we don’t have the goods on somebody else. We have the goods on McGwire and Palmeiro.

– Lowell Cohn, Santa Rosa Press-Democrat.

Cohn has become the Internet’s new whipping boy for his ridiculous murder comp, but that’s not actually the thing that most stands out about this article to me.

He repeatedly states that he feels good about not voting for known PED users like Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro and Barry Bonds. That’s weird to me. Does that really feel good? Even if you’re broken up about steroid use in baseball — as Cohn undoubtedly is — is it really ever enjoyable to punish someone? Don’t get me wrong, there are times when punishment is just and proper. But even in those cases, is it fun to be the punisher?*

Apparently Cohn thinks so, and that’s his right. It’s just not for me. I made a terrible substitute teacher.

* – It is definitely fun to be The Punisher, except for the whole tortured-antihero thing.

From the Wikipedia: Pale Male

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Heard about this thing for the first time this morning. Here I thought the city’s only notable bird was the middle finger. (Ed. note: Heyoo!)

From the Wikipedia: Pale Male.

Pale Male is a Red-tailed hawk that has made his home in New York City since the early 1990s. He is the first of his species known to have built his nest in a building instead of a tree, and he has sired at least 26 chicks. He is named Pale Male because he is a male bird and he is pale.

I’m on the record as saying birds are pretty stupid, and I’ve never really understood birdwatching as a hobby. I mean, look: I like looking at birds because they can fly, which is awesome, and they’re colorful, which is nice too. When I see a blue jay or a cardinal in my backyard I’m all, “hey, look at that bird! It can fly and it’s colorful, and I can identify it because I recognize it from a baseball team’s logo.”

But then after I look at it for a little while, either the bird flies away or I go back to tending to my barbecue, because it’s highly unlikely the bird’s really going to do anything all that interesting. And after the bird leaves I’m never like, “damn, I wish I were still looking at that bird.”

Hawks and other birds of prey are clearly a different story, though. First of all, they’re called raptors, which is viciously badass. And I know I only think that because of the velociraptors from Jurassic Park, but whatever. Also, they’re birds that totally dominate other animals. Death from above.

When I was in Costa Rica I watched a hawk stalk a family of monkeys, then swoop in and grab a baby monkey. Monkeys are sweet so it was sad and all, but they’re also crazy dexterous even when they’re young, so that’s pretty impressive work by the hawk right there. Really some impressive nature all around.

Back to Pale Male: After being chased from Central Park by crows in 1991, he moved to a classy 5th Ave. apartment building, sort of a real-life rags to riches story. In his prime location on E. 74th St., overlooking the park, he has romanced four different mates.

In 2004, a group of chumps and suckers, obviously jealous of Pale Male’s remarkable virility, took down his nest and the anti-pigeon spikes upon which it was built. But it turned out Mary Tyler Moore lived in the building, and she and a group of birders protested until the co-op board agreed to install a new “cradle” for his nest.

Since then, there have been numerous accounts of other red-tailed hawks setting up camp on buildings around the city. Presumably many of them are Pale Male’s offspring. I will go ahead and assume this means the city’s going to eventually be overrun with a bunch of inbred hawks, which might be kind of awesome if you think about it.

Pale Male has been featured in a PBS Documentary, three children’s books, a Steve Earle song, and numerous Conan O’Brien sketches.