Category Archives: Words

Most awkward conversation

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We were shooting some interviews for the Baseball Show yesterday and we cornered Chris Carter to ask him about his at-bat music, Hulk Hogan’s old ring-approach song, “Real American.”

Carter was happy to oblige. He said he liked Hogan growing up and that the song got him pumped up. Nothing really groundbreaking.

But I’m a jackass and these pieces are supposed to be entertaining, so I pushed it. Playing off the lyrics, I asked him if he fought for what’s right and fought for his life or something stupid like that — I’m pretty sure I even botched the lyrics a bit and screwed up the joke.

Carter tensed up a bit and I soon realized why.

“I, ahh, I don’t know about that question,” he said, “but I really support what our troops do and, ahh…”

I stopped him and he looked relieved. I said I was just playing off the lyrics and that we wouldn’t use that part. He was cool about it and even said we could include it in the show for laughs — we won’t — but I think it’s an interesting example of how careful these guys have to be. The whole Walter Reed thing is apparently fresh in everyone’s mind but mine, and Carter was obviously being cautious — overly cautious, maybe — about walking into any traps.

And don’t get me wrong, knowing how to deal with stuff like that is part (albeit a small fraction) of what baseball players, as public figures, get paid to do.

But — and this won’t win me any favors with some of my colleagues — since there are certain members of the press ready to spin every word out of an athlete’s mouth into something shocking or sensational, you understand why some players clearly think it’s easier to clam up or turn into cliche machines than to actually say what they’re thinking.

I wasn’t out to make Carter look bad and he figured that out pretty quickly, but he doesn’t know me from any of the 30-odd reporters slouching around the clubhouse.

And so though it might have seemed a bit odd to me, he was probably right to protect himself when I asked him a stupid question about fighting for his life. For all he knew, I could have seized the opportunity to excoriate him for hating America, as is trendy these days. There’s Web traffic in that, I’m sure.

Chocolate war!

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But there are two separate groups vying for credit in what some might consider the research arm of a chocolate factory war.

The candy maker Mars is expected to announce on Wednesday that a project it financed has essentially completed the raw sequence of the genome of the cacao tree, and that it would make the data freely available to researchers.

The announcement upstages a consortium involving French government laboratories and Pennsylvania State University that is backed in part by a competitor of Mars, Hershey. This group says it has also completed the sequence, but cannot discuss it until its paper analyzing the genome is published in a scientific journal.

– Andrew Pollack, N.Y. Times.

Whoa, nelly. The article says that understanding the chocolate genome sequence should help chocolatiers create more chocolate more deliciously, which seems awesome at first but is actually kind of terrifying when you think of it.

The French government is normally considered benign to the point of punchlines, but I’ve read Brave New World, and I’ve got to think that if someone were creating a drug to tranquilize society, it starts with a mass-produced super-chocolate.

Also, who the hell knew that Mars and Hershey were into this type of stuff? Mars has a research arm? I mean I guess that makes sense, but that’s so completely ominous.

And furthermore, I just now considered the implications of a chocolate war. Chocolate war! That’s about the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard of. You can call me naive, but I like to envision a world where all wars are chocolate wars — not like that book, but like replacing gunpowder with pure molten chocolate, and then when soldiers get hit they’re all covered in chocolate, and they say, “OK, you got me,” and they have to stand down, but the upside is free chocolate. Kind of like paintball, I guess, but the guns shoot chocolate truffles. Holy crap why has no one invented that yet?

Finally, you know who’s behind all this research at Mars? The article calls him Howard Yana-Shapiro, but you may know him better as Santa Claus:

This Derek Jeter thing

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I saw the video of the Derek Jeter acting thing from last night but I haven’t yet seen the way the Internet or newspapers are taking to it. Put me down for thinking it’s pretty awesome, though.

Look: It’s downright silly, and certainly something for which Jeter deserves to be taunted mercilessly by opposing fans. But he exploited the situation to gain a competitive advantage. Is that cheating? Kind of, but if you’re going to get bent out of shape every time a player tries to mislead an umpire you’re going to have a whole lot of blustering to do. It just so happens that this example was particularly egregious, the evidence proving it nonsensical particularly strong, and Jeter’s reaction particularly absurd.

But what matters most is, like he said, that he got to first base. And it’s cool that he recognized the opportunity, and that he appropriately values that chance. Probably realizing how important it is to reach first base and seizing every opportunity you have to do so is a big part of the mindset that makes you become Derek Jeter.

The doubling over felt a little unnecessary though.

Another thing I want to reiterate, since this is coming up all over again now: It really amazes me that so many people can be so certain that the quality of Major League umpiring has gotten worse in some tangible way. This strikes me as a combination of confirmation bias — there are lots of stories of how the umpiring is bad, so we’re seeing a normal amount of bad calls and every time thinking, “yup, more bad umpiring!” — and new technologies that allow us to better assess umpiring.

I imagine if we could watch back every game from the 60s, 70s and 80s in high definition with ultra-mo replay and a billion camera angles like we have today, we’d spot thousands of blown calls at first and a hundred gaffes like Jeter’s last night that just got shrugged off by fans and media in the past because they appeared too close to contend with.

Things that suck hardcore

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1. Jenrry Mejia getting injured
2. REO Speedwagon
3. The Phillies moving three games into first place
4. Most other things

Man, that sucked. We’ll have more information soon for sure, and just last night I talked to Dillon Gee about rehabbing and working all the way back from a shoulder injury. But shoulder injuries tend to be pretty bad news for pitchers, so here’s hoping this is a minor one.

Beyond REO Speedwagon heights of suckitude. No offense to fans of REO Speedwagon. I’m getting a late start today but I’ll have more in a bit. This video is amazing:

Shockingly, Ray Lewis’ son also good at football

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Ray Lewis had a big game last week, leading his team to a dominant victory with 504 yards, two touchdowns and six completed tackles. No, we’re not crazy, we’re just not talking about the Ray Lewis you’re thinking of; it’s not the Baltimore Ravens linebacker. We’re talking about his son, Ray Lewis III, a budding sophomore star at Lake Mary Prep High School in Florida.

According to the Orlando Sentinel, Ray Lewis III gained 504 yards in a 34-7 Lake Mary Prep win over Windermere Prep on Friday.

– Cameron Smith, Prep Rally.

I can’t decide if the 504-yard total looks more or less impressive when you find out it came as a combination of rushing, passing, receiving and punt and kick returning. Probably more impressive. Ray Lewis’ kid pretty much dominated this football game.

Anyway, it reminded me of the most hilariously dominant burst of individual performance I’ve ever seen in a football game. And amazingly enough, the kid responsible was actually on my team.

That means I’m not talking about the humiliating time when, in my first-ever game starting at inside linebacker my junior year, a kid named Jason Ham from Port Washington nearly set the Long Island single-game rushing record against us. Or the time in middle school when a dude on Malverne named Jeffrey Birthwright dunked over the uprights (in middle school!) after his fourth rushing touchdown in the first half. Or the time in pee-wee ball when a boy named Jeremiah Pope from Inwood scored so many touchdowns that my dad and I walked off the field noting to remember his name as he would certainly make the NFL someday (we weren’t terribly far off.)

No, the instance I’m talking about happened in the first JV game of the season when I was in ninth grade, and really lasted only a quarter.

The opening kickoff fell in the hands of a kid on our team named Peter, a kid who played fullback in eighth grade the year before but grew up, thinned out and moved to tailback that season. The first time he touched the ball — the first time anybody but the kicker touched the ball that year — he returned in 76 yards for a touchdown.

On the ensuing series, our defense got a stop, so our opponent — I forget who it was but even-money it was West Hempstead, sucking like this — had to punt. Peter returned it 68 yards for another touchdown.

We weren’t able to stop them the next series, but obviously they didn’t want to put the kickoff anywhere near the kid so they squibbed it. We recovered. Then, on the first play from scrimmage, Peter ran the ball 65 yards for a touchdown.

The first three times he touched the ball, he broke touchdowns of 65+ yards. Craziest thing I’ve ever seen. It wasn’t even that he was faster than everyone on the field, either; he just had this remarkable vision for where the seams would develop, combined with outstanding quickness to cut deftly and hit those seams

Sadly, that first quarter of his first season of JV was probably Peter’s peak. He was a nice kid, but he struggled with his grades and authority — at least once in spectacular fashion — and it led to a lot of trouble remaining on the football field.

Everybody hurts

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Major-league players have combined for 448 disabled-list trips so far this season, good for an average of nearly 15 per team. While this figure falls in line with the past couple seasons, the number of injury stints has been on the rise for the past quarter century. From 1984-89, baseball teams averaged 9.3 DL stints a year. That number rose to 12.2 in the 1990s and has reached 14.8 since 2000….

While the primary theory for the injury spike is better testing and diagnostics, players might have been better off when the winter workout consisted of lifting six packs and hot dogs. New York Mets medical director Dr. David Altchek of the Hospital for Special Surgery in Manhattan believes today’s player may be too committed to his craft. “The modern player, in trying to constantly improve, may not be getting the necessary rest and recovery time,” Dr. Altchek says. “This year, we decided that the Mets would reduce time spent in off-field workouts by two-thirds. The result thus far in 2010, knock on wood, is that DL days have been cut in half.”

– Michael Salfino, Wall Street Journal.

Interesting facts from Salfino on the increasing rate of DL stints over the past 25 years. I imagine at least some of it has to do with something not mentioned in the article — players make a lot more money these days, so teams are less willing to take risks with their investments.

And so I’d also be interested in seeing an exhaustive study that would be impossible to undertake — the relative length of careers now and then, plus how many fewer careers were shortened by permanent injury and stuff along those lines. In other words: Does more careful treatment of players benefit them in the long run? I would guess yes, but then I’m no doctor.

Nick Evans: Guy?

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With few fans on hand at Citi Field last night and presumably few people watching on TV, in a meaningless game against a terrible team, Nick Evans seized his opportunity for some rare Major League playing time and smacked a home run. It looked like this:

I bleat on about this endlessly: Too often under this regime, the Mets have overpaid free agents to fill out the margins of their roster instead of developing in-house options to fill useful, albeit unheralded, roster roles. It appears that in 2011, more out of necessity than design, they will not be able to repeat that.

Evans is 24 now and will be 25 when Spring Training rolls around, and it sure doesn’t seem like the team considers him much of a prospect anymore. But before he gets cast into a Mike Hessman mold, some Minor League masher doomed to dominate Triple-A pitching for the next decade, perhaps the Mets will provide him an opportunity to serve a valuable role as a righty corner bench bat in the bigs.

Evans, after all, crushed pitching at the two upper levels of the Minors to the tune of a .317/.371/.536 line this season, and boasts a career Minor League split of .314/.391/.572 against left-handed pitching.

At this point, it doesn’t seem like carrying Evans on the Major League level — even with limited at-bats — would amount to hindering his development much. Though for some reason the Mets didn’t let him play the outfield spots this season, he can man all four corners and provide a bit of pop, as a few of us saw last night.

In short, Nick Evans is probably ready to be a Major League guy for several years on the cheap, and the Mets could use those.

On individual vs. collective art, or: It ain’t no fun if the homies can’t have none

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In the comments section yesterday, djonpoynt brings up an interesting point about Dr. Dre:

Dre is known to use “ghost producers” on some tracks on which he gets sole production credit. This is tough to substantiate because it’s such a touchy and ambiguous subject in hiphop. And obviously, Dre would never go on record and admit it.It’s been talked about in hiphop circles since “Chronic 2001″ was released when he had a production team working with him, including Scott Storch (former Roots keyboardist and now super-producer himself). Dre isn’t known for his instrumental skills, so he usually relies on others like Storch to lay down riffs, basslines, etc. Though to his credit, he’s probably the one who lays down drums and ultimately sequences these beats.

In fact, if you check out his production discography (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Dre_production_discography), it’s littered with co-producers whom he does give credit to. Notables: Storch did the famous riff on Still DRE and Xzibit’s X. A key guy named Mel-Man co-produced Chronic 2001 and The Marshall Mathers LP, doing significant synthesizer work on Xxplosive, Next Episode, Forgot About Dre, and Real Slim Shady.

My personal take is, he established himself by doing the bulk of production for the original Chronic and Doggystyle. But after he reached celebrity status, he needed to enlist others just to keep up with demand, which is completely fine.

Where it gets fuzzy is, how many no-name producers did he work with who never appeared on liner notes? I’m sure there’s more than a few, which probably isn’t that big of a deal given how hiphop production works in the first place (sampling, drum machines, etc). It’s just that a lot of people solely associate Dre with certain classic tracks, when much of the time he actually has a team of co-producers working for him.

I can’t speak to the uncredited producers part of it, but I can say this for sure: Very, very few pieces of art in any medium are truly the work of an individual. Certain works of fiction, maybe, but even then there’s usually plenty of editorial interaction. It is the tendency of the consumer and critic to associate the finished product with a single artist, usually attributing to that artist some sort of unified vision, but clearly that’s not often how it works.

Even some great Renaissance masters didn’t actually paint large portions of their paintings. They sketched out ideas for what they wanted them to look like, worked certain important parts of the pieces themselves, and then left big portions up to their apprentices and underlings. Blew my mind when I learned that. I always envisioned the lonely-painter-in-a-studio type image we romanticize, but those guys — like Dr. Dre, really — were in high demand.

Probably the best and most obvious example is with film. We talk about Woody Allen movies like they’re all his own because it’s simpler to do it that way than to consider the creative input and choices of the hundreds of other people involved in creating a motion picture.

And I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing or anything else, it’s just a thing. But the truth is, perhaps the person making the final, overarching aesthetic decisions should get the bulk of the credit, since he or she is the one making the choices that ultimately determine the piece’s success.

No, Dre didn’t play the riff on Still D.R.E., but presumably he recruited Storch to record on the track, influenced what Storch played and selected that particular riff from many that got left on the proverbial cutting-room floor. And while maybe none of that classifies as typical nuts-and-bolts production in one sense, it seems like it should all fall under some larger umbrella of “producer.”

After all, those tracks are nearly all unified by the throbbing funk we identify we Dre’s production. It could be that he’s relying on co-producers as an easier way out, but it strikes me — and this, I should say, is entirely uninformed and spoken mostly as a hopeful Dr. Dre fan — as equally possible that he’s leaning on collaborators to help develop his production beyond the scope of his own limitations.

Regardless, the most awesome news is that Dr. Dre has a sweet robot helmet:

The forthcoming Beltran thing

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Right Field: … Where the starter next April has to be Carlos Beltran, assuming certain reasonable outcomes. Consider that Beltran has an $18.5 million contract for 2011, a history of bad knees, just turned 34, and his OPS this year is .709.

Who exactly is trading for him? A team willing to take on almost none of his salary, and part with an unimpressive prospect for their trouble, I figure.

So since the Mets could pay some other team $17 million for the chance to see Beltran rebound, why not pay him a little more and see if he can help you in the final year of his deal? As recently as last season, he hit at an elite level, and though it is a foolishly small sample, his OPS is up above .900 in September.

– Howard Megdal, SNY.tv.

I don’t know what will happen with Beltran this offseason. His agent, Scott Boras, has grumbled — with reason — about the way team brass “anonymously” fumed to reporters after Beltran, because he had other charitable commitments, missed an optional trip to Walter Reed hospital to visit veterans.

So I imagine politics will play into whatever happens with Beltran this offseason, for better or worse. But that said, I agree with Howard. Even if Beltran demonstrates some massive turnaround in the next two weeks, no team is likely to take on his contract unless the Mets essentially provide the Gary Matthews Jr. treatment — eating most of it and accepting little in terms of players in return.

And if they’re going to do that, then, man, I don’t know. It’s hard to bet that he’ll ever be anything like healthy again, but if you’re just looking in terms of back-of-the-baseball-card likelihood for a bounceback, Beltran seems a reasonable bet.

Basically what Howard said. He’s got too much potential upside to be kicked to the curb like he’s Gary Matthews Jr. They would just need a very solid backup plan for if Beltran gets hurt or proves ineffective.