Category Archives: Words

Hey look, actual baseball stuff!

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But at the risk of disagreeing with Ted Berg, something I try never to do, I believe the 5-6 starts Mejia makes between now and October should be at least somewhat determinative as to whether the Mets go after a starter this offseason.

Consider that all reports have the Mets with very little money to spend this offseason. So should Mejia, say, dominate in a similar way to his Monday start in Buffalo, or even approach that from a peripheral standpoint, the Mets should really spend the money it would take to bring in a starting pitcher when they have a returning five of a (hypothetically) dominant Mejia, Dickey, Niese, Santana and Pelfrey? When the team has no second baseman, one outfielder whose production can be counted on, no backup plans at catcher or first base, and no bullpen?

– Howard Megdal, New York Baseball Digest.

Well dammit, Howard, try harder.

Seriously, though, this is an easier point to contend with now that Mejia looked unspectacular in his first start on Saturday, but even if he goes out and dominates his next four outings I’ll still likely argue that he should start next season in Triple-A.

If Mejia pitches every fifth game for the rest of the season and throws a complete game in each outing (which probably won’t happen), he’ll barely have thrown 100 innings this season. The Mets will be wise to limit him in 2011, and bringing him along slowly in the Minor Leagues — allowing him to better his control and secondary arsenal — seems like as good a way as any to do that. Then, if he succeeds in Triple-A, unleash him on the National League. Let him force his way into the Majors, rather than the other way around.

Dillon Gee’s nice start provides some optimism that the Mets can fill out their pitching staff from within regardless of whether Mejia is ready, but I’d still argue that the team should pursue rotation depth this offseason. Assuming Dickey, Santana, Pelfrey and Niese all stay healthy and pitch this well again in 2011, with no contingency plan, could burn the team.

Of course, as Howard points out, pitching is hardly the team’s only need and the wisdom of all offseason moves is dictated by the cost.

Yes, the Mets will need to find some way to better their offense, though I think they can actually safely assume something of a return to form from Jason Bay and some improvement from Ike Davis, and that simply not having Jeff Francoeur suck up 400 at-bats in a corner outfield spot will benefit the team immensely.

These are concerns for the offseason, of course.

The important thing is that the Mets are still playing baseball, and that with Mejia taking the mound tonight against the full-strength Phillies, there’s actually something interesting to watch.

World’s most expensive sandwich probably not even that good

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Actually the gold sprinkles are relatively cheap. What makes it so expensive is that white truffle cheese, which itself cost £92 to make.

Blunos used a £5 loaf of sourdough dressed with extra virgin olive oil and then layered cheese, slices of quail egg, tomato, apple and fresh figs. He added dainty mustard red frills, pea shoots and the herb red amaranth for a salad layer and topped the whole masterpiece with edible gold dust.

– Steven Morris, Guardian.co.uk.

Wait, so you’re telling me I’m going to pay the equivalent of $170 for a sandwich and there’s not even going to be any meat on there? Look, I’m sure that white truffle cheese is plenty tasty — wait, actually, no, I’m not sure that white truffle cheese is plenty tasty. Who wants white truffle cheese? I’m about cheddar or jack, a nice hearty cheese.

And I’m sorry, figs aren’t any good. Fig Newtons are delicious but figs themselves are too sweet. We have a fig tree in my backyard and it yields billions of figs. And every day my wife’s all, “you’ve got to eat some of these figs, we’ve got so many,” but sorry, they’re gross. If I wanted candy, I’d plunge into that huge bag of Nerds and Now and Laters we’ve got in the pantry for some reason. And neither those nor the figs are appropriate to be anywhere near my sandwich.

Quail eggs and edible gold I’m fine with. I can abide a baller-ass sandwich even if I can’t afford one. Also, my compliments to the chef on his fine mustache:

Hat tip to commenter Andrew.

Derek Jeter is moving

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The 5,425 square-foot apartment has four bedrooms, five and a half bathrooms and a chef’s eat-in kitchen. It also has 16-foot floor-to-ceiling windows, which flood the apartment with light and give jaw-dropping views of the East River.

But don’t worry that Jeter won’t have a place to call home now that plans on vacating 845 United Nations Plaza.

He is putting the finishing touches on a massive, 30,875 square-foot, seven-bedroom, nine-bathroom waterfront home on Davis Island in Tampa, Fla.

– FoxSports.com.

OK, here’s what jumps out at me. And I don’t traffic in high-end real estate or hobnob with the elite too much, so maybe some of you can help me out here: Do rich people’s homes always have so many bathrooms, or is this something particular to Jeter?

Because five and a half baths, when you’ve got four bedrooms, that just seems excessive. And at the new place — nine bathrooms for seven bedrooms? Am I nuts or is that just weird?

I mean I guess it makes sense to have a bathroom for every bedroom so Derek Jeter’s houseguests don’t need to be inconvenienced by having to share bathrooms, but having two additional bathrooms means he’s either anticipating more guests than he has bedrooms — Nick Swisher crashing on the sofa, a couple Giambis strewn about on the floor — or he expects there’ll be situations in which people don’t want to go all the way back to their rooms to shower and so could stop at either of the two extra bathrooms Jeter has strategically placed inside the mansion.

And you know what? When you’re dealing with 30,875 square feet I guess that’s a reasonable possibility.

Also, when you have multiple half-bathrooms in your home, how is that listed? Do two half-bathrooms count as one bathroom? Could it be that Jeter’s new place just has one regular bathroom and 16 half-bathrooms? That would be kind of awesome. Maybe he has the world’s smallest bladder and just wanted a water closet at every turn, for his comfort.

Here’s the thing

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Take Jacobs, for example. He’s apparently annoyed about being demoted to the No. 2 running back role behind Ahmad Bradshaw. OK, fine. You and I would be annoyed too. Human nature, etc.

But Jacobs deserves to be demoted, based on the way he played last year. Bradshaw’s injuries severely limited his playing time, Derrick Ward was gone, the rookie they drafted got hurt and missed the whole year. Last year was Jacobs’ year to dominate — to stamp himself as one of the best and most reliable backs in the league. And he didn’t do it.

Jacobs ran carefully when he should have been aggressive. He whined about the way he’s used and perceived. He stunk, along with so many other parts of the team, and as a result he has lost his starting job.

For many, this would be a wake-up call. A sign that something has to change. That the way you went about your business last year wasn’t good enough and you need to look in the mirror and do something about it. But not for Jacobs.

– Dan Graziano, SNY.tv.

I was going to write about this today, but Graz took care of it. I don’t like to put too much stock in players blowing up at reporters, but answering questions is part of the job, and — like Dan says — while it’s human nature to be upset about losing his starting spot, Jacobs has a lot of nerve to be complaining. For all the reasons Dan mentions, but also this:

You’re playing behind a guy who has had injury problems his whole career on a team known for sharing carries. You’re going to get plenty of chances. If you know you’re better than a backup — and it sounds like you feel that way — make something of them.

Finally, I am listed alongside Luis Guzman somewhere

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I just got a review copy of Alex Belth’s Lasting Yankee Stadium Memories, a collection of essays from well-known and less-well-known writers about, well, their lasting memories of Yankee Stadium.

I haven’t read them all yet, but the book looks awesome. I’m obviously biased because I’m in there — near the back, in the section about the new stadium — but at the same time, often I’m disappointed with my writing when I go back and read it later and I’m pretty happy with the way my entry came out.

Of particular note, of the stuff I’ve read so far, are Tony Kornheiser’s piece about growing up a Giants fan — poo-pooing all Billy Crystal’s hoopla around Yankee Stadium — and Emma Span’s hilarious bit about Game 6 of the 2004 LCS in the Bronx.

You should probably buy this book, even though you’re probably a Mets fan. It’s got contributions from all sorts of famous writers and great baseball writers, plus from Luis Guzman and John C. McGinley, because that’s just how Belth rolls. Many, maybe most, of the writers involved aren’t Yankee fans. It’s just about the stadium, and baseball and memories and all that.

Plus it’s got me in there.

It ships in October but you can pre-order it from Amazon.com now.

All my rowdy friends are tuckered out from the work week and watching football in their own homes tonight

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Ryan and his staff have altered the way people look at the Jets and given the team an unexpected marketing boost as they move into the New Meadowlands Stadium, where the Jets will have a new identity even though they will still share quarters with the Giants. For the Jets, the promotional dividends produced by “Hard Knocks” have not been countered by a disastrous injury. The worst that happened was Ryan’s mother (and Tony Dungy) expressing consternation about the coach’s profanity.

And like a good cliffhanger, the hero of the tale, Revis, returned just in time to end the series.

– Richard Sandomir, N.Y. Times.

I’ve neglected the Jets for the last couple weeks here because, honestly, I find preseason football awful and the hype around it difficult to bear. It’s meaningless. Teams show very little in the preseason and the starters hardly play.

But I probably should have mentioned the Revis thing, which is legitimately huge. For no particular reason, I felt confident from the start that the Jets and Revis would get something hammered out, then grew nervous thanks to Hard Knocks and the media blackout.

Anyway, now football season is starting. It’s starting! Football season! Hooray!

Before that happens, two final thoughts about Hard Knocks upon its finale last night:

• Everything they aired only served to confirm/strengthen my feelings about Mark Sanchez. Clearly he’s hilarious and awesome and willing to wear Taco Bell hats. What a hero. It only helps that I think he might actually turn into a decent quarterback.

I also like the idea of having him call the offense for the last preseason game. Then I thought it was particularly interesting or funny, or something, that he called that little slip-out pass on the goal line for the touchdown. That’s a Madden play. It’s a good call, no doubt, and it worked, but that’s one of those unstoppable Madden plays.

And it struck me that Sanchez’s generation — hell, my generation — is now growing up and coming of age and impacting professional football, and we all came up playing that game.

Madden’s not exactly like real football, obviously, but it’s not a terrible simulation either — and it gets more accurate all the time. And it encourages players to watch and interact with the game in a way they never would have if they were just playing it then tracking themselves on film in some dark room the following Monday with the coach yelling at them.

And so I wonder how the game will continue to change as a generation of players who grew up not just playing the game, but coaching and play-calling and strategizing in a decently accurate simulation year-round, comes of age.

• I could do without ever seeing Mike Tannenbaum on camera again. I know Hard Knocks is reality TV and the idea is that they’re all supposed to be behaving the way they would if the cameras weren’t there, but there’s no way you could convince me that everyone involved wasn’t conscious of the cameras throughout.

Rex Ryan and Mike Westhoff were really good at playing themselves, it seemed, but Tannenbaum’s performance seemed the most forced, like he was overacting the role of exasperated football GM.

Plus it just didn’t sit right with me that they filmed guys getting cut. That’s a major life event. If I’m a 23-year-old kid trying to make it in the NFL, there’s absolutely no way I want that documented and broadcast to a million homes or whatever.

Sandwich of the decade

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“Where you are going — this is a good neighborhood?” the cabbie asked as we sped south, past the crush of skyscrapers, the chain stores giving way to empty storefronts, then empty lots.

“I don’t know, man. You tell me.”

“I don’t usually come so far south,” he said as we pulled up alongside a few concrete, cylindrical, vaguely Soviet apartment towers pocked with evenly placed circular windows.

This part of Chicago didn’t make the guidebook. Underbelly. A promising sign, perhaps. I didn’t come here for a tourist’s sandwich.

It’s not hard to spot Ricobene’s once you reach 26th st. Its glowing red neon sign hangs between a freeway overpass and Chinese live-poultry market, the squawking audible as you walk by. Across the street stands a massage parlor and a dive bar with a few happy-hour revelers huddled outside around cigarettes. Inside is a pleasant dining room, a clean well-lighted place brimming with nostalgia and black-and-white photographs, bursting with warm smells. An oasis.

The sandwich: Breaded steak from Ricobene’s, multiple locations in the Chicago area.

The construction: Thinly sliced steak, breaded and fried, on Italian bread with hot peppers, marinara sauce, mozzarella cheese and giardiniera — a type of pickled vegetable relish, here consisting of peppers, olives and celery.

The peppers and mozzarella cheese were optional. Obviously I opted for both. The woman asked if I wanted “hot or sweet.” I assume she was referring to the peppers. I went with hot.

Important background info: Cerrone faded by Sunday, sick with a sinus infection, but I still wanted to try more Chicago specialties. I settled on breaded steak because it was breaded steak, and Ricobene’s because it was open. The tip came via the excellent Jan and Michael Stern of the Road Food book series, which I could not recommend more heartily. Those people are heroes.

What it looks like:

(My apologies, this picture sucks)

How it tastes: You might know by now that I’m prone to hyperbole. But I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say the breaded steak sandwich from Ricobene’s is the pinnacle of human achievement.

Holy hell. Every single flavor I could want on a sandwich was on this sandwich. The beef was tender like veal, and the breading savory. The sauce was sweet and flavorful. The bread was sturdy enough to hold the thing together, but soft and delicious as well. The cheese was heaping, moist, cheesy. All those aspects added up to something like the best veal parmigiana hero I’ve ever had, and I’ve had a lot of veal parmigiana heroes. Some really, really good ones, too.

But what put this thing over the top were the giardiniera and hot peppers. The former added a tangy flavor, plus crunch from the celery. The latter set my mouth on fire, and amplified all the other amazing flavors in this sandwich.

The thing probably weighed about a pound and a half, but I wolfed it down, possessed.

When I finished, I stumbled out to the curb, dizzy and delirious. A couple of cops pulled up, and instinct told me to run — I felt like I had just done something illegal. I couldn’t, though. I couldn’t bring myself to leave the front of the restaurant.

I knew I had to leave Chicago the next morning, but I tried to consider ways I could have another breaded steak sandwich before I did. I thought about walking back in and ordering another right then even though the coma was already setting in.

Not knowing what else to do, I tweeted a few nonsensical things. Playing with my phone gave me an excuse to keep standing there.

It started raining. I kept standing there. I knew I probably looked like a crazy person. I didn’t care. I was a crazy person. I was standing outside a restaurant, right next to a live-poultry market and under the freeway overpass, in some odd area of a city I don’t know because I couldn’t tear myself away after eating an inconceivably good sandwich.

Finally I approached the crowd outside the bar. I wanted to accost them. I wanted to say, “good lord! What in hell are you doing at this bar, don’t you know what they’re serving across the street? Why are you wasting space on beer when that sandwich is available to you right there? You maniacs!”

But instead I collected myself and asked them where to find a cab. They pointed me to a depot down the block and I headed back to the hotel, forever changed.

What it’s worth: This sandwich cost like $6 or something. The cab rides were about $10 each way. This was easily worth $26, plus I’m always down for a sandwich adventure anyway. I could have taken the El train there, too, I just got lazy.

Hell, if I were working with a larger sample I’d say you should probably travel to Chicago for this sandwich, but since I’ve only had one I don’t want to send you packing on the possibility of an outlier. This was a sandwich worth traveling for, though.

The rating: 99 out of 100, and only because I’m not sure I’m willing to give out 100s. Best sandwich I’ve had in years, though, and since there’s no Chicago baseball player that makes for an appropriate comparison, I’m just going to have to go for it: The Michael Jordan of sandwiches.

On absolutely everything

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At its core “The Grand Design” is an examination of a relatively new candidate for the “ultimate theory of everything,” something called M-theory, itself an extension of string theory, which tries to reconcile general relativity and quantum mechanics. “M-theory is not a theory in the usual sense,” the authors write. “It is a whole family of different theories.” According to M-theory, “ours is not the only universe,” the authors say. “Instead M-theory predicts that a great many universes were created out of nothing.” The image that comes to mind here, others have written about M-theory, is of a God blowing soap bubbles.

But Mr. Hawking and Mr. Mlodinow assert that “their creation does not require the intervention of some supernatural being or god. Rather, these multiple universes arise naturally from physical law. They are a prediction of science.” Many of these universes would be quite different from ours, they add, and “quite unsuitable for the existence of any form of life,” or at least any form of life remotely like ours.

M-theory, if it is confirmed, would be “the unifying theory Einstein was hoping to find,” the authors write. But it’s a somewhat disappointing theory, a patchwork quilt rather than a fine, seamless garment.

– Dwight Garner, N.Y. Times.

OK, let me make this perfectly clear: I am in no position to reasonably doubt Stephen Hawking. Through endless Wikipedia tangents, I’ve tried to wrap my mind around theoretical physics, and I pretty much can’t do it. It seems like it’s the type of thing you’d need to be a physics major in college to fully grasp, and I was an English and music guy. I am not qualified to be discussing this.

But my understanding of M-theory is that it’s an attempt to explain everything we know about how the universe started under the terms of everything we know about how the universe currently functions, at the atomic level, on Earth, in deep space, everywhere.

And all that stuff is complicated, so you kind of work backwards to reconcile everything and settle on a pretty convoluted-sounding conclusion that states there are 11 dimensions, a bunch of them unknowable and unprovable, and you just kind of have to believe they exist because it’s the only way we can figure out to make sense of this all.

Again: I’m oversimplifying and talking out my ass about something I don’t really understand at all. But I read a pretty awesome article in Discover a couple months ago (which is unfortunately not online) that suggested a controversial counter to M-theory.

Some say the laws that govern our universe could have changed over time since the Big Bang, sort of like evolution, except without the whole survival of the fittest part. And so, they say, the scientists trying to use the physical forces as they currently exist to explain what happened eons ago are looking at it the wrong way.

That seems to make sense to me, uninformed though I am. It’s a difficult thing to even think about, but if all of the galaxies in the universe were once compressed into one dense mass, it seems believable that the physical laws governing that mass might be different from the ones governing everything now. Does that make any sense?

Maybe not. No more theoretical astrophysics. The game’s on.

This.

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The Mets perpetually throw away at-bats on pieces not likely to contribute in 2011. It happened in a small way Tuesday when David Wright was scratched and Mike Hessman rather than, say, Nick Evans was used at third base in his place. And it could happen at second base this weekend with Jose Reyes scheduled to return to the lineup Friday to face Philadelphia’s Roy Halladay.

Asked if Ruben Tejada would see the bulk of the starts at second base once Reyes returns, Manuel indicated not necessarily — saying Luis Hernandez merits time based on his recent performances.

– Adam Rubin, ESPN New York.

This. Evans needs at-bats. Tejada needs at-bats. I’m rooting like hell for Hessman, but he’s not part of the team’s future. To piggyback on my earlier point, Evans could be a homegrown Fernando Tatis type without the million-dollar pricetag. And yet the Mets didn’t want him playing the outfield in the Minors for some strange reason and now are opting to give Hessman more at-bats in the Majors.

This is part of the issue with having a lame-duck manager. Manuel has no impetus to do anything besides win games and better his resume. Even an organizational interim guy might be motivated to take a look toward the future and improve his standing with the club.