Category Archives: Words

Twitter Q&A, pt. 2

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Now the baseball stuff:

https://twitter.com/GSchif/status/223424645775368193

I’d take Castro, partly because he’s hit a bit better, partly because he’s ever-so-slightly younger, and mostly because he’s performed well over a sample nearly twice as large as Tejada’s. To succeed like he has in the Majors at his age bodes extremely well for his future. Sam Miller covered this at Baseball Prospectus recently. This sounds ridiculous, but it’s basically even money Castro winds up a Hall of Famer.

That I had to think about it speaks very well of Tejada, who’s not exactly an old man himself. Tejada doesn’t come with Castro’s prospect pedigree, but I suspect that is more an indictment of the fickle hype machine than the player. Tejada’s not flashy in any way, but he’s quickly becoming one of my favorite Mets to watch play. And I know I’m not alone.

And check this out, following Miller’s lead: If Tejada stays healthy this year and plays well enough to keep his career OPS+ at 92 or above, he joins a very short list of guys who have regularly played shortstop in the Majors at his age and not embarrassed themselves offensively. Only 16 shortstops in history have amassed 1,000 plate appearances with at least a 92 OPS+ through their age-22 season. Of them, five are Hall of Famers and one of them is A-Rod, and every single one that played after the dawn of the All-Star Game was an All-Star at some point.

https://twitter.com/JamesPJennings/status/223414750879555584

No, and thank heaven for that because I want to enjoy Mike Trout unencumbered by any of those thoughts. The Angels had two consecutive picks that year from New York teams that had signed away their free agents. With the Mets’ pick — 24th overall — they took a high-school outfielder named Randal Grichuk who is now in High A ball. With the Yankees’ pick — 25th overall, a compensation for Mark Teixeira’s signing — they took a high-school outfielder named Mike Trout who is now impossibly good.

So yeah, if the Mets had their 24th overall pick that year they could have taken Trout. Didn’t happen, but there’s no guarantee they would have anyway. Also, check this out:

The Angels traded Casey Kotchman for Teixeira and got a decent part-season from Teixeira that helped them to the 2008 playoffs, then the pick that brought them Trout. Following the Teixeira transaction-thread back, the Braves’ role in it looks awful. They traded Neftali Feliz, Elvis Andrus, Matt Harrison and Jarrod Saltalamacchia (and Minor Leaguer Beau Jones) to get Teixeira and Ron Mahay.

Mahay left in free agency after that season, and the Braves got a sandwich-round pick they used on lefty Brett DeVall, who never pitched in the Majors and appears to be out of baseball. They kept Teixeira for essentially one full season, then traded him for Casey Kotchman and Minor Leaguer Stephen Marek.

They kept Kotchman for 54 games then traded him to the Red Sox for Adam LaRoche, who provided them excellent production over 57 games but whom, as far as I can tell, they declined to tender a contract in the offseason — meaning no draft-pick compensation.

So for Andrus, Harrison, Feliz and Saltalamacchia — all Major Leaguers, three of them All-Stars — the Braves got one season of Mark Teixeira, part seasons of Casey Kotchman and Adam LaRoche, and two guys who never played in the Majors. For Kotchman and Stephen Marek, the Angels got a part season of Mark Teixeira and a draft pick that netted them Mike Trout.

https://twitter.com/e_lobell/status/223412225451376640

I don’t think they’re going to give up on him in right field this year, nor do I think they should. Duda has been woeful defensively, no doubt, but he’ll likely hit better than he has at some point and we’ll all suddenly be willing to cut him some slack. Plus, if they determine conclusively that he’s a DH/1B type, he’s got to have some value in a trade. And in that case, they’d probably want to keep playing him regularly until they ship him out.

Left field might be an option down the road, but he’s not going to be rangy anywhere. His arm might play a little better in left, but I don’t know that it would make a huge difference for his defense in total.

https://twitter.com/Huerts31/status/223411261868740608

They have Rocky Mountain Oysters in Denver. I seriously considered them for the novelty, and I’m not normally squeamish about anything, but it came time to get on the line and I just couldn’t do it.

I don’t know that I’ve had anything particularly weird at a ballpark. I had an Ichi-roll in Seattle because I couldn’t not, but though that’s not standard ballpark fare, at this point I’d hardly call sushi “weird.”

I can tell you the most satisfying ballpark food I’ve ever had though: Corn. In the midst of a long baseball roadtrip during a brutal heatwave, stuffed with all sorts of greasy fried food and fast food, my friends and I went to see the Peoria Chiefs. I didn’t know I wanted corn until I saw the corn, but I guess my body was trying to tell me to take a break from the processed food because the corn — roasting over a charcoal grill — looked so amazing. And it was. That’s corn country, after all.

 

Twitter Q&A, pt. 1

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I’m heading out of town this weekend for a friend’s bachelor party. I’ll have a more Mets-heavy Q&A post tomorrow, but I’m writing it today so if there’s any major breaking news between now and then it won’t be in there. Also, if you come to this site for major breaking news, you’re probably not still coming to this site.

Here we go. Apparently the Twitter/Wordpress thing is going to embed my one Tweet with all the responses:

https://twitter.com/connallon/status/223408510271098881

Do you mean I have to choose between pizza and ice-cream cake and can never eat the other one again, or I have to pick which one I’d rather eat for every single meal for the rest of my life?

Either way, it’s pizza. For one thing, there’s way more variety. Ice cream cake is great, but it’s always primarily ice cream. There are so many possible options for pizza toppings, not to mention styles of pizza. I could eat a New York-style pepperoni slice for breakfast, then a Chicago-style sausage slice for lunch, then a brick-oven pizza with soppressata on it for dinner. That’s three different types of sausage in one day, my friend. And pizza is one of our best delivery systems for sausage.

And maybe now you’re saying, well there’s nothing in this hypothetical question that prevents you from eating sausage-topped ice-cream cake. Well how about propriety, bro? Until I taste it and determine otherwise, I’m going to assume any sausage-topped ice-cream cake is a gluttonous gimmick. Sausage-topped pizza is a delicious meaty meal. Also, most of the places that sell ice-cream cakes don’t even stock sausage, so I’m going to have to bring my own sausage to the Carvel and ask them to whip me up something fresh. Not only does it seem like that’d take a long time, but it also, I think, violates the spirit of the question.

Carlos Beltran is fit to be blamed for everything. Presumably your waitress was tired from staying up too late watching Beltran do awesome things on a baseball field somewhere.

There was a Comic-Con in Phoenix when I was there a couple of months ago. My friends alerted me to it on the trip from the airport to our hotel, and within five minutes we witnessed a parking-lot light-saber battle fit for George Michael Bluth.

Judge me if you must: I’m hardly a bully and really never was much of one even in high-school when I was a total football bro, but walking through herds of people in makeshift superhero costumes gave me an overwhelming urge to start dolling out spirited wedgies. Note that they would have been vaguely ironic wedgies, because, again, I’m a 31-year-old man and I’d be doing it more to celebrate the very silly concept of wedgying nerds than because I actually want to punish them for their hobbies of choice. But that’s a difficult distinction to elucidate when you’ve got a guy’s underwear up over his head.

My wife brought home a Rubik’s Cube from a med-school class a few weeks ago. I’m still not clear on what it has to do with medicine, but the thing has been sitting on the coffee table next to my recliner since. So inevitably I started messing with it, trying to figure it out without resorting to the instructions or the websites upon websites I assume exist that are dedicated to cracking it.

It’s so hard. After playing with it for a while you start seeing the cube differently, and you get to understand which moves you need to make to get each square where you want it. But I still haven’t gotten it. I can get a full face of one color pretty easily, but then I start working on a second face and screw up the first one, then eventually get really frustrated and just jumble it all up again. I assume I’m not going about it the right way, and that someone’s going to tell me that in the comments now. I know. I don’t want your help. I need to make this happen on my own.

I wouldn’t call that “my favorite” though. I think I actually hate it. But every so often I’m watching TV, a commercial comes on and I pick the thing up and can’t stop.

I think I’ll go with the Slinky. Slinkies are awesome. Total one-trick pony, but it’s a really neat trick.

When I was really young, I harassed my dad into taking me to an automat somewhere in Midtown while we were in the city for some reason or another (probably the car show or the Museum of Natural History). I remember him insisting that the food wouldn’t be very good, but the idea of vending-machine cheeseburgers was about the best thing five-year-old me had ever heard of. I can’t remember if I liked the food or not.

When Bamn! opened, I was in grad school at NYU and my band was playing fairly regularly at The Continental on St. Mark’s and 3rd. Bamn! offered cheap, quick, surprisingly fresh food in snack-sized portions, perfect greasy treats to follow a night of drinking or bass-slapping. And sometimes when it’s late and you’re spent the last thing you want to do is interact with an actual human being, so I appreciated that too. They had some sort of fried macaroni-and-cheese thing that I really liked.

I believe it’s closed now, though.

 

Airships: Happening

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You know what’s cool? Led Zeppelin. You know what’s equally cool? Actual zeppelins.

Over at PopSci.com, Josh Bearman checks in with Igor Pasternack, a man who has wanted to build airships since childhood. He’s developing one that can take off and land on its own and that can carry up to 500 tons of cargo — nearly twice as much as has ever been hauled through the air. Oh, and it’s awesome looking:

According to the article, if these, ahh, get off the ground, they will initially be used to ship freight to inaccessible places but “could eventually be developed into flying hotels that silently transport guests from New York to Los Angeles overnight.” Sign me up. The Hindenburg be damned.

Also, it’s worth noting that blimps and zeppelins are two different things but they are both considered dirigibles or airships, and that all four of those things have awesome names.

I yearn for a day when the skies are dotted with massive, efficient, rigid airships hovering over cities. Also, if I had an airship company I think I’d name it “Ice Cube’s A Pimp” and plaster that on the side of every one of our vehicles.

For now, we can consider:

[poll id=”114″]

From the Wikipedia: Tallest buildings in New York

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People say real New Yorkers never look up. Seems stupid to me, but I guess I am not a real New Yorker.

From the Wikipedia: List of tallest buildings in New York City.

This city’s skyline is awesome. And I mean awesome, here, in the dictionary definition of the term. New York’s buildings inspire awe. That’s not on the Wikipedia page but it’s true. Find me a city in this country with a more imposing, inspiring skyline. Chicago is close, but New York wins on its sheer wealth and density of tall buildings.

To boot: There are 117 completed buildings in this country over 700 feet tall (not including antennae). New York has 38 of them. That makes sense. Because Manhattan is an island, the nucleus of the city could not expand outwards. Instead, it expanded upwards.

New York City’s first skyscrapers were built in the 1890s, some 35 years after Elisha Otis invented the safety elevator. Those have been demolished now, or overshadowed by buildings that grew in the city’s first high-rise construction boom in the early part of the 20th century.

From 1908 to 1931, five different buildings in New York set new world records for height: The now-demolished Singer Building in 1908, then the Met Life Tower (which now serves as a beacon for Shake Shack) in 1909, then the wildly underrated Woolworth Building in 1913, then the Bank of Manhattan Trust Building in 1930, then the Chrysler Building a month later, then the Empire State Building the next year. This happened to be a really fortunate time for a city to be churning out huge buildings, because everyone knows art deco is right for skyscrapers.

The Empire State Building remained the tallest building in the world until the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were built in 1972 amidst the city’s second skyscraper boom. That era also produced the endearingly ugly Citigroup Center, currently the seventh tallest complete building in the city.

Here’s the interesting part, to me at least: It would seem like, given the cost of living and building in New York City and the trend toward telecommuting facilitated by the Internet, our dedication to making giant buildings should slow. Right? Wouldn’t that make sense?

Not happening, though. Two of New York City’s four tallest completed buildings have been built since 2007 — the Bank of America Tower and the New York Times Building. And if everything goes as planned, by 2016 six of the city’s eight tallest buildings — all but the Empire State Building and the Chrysler building — will be less than a decade old.

Three of the new skyscrapers are already evident in the skyline. One World Trade Center (aka the Freedom Tower), which will top out soon, is already the tallest structure in the city. Four World Trade Center topped out on June 25. One57, which looms over Central Park and piqued my curiosity enough to start looking this stuff up, also topped out last month.

Also under construction, but not yet above ground-level, is 432 Park Avenue. If that building continues as planned, it will be the tallest building by roof height in the city upon its completion in 2016. Why didn’t I know about that until I checked the Wikipedia page? Shouldn’t this stuff be bigger news, than, I don’t know, TomKat splitting up?

And why do we keep journeying upward, anyway? Presumably there’s some better explanation, but I like to think it’s just because we can. Why wouldn’t we want 1,400-tall buildings? And really, if given the option of working from anywhere, who wouldn’t want to set up 70 stories above Manhattan? Have you had the pizza here?

Bill Murray can crash here

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Apparently Bill Murray likes to randomly crash parties in the New York City area, which is news to me but not overwhelmingly surprising, given how awesome Bill Murray is and how he seems to realize it. Now he’s taking his act on the road and will kick off a party-crashing tour of the United States in August. He asks only that you have alcohol and karaoke available, a couch or spare bed for him to crash on, and a sign outside your home that says “BILL MURRAY CAN CRASH HERE.”

Man I hope this is for real. Also, I would like to see “BILL MURRAY CAN CRASH HERE” signs become standard home decor everywhere. Bill Murray deserves to know where he can crash.

Via Scott.

Mets over-unders settled

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Before the season, 67 percent of readers expected Jason Bay would start more than 114 1/2 games for the 2012 Mets. He has started 21 so far and there are only 76 games remaining. So the unders have it.

51 percent of readers thought the Mets would have fewer than 41 wins by the All-Star Break. They have 46.

Also, this one’s far from settled, but 70 percent of readers expected I would eat more than 13 Shake Shack burgers at Citi Field this season. I’ve had two. The combination of Shake Shack available within walking distance of my home and my recent appreciation for the Blue Smoke fried-chicken sandwich has made 13 Citi Field Shake Shack burgers eaten by me this season appear unlikely. But it’s a long season and you can’t script baseball.

Hat tip to Rob V for reminding me.