Season in preview: Starting pitchers

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Opening Day is Thursday, and since 20 posts about how great baseball is between now and then would probably grow tiresome, I’ll take up my annual season preview tradition today and try to crank nine more out in the next few days. First come the starters, then around the diamond, then the bullpen.

The starting pitchers in April: Johan Santana, R.A. Dickey, Jon Niese, Mike Pelfrey and Dillon Gee.

Overview: Hey everyone! It’s Johan Santana and he’s pitching baseballs!

That part is awesome. Santana’s actual returns this year seem likely to be less awesome, since he was declining before he got hurt, he’s coming back from a surgery very few pitchers have ever returned from and his velocity is not where it once was. If all goes well for Santana he can still be effective, but it would be a near-miracle for him to again emerge as a true Major League ace.

That role — or something close to it — is more apt to be filled by R.A. Dickey or Jon Niese. The knuckleballer Dickey has fluttered unpredictably to the ranks of the better pitchers in the National League over the past two seasons, posting a 124 ERA+ since joining the Mets by commanding his signature pitch and yielding a lot of weak groundball contact. Since Dickey is 37 and relies on the defense behind him, it’s unlikely he’ll get much better in 2012. But another season like the ones he gave the Mets in 2010 and 2011 would be… well, awesome and bearded and knucklebally.

Niese represents the team’s best hope for improvement. The 25-year-old lefty strikes out a good number of batters, doesn’t walk many, and yields a lot of groundballs, but he has yet to post a performance that matches his peripherals. Maybe 2012 is the year he does, or maybe it’s the year we throw our hands up and decide he’s doomed to underperform his peripherals.

Behind Niese, the Mets have Mike Pelfrey. Many Mets fans hate Mike Pelfrey for his inconsistency, but Pelfrey is quietly becoming my favorite player a) because of his consistency and b) because I’m a massive troll. He can be maddening to watch (unless you love fastballs), but Pelfrey posts remarkably consistent walk and strikeout rates every year. His performances vary based on how many hits and how many home runs he yields. From here it seems just as likely Pelfrey repeats his 2010 success as he does his 2011 struggles. Most likely, he pitches somewhere between the two.

It’s harder to know what to expect from Dillon Gee, besides his ridiculous chin beard. Gee did yeoman’s work in the back of the Mets’ rotation last year and won 13 games despite few strikeouts and a high walk rate and ERA, but the glimmer of hope should come from how he whiffed more than a batter an inning in Triple-A in 2010. Gee doesn’t have overpowering stuff, but since he’s still reasonably young, it’s not outlandish to hope he can improve in 2012.

Top prospects Matt Harvey and Jeurys Familia both appear ticketed to start the season in Triple-A Buffalo. The Mets want their pitching prospects throwing about 130 innings in the high Minors before they reach the big leagues. Though I’m not sure that’s a hard-and-fast number, Familia needs just over 40 to get there and Harvey needs 70. It’s never smart to bank on pitching prospects, but there’s some chance one or both could be in the rotation by August. There are arbitration clocks to factor in, though, and the Mets will want to be careful with their young pitchers’ innings totals.

The starting pitchers in September: Dickey, Niese, Gee, Harvey and Chris Schwinden. Hunches all. I’m going to proceed with skepticism on Santana and hope like hell he proves me wrong. But this figures Pelfrey gets dealt near the deadline.

How they stack up: Again — and obviously — the Mets’ starting pitchers do not actually face off with the other starting pitchers around the division; they face the hitters. This is just a means of comparison.

The Mets’ starting rotation doesn’t look awful, but it doesn’t look great either, and it likely won’t get much help from the defense behind it. And the rest of the teams in the division have some pretty good rotations.

The Phillies’ rotation is the standard-bearer, followed by the Braves’ and Nationals’. The Marlins have the only starting staff the Mets can hope theirs will best, and then only if Josh Johnson struggles in his return from injury, Ricky Nolasco continues to underperform his peripherals and Mark Buerhle suddenly ages.

Sandwich of the Week

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Big thanks to sandwich enthusiast @BobbyBigWheel for tipping me off to this thing and joining me for the festivities.

The sandwich: Ju Pa Bao (a.k.a. Macanese pork chop bun) from Pok Pok Wing, Rivington and Suffolk in Manhattan.

The construction: A fried pork chop on a Portuguese roll. That is all.

Important background information: Pok Pok Wing primarily sells wings made from a Vietnamese family recipe from a former co-worker of a chef named Alan Ricker who is lauded for his Thai restaurants in Portland, Oregon. The Ju Pa Bao is, per the Wikipedia, one of the most famous and popular snacks in Macau. I ate it in a Lower East Side bar next to a 50-something British photographer and his mid-20s girlfriend, both of whom complimented my looks and told me they had an open relationship. New York City is a strange and interesting place.

What it looks like:

How it tastes: You don’t even know. You don’t.

F@#$.

Look at that unassuming thing. Just look at it for a second. It looks like something that shouldn’t even merit a shrug no less several hundred words here, and you’re probably thinking, “oh Ted’s run dry now, just reviewing a plain ol’ pork chop on a bun.” But that’s because you don’t know.

Holy hell. There’s only two things and they’re both amazing. First, the bread: Piping hot, crusty on the outside, soft on the inside and sopping up just a little bit of the grease from the pork, bready and delicious.

Then, the pork: Not terribly thick but not too thin either, the perfect balance to the bread, and so tender and juicy, and just singing with pork flavor. It’s seasoned on the outside with what I’d guess is salt and black pepper and some garlic, pleasant and familiar flavors that remind me of my mom’s fried chicken only then, lo, it’s amazing pork.

There’s just one issue, one minor setback that’s going to keep this sandwich out of the Hall of Fame. There’s a bone in there. It’s a pork chop, remember, and it’s cooked with the bone in and they leave the bone in when they serve it up on the bone.

It’s not a terrible thing to negotiate, plus I recognize that there are some culinary advantages to leaving it that way. And it’s apparently the traditional way, for whatever that’s worth.

But everything else about this sandwich demands that I absolutely punish it with giant disgusting wolf-bites, and here I needed to be tentative because I knew that bone was threatening. It alters the sandwich-eating experience, and not in a good way.

Which is not to say the sandwich-eating experience wasn’t a pleasant one. It was amazing. This sandwich is outstanding. It’s just falling short of the Hall of Fame because I had to nibble at times instead of gobble and this is America bro.

What it’s worth: $8, and it’s a solid but not huge meal.

How it rates: 89 out of 100.

 

This week in taco theft

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Florida guard Erving Walker has been charged with stealing a taco and running from police.

Walker, a senior who ranks first in school history in assists, was arrested and given a notice to appear in court early Friday. He was charged with petty theft and resisting an officer without violence, both misdemeanors. He was not taken to jail.

Gainesville Police say Walker ordered a $3 taco from a street vendor, got the food and ran away without paying. When a police officer caught up with him and told him stop, Walker kept going, according to the police report.

When officers finally caught Walker with help from “several marked patrol cars,” he told them he was “just playing around,” the report said.

– Associated Press.

TedQuarters does not endorse this type of behavior. No matter how many assists you have in your college career, you still need to dish out $3 for a taco. Worst-case scenario, kindly explain to the vendor that you’re really hungry, you forgot your wallet and you will absolutely get him back the next time you pass by. Maybe he’s an understanding dude and he’ll trust you. Do not steal the taco, no matter how delicious it looks.

Thanks to the six or seven people who tipped me off to this news.

Mets and Niese near extension

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Good. If the terms are as reported, Niese gets guaranteed money and the Mets buy out his arbitration years and get a few more years of control on top of that. If Niese is the guy he has been the last couple of years, they get him at a fair market value. If he stays healthy, pitches to his peripherals and improves, they can pick up his sixth- and seventh-year options and get him at very favorable rates.

Not a big-market move or a small-market move, and nothing innovative at this point. Just reasonable baseball decision-making, it seems. Presumably the same will follow for Niese’s young teammates if they prove capable of contributing at the Major League level in 2012.

I would like to take this time to revisit my stance on the Braves’ starting rotation

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Wednesday night on the Mostly Mets Podcast , I said I liked the Braves to win the division because of the depth in their starting rotation.

Today, the Braves signed Livan Hernandez, who was just cut by the Astros, to be their fifth starter. Apparently the Braves weren’t thrilled with the way some of their young pitchers looked in Spring Training, plus Tim Hudson’s going to miss the start of the season after back surgery.

I happen to love watching the Livan Hernandez Magic Show, so I’m all for it. But his acquisition probably doesn’t speak well of the depth in the Braves’ rotation I was lauding the other night.

Canada ditches the penny

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In an effort to cut costs, the Canadian government released its 2012 budget Thursday without any money designated to fund the Canadian penny. The penny’s costs have finally grown so high that the government has realized it just doesn’t make sense to keep the 1-cent coin going. Does any of this sound familiar?…

The U.S. penny costs an incredible 2.4 cents to make (and the nickel, by the way, costs 11.2 cents). That’s why a couple months back the Obama White House included a proposal in their latest budget to make pennies and nickels cheaper to produce in order to pare down the federal deficit.

There are numerous private citizens and legislators who have proposed getting rid of the U.S. penny altogether. (There are some who even think we should retire the U.S. dollar.) A couple bills have been introduced but of course neither has passed.

– Josh Sanburn, Time.

Did you read that? We mint coins that cost twice as much as they’re worth. And we’re never going to do anything about it, you know why? Because we hate making minor mathematical adjustments. Why do you think happened with the metric system? Eliminating nickels and pennies would mean every cash-register exchange would require some tiny modicum of math: rounding and some very simple subtraction, at least until all businesses have new registers. No way is anyone signing up for that.

Octopus eats seagull

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I’m not sure there’s a living creature I detest more than the seagull. And it sucks because when you’re an aspiring sandwich artisan growing up on Long Island, a picnic on the beach seems like a great idea for a date right up until you’re forced to reveal how freaked out you are by the scores of seagulls circling your blanket, sizing you up.

They just don’t look like they’re nearly as afraid of me as they should be given our difference in size, plus they eat garbage all day so I just assume they’re rife with all sorts of infectious disease. And they don’t seem nearly as dumb as every other bird. Man I hate seagulls.

Anyway, octopi are awesome and this one is fighting the good fight: