Trying something new with the podcast player. I’m not sure how many pro athletes I’ll be able to convince to do this, but I figure every one that’s willing is worth hearing from. And what better first guest for the Mostly Mets Sandwich Show than knuckleballer extraordinaire R.A. Dickey:
The Mostly Mets Podcast is on iTunes here. There’s some more on his namesake sandwich, The Dickster, here and here.
This is a weird and awesome niche I’ve carved out for myself.
I wanted to make this “Tim Byrdak postgame videobombs” but that’s a difficult thing to track.
Context: Lefty specialist Tim Byrdak appeared in 72 games for the Mets in 2011. He pitched 64 times for the Astros in 2010 and 76 times in 2009. The Mets have lefties Danny Herrera, Chuck James, Garrett Olson and Rob Carson in Major League camp, but none is a lock to make the Major League roster.
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People always refer to “gilding the lily” as if it’s a bad thing. And look: Lilies are nice and all and I recognize that there’s not much demand to improve them. But only a fool wouldn’t trade a straight-up old school lily for a lily covered in solid gold. Gild that thing. That’s what I say.
Flowers are great and all, but I dismissed that Shakespeare-inspired idiom in a sandwich review last January with no particular inclination toward lilies. I actually had to Google-image them now just to determine what they look like.
They’re pretty and they probably smell nice, but they mean very little to me. So when I said “gild that thing,” I never considered the feelings of those who might hold lilies dear, who believe the lily perfect in its natural, un-gilded form. A more apt phrase that expresses the same cavalier and unnecessary excess but cuts nearer to my heart is this one: Doritoing the Taco.
I have never bit into a Taco Bell taco and thought, “You know? This could be saltier, more flavorful, nacho cheesier.” I’ve never really considered how or why it should be improved at all, save a packet or two of Fire Sauce. It is Glen Bell’s Mona Lisa, a towering fast-food masterpiece in a tiny package: The crunchiness of the shell, the tastiness of the beef, the cooling crispness of the lettuce, the creamy flourish of the cheese.
Just after midnight on March 8 at the Taco Bell near the Wal-Mart on Gatlin Boulevard in Port St. Lucie, cars snake around the drive-thru lane and into the half-full parking lot. There’s a shiny SUV with dark-tinted windows, a sportscar, a pickup truck and a crossover. There’s a banged-up compact full of oily looking locals crawled up from Florida’s gloriously seedy underbelly. Whether by design or by coincidence, they are just in time for the debut of Taco Bell’s Doritos Locos Taco.
At the menu board, there’s no mention of the new product. But when I ask the disembodied voice from the speaker if they have them yet — as if I don’t know, as if I didn’t RSVP on the Facebook page and call ahead to make sure — the woman offers them in regular and Supreme versions. I order one of each and proceed to the nearest empty parking spot for my Fourthmeal.
Perhaps I’m mistaken, but the shell of the regular Doritos Locos Taco seems a bit thicker than on the traditional Taco Bell taco, perhaps to emphasize its Dorito-ness. That’s good: It’s hearty and crunchy. The inside stuff is the same: lettuce, cheese and seasoned beef, all predictably delicious.
But the powdery Dorito stuff on the outside upsets the delicate taco balance a little bit, and dries up the tongue before it even reaches the inside parts of the taco. And there’s no clear evidence of synergy here: It tastes like a Taco Bell taco inside a Dorito, so it’s still great, no doubt. But I can’t comfortably say the pairing clearly benefits either component.
The Supreme version is better. The tanginess and creaminess of the sour cream both complements the flavor of the Dorito stuff and mitigates its dryness. Add some Hot Sauce on there and it’s pretty damn delicious. Better than a Volcano Taco, though? A Crunchwrap Supreme? A Cheesy Gordita Crunch? Hardly.
This might disappoint some of you to read, I understand, but if I were to simply provide fawning coverage of every single step Taco Bell takes, it would trivialize everything I write about Taco Bell. We need to call this what it is: A clever marketing gimmick aimed to hype up the brand — which is working, if the midnight lines in Port St. Lucie are any indication — but more of a novelty item than the paradigm-shifting Taco Bell innovation I hoped for.
I suspect with some experimentation the Doritos Locos Taco shell might prove a valuable Taco Bell ingredient in other incarnations: A Cheesy Doritos Gordita Crunch would probably be amazing, for example. But on its own, it seems like living a little too mas even for me.
To Dorito the Taco, “to throw a perfume on the violet, to smooth the ice, or add another hue unto the rainbow, or with taper-light to seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish, is wasteful and ridiculous excess.”
Johan Santana played catch with Mike Nickeas this morning on Field 2 at the Mets’ complex in Port St. Lucie, then moved over to the bullpen outside the Mets’ clubhouse, made some throws from the back of the mound, then took his rightful place atop it for some proper pitching practice.
About halfway through the session, pitching coach Dan Warthen stepped into the batter’s box to simulate a hitter. From my perspective, about 10 feet to Santana’s left and maybe five feet behind him, I could see the signs Nickeas threw down and watch as Santana manipulated the ball in his glove, wound up and fired.
After one well-placed changeup at Warthen’s knees, Santana shouted, “What’re you going to do with that?”
Later, after the Mets’ one-time ace put a slider on the inside corner to Warthen in the lefty hitter’s box, the pitching coach laughed. “Can you start today?” He called out.
Near the end of the session, Santana announced, “two more hitters.”
“Do you want a lefty first, or a righty?” a coach asked.
Santana turned, shrugged and smirked. “Doesn’t matter.”
I’m just going to post the video now because it’s hard to keep typing with my fingers crossed:
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With Toby, Patrick and Miguel Batista.
On iTunes here.
I misstated something near the end for the sake of (attempted) humor that I should probably clarify: I do care about team ownership when it affects the teams, obviously. And I’m not so ignorant to believe ownership isn’t a factor in the decisions many GMs make, and I know I’ve been burned in the past by blaming general managers for moves supposedly forced on them by owners.
I was fresh off writing this thing yesterday when we recorded the podcast. While writing the part about sports being entertainment, I got sidetracked thinking about the Wilpons’ legal and financial issues, which Mets fans want to talk about all the time these days. They’re just not all that entertaining to me.
I still pay attention to what happens because I want to know how it all continues to affect my favorite baseball team. And I have opinions, of course, but they are: a) mostly uninformed and based on reporting from various sources that constantly contradict one another; b) without any legal or financial expertise whatsoever; c) due to my employment likely to be interpreted as some direct message from someone up the chain at SNY, which is endlessly frustrating. So they’re kind of useless, and nowhere near as exciting to write about as even a Spring Training bullpen session from Johan Santana.
For what it’s worth: Upon request, I’ve added all of these to the right column of this site for future reference.
Context: The Mets used nine starting pitchers in 2011. They used 12 in 2010, 11 in 2009, 11 in 2008 and 12 in 2007. They have Johan Santana, R.A. Dickey, Jon Niese, Mike Pelfrey and Dillon Gee slated to start the rotation, with Miguel Batista and Chris Schwinden likely behind them and Jeurys Familia and Matt Harvey coming up the pike.
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There’s a pitcher who’s in Mets Major League camp that’s staying at my hotel. It doesn’t seem appropriate to say his name and it doesn’t much matter for the sake of this weird and potentially off-putting post anyway, but I can say with some confidence that he’s very unlikely to make the Mets’ roster out of Spring Training.
And nearly every evening I see this guy sitting in his car in the hotel parking lot talking on the phone, and something about it makes me sad. I don’t know what he’s saying or to whom. For all I know he just spends an inordinate amount of time ordering pizza or engaging solicitors. But I assume he’s talking to his dad or his sister or his best friend or his old coach, someone or some combination of people who care about him a whole lot and want to hear about his progress and performance in Port St. Lucie. It takes a village to raise Minor League bullpen depth.
Baseball at its best is both joyous and comprehensible. It’s entertainment. Cable deals and ad sales and revenue sharing and all sorts of businessy stuff complicate things a bit, but that’s what it boils down to: The players perform and the fans pay to watch them. And baseball is so entertaining and commands so much of our attention that some lucky souls get paid to cover it. Mine is an utterly enviable occupation, I realize, as is actually playing baseball.
Due to some odd bit of wiring in my mind — or, hell, maybe this is common — whenever I spend time thinking about a job, I also think about the particulars of it that might make me a little nuts.
The most accessible example from my own past comes from the job I had at a wholesale/retail lobster farm for three summers when I was in my late teens:
Lobsters, when you deal with them daily, become kind of despicable. We called them “bugs,” and they bit us and stunk and sometimes ripped each other’s limbs off. And by that point I had long since made peace with killing animals for meat, but still something about dumping crates upon crates of living things into huge vats of boiling water every day messed with my 17-year-old head. I had some really weird dreams.
And in terms of jobs that could drive you crazy if you let them, playing baseball must be a doozy. How many careers exist on such short arcs, with so little margin for error, with so much randomness in play but with every single occupational event recorded, computed, graphed and analyzed? And how torturous must it be to face at some point the realization that you are demonstrably not good enough at the thing you are best at?
But then, though there are some isolated cases, there aren’t a whole lot of baseball players who seem to think that way. In talking to them, it seems like for many the drive required to ascend to (or near) big-league heights helps players shut out the external variables and focus on the day’s work. It sounds cliched, but many athletes appear far more capable than most of us at staying within themselves. Worrying about the above-listed peculiarities of playing the sport professionally and actually playing it professionally are likely, in many cases, mutually exclusive.
Which is to say: Maybe this is my issue. And I realize it’s part of baseball, and that it’s not necessarily rational, and most days when I’m sitting at my desk or in some press box using a myriad of figures to explain why some guy sucks or making snarky jokes about his baseball misdeeds on Twitter, it hardly weighs on me at all.
But in the parking lot behind the hotel, under the wide-open blue and orange sky at dusk in Port St. Lucie, it’s hard not to let it at least creep in to my mind: For every dude I dismiss, every footnote in a roundup post, every guy deemed worthy of mere shrugs or raised eyebrows — all of whom are well-compensated for their work, no doubt — there is someone far away on the other end of the phone coaching him or advising him or loving him who wants desperately for him to succeed and be happy.
And I sit here explaining why he won’t, discounting living things as though they only exist for my consumption, dumping lobsters in the pot again.
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“[Reyes] said, ‘I really want to play in Miami as long as you pay me $1 more than anyone else. … I really want to make the most money I can,'” team president David Samson told Miami businessmen during a speech Tuesday, according to Miami Today.
According to the report, Samson also bragged about securing taxpayer dollars to get a new Marlins stadium built.
“I don’t have to hold back now that the stadium is built — not that I ever have,” Samson reportedly said. “We’re not the smartest people in Miami. If you’re in this room, you’re instantly in the top 1 percent.”
Oof, everything about this. And I know it’s nothing surprising. It’s just the bluntness.
Context: Ronny Cedeno appears set to be the Mets’ primary backup at shortstop and an occasional defensive replacement at second. He was a regular shortstop for the Pirates in 2010 and 2011. For what it’s worth, the Mets have encouraged him to work on his plate discipline this offseason, and yesterday Terry Collins praised Cedeno’s work in that area. But Cedeno is a lifetime .246/.286/.353 hitter and the Mets have both righty-hitting Scott Hairston and Justin Turner also set for the bench, so it would take some dramatic improvement or a rash of injuries for him to merit any pinch-hitting opportunities.
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Tedquarters 