Minor Leaguers

Posted on February 14, 2012 by Ted Berg

The best part about being in the Minor Leagues, I assume, is that they pay you money to play baseball. The worst part, I figure, is just about everything else: The constant travel on long bus rides, the brutal schedule, and trying to keep yourself fed and in shape on a small per diem in unfamiliar cities.

I imagine this is why all the Minor Leaguers on Twitter seem to spend so much time Tweeting about Chipotle. The restaurants are everywhere, they’re consistent, and they provide a hell of a lot of food for a reasonable price. Plus, though Chipotle could hardly be called healthy, it’s probably better than most of the fast and cheap options available on the road, and the burritos are packed with protein for the hungry young athlete.

Anyway, in celebration of all that, I’ve started this little side project: Minor Leaguers Tweeting About Chipotle. It’s short right now, so please, if and when you notice a Minor Leaguer Tweeting about Chipotle, draw my attention to it in some way.

Sandwich of the Week

Posted on February 13, 2012 by Ted Berg

I’m a big man. I need a big Shredder.

The sandwich: Five-Spice Glazed Pork Belly from Num Pang, two locations in Manhattan. This one came from the 41st St. location near Grand Central Station. The other spot is just south of Union Square (more on that in a bit).

The construction: Five-spice glazed pork belly (obviously) with pickled Asian pear, cilantro, carrot, cucumber and chili mayo on a semolina roll from Parisi bakery.

Important background info: Several items. First: The owners of Num Pang used to run a Cambodian restaurant on the Lower East Side called Kampuchea that was among my favorite places to eat in the city. It served amazing sandwiches. Long before I reviewed sandwiches online or knew much about the Vietnamese banh mi, Kampuchea introduced me to the wonders of the banh-mi stuff — pickled carrots, cucumbers and cilantro, most notably — atop a sandwich.

Second: “Num Pang” means sandwich in the Cambodian language Khmer.

Third: At both Num Pang locations and on the Num Pang website, there are signs reading, “Our sandwiches were created to be enjoyed as they are. Please, no modifications!”

I have mixed feelings about that. On one hand, I appreciate that the chefs responsible for these sandwiches put thought into how the ingredients are going to interact, and that they want the products that represent them to be the ones they actually created. For this reason, I now almost always order sandwiches for review as they’re listed on the menu — I used to modify some (usually by omitting onions). Also, I imagine prohibiting modifications helps keep the line at Num Pang moving at peak hours.

On the other hand, the adamance with which they herald the rule does come off somewhere between pretentious and self-conscious. Plus, if it extends to the chili-mayo (and I’m not sure if it does), I imagine they’re alienating a ton of potential customers who vehemently dislike mayo and don’t feel like having to scrape it off their bread just because the chef said they had to have it on there.

What it looks like (in this crappy, shadowy photo):

How it tastes: Outstanding. Let’s talk about that part first.

The bread is fresh and toasted to just a touch of brownness around the edges, and it’s just thick enough to hold up under the intense moisture of the sandwich without making it too bready. It’s a pretty neat trick the bread pulls, really: Throughout eating the sandwich you feel like it’s so messy you must be losing stuff out the sides and back of the roll, but somehow it all stays contained in there. (Some of that’s on you, of course, assuming you’re the careful and experienced sandwich-eater that I am and you bite at the correct angles to push stuff back inside the boundaries of the bread. It’s not magic bread, fellas.)

The base ingredients that come standard on all Num Pang sandwiches play nicely. The cucumber adds a ton of crunch, the carrot brings some sweetness and the cilantro some bite. The chili mayo helps bind everything together, like mayo does, plus contributes some spice and tangy mayo flavor.

The pork belly is so tender and juicy that it’s almost hard to distinguish from the mushy pear, and they work together in a delicious mix of sweet and savory flavors. There’s something warm and earthy in there — ginger? — and definitely cinnamon. And the combination of the pork and pear is so moist that the juices were dripping down my hand and spilling into the little cardboard dish, making the bread’s ability to hold up under pressure that much more impressive.

Here’s the issue: It’s just not very big.

Yeah, yeah, that’s what she said and all that. Seriously though, I don’t want to sound like a cretin here, and I imagine if I saw the calorie count for this sandwich I might be singing a very different tune, but I do think the size of this sandwich needs to be held against it.

I ate at the Union Square location of Num Pang for the first time on Saturday night with my wife and enjoyed the delicious veal-meatball sandwich. Immediately upon finishing it, I told her that I needed to go back to try to the pork-belly sandwich — the decision that led to this writeup.

Then, after I ate the pork-belly sandwich on Monday, my first thought was that I should go back and try the pulled pork or brisket. Both times, immediately after eating a delicious sandwich, I was thinking about the next sandwich I should eat and not the delicious sandwich I just ate!

Part of that’s on me. Both times I ate a meal at Num Pang it was a couple of hours later than I normally eat that meal, so both times I was quite hungry. And it’s not like they don’t serve sides or the sandwiches are prohibitively expensive.

But at the same time, with a sandwich with this many ingredients, you’re necessarily going to have a limited number of bites that boast the full distribution of stuff. And when it’s this small, it’s like… two. Two bites of sublime, transcendent sandwich awesomeness, and then a bunch of others that are various sub-combinations of the delicious ingredients, hints and notes of the greatness to keep you involved while you search and push and rearrange to try to recapture that grandeur.

Which is to say: It’s a sandwich that leaves you wanting more. Or at least that it’s a sandwich that very decidedly left me wanting more.

What it’s worth: $7.75 plus tax. That might seem steep for a sandwich of this size, but it’s an adequate lunch if you’re not a glutton, plus it’s pretty easy to tell from the taste that they’re using excellent ingredients.

How it rates: 88 out of 100. If you don’t have my appetite you could easily put this in the Hall of Fame though.

Short List presents the World’s 10 Best Sandwiches

Posted on February 13, 2012 by Ted Berg

The pictures are pretty amazing, even if a) the only one of these I’ve had probably does not rank among the top 10 sandwiches I’ve eaten and b) at least one of them pretty clearly isn’t a sandwich.

Right now if I were making a “World’s 10 Best Sandwiches” photo gallery I’d probably just show ten breaded steak sandwiches from Ricobene’s. Man, I really need to eat that again. There’s almost no way it’s going to live up to my memory/expectation/fantasy.

Via Tom.

Flip-flopping Bay and Duda?

Posted on February 13, 2012 by Ted Berg

Right now, we’re looking at Duda in right and Bay in left. Duda is clearly a significantly below average outfielder, Bay is probably a slightly above average outfielder. Why not put Duda in left and Bay in right? That would definitely make the outfield better for this year and would also cement Duda in left for the future which is probably where he belongs. Why should we force Duda to learn right field when he’ll probably move to left as soon as Bay leaves anyway? The only reason would be to respect Bay’s tenure in left and not inconvenience the veteran player. But frankly Bay doesn’t deserve this respect given how awful he’s been. He should be forced to move to right both to make this year’s team better and so that Duda can become comfortable in the position where he’ll most likely end up in the long term anyway. What do you think?

– Josh, via email.

I’ve seen this come up a couple of times elsewhere and wondered about it myself. First things first: It’s almost certainly not going to happen unless Bay suggests it himself. As much as Duda’s development is and should be a priority for the Mets, getting Bay corrected is important too. And I can’t imagine the team will want to give him another thing to think about beyond the whole hitting thing he clearly spends a lot of time thinking about.

Plus, while Josh is right that Bay hasn’t done much on the field in the past two seasons to earn any deference from the Mets, he is by all accounts a hard-working veteran leader in the clubhouse, and for a variety of reasons (and as we’ve seen time and again) those guys get a ton of respect in baseball. Forcing Bay to switch positions at 33 could easily be perceived as jerking him around — especially if it didn’t go well — and is the type of thing that could make the younger players lose faith in their manager and front office.

Moreover, and most importantly, I’m not certain it would actually benefit the Mets in the short or long term. You’re talking about the same personnel with the same range (or lack thereof), and there are about as many balls hit to right field as there are to left field. They’re going to cover the same amount of ground regardless of where they’re standing.

The defensive metrics say Bay is a below average left fielder due to limited range, though he appears decent to the eye. Duda was by all accounts pretty woeful in his audition in right field last year. As Patrick Flood pointed out in an email discussion hashing this out, the standards are higher for right fielders, so Bay’s defensive stats would likely dip (and Duda’s benefit) after a switch because those rates are calculated against league average. But since Bay would still be Bay and Duda would still be Duda, switching them theoretically wouldn’t change much in terms of total runs saved by the Mets.

Toby Hyde noted in that same email chain that a switch might make some sense if Bay had an outstanding arm, but though Bay’s throws are generally accurate he’s not exactly Jeff Francoeur.

I guess the caveats to all that would be a) if there’s something about picking up the ball off the bat in right field that Duda just can’t handle and won’t be able to adjust to or b) if trying to play right field starts affecting Duda’s development on offense. Neither seems likely enough to merit messing with Bay.

In any case, it seems like Andres Torres has his work cut out for him.

YouTube doubler

Posted on February 13, 2012 by Ted Berg

Yesterday the estimable Jon Bois posted a link to something called YouTube doubler, a technology that allows you to play two YouTube videos simultaneously. This is amazingly useful for me, since one of my favorite time-killers is coming up with new scores for silly Internet videos, and until yesterday I had to juggle YouTube pages to do so and couldn’t share my silly hobby with the world.

Here are some:

Spelling Bee Faint
Waterskiing mishaps (mute the left one)
The Very Melancholy Baseball Show

Here’s one Shamik made:

Todd Coffey/Dr. Dre mashup

And here’s one in honor of the A’s signing of Yoenis Cespedes:

WE EAT THE PIG AND THEN TOGETHER WE BURN!

I had some meetings and a lot of work to do this morning but I’ll have more stuff soon, I promise. For now, enjoy YouTube doubler.

All Lin

Posted on February 13, 2012 by Ted Berg

Around 11 p.m. on Friday evening, some guy was walking down 2nd Ave. just north of 86th street shouting, “JEREMY LIN! JEREMY LIN!” like he’d gotten the Spirit. Passersby encouraged him with high-fives and bro-hugs.

Here’s what the front of the Daily News’ online sports section looks like right now, with some arrows for emphasis:

The time for Jeremy Lin snark will probably come, but we’re not there yet. Let’s enjoy this while it lasts. It’s rare to have a phenomenon so gloriously unifying in this city’s divisive sports landscape.

Of interest to maybe no one but me

Posted on February 10, 2012 by Ted Berg

Toby Hyde is right in the middle of his always excellent Top 41 prospects series, and No. 20 on the list is a guy I’ve taken a particular interest in: 19-year-old pitcher Akeel Morris.

Y’all know by now that I’m often pretty down on prospects and prospecting, especially when it comes to pitching prospects that haven’t yet made it out of rookie ball. Toby reports that Morris throws really hard and “has flashed a plus curveball” but “has control issues,” which couple to explain why finished fourth in the Appalachian League in strikeouts and first in walks in 2011.

But that’s… well, whatever. I’ll concern myself with Morris’ performance more when he hits High A ball or something. What’s unusual about Morris among most Major and Minor League baseball players is that he was born in St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands and went to high school there.

Three Virgin Islanders played in the Majors in the last 10 years, but all of them went to high school in the continental U.S. The last guy who went to high school in the Virgin Islands to play in the Majors is, as far as I can figure from baseball-reference, journeyman utility guy Jerry Browne.

There’s a bunch more on recent player development and scouting in the Virgin Islands here and a V.I.-specific baseball site detailing the history of the game in the islands here.

The way I see it, the more places that produce successful professional baseball players, the more people that get exposed to baseball. More people getting exposed to baseball means more people realizing how awesome baseball is, which means more people playing baseball and dedicating themselves to baseball, which means a bigger talent pool for Major League Baseball, which means baseball somehow winds up even more awesome. No pressure, Akeel Morris.

Sandwich? of the Week

Posted on February 10, 2012 by Ted Berg

Weather the pre-baseball doldrums with lots and lots of cheese.

The candidate: Kentucky Hot Brown from Bar Americain, 52nd street between 6th and 7th in Manhattan. Only available at lunch.

The construction: One thick-cut slice of bread topped with turkey, some sort of creamy cheese sauce (Mornay?), melted cheese, bacon and tomato.

Arguments for sandwich-hood: It’s on bread. The Wikipedia page for Hot Brown calls it a sandwich.

Counter-arguments: Since there’s only one slice of bread, nothing is properly sandwiched here. Also, it’s decidedly a knife-and-fork type dish, far from the convenient and portable food concept envisioned by ol’ John Montagu.

How it tastes: Amazing.

Allow me a brief aside: Some significant percentage of the members of my generation, I am certain, have spent some significant percentage of their waking hours sharing, discussing and giggling over a certain set of silly names given to rumored but probably infrequently performed lewd acts. For me, those conversations occurred during slow times at the deli: my co-workers and I tried constantly to one-up each other with the most bizarre and creatively titled bedroom behaviors that we had heard of or could make up ourselves.

And for anyone who has resorted to such discussions to stave off boredom — and, like I said, there are lots of us — I think it is impossible to hear the term “Kentucky Hot Brown” without considering the many ways in which it sounds like some particularly gross sex act: Its nomenclature so perfectly fits the typical place/descriptor convention of that weird set of jokes. But, of course, people eat it anyway.

After this paragraph, I want you to stop reading for a few minutes. First, think of several of the filthiest, most outrageously vile words and concepts you can imagine, then come up with some way to combine them into a singular phrase. Take your time with it and probe the darkest places of your imagination; get creative. It can incorporate the universally disgusting — say, I don’t know, bloody rat mucus — or something more personal if you need — grandma belches. Play around with it in your head until you’re satisfied you have something so viscerally repulsive that just the thought of it would make Chuck Palahniuk vomit, then write it down or type it out. Email it to me if you have to. It’s important that you see what it looks like in print.

Once you’ve done that, imagine going into a restaurant, opening up the menu and seeing that same term — the most revolting thing you could imagine — listed under “entrees.” You work up the courage to say it out loud and ask the waiter what it is, and he tells you it’s a slice of bread topped with turkey, cheese sauce, melted cheese and bacon.

I can’t speak for you, but I’m going to order it anyway. Hell, the waiter could stand over me while I ate it repeating its sickening name every time I took a bite and I’d still enjoy the hell out of it. That’s the thing about tons of cheese and bacon.

Point is — and the underlying problem with this whole exercise, really — is that it doesn’t matter what you call something as long as it’s delicious.

And this Kentucky Hot Brown is certainly that: The turkey is moist and steamy hot. The cheese sauce is rich and plentiful, and reminiscent of the earthy, wine-y flavor of a good cheese fondue. The melted cheese is melted cheese, plus it works to contain the cheese sauce on top of the bread and turkey. And the bacon is crisp and perfectly prepared. Do a strong enough job slicing this thing up and distributing the sweet, juicy tomato and you get an outrageous array of flavors and textures in every forkful. It’s just good.

The verdict: But it is not in any way a sandwich. The Wikipedia can call it whatever it wants, but nothing about eating this feels like a traditional sandwich-eating experience. Not only can you not pick this thing up, but the turkey and cheese are piled on thick enough that it’s sort of a chore to eat with a fork and butter knife. It’s a big, delicious, sloppy mess with not even a pretense toward portability. I move that the term “open-faced sandwich” is an oxymoron.

What it’s worth: The Kentucky Hot Brown at Bar Americain is $18 — a bit steeper than most of the meals discussed here, but not if you’ve got a friend in your industry with an expense account willing to chalk it up as a business lunch. And it is much appreciated.

The Greek Scrod of Walks?

Posted on February 10, 2012 by Ted Berg

Turns out Kevin Youkilis is fully committed to this Boston thing:

This is supposed to be hush-hush and on the deep down-low, but you know us. It’s time to pop the bubbly because Kevin Youkilis and Tom Brady’s sis, Julie, are engaged!…

Friends report that Youk and Julie met at a postgame party at Patriot Place last year after that other New York team Jet-tisoned the Patriots out of the playoffs. Not a good night for Tom, but a rather good one for his sis!

It will be Julie’s first marriage and Youk’s second. He was married in 2008, but turns out not legally, to Ben Affleck’s ex, Enza Sambataro.

That’s right: Youkilis is engaged to Tom Brady’s sister after having been quasi-married to a woman who once dated Ben Affleck. He has also appeared in a Dropkick Murphys video.

Via Dustin Parkes.

Sandy Alderson is pretty much awesome

Posted on February 10, 2012 by Ted Berg

Alderson said he had been amused to see another innocuous factoid — his revelation that he would be driving to Florida for spring training — joked about, dissected and in some cases seriously analyzed by some on Twitter and on blogs as a reflection of the Mets’ finances.

So someone in his office suggested he create a Twitter account to respond, Alderson said, and he thought, “Why not?”

“We wanted to play off the absurdity of it,” Alderson said. “Everything we do is viewed through the prism of our perceived financial situation.”…

“There are always some that take life way too seriously,” Alderson said. “For those people, it might take longer for my message to get across.”

– Andrew Keh, N.Y. Times.

So… this. All of this. Click through and read the rest, in part because I feel guilty about excerpting so much.

These are tough times for Mets fans obviously, but you ever stop and consider how much worse they would be if the team had a less competent, less reasonable GM at the helm?