This is the chicken biscuit from Chick-Fil-A. It is the simple showpiece of their breakfast menu: A fried chicken cutlet on a biscuit.
But is it a sandwich?
[poll id=”54″]
Is it a sandwich?
Reply
Live from the Walt Whitman rest stop
I’m on my way to DC for some Georgetown basketball and Super Bowl festivities. I planned to cue up some posts to roll out today, but I blew it. I’ll have some more stuff tomorrow and Friday, and I’ll be back in business (and quite tired) on Monday. For now, here’s some Super Bowl talk with Tom Curran from CSNNE.com:
Your browser does not support iframes.
Presenting Randwiches
This seems like a good idea. You pay randwich.es $7 and they bring you a random sandwich. I haven’t tried them yet so I can’t vouch for them myself, but they seem to thrive on social-media word-of-mouth so maybe this is good for some extra bacon or something when I do make an order after they return from vacation on Feb. 3.
This cajun turkey, bacon, arugula, blue cheese, tomato and alfredo sauce sandwich looks promising:
Via reader Greg.
Also — since we’re on the topic of sandwiches (as we frequently are), I’m kicking around an idea in my head and I’m looking for some feedback: I bring a pretty humble sandwich for lunch almost every day. It’s healthier and less expensive than eating out in midtown.
Obviously no one wants to read a diary of every boring sandwich I eat, but what if I worked across the week to maximize the potential of the cold cuts I buy, then make posts about the best reasonably simple and inexpensive sandwiches I can conjure up with those meats and cheeses and the condiments and vegetables in my fridge? Does that have any appeal beyond making my lunches more interesting?
Cool
If you’ve ever wondered why Quad-A reliever Dirk Hayhurst is something of a baseball-nerd darling on the Internet, it’s because his book The Bullpen Gospels is really good. Not just good-for-something-a-ballplayer wrote, legit good.
Anyway, now it appears he’s bound for Italy to play baseball there and write about it. I’ve long fantasized about writing a book about baseball around the world — going to games every place baseball is played and detailing each place’s baseball culture. But it looks like Dirk Hayhurst is going to trump the hell out of that idea, and good for him.
Famous artworks tranformed into… sandwiches?
Wendy Thurm passes along this entertaining link. One issue, though: I wouldn’t call most of these sandwiches. Predictably, the Duchamp is my favorite, for a variety of reasons. The Christo is playful and captures the imagination, and the Rothko just seems uninteresting to me.
NY vs. NE tale of the tape
With Danny Picard from CSNNE.com:
Your browser does not support iframes.
Good riddance to bad rubbish
Pat Burrell retired yesterday, and as Adam Rubin pointed out, he finished his career sixth all time in home runs against the Mets.
What Rubin didn’t point out (but probably knows) is that every other guy on the list besides is either already enshrined in Cooperstown, will be soon, or will render the whole place obsolete with his exclusion.
Burrell, in comparison, looks like just some guy: Undoubtedly a very good Major League hitter but by no means a superstar, a dude whose top baseball-reference comps include Greg Vaughn, Tim Salmon, Ryan Klesko and Danny Tartabull.
He will not be missed.
The following is skewed by the peculiarities of expansion and divisional play, I realize. List via Rubin’s post. Mays gets the asterisk because I didn’t count the home runs he hit with the Mets as part of his career total:
| Guy | HR vs. Mets | % of career HR |
|---|---|---|
| Willie Stargell | 60 | 12.6 |
| Mike Schmidt | 49 | 8.9 |
| Chipper Jones | 48 | 10.6 |
| Willie McCovey | 48 | 9.2 |
| Hank Aaron | 45 | 6 |
| Pat Burrell | 42 | 14.4 |
| Willie Mays | 39 | 6* |
| Barry Bonds | 38 | 5 |
| Andre Dawson | 36 | 8.2 |
| Billy Williams | 34 | 8 |
How we overrate prospects, nutshelled
Patrick Flood posts a great question and poll at his blog: Which players will be most valuable to the 2014 Mets? He provides a ton of context, too, but the answer speaks to the current state of the Major League club and the way in which we overrate prospects.
Zack Wheeler, who hasn’t yet pitched above High A, has 80 votes. Daniel Murphy, already a pretty good Major Leaguer, has 11. And two of Murph’s votes are from me.
To be fair, Wheeler is arguably the Mets’ top prospect and Murphy, at 27, probably isn’t getting much better. So maybe people are voting on ceiling. Plus the Mets will only control Murphy through 2015 and could control Wheeler through 2018.
But c’mon: Reese Havens, 25-year-old guy who cannot stay on the field, gets more than twice as many votes as Josh Thole, who is eight days younger than Havens and has already shown he can be an average-hitting catcher in the Majors?
I think y’all might need to temper your expectations.
Also, I’m pretty sure Patrick wrote about 1,000 words and came up with an interesting poll as an excuse to post that Ruben Tejada factoid. Flood is the anti-Sarris.
Twitter Q&A part 2
I just moved back to the city in November, so it’d probably be bad form to whine too much about all the theoretical tourists that would have come along with the Olympics, plus the various logistical nightmares it would inevitably bring. All that would certainly suck, though, especially when you consider many longtime New Yorkers struggle with the basics of subway etiquette.
But it would especially suck — and Tom knows I feel this way — to go through that in the name of Olympic sports, which mostly suck. One guy runs faster than the others. Some judge finds some routine more compelling than the rest. Flags are flown and anthems are played, and then within a year no one outside the discipline really remembers what happens. Call me a xenophobe, but I’d rather watch a mid-August Pirates-Astros game every single time.
Badminton is pretty cool though.
To be honest, I don’t eat candy bars very often. When you eat as much fried food and starch as I do, you’ve got to make concessions somewhere to not be dead by now, and for me that generally means cutting out the most intensely sugary foods. Plus, it’s kind of a long and unfortunate story but I’ve been down on chocolate since this summer.
Bottom line, I’d take a piece of cake, a cupcake or some sort of Drake’s Cake over candy most of the time, and if I am eating candy it’s almost always going to be Gummi Bears — Haribo, if possible, and preferably frozen. But that doesn’t mean I don’t think candy bars are delicious. If I had to rank my top five of the ones , I’d probably go:
1) 100 Grand
2) Whatchamacallit
3) Twix
4) Take 5
5) Butterfinger
I guess I’m a big fan of caramel in candy bars. Also, that’s discounting Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Reese’s Pieces, since neither is a candy bar proper. Furthermore, Snickers are way better than Baby Ruths even though they have similar ingredients. Also, I really like Heath Bars crushed up in ice-cream concoctions, but I’m not sure I’ve ever had a Heath Bar.
Finally, I’d say David Wright is more likely to rebound than Jason Bay, Andres Torres, or Johan Santana.
Mets rumored to be pursuing Rick Ankiel
Rick Ankiel’s name keeps coming up in rumors related to the last spot on the Mets’ bench. Ankiel hits left-handed and plays center field, so on the surface level he fits the Mets’ needs for the spot.
If the Mets have concerns about Andres Torres’ ability to hold up in center field over the course of a season and Scott Hairston’s ability to back him up, then I guess Ankiel makes some sense. For whatever they’re worth, UZR pegs Ankiel as just shy of average in center field — no small feat — largely because his outstanding arm helps mitigate underwhelming range.
But if the Mets think Hairston can handle center and want Ankiel because he hits left-handed, then the only thing he’s really got over Mike Baxter is a Major League resume. Ankiel mashed righties to the tune of an .890 OPS in his renaissance year in 2008, but his offensive numbers across the board have plummeted since then. In 327 plate appearance against right-handers in 2011, Ankiel mustered only a .678 OPS. By comparison, in Baxter’s last full season of Triple-A play in 2010, his line against righties translates to a .769 OPS in the Majors.
That’s only one year for both players, of course. But if the Mets bring in Ankiel and Terry Collins maintains his insistence on platoon matchups, they could very well be assigning the bulk of their pinch-hitting opportunities to a guy that’s not really fit for them.
Though if you’re playing at home, note now that it’s Jan. 30 and I’m lamenting the way Terry Collins might use a player the Mets are speculated to be considering for the very last spot on their roster.
But hey, the Giants are in the Super Bowl!
Tedquarters 