Ike Davis mending, Mets medical staff… who knows?

Posted on by
Reply

Good feature from Anthony Rieber in Newsday about Ike Davis’ recovery process. The bottom line? Davis is ready to go, but his ankle injury could linger in some fashion for the rest of his career. And it was at some point misdiagnosed by the Mets’ medical staff.

That report sparked a flurry of Tweets from Adam Rubin indicating other times the Mets have mishandled player injuries, but though some of them are quite damning, the cases — as Rubin briefly notes — are different than Davis’.

With Davis, the medical staff actually misdiagnosed the injury. Traditionally, it seems, the problem has not been the diagnoses from the medical staff but how the team acts on them, and there’s not a ton to suggest the problem has continued under Sandy Alderson.

Remembering Pascual Perez

Posted on by
Reply

Navin Vaswani at NotGraphs collected a bunch of solid anecdotes about Pascual Perez from the Internet. It’s worth reading, but it made me feel pretty old because about halfway through I realized it was pretty clear that Vaswani — as he later noted — never saw Perez pitch.

He was all those things and more, Navin. It was something to behold. He didn’t just wear the jheri curls, he lived them.

If I remember it right, Carlos actually proved the craziest of the pitching Perezes. The Wikipedia is blacked out and so is a good portion of my memory, so I can’t prove that now. But I remember him wildly signaling strikeouts from the mound and taking ridiculous home-run swings every time he came up to hit, and I remember aping both those things while playing stickball.

Melido, on the other hand, never did anything I can remember to distinguish himself as weird besides being Pascual’s brother, throwing a rain-shortened no-hitter against the Yankees then later joining the Yankees, and also having sweet jheri curls.

Via Steve Schreiber.

None of the above!

Posted on by
Reply

Do I really think Brewster’s Millions is the best baseball film ever made? No. It’s a really stupid movie. But it’s one of those awful movies that every time it pops up on one of my 15,000 DirecTV channels, I fall into some sort of drooling trance in which time stands still. I don’t know that I’ve ever watched the thing from start to finish, but I’ve probably seen it about 30 times in fits and starts. There are some things the film did well. First, it proved that you can stick John Candy and Richard Pryor in the same movie and not only render them completely unfunny, but you can in fact make them seem almost child-like. I mean, this is Richard freaking Pryor, and I’m pretty sure he didn’t use a single swear word in the entire film.

– Bradford Doolittle, Baseball Prospectus.

I was pretty excited to see Brewster’s Millions on Baseball Prospectus’ list of 10 favorite baseball movies, but then I read the accompanying blurb. “Awful”? “Unfunny”?

Get your head out of the spreadsheet, son. Brewster’s Millions is a classic, and this dude at work who went to film school agrees. The premise is outstanding and the Richard Pryor is Richard Pryor. And “None of the Above” remains the only political candidate to which I could ever give my wholehearted endorsement.

Why national baseball writers should avoid writing team-specific articles

Posted on by
Reply

A couple of people pointed me to Jeff Passan’s ill-considered rip-job of the Mets for Yahoo! yesterday, but I was struggling to muster up the energy to write something about it, in large part because I didn’t know where to begin and in smaller part because I’ve come to hate indulging stuff like that with whatever little traffic I’d send its way. Luckily, Eric Simon took care of it.

Maybe it’s my fault

Posted on by
Reply

I was struck by something on my walk to the subway this morning. I’ve been following sports in earnest since 1987, when I was six years old. I remember watching the 1986 World Series with my family, but I didn’t understand it or recognize its import. I took up the Mets the following offseason, perhaps in part because of that championship but more likely because I was finally old enough to appreciate how awesome baseball is.

Anyway, sometime not long thereafter I started following the Jets and Knicks (to varying degrees). I’m nominally an Islanders fan, but let’s ignore hockey for the purposes of this discussion because, well… because it’s what people so often do.

2012 will mark my 26th year of following sports, and I have not yet known the glory of seeing one of my teams win its sport’s title. Actually, I shouldn’t even say “glory.” I don’t know if it’s glorious. It seems that way, but really I have no idea. I’m going to be 31 next week and I have been following sports for my entire conscious life, and that feeling — the ultimate reward for following sports — is still foreign to me.

I spent part of this morning trying to determine how many other cities might have fans as unfortunate as I have been these past 21 years. Granted, it’s inarguably better to have a perennially lousy professional sports team than no team at all, but I looked up all the cities with MLB, NFL and NBA franchises to determine if it’s feasible any fan in any city, choosing from local teams, might have it as bad as I do. One of those days.

Boston fans, you know, have seen recent successes from their teams in all three of those sports. Chicagoans who favor the Cubs have not seen an MLB or NFL title in the stretch, but can hang their hats on the Bulls’ unbelievable Michael Jordan run in the 90s. It has been mostly bad for them from Detroit, but they’ve got the lone Pistons championship in 2004 to hold on to. And so on.

Things have been nearly so bad for San Francisco Bay Area natives — likely on the Oakland side — who follow the A’s, Raiders and Warriors. The A’s won the World Series in 1989, but those teams have been otherwise quiet since.

Cleveland has a case: Neither the Browns nor Cavs nor Indians has taken its league championship since the Browns won the pre-Super Bowl 1964. And Seattle’s teams have been silent, title-wise, since the Supersonics took the crown in 1979.

But if you want to pick nits here — and I do, because this is about proving to myself how bad I have it — Mets/Jets/Knicks fans can claim this pathetic distinction on a technicality: The Browns, of course, have not operated continuously since 1987, and Cleveland was without a football team for three seasons from 1996-1998. And the Supersonics moved to Oklahoma City in 2008.

So no fan who came of age after 1987 and has followed continuously operating local MLB, NFL and NBA franchises has it quite the same as the Mets/Jets/Knicks fan. Certainly a case can be made that the Mets’ World Series berth in 2000 and the Knicks’ finals appearance in 1999 mitigate the suffering, but in truth it’s all about RINGZZ and my teams have f@#$ing none of them since I’ve been paying attention.

I imagine a lot of you are in the same boat. Let’s wallow in self-pity!

From the Queen of England to the hounds of hell

Posted on by
Reply

Good story from Alan Siegel at Deadspin detailing the rise of the White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army to mainstay stadium anthem. I’m not a huge White Stripes guy, but it’s about the catchiest song imaginable. I remember plunking it out on the guitar about an hour after I heard it the first time, then seeing Audioslave cover it live only a few months later at Lollapalooza in 2003. It’s a song you inevitably wind up jamming on if you rehearse with a band for any length of time, since someone will certainly play the riff shortly after tuning at some point and there’s so much space for interpretation that you can noodle with it for a surprisingly long time before it gets boring.