LOL Mets 2012 schedule

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Major League Baseball released its full schedule for 2012, and the Mets’ kind of sucks. I’ve come to be something of an apologist for Interleague Play even if I think it lasts too long every summer. It’s a good way for fans to get to watch great players we don’t often see in person, like Jose Bautista and Kevin Youkilis and… Nolan Reimold?

The Mets will host two Interleague series in 2012: One with the Yankees and one with the Orioles. With the NL East and AL East due to match up, the Mets drew the one team in that division that’s not really at all compelling. The Orioles have a bunch of young players so there’s some chance they start to turn it around by June 18, 2012, but I was really hoping to get to watch Bautista tee off in Citi Field.

Of course, the Blue Jays are one of only six big-league teams I haven’t seen in their home park, so perhaps a road trip is in order. The Mets are ticketed for Toronto the weekend of May 18-20. Are there any notable sandwiches there? The Wikipedia tells me that one of the city’s nicknames is “Hogtown,” so that sounds promising.

John Sickels scouts Chris Schwinden

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There is nothing special about [Chris Schwinden’s] velocity, his fastball is just in the 86-90 range. He mixes in a cutter, curveball, and changeup, relying on sharp command of his secondary pitches to succeed. He has little margin for error and needs a strong defense behind him, but there are pitchers with worse stuff who have made careers for themselves due to superior command, and he’s shown the ability to make adjustments to higher level competition.

Schwinden really snuck up on us this year, but I don’t see him as a total fluke. I think he projects as a fifth starter or long relief type as long as his command remains strong.

– John Sickels, MinorLeagueBall.com.

Sickels scouts Schwinden, a surprise Triple-A success. I link it here because I like the idea of the Mets trying him — and guys like him — in the bullpen. Middling starters often turn into very effective relievers. And though Schwinden doesn’t have the type of stuff typically associated with late-inning bullpen roles, he appears apt to get the ball over the plate — more than many members of the Mets’ current bullpen can boast.

But obviously the first step is securing enough decent starters that they won’t need Schwinden in the Major League rotation.

Mariano Rivera reaches inevitable milestone

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Presumably you’ve heard that Mariano Rivera saved his 600th game last night. Sometime this week he’ll save his 601st game, and before the season is done he’ll save his 602nd game and break the all-time saves record, just in case anyone is silly enough to need that figure for evidence that Rivera is the greatest closer of all-time.

By allowing a single hit last night, Rivera maintained his career 1.000 WHIP. To date he has thrown 1206 innings, yielded 932 hits and walked 274 batters. That is, if you’re scoring at home, awesome.

Adjusted ERA+ factors park- and league-effects into earned-run average and scales it so that 100 is average — sort of like IQ tests and the old SATs. Among pitchers with over 1000 innings pitched, Pedro Martinez has the second best ERA+ of all time with 154. Third is someone named Jim Devlin, who dominated hitters for three seasons in the 1870s and managed a career 151 mark. Fourth and fifth are Hall of Famers Lefty Grove and Walter Johnson, with 148 and 147, respectively. Those men were pitching geniuses.

Rivera’s career adjusted ERA+ is 205, more than 50 points higher than the next best ever. Isaac Newton stuff, in this imperfect metaphor.

Of course, any discussion placing Rivera among the best pitchers ever must be qualified with the fact that his dominance almost always came in one-inning stints. Who knows what Johnson or Grove or Pedro would have done if afforded that luxury? Who knows if Rivera would have been anywhere near as effective if asked to throw 120 relief innings every year the way Rollie Fingers once did, or — heaven forbid — to start games.

It never happened, so it doesn’t matter much now. Rivera happened to emerge and succeed in the era of the one-inning closer, a role he has come to define better than Tony La Russa ever could.

And though there’s evidence to show that teams leading after the 8th inning have won the same rate of games since the dawn of the closer as they did in all the years before that, perhaps increased specialization in bullpens was an adjustment necessary to maintain that percentage in the contemporary game rather than a needless rejiggering of an already effective system.

Either way, Rivera is awesome. That’s the main thing.

Louis CK and Robert Smigel on Conan in 1993

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Obvious ancestor of the Triumph voice.

Is everyone watching Louie? I started the series about two weeks ago and I’m already almost caught up. It’s incredible.

There probably needs to be a Hall of Fame for TV shows. Every time a really good show comes along, people inevitably say, “it’s the best thing on TV,” or “it’s the best thing ever on TV.” We have no better way to heap praise upon it because the Emmys are about as good at rewarding the best TV shows as the Gold Gloves are at rewarding the best fielders. Of course, it’s no safe bet the Hall of Fame would be either.

Anyway, Louie might actually be the best thing on TV, though it’s definitely not the best thing ever on TV. The only other worthy candidate for current best show I can think of is Breaking Bad, which excellent. But it’s worth noting that a purported comedy about the life of a comedian manages to be more thoughtful and more bleak than a drama about a cancer-stricken meth cook. Apples and oranges though, obviously.

Both shows are better than Strike Back, but Strike Back features more hot people blowing stuff up and having sex at angles unique to Cinemax.

Apparently we’re still talking about hats

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And I have little urge to discuss them. The whole thing seems like the PR equivalent of a broken-bat dribbler bobbled by the pitcher then fired in the dirt to first where it was ole’d by the first baseman into right field then tossed into the crowd by an outfielder who had no idea how many outs there were while meanwhile the hitter faceplanted on his way to second base. It is confusing and ugly, and the only thing clear is that no one involved played it particularly well.

If you want more than that, check out what Patrick Flood has to say.

Also, if you’re looking for a slightly more upbeat (though still unutterably sad) bit of 9/11-memorial news, check out Newsday’s piece on my old high school football coach and his wife, who lost their son in 2001. Coach Caproni is on the short list of the warmest, classiest, most downright decent people I’ve ever known.

It’s like regular Earth, only better

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More than 50 new alien planets — including one so-called super-Earth that could potentially support life — have been discovered by an exoplanet-hunting telescope from the European Southern Observatory (ESO).

The newfound haul of alien planets includes 16 super-Earths, which are potentially rocky worlds that are more massive than our planet. One in particular – called HD 85512 b – has captured astronomers’ attention because it orbits at the edge of its star’s habitable zone, suggesting conditions could be ripe to support life.

– Denise Chow, Space.com.

Well that’s exciting. And hey, it’s only 35 light years away! That means if we ever figure out a way to travel at the speed of light, which we won’t, we can put a bunch of babies on a space ship and they can go check it out and report back when they’re old. Provided the space ship that travels at the speed of light also can sustain human life for 70 years, of course.

I was driving north on the Sprain Brook Parkway on Saturday, looking at the pavement and the mild automobile congestion and the roadkill and the trees looming over the highway, when I decided there must be other life somewhere in our universe.

How arrogant are we to ever think otherwise? There are about 400 billion other stars in our galaxy, and maybe 400 billion other galaxies with that many stars. One recent estimate suggests there are 300 sextillion stars in the universe. That’s 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

And you want to tell me this here, that Ford Explorer speeding over the remains of what was probably a raccoon, is the best the universe can offer? I don’t buy it.

Twitter Q&A Part 3: The Search for Twitter Q&A Part 2

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Remember when they used to say they were making Space Balls 3: The Search for Space Balls 2? That would have been awesome. Instead I’ve co-opted the title for this post.

OK, I know everyone always says an elephant with a shark’s face, but I’m going to go with a flying polar bear that spins spiderwebs.

Because how sweet would that be? It could maul you from land, air or sea, and also set sticky traps so it could eat you later just in case it wasn’t around to maul you when you happened to walk by its dam. Oh yeah, it would also build dams and live in lodges like a beaver.

Problem is, the protection offered by the lodge and the convenience of the web would probably allow the Flying Polar Bear that Spins Spiderwebs to get pretty lazy, as is the bear’s wont. And so you’d just have these lodges full of fat, lethargic killing machines filling up on all the good stuff they collected in the web outside instead of fully exploiting all their awesome and terrifying powers.

Seriously though I don’t think we spend enough time talking about how great spiders are. I’m not trying to sound like some creepy bio teacher with a big collection of arachnids or anything, but man, that’s one bug that figured it out.

Though it’s tempting to imagine TedQuarters favorites Lucas Duda and Val Pascucci on a defensive line, I happen to know that Willie Harris turned down a football scholarship to Florida State to play pro baseball after high school. So it almost has to be him, even if Bobby Parnell might make a nice successor to Brett Favre as the NFL’s best quarterback with an awesome arm that doesn’t really know where it’s going.

If I didn’t know that about Harris, I’d say Jose Reyes could make for a pretty fine wide receiver. Good size for it, great speed, good hands. It pains me to imagine Reyes going up for a pass across the middle though, knowing what Ray Lewis might do to him.

As for Jets that could be Mets, I’d love to see what Darrelle Revis looked like in center field. I’ll just assume he’d be an awesome hitter, too, because what can’t Revis do?

I’m not interested in crapping on any small businesses, so I’ll stick to chains. And I’ll amount that I will probably eat at several of these places again. Sometimes you wind up in a group of people going someplace and you don’t want to be that guy so you just roll with it. Anyway, here we go:

– Subway: Many of my negative feelings for Subway come from its haphazard use of the term “sandwich artist,” which I believe should be reserved for true sandwich artists. That’s not to say there aren’t some potential sandwich artists working at Subway, but I know from talking to ex-Subway employees that they’re given set amounts of each ingredient to include on sandwiches (four half-slices of cheese, eight olives, etc.), which seems more like sandwich building than sandwich artistry.

– Pizza Hut: The (literally) red-headed stepchild of Yum! brands and worst of the major pizza chains. The last time I ate pizza from Pizza Hut I was three weeks deep into a trip to China and desperate for familiar food, but all that did was remind me that I don’t much care for Pizza Hut. Notable exception: Breadsticks.

– Taco Time: Never again.

– TGI Friday’s: The younger brother of one of my best friends worked at Friday’s for a long time. Since his brother could comp us stuff, my friend always wanted to go there. Everything they serve at Friday’s tastes primarily like Friday’s, and after enough trips you grow to really dislike that taste.

– Hale and Hearty Soups: Similar to Friday’s in that my distaste for it grew due to too-frequent visits, this time perpetrated by some work friends at an old job. For some reason I tend to think of soup as a vaguely healthy lunch option even when it’s chowder or bisque, so Hale and Hearty always burned me twice: What you think is going to a healthy alternative to pizza turns out to be just as bad for you, plus it’s so greasy that you can’t even think about actually tasty food for hours afterward.