Murphy to the outfield?

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Before last night’s game, Terry Collins told reporters that the Mets “have to be open-minded enough to think the outfield may be a spot” for Daniel Murphy.

Presumably neither Collins nor Sandy Alderson saw much of Murph’s first go-around in the outfield in late 2008 and early 2009, when Shea Stadium’s left field seemed to expand to a hundred times its normal size: a sprawling grassland stamped flat by Murphy hustling in every direction in dogged pursuit of balls hit past him, over him and sometimes right at him.

But then maybe it’s better Alderson and Collins missed that. If Murphy can hit anything like the way he did for the Mets in 2011, his bat plays in an outfield corner — way better than it does at first base. Murphy’s .320/.362/.448 line this season and .292/.343/.441 career mark are better than the league averages in both corner outfield spots this year, and notably better than the (perhaps flukishly low) .256/.322/.404 line posted by Major League left fielders in 2011.

Gone are the days when the average left fielder had an .820 OPS. Barry Bonds, as they say, ain’t walking through that door.

And for as bad as Murphy looked in left field, it was 59 games at a brand-new position for young player in his first days in the big leagues. If the Mets find a spot for Murphy in the outfield, his first handful of games there shouldn’t deter them from trying it again.

That’s the thing, though: Where exactly does Murphy fit in the outfield? Last I checked, the Mets are committed to paying Jason Bay at least $35 million through 2013 with a vesting option for 2014. So Murphy plays right, then?

I guess the idea is that trying Murphy in the outfield again offers the club flexibility. A good left-handed bat that could play five different positions would be a pretty damn valuable thing to have, it would just mean the team would have to continue suffering some of the mistakes that come from Murphy’s defensive inexperience and expect that he’ll repay them on offense.

Since I broached the topic of Bay: Earlier in the season, when his OPS floundered below the Ordonez Line, Bay looked like one of the game’s most untradeable players. His recent torrid stretch pushed his OPS up over .700 Monday night, and those two years, $35 million and vesting option now look… well, still pretty hard to deal.

Just thinking out loud here, but is there any way Bay finishes the season hot enough to allow the Mets to get out from under his contract this offseason?

He has raised his OPS 82 points in his last 10 games. He won’t maintain this pace, but if he can even match that gain over the course of the rest of the season, he’ll finish with a well better line than this year’s awful average left fielder. If that happens, could the Mets find a taker for Bay in return for, I don’t know, a low-level prospect and some salary relief? (Depends on how much salary relief.) Would they? How much of Bay’s deal should they be willing to eat to unbury themselves from the rest of it?

These are offseason questions, and perhaps unnecessary ones; Bay has teased us before.

But neither Murphy nor Lucas Duda seem to have the arm strength typically associated with right fielders, and moving Bay would allow the Mets to employ one of their less-expensive, homegrown (and likely more productive) bats in the outfield while using whatever part of Bay’s salary they save to upgrade elsewhere. That is, if it’s at all possible.

 

Sandwiches of Citi Field: Crabcake sandwich

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My wife and I hit up Catch of the Day at Citi Field on Sunday as part of my enduring quest to eat and review every sandwich available in the stadium. She got a lobster roll, of which I took a bite. That sandwich will be reviewed here after I’ve discussed it with her at greater lengths. She is a distinguishing eater of sandwiches and trusted source on such matters.

I ordered the crabcake sandwich: A crabcake on a potato bun with tartar sauce. The Catch of the Day menu actually calls it “tarter sauce,” but I follow the Wikipedia’s American English spelling. Either way, whenever I start talking about tartar sauce I inevitably say, “Let the fools have their tar-tar sauce,” in my best C. Montgomery Burns.

The damage is $15:

Crabcake sandwiches always feel a little funny to me, since you’re putting the crabcake on bread but there’s already a lot of bread in that crabcake. No disrespect to bread, of course. And it’s not anything like as strange as shoving a perfectly portable Jamaican beef patty inside a thick hunk of coco bread (which is delicious, it turns out).

The crabcake here is good. It’s not quite as crabmeat-heavy as I’d like, but when I think about it, I’m not sure I’ve ever had a crabcake that was. Maybe they just don’t make ’em that way. And this one maintains a pretty good crab flavor.

The downside to this sandwich is that whoever put it together went very heavy on the tartar sauce, so the whole thing got pretty goopy. The tartar itself is better than the standard deli mayo-mixed-with-relish concoction, but it’s still decidedly tartar sauce: tangy, thinner mayo to complement seafood.

On the whole, this isn’t a bad sandwich. But I’d say that if I were in the mood for seafood and a) I weren’t out to review every sandwich available at Citi Field, b) I could eat a whole lobster roll without getting sick and c) I was willing to spend upwards of $15 on a sandwich at a ballpark, I’d probably opt for the lobster roll instead. The lobster roll is $17, so the markup from real-world price to stadium price seems slimmer than it is on the crabcake, plus you get a good amount of lobster meat. But more on that will follow.

And we learn how Justin Turner got teased in high school

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A bunch of these responses to Mets Weekly’s question about which actors would play the Mets are entertaining. I highlight it here for Jason Pridie’s suggestion that the guy who played Bilbo Baggins would play Terry Collins. It sounded like a stretch to me at first, but TNT aired all three Lord of the Rings movies this weekend and I caught some of the Bilbo Baggins scenes, and it’s a surprisingly good call.

Elevated to absurdity

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I like this sequence from 30 Rock. A mildly funny joke followed by a better joke building off the first one, then elevated to absurdity by the third, all across 20 seconds.

I thought of it yesterday while watching the Mets lose to the Braves from the second deck in right at Citi Field, and not just because Excelsior sounds like a name Jack Donaghy would choose for a level in his stadium.

Something about the rapid-fire one-upsmanship during the game reminded me of the scene, with bad news replacing Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin — first Willie Harris pinch-hitting for Jose Reyes, then Daniel Murphy hopping out to short right field and collapsing with a season-ending knee injury, culminating in the ridiculous sight of David Wright playing shortstop and then, when it seemed like being a Mets fan couldn’t get any more depressing and silly, the game’s ultimate punchline: Chipper Jones lining the game-winning hit.

The metaphor fails because 30 Rock is funny and injuries to Reyes and Murphy are nothing like that, except I suppose in some grim, rock-bottom way.

Murphy was to date the team’s third-best hitter. Carlos Beltran, debatably the team’s first-best hitter, plays for the San Francisco Giants now. We await word on how long this hamstring tweak will sideline Jose Reyes, the other side of that debate. And that’s not to mention Ike Davis, who had been hitting better than all of them when he went down with the ankle injury that appears to have ended his season.

This sucks. It’s a damn-near miracle that the Mets can shoulder so many losses and still field a lineup of mostly not-embarrassing Major Leaguers, but a lineup of David Wright and a bunch of mostly not-embarrassing Major Leaguers isn’t going to score nearly as many runs as one with Wright, Murphy and Reyes, with a couple extra not-embarrassing Major Leaguers on the bench. Obviously.

I guess a more appropriate simile would be to say Sunday’s game hit like a flurry of punches from Mike Tyson in his prime, jabs and hooks and crosses and uppercuts, leaving us dazed and on the ropes. Something like that.

Whatever. Who cares what it’s like? It is what it is: Two of the Mets’ best players and best reasons to keep watching for the rest of 2011 getting hurt within the course of a few innings. Reyes may be back soon. Murphy won’t.

The upshot is we’ll probably see Lucas Duda in the lineup just about every day from here on out, and maybe more of Nick Evans too. We won’t get any better sense of if Murphy can play second in the future, though if you’re playing at home that makes two straight seasons for Murph ended by knee injuries sustained at the keystone, for whatever that’s worth.

Brutal. At least there’s still David Wright, playing shortstop or anyplace else. And Jason Bay… oh, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Sandwich of the Week

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Let’s get right into it.

The sandwich: Roast Pork Special from Shorty’s on 9th Ave. between 41st and 42nd in Manhattan.

The construction: Thin-sliced roast pork and broccoli rabe with sharp provolone on French bread, served with au jus.

Important background information: This is the second pork cheesesteak I’ve had. The first made the Hall of Fame. It’s a great concept: Pork is delicious, but the only thing that might hold it back on sandwiches is its toughness. Slicing it thin combats the chewiness associated with poorly prepared thick-cut pork chops.

Shorty’s provides the option of sharp or mild provolone. I chose sharp, because subtlety is for chumps and suckers. This… well, more on this to follow.

What it looks like:

How it tastes: Oh my sodium.

I started by pouring about half of the au jus over the sandwich, which might have been my mistake. Between the pork, the au jus, the provolone and whatever the broccoli rabe was cooked in, biting into this thing felt like plowing face first into a giant wall of salt. Still tasty, I should say, but so, so salty.

When I thought about it, I could pick up other flavors: Garlic, oregano, and some of the sharpness of the Parmesan. But tasting the broccoli rabe required either a great deal of focus or separating the vegetable from the rest of the sandwich. That’s a shame, as broccoli rabe is both an underrated and underutilized sandwich topping. Here, its natural flavors were almost entirely obscured by much more aggressive tastes.

Like our man Karl Welzein — referenced here in the last Sandwich of the Week as well — I appreciate bold flavors. But a sandwich needs to be more than a ferocious onslaught of powerful tastes, lest the palate be overwhelmed. A delicate balance must be achieved.

People watch action movies for the massive explosions and white-knuckle chase scenes, but if a movie were just a 120-minute long, mega-budget action sequence, it’d probably get boring no matter how many things blew up. I fear this sandwich drifted into Michael Bay territory.

Meh, that’s a bit too harsh. The pork was tender and juicy, the bread was fresh, and the sandwich-eating experience as a whole was an enjoyable one. It’s a fine sandwich. It’s just disappointing, since all the elements here should add up to a great sandwich.

What it’s worth: It cost $10. It was a decent-sized sandwich, but I wouldn’t call it a bargain at that rate.

How it rates: 72 out of 100.