Twitter Q&A-style product, part 2

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You can’t see it, but I’m shrugging my shoulders right now. Here’s a story: The day before the Super Bowl I spent some time with a rabid Steelers fan. Obviously the non-Steelers fans among us brought up Ben Rothlisberger and his alleged habits, and the Steelers fan just kept defending Big Ben, insisting that nothing had been proven, maintaining that the quarterback hadn’t done anything wrong.

So while, in my eyes, what Sanchez supposedly did cannot compare in any way to what Rothlisberger allegedly did, I also realize that I am hopelessly biased toward the Jets’ Taco Bell-loving quarterback and unlikely to see fault in any of his actions until they somehow impact his ability to contribute to the Jets, and maybe not even then.

I’m sure some people probably take issue with Sanchez bringing a 17-year-old home, and perhaps rightfully — I’ve known enough 17-year-olds (and interacted with enough of them when I was myself 24 [not in the way Sanchez did, I just mean I worked in a high school]) to recognize that most of them aren’t really ready to be making grown-up decisions, even if they think they are. Hell, I’m not really ready to be making grown-up decisions and I’m 30.

As for Deadspin posting it, more shoulder-shrugging. Is it manufacturing a controversy, as @JoeBacci asked? Perhaps, but who am I to judge what they do? I still read the site with some frequency, and it gets about a billion times more traffic than this one. The Sanchez story is not the type of content that draws me to that site, so I suppose if it became entirely dedicated to exposing athletes’ affairs I’d stop reading. But until it does, I probably won’t.

I strongly advocate more Taco Bell, but I don’t think anything could guarantee 200 innings from Johan Santana, in 2011 or anytime beyond, really. It seems like Santana’s recovery is becoming a pretty big story in Mets camp, and, at the risk of sounding like Debbie Downer I’ll say this: Don’t hold your breath.

Shoulder injuries are very, very, very bad news for pitchers. As a Mets fan and a Santana fan (the pitcher, not really the band), I hope the lefty can recover and soon. But I’m pretty sure — and I can’t find the quote now — that at the press conference to announce Santana’s surgery, he listed other pitchers that had the same procedure and included Jorge Posada, Kelvim Escobar, Chien-Ming Wang and Mark Prior. Tell me which of those names sounds like a promising comp for a pitcher.

I’m not asking this rhetorically, I’m straight-up asking: Does anyone know of a pitcher who has fully recovered from surgery to repair the anterior capsule in his throwing shoulder? It’s entirely possible Santana’s condition and surgery were less severe than those of Escobar, Wang and Prior, but I’d love to be able to cling to an example of a guy who made it all the way back when I’m looking at that targeted July return.

Twitter Q&A-style product

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Kind of a long story that I might touch on later, but I don’t have my phone, which had the audio of the interview I intended to transcribe today. So in lieu of that, here’s some Twitter Q&A-type stuff. Actually, these ran long so I’m breaking them up into two posts.

One of the inevitable downsides of a sports reporter’s affecting or achieving disinterest in his subject is that readers will perpetually speculate which team he or she favors. I am lucky in that I am able to come right out and tell you I’m a Mets fan so there’s no doubt where my rooting interest lies, and even so I have been accused of being a “fake” Mets fan — though it was never clear if those people meant I was faking my favoring of the Mets or just a fake human, perhaps some sort of bot developed by SNY to forward the company line.

Anyway, I’m reasonably sure that in 90% of cases, the fan guessing at the journalist’s rooting interest is wrong — either it’s simply a matter of confirmation bias on the part of the fan, or the journalist quietly roots for some team the fan hasn’t even considered, or the journalist unknowingly favors the players and teams that make his job easier, or the journalist really doesn’t care. But Stark, here, lends credence to the common Mets-fan theory that he’s a big-time Phillies fan, formed partly because of his past as a Phillies reporter and partly because he dedicates thousands of words to trumpeting the Phillies’ grit and hustle and greatness.

The section about the Mets’ offseason in Stark’s column is so silly it doesn’t even really merit a response. It starts with a joke about how Sandy Alderson probably didn’t know what a Ponzi scheme was before this offseason (with no mention of how he went to Dartmouth then Harvard Law), then goes on to… oh lord, it’s not even worth my frustration. Basically every single thing he writes in the section is wrong or poorly considered.

I was actually thinking about it, so here’s a good excuse. It doesn’t often happen to me — usually I check for my phone, watch and wallet before I leave anywhere. But today I had a small notebook in my coat pocket, and I must have mistaken that for my phone. I had a doctor’s appointment in the morning so I took the train into the office in the middle of the day.

When I finished the Daily News and reached in vain for my phone, my reaction to not finding it wasn’t disappointment or annoyance, but something closer to terror. Then when I realized I was terrified by not having my phone on me, I grew even more terrified because of the implications of that response. What the hell is wrong with me? It was only a little over a year ago that I got a smartphone, and now I’m so dependent on the thing that I completely panic when I don’t have access to it.

I mean, granted in this particular situation I had work I wanted to be doing that required the phone, plus it was technically in the middle of my work day and I work on the Internet, so I have a couple of excuses. But still. Kinda got me thinking of the Matrix, and wondering if the first people that plugged into those pod things did so on a voluntary basis.

I am generally of the mind that the technology that enriches our lives makes us smarter, and I have no doubt that the awesome breadth of information now almost perpetually available at my fingertips has better prepared me to succeed on Jeopardy. But I do wonder sometimes if the constant distraction affects the depth of my thoughts, and if I wouldn’t be better off putting the damn thing on the shelf for a few days every so often to better convene with whatever the hell is out there that’s not on Twitter.

A conversation about Matt Cain

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Interesting read for baseball nerds. Dave Cameron and Rory Paap try to investigate why Matt Cain consistently outperforms his peripheral numbers. If you’ll recall, I struggle a bit with xFIP. I have no doubt that most pitchers’ HR/FB rates will normalize over time, but I’m unwilling to go all-in on the idea that no pitcher can consistently yield weak fly-ball contact. Also, I wonder if the organizational angle that Cameron and Paap seem to settle on would also pertain to the A’s. I think it’s eminently reasonable to consider that the nerds in Major League front offices and dugouts could be a step ahead of us nerds on the Internet on this one.

BREAKING: Rich guy could buy the Mets, probably won’t

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With his excellent seats at Citi Field, Michael Bloomberg says he won’t upgrade to the owner’s box.

The billionaire mayor was asked Thursday if he was interested in purchasing the 20%-25% stake the Mets’ current owners, Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz, are selling off to raise cash for potentially crippling litigation involving their ties to Bernie Madoff’s collapsed Ponzi scheme.

“I don’t think I should own a baseball team,” answered Bloomberg, smiling.

– Nathaniel Vinton, N.Y. Daily News.

So is this how it’s going to be now? We’re just going to start speculating that every single rich person with even vague ties to baseball or New York might purchase the Mets? Because that’s going to get tedious.

First of all, it seems likely that anyone with $250 million lying around to invest in a baseball team didn’t come into that money without being pretty careful about his or her investments, so outside of a few outlying eccentrics I imagine most billionaires aren’t going to come out and be all, “HELL YEAH I WANT THE METS! TRADE DAVID WRONG!”

Second, there are a ton of extremely rich people who aren’t celebrity rich people, meaning that there are prospective buyers beyond Bloomberg and Mark Cuban and James Dolan and Derek Jeter and whoever else. It might not make for an interesting story if some hedge-fund manager from Chappaqua that no one outside the financial world has ever heard of emerges as a candidate to buy all or part of the team, but I can’t imagine it makes much of a difference to the Wilpons or, for that matter, to the Mets in the long run.

Speaking of: The 20th richest man in America, per Forbes, is a New York hedge-fund manager named John Paulson (Ed. note: His name is John Paulson). Forbes says Paulson is worth $12.4 billion, and yet I had never heard of him until right now. What’s up with that, Mr. Paulson? What’s the point of making $12.4 billion if your name’s not going to ring out through the streets?

Anyway, I’ve got an easy solution for you, John Paulson: Give me a billion dollars. That’s less than 1/12 of your riches. I keep a sports and sandwich blog of moderate repute, and if you made me rich, I’d probably dedicate half my posts to writing about how awesome you are. Think of the publicity! Sandwich of the Week: Lobster and Caviar on saffron-infused brioche with diamond aioli. And bacon. All thanks to Mr. John Paulson, billionaire philanthropist and patron of the sandwich-oriented arts.

Long story short, guessing that the rich people you’ve heard of will buy the Mets is probably a fool’s errand, because there are likely way more rich people you haven’t heard of. And it’s certainly going to take a while before anything concrete gets done, so it’s probably fruitless to spend the interim picking billionaires out of hats and assuming they might be interested in investing in a baseball team supposedly carrying considerable debt.