Look: If I knew before I left for work that we were going to get Peter Gammons on the line today, I probably would’ve shaved. But then I was out pretty late last night at the Prince concert, so no guarantees.
Brian Cashman more or less admitted that the Rafael Soriano contract was Hal Steinbrenner’s idea, not his own. As Emma Span writes: “Huh.” In more hilarious news, the Yankees were apparently unironically pursuing Carl Pavano. He was the best starting pitcher left on the market, they need a starter and they have the funds so it actually isn’t horrendously unreasonable, it’s just, well, you know.
Japanese researchers expect to clone a woolly mammoth within five years. Those things are awesome looking, and if they were really hunted to extinction, they might also be delicious. Let’s get on the reintroduction of woolly mammoths to nature. What could possibly go wrong?
On Friday afternoon in the batting cages at the Mets’ Minor League facility in Port St. Lucie, Fla., Tim Teufel pitches to a righty-hitting college-aged kid in blue mesh shorts and a t-shirt.
A clutch of guys in Mets jerseys looks on, but none among them can peg down the identity of the kid. They know his name is Mike and that he’s not among their ranks at Fantasy Camp. They think the kid knows Teufel. One says he’s Teufel’s son. Another suggests he’s Teufel’s son-in-law. A third says he’s Teufel’s son’s friend. No one is certain.
But they see that he is awesome. He lashes line drive after line drive, every ball darting off his bat toward left-center field, slicing into the cage’s net and pulling it taut against its supports, then ricocheting back near where Teufel is throwing.
His contact produces a Major League sound. It is something different than the clichéd “crack of the bat.” That familiar sound, at stadiums, is filtered by distance and crowd rumble, limiting the spectrum of noise that hits the eardrum.
Here, up close, you can hear the sizzle and whoosh as the kid’s hands and bat and the ball all speed into the zone at the same time, then an oaky baritone report when they all come together. Thwock, thwock, thwock. It is magnificent.
“You know what’s wrong with this kid’s swing?” one camper asks another.
“What?”
“Nothin’.”
Only Lenny Harris sees something amiss. The familiar pinch-hitter extraordinaire, fresh off his own BP session in the next cage over, stops Teufel and jumps in the cage. The kid, he says, is cheating forward with his lower half before he swings, costing him balance — presumably passable in batting practice but the type of thing good pitchers will eventually exploit.
“You see it, Teuf?” Harris asks. Teufel nods and steps over to the batter’s box. He explains the importance of keeping flexible through the hips, swiveling his own as he does so. A few of the Fantasy Camp group chuckle; they have enjoyed a brief, exaggerated version of the Teufel Shuffle.
Harris pulls over a tee to teach the kid — and Teufel — a drill to help hitters stay back in the box. The kid hits more line drives toward left-center, shots that look and sound a lot like the earlier ones. Harris, a Minor League hitting coach these days, can see the adjustment, and he seems satisfied.
In the next cage over, one of the camp-goers takes his cuts off Pete Schourek. Long and lean and probably in his early 30s — one of the youngest in attendance — his swing appears steady, if lacking power. But he is missing the ball, swinging over it. The few he connects with veer straight down into the artificial turf.
Jim McAndrew walks into the area from one of the back fields. He watches the hitter struggling, then speaks up.
“Put your bat on your shoulder,” he says.
The guy looks confused, and a bit tentative. Little League coaches everywhere earn their pay reminding hitters to take the bat off their shoulder. Now, a member of the 1969 Mets — a pitcher, no less — is telling him otherwise. He pulls his hands in uncomfortably close to his body, elbows bent so tight his forearms almost graze his biceps, then swings and misses again.
“No, no. Just place the bat on your shoulder. Relax,” McAndrew says. The guy heeds his advice. Line drive.
The people at Mets Fantasy Camp are dentists and lawyers and doctors and teachers in real life. They range in age from about 30 to 70. Most of them are men, but there are a few women peppered throughout. Most come alone, but there are some kids and wives and parents milling about. They have in common only a love of baseball and a learned understanding that Major League Baseball players are really, really, really good at it.
The former players, too, seem to delight in the sport as much as the campers do, and the place becomes like a weeklong mid-Winter celebration of its grandeur. It’s January, and you’ve missed baseball. Here, you watch baseball, you play baseball, you talk baseball, you revere it.
“After October, you just kind of sit around,” says Al Jackson, a veteran of some 50 years in various positions in professional baseball. “This gets you ready for Spring Training. It breaks up the monotony.”
Sports Illustrated’s cover this week:
German police detained an owl that drank too much Schnapps. The best part? They brought it to a “bird expert who has treated alcoholized birds before.” Apparently German birds know how to party.
Outstanding read from former Broncos tight end Nate Jackson at Deadspin.
I think it speaks to Favre’s legacy that the verb “to Brett Favre” no longer means, “to scramble around then chuck up a 50-yard interception to a defender that’s nowhere near any of your receivers downfield.” Now it either means “to pretend to retire then unretire” or “to text message photos of your junk.”
To celebrate the Topps Diamond Anniversary on Valentine’s Day, Topps will give a lucky couple a chance to propose in Grand Central Station in New York City, and win a $10,000 diamond ring. To get there, couples need to explain in video why they should be selected.
To learn more, go to the Topps Facebook page.
My sister and her husband gave me an assortment of exotic meats for Christmas, because my family is just that awesome. Many of them are in burger form, which is massively convenient because I make a lot of burgers at home. Some of them are in steak form. All of them* will be introduced in this new TedQuarters feature, Meet the Meat.
I started with wild boar. Here’s what it presumably looked like before someone went all Lord of the Flies on it:
Here’s what it looks like as steak:
From the Internet, I expected lean, tough meat, but as you can see in the picture above the steak had some nice fatty marbling to it.
My wife and I picked up some frozen steamed buns in Flushing on Saturday after she picked me up from the airport, so my first instinct was to turn the boar into a version of the Hall of Fame Momofuku pork bun, since that seemed like a good easy recipe that would showcase the meat.
But then it turned out my wife doesn’t like hoisin sauce, which came as news to me. Turns out it takes at least a year and a half of marriage before you fully comprehend your spouse’s taste in Asian condiments. She happens to be wrong — hoisin is delicious — but even though I was once in a band called the Moo Shoo Porkestra, I was willing to adjust the recipe. That’s love, right there.
I pan-fried the boar in a little bit of olive oil and steamed the buns. Then, inspired by banh mi sandwiches and the herbs I happened to have at my disposal, I put a piece of boar on each bun with some Thai chile sauce (think sweet and sour sauce but with a little heat), fresh cilantro, and a couple of slices of cucumber and jalapeno:
Before I ate it I added a little bit of Sriracha, because Sriracha is amazing.
This wild boar bun is amazing. Honestly, I heartily recommend combining cucumbers, cilantro, jalapenos and Thai chile sauce wherever possible. Turns out they go really, really well together — really capture that sweet, spicy, sharp mix of flavors you get in a lot of southeast Asian foods.
And as for the meat? Excellent. I wouldn’t say it was tender, but it was a lot less tough than I expected — somewhere on the scale of a steak or a pork chop. Actually, halfway between a steak and a pork chop is probably a good way to describe the flavor. It tasted very meaty, but not in a way I’d call “gamey” — though I’ve never been entirely clear on what that word really means.
*- I reserve the right to not document some of them if I can’t come up with anything to say about them. But then you won’t know anyway.
Tedquarters 