New comments section and Facebook stuff

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As you may have noticed, the comments section looks different. Thanks to the tireless work of Matt Cerrone, the comments on this site — as well as MetsBlog.com and SNYRangersBlog.com, and ideally a few more of our SNY.tv blogs in the coming days — are now on Disqus.

I’ve never made anyone register or log in to comment here*, and you will still be able to post as a guest in the new system. Just type your comment and hit “Post as…” and Disqus will prompt you for a name and email, same as what was here before.

But because many of the community aspects of the new system are pretty cool, I urge you to log in and comment via Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo! or Open ID, or sign up through Disqus.

That way the personified and ominous SNY can monitor your activities from smoky back rooms, petting a cat and plotting your demise. Also, you’ll be able to more easily comment on other SNY blogs (and other blogs on Disqus like MLBTradeRumors.com), and the site will keep track of how many other readers like your comments. Validation!

(Also, for the paranoid: I was kidding about the monitoring your activities thing. This change is to liven up the commenting communities on our sites and take some of the burden off our servers. You’re paranoid so you probably won’t believe me, but no one’s up to anything shady.)

Finally, you may have noticed that you now have the option to “recommend” posts on this site on Facebook and “Like” the site in general (on the top right of the page below the search bar). We’re still working on some stuff with that, but feel free to recommend and like away. There’s even this new (still in-progress) TedQuarters fan page on Facebook. You like me, right? Please, tell me you like me!

Of course, all these changes come just in time for this site to slow down for the holidays. Consider it, I don’t know, a transition period. You slowly adjust to the new comments section and to officially declaring your like for TedQuarters on Facebook while I publish 1-2 posts a day through the New Year. Then, come January, you’re fully ready to comment and like away and I’m all refreshed from vacation, and we all come out swinging in 2011.

But not swinging in the Rex Ryan way. This is not that type of web site.

Thanks, as always, for reading and commenting and everything else, and thanks for helping make this site the Internet’s second most awesome TedQuarters. The Top 10 Things of 2010 will start rolling out this afternoon.

*- Except one time, very early on, when I screwed something up in the admin. I do reserve the right to someday make you log in to comment, but I won’t do it before we enjoy some hilarious and rampant trolling.

Introducing: The TedQuarters Top 10 Things of 2010

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I’ve got about a billion overdue expense reports to file and Christmas gifts to buy in the next couple days, then I’m taking off from Thursday until the New Year.

But since I don’t want to leave this blog totally dark for the next week and a half, starting tomorrow I’ll be rolling out one post per day about the TedQuarters Top 10 Things of 2010. I’ll probably post some other stuff too as it comes up, but it will otherwise be mostly quiet around here.

What are the TedQuarters Top 10 Things of 2010? Well, you’ll have to wait and find out. But I’ll admit now that it’s a very biased list, it includes a bunch of stuff I’ve already talked about here and some things I haven’t but that all certainly fall within the normal realm of things discussed on TedQuarters.

So, you know, look out for that. You might also notice some minor changes around the site, since this blog remains the guinea pig for our SNY.tv Blog Network and we’re trying to get our act in gear for next year. I will probably mention them when they are completely functional and worth mentioning.

New York’s most notable burgers

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A good compendium of notable area burgers from the folks at Grub Street. Since my wife and I (back when she was my girlfriend) spent a lot of time in search of the city’s best burger, I’m happy to say I’ve eaten a lot of these — 19, to be exact.

Said wife used to judge the hell out of me for frequently ordering burgers in relatively upscale (by our standards) restaurants. But I’ve always held that, since I have high standards and a distinguishing palate for burgers, the burger is like my litmus test for a restaurant. If it’s awesome, I’ll probably go back and try something else. Or maybe just eat the awesome burger again.

Hat tip to Brad for the link.

The Mets lineup as half-full

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Over at MetsBlog today, Matt Cerrone took issue with Ben Shpigel’s assertion that the Mets, “in all likelihood,” would not contend in 2011. I can’t fault Shpigel for the prediction — the Mets, as we all know, are coming off two sub-.500 seasons, have made few roster moves, and will start the year without Johan Santana in their rotation.

But as Matt points out, unpredictable things happen in baseball all the time. I didn’t talk to Cerrone about the post, but if I had to guess I would assume it was at least in part motivated by the sense of fatalism that seems to be growing in Mets fans, especially since the Phillies signed Cliff Lee. There’s nothing wrong with making predictions and taking stabs at what will likely happen, as Shpigel does. Writing off any team entirely before the season even starts is silly.

For what it’s worth, last winter I listed both the Reds and the Padres as “unlikely to contend” in my National League preview for the Maple Street Press Mets Annual. Captain Hindsight can look back now and identify the ways in which both clubs were primed to compete, but at the time it hardly seemed I was taking controversial positions.

Anyway, on to the point. If we’re talking optimistically and trying to figure out the things that reasonably could happen to launch the Mets into contention, I’ll point out that the Mets might have a very good offense next season.

Fangraphs currently lists two 2011 projections for most players — Bill James’ version, and their crowdsourced fan projections. In most cases, the two are reasonably similar. Because I’m trying to see the cup half-full for the sake of this post, I took the better of the two projections for everyone slated to be in the Mets’ lineup and plugged them into David Pinto’s lineup analysis tool.

I even gave Josh Thole a bit of a boost, figuring Ronny Paulino will take some at-bats away against tough lefties. Since Thole was projected at a .358 OBP and a .378 slugging by the fans, I unscientifically bumped those numbers up to .360 and .415, seeing as Paulino has a lifetime .390 OBP and .490 slugging against lefties. I’m painting in broad strokes here.

I plugged in Daniel Murphy for second base, which assumes he can capably man the position. His Bill James projection seemed so optimistic that I didn’t bother adjusting it for any sort of platoon. James’ system projects Murph to post a .339 OBP and .455 slugging in 2011, which would put him among the top handful of second basemen offensively.

Anyway, with a lineup of Jose Reyes, Angel Pagan, David Wright, Carlos Beltran, Jason Bay, Ike Davis, Murphy and Thole/Paulino all performing up to the most optimistic of reasonable projections, the Mets would score just short of five runs per game (4.959, to be exact) according to the tool.

That’s nearly a full run per game better than the Mets scored last season. It would have made them the NL’s top offensive club in 2010.

Obviously the system is not perfect for a variety of reasons. For one, it assumes all players play 162 games at their positions, which clearly won’t happen. There’s a dropoff when you start plugging in bench players for the starters, and even in full health every team needs to plug in bench players with some frequency.

But even despite the team’s impotent offense last year, I don’t think it’s crazy to expect the Mets to score a lot of runs next season. There’s no obvious gaping hole in the lineup, and amazing things can happen when you replace out machines with capable Major Leaguers. Subbing in Jeff Francoeur’s 2010 Mets line for Beltran and Rod Barajas’ for Thole/Paulino would cost the team about a half-run per game, per the tool. (Pinto’s script fails to factor in smiles and leadership.)

If the Mets could only prevent runs as well as they did last year, using the Pythagorean win expectancy formula with that lineup projection, they’d finish with right around 100 wins. So that, well, that’d be cool.

Problem is, it’s just not that likely to happen. The Mets enjoyed very good pitching last year, but they also had a healthy Santana throw 199 innings. Jon Niese and R.A. Dickey, two of the three starters penned in for the 2011 rotation, experienced lasting big-league success for the very first time in 2010. And throwing Murphy in at second base could have repercussions for the defense.

The Mets lineup, as currently constituted, probably won’t score 800 runs. But it will probably be pretty good. That is what we can hold onto until April. That and the knowledge that lots of crazy things happen in baseball.

I’d say neither of those things makes the Mets likely to contend in 2011, but together they should be enough for us to recognize that it’s not downright impossible for the Mets to contend in 2011.

Well, I compare sportswriters to totalitarian dictators

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I compare PED users to murderers — of course, it’s not the same thing. But please follow my reasoning. Lots of murderers never get caught. Yet society has no trouble punishing murders who get arrested and convicted. It’s not like a defense lawyer walks into court and says, “Thousands of murderers get away with their crimes, so you should let my client, who wiped out an entire family, go free in the interest of fair play.”

That would be absurd. It also is absurd to let McGwire or Palmeiro into the Hall just because we don’t have the goods on somebody else. We have the goods on McGwire and Palmeiro.

– Lowell Cohn, Santa Rosa Press-Democrat.

Cohn has become the Internet’s new whipping boy for his ridiculous murder comp, but that’s not actually the thing that most stands out about this article to me.

He repeatedly states that he feels good about not voting for known PED users like Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro and Barry Bonds. That’s weird to me. Does that really feel good? Even if you’re broken up about steroid use in baseball — as Cohn undoubtedly is — is it really ever enjoyable to punish someone? Don’t get me wrong, there are times when punishment is just and proper. But even in those cases, is it fun to be the punisher?*

Apparently Cohn thinks so, and that’s his right. It’s just not for me. I made a terrible substitute teacher.

* – It is definitely fun to be The Punisher, except for the whole tortured-antihero thing.

Mets Interactive with Matt Cerrone

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The fruits of our earlier labors:

On the Garza for Mejia and Flores thing: You’ll see in the video that I say, in a typically hedged way, that I’d probably do it. 70 percent of TedQuarters readers and conversations with a few Mets fans and non-Mets fans have me at least considering otherwise.

Y’all know I’m all about keeping the farm system intact and building from within. Thing is, both Mejia and Flores seem pretty far off from impacting the Major League team, and so much can happen between now and when (and if) they do.

Garza, like I say in the video, is hardly an ace, but he has proven he can stay healthy and throw 200 big-league innings, plus he’s under team control via arbitration through the 2013 season.

Still, I get that Flores and Mejia are the Mets’ two best prospects, and Mejia seems like the guy in the system most likely to develop into a legit ace. And I happen to like Flores for a variety of reasons, even if he’ll have to move from shortstop and everything else.

I would love to be able to poll a larger sample of non-Mets fans to see what they’d say. And like Matt suggests in the video, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect the Rays might be able to get a more enticing package of prospects — with at least one that’s ready to contribute in the Majors — than the Mets’ top pair.

From the Wikipedia: Pale Male

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Heard about this thing for the first time this morning. Here I thought the city’s only notable bird was the middle finger. (Ed. note: Heyoo!)

From the Wikipedia: Pale Male.

Pale Male is a Red-tailed hawk that has made his home in New York City since the early 1990s. He is the first of his species known to have built his nest in a building instead of a tree, and he has sired at least 26 chicks. He is named Pale Male because he is a male bird and he is pale.

I’m on the record as saying birds are pretty stupid, and I’ve never really understood birdwatching as a hobby. I mean, look: I like looking at birds because they can fly, which is awesome, and they’re colorful, which is nice too. When I see a blue jay or a cardinal in my backyard I’m all, “hey, look at that bird! It can fly and it’s colorful, and I can identify it because I recognize it from a baseball team’s logo.”

But then after I look at it for a little while, either the bird flies away or I go back to tending to my barbecue, because it’s highly unlikely the bird’s really going to do anything all that interesting. And after the bird leaves I’m never like, “damn, I wish I were still looking at that bird.”

Hawks and other birds of prey are clearly a different story, though. First of all, they’re called raptors, which is viciously badass. And I know I only think that because of the velociraptors from Jurassic Park, but whatever. Also, they’re birds that totally dominate other animals. Death from above.

When I was in Costa Rica I watched a hawk stalk a family of monkeys, then swoop in and grab a baby monkey. Monkeys are sweet so it was sad and all, but they’re also crazy dexterous even when they’re young, so that’s pretty impressive work by the hawk right there. Really some impressive nature all around.

Back to Pale Male: After being chased from Central Park by crows in 1991, he moved to a classy 5th Ave. apartment building, sort of a real-life rags to riches story. In his prime location on E. 74th St., overlooking the park, he has romanced four different mates.

In 2004, a group of chumps and suckers, obviously jealous of Pale Male’s remarkable virility, took down his nest and the anti-pigeon spikes upon which it was built. But it turned out Mary Tyler Moore lived in the building, and she and a group of birders protested until the co-op board agreed to install a new “cradle” for his nest.

Since then, there have been numerous accounts of other red-tailed hawks setting up camp on buildings around the city. Presumably many of them are Pale Male’s offspring. I will go ahead and assume this means the city’s going to eventually be overrun with a bunch of inbred hawks, which might be kind of awesome if you think about it.

Pale Male has been featured in a PBS Documentary, three children’s books, a Steve Earle song, and numerous Conan O’Brien sketches.