Awesome. Hat tip to Scott:
Today in Great Marching Band Accomplishments
Reply
Hold it together
Fun fact: If you asked me yesterday to predict the 2011 NL East winner, I would have said the Braves. They have a bunch of good young hitters and a strong, durable front of the rotation.
Then last night, the Phillies signed Cliff Lee to a reported five-year, $120 million deal with a vesting option. Today, the Phillies stand as the obvious favorites to repeat as division champs. And I hate the Phillies even more than I hate the Braves, so that sucks.
On Twitter this morning, someone asked me if I still thought the Mets shouldn’t have pursued Lee this offseason.
What? Of course I still think that. As a Mets fan, my foremost concern is that the Mets get better for the short- and long-term, and if I didn’t believe signing Lee was the best way for the team to do that yesterday or in September I’m not about to change my mind just because the Phillies signed him. That’d be some weird, Freudian approach to roster construction, and not a good one.
Besides, if Cliff Lee supposedly rejected the Yankees’ six-year, $132 million offer with a vesting option for the seventh year, that means the Mets would have had to beat that to lock up Lee. And I mean, hey, it’s not my money. But it sure seems like handing a 32-year-old pitcher $140 million over six years is a great way to get the Mets right back into the inflexible mess they’re in right now.
And just on a plain visceral level, do you really want a guy who apparently loves Philadelphia so much? What type of judgment is that? C’mon.
The Phillies will be awesome next year. They’ll have Lee, Roy Halladay, Roy Oswalt and Cole Hamels in their rotation. That’s unreal. Unreal. You can pencil them into the playoffs for 2011. Even if one of those fellows goes down, they’ll have the best starting pitching in baseball.
They’ll also be one of the very oldest teams in baseball, quite likely the oldest. They were the oldest team in baseball last year, and now they’re all a year older — you probably know how that works. Chase Utley missed 40-odd games with injuries. Ryan Howard suffered the lowest OPS of his career. Jimmy Rollins hasn’t been good since 2008.
As Mets fans, we think of the Phillies as invincible because the Phillies are the bad guys, and the ones that so often victimize our favorite team. But the cracks are starting to show. Probably not enough to slow them in 2011, but don’t go writing off 2012 for the Mets. Have you been watching baseball? Do you not realize how quickly things can go south for old players?
For a variety of reasons, the Mets could not sign Cliff Lee. They didn’t have the money and he didn’t seem particularly eager to pitch in New York. That’s fine, because the Mets should not have signed Cliff Lee. The Phillies’ decision is perhaps defensible since they’ve got an old team and an opportunity to win now and flags fly forever. They can worry about how they’ve got $80 million committed in 2013 to four players who are 33 and older in 2013.
And Mets fans, what we need to worry about most is that the Mets do the right things to make the Mets better. The Mets seem to be doing that. Hold it together.
Hunting is apparently good for nature
The falloff could have far-reaching consequences beyond the beginning of the end for an American tradition, hunting enthusiasts say. With fewer hunters, there is less revenue for a multibillion-dollar industry and government conservation efforts.
“As paradoxical as it may seem, if hunting were to disappear, a large amount of the funding that goes to restore all sorts of wildlife habitat, game and nongame species alike, would disappear,” said Steve Sanetti, the president of the National Shooting Sports Foundation.
Hunting generates billions in retail sales and pumps hundreds of millions of dollars into government conservation efforts annually through license sales and federal taxes on firearms and ammunition sales.
Interesting read. Turns out big-money hunting industry funnels money back into conservation efforts, and I guess that makes sense: hunting is a great way to convene with nature and then shoot at it.
Again, and for the hunting enthusiasts that will inevitably find this post and comment on it: I have no moral issue with hunting, it’s just not for me. I will say, though, that if people aren’t going to hunt anymore, then someone’s going to need to do something about the deer population eventually.
In my neck of the woods, there are deer — and dead deer — everywhere. A deer-on-car accident is a massive lose-lose. Messes up your car, quite possibly messes up you, and messes up the deer most of all. I see ’em off on the side of the road and it scares the hell out of me.
Taylor University’s Silent Night
Of all the incredible traditions in college basketball, Taylor University’s annual “Silent Night” has to be one of the most original.
Pajama-clad students, faculty and alumni packed Odle Arena on Friday night for Taylor’s home game against Ohio State-Marion. They remained dead silent until guard Casey Coons scored Taylor’s 10th point at the free throw line and then they erupted in confetti-filled mayhem for five straight minutes as though the tiny NAIA Indiana school had just captured a national championship.
It’s a sweet idea, but as you’ll see from the video, it’s not perfectly executed. That’s always going to be the problem: There’ll be some fans of the opponent around, plus a few who just didn’t get the memo.
I’ve always held that it’d be awesome if a closer could organize something like that for his entrance music. Instead of a song, the whole stadium goes completely silent, and the only thing anyone hears is the sound of the ball popping the catcher’s mitt as he warms up. Badass, right?
Problem is if the guy isn’t Mariano Rivera and fans start to turn on him, then you’ve got all the supportive fans sitting silently giving a few vocal haters the opportunity to broadcast whatever they want.
Talking Mets with Harold Reynolds
Harold and I go way back:
Recapping Jets-Dolphins with Brian Bassett
Now with visible frustration:
Since ripping Murray Chass is apparently en vogue
Let the record show that this will be the last time I ever rip Murray Chass in this space. I confess that I’m growing a soft spot for the man. No, he shouldn’t have lashed out at Tom Verducci on hearsay, as he did last week. Of course not.
But add up the sum of the Murray Chass parts at this point — the blog-hating blog, the cliched blinders-on criticism of the stats community, even just the way he’s continuing to work despite no professional affiliation or advertisers. It can be infuriating and obnoxious and just downright silly, but I think more than anything, it’s sad.
I didn’t always view it this way. Back before this blog existed, I wrote for SNY’s The Nooner blog under the pseudonym Duke Casanova (a tribute to two great men named Raul). Murray Chass wrote a post about Mike Piazza’s bacne and I responded with an angry Fire Joe Morgan-style screed for that site’s “The Editorial Whee!” feature (hence the first-person collective).
Anyway, since I’m bored of speculating about what Cliff Lee’s currently thinking and uninterested in weighing in now on the Mets’ social-media efforts, and since the Nooner blog no longer exists and ripping Murray Chass is currently en vogue, I re-posted the Murray Chass teardown here. Check it out.
Scribernetics: Watching the watchers
William Jim has invented a bunch of stats like “Bold Utilization of Nebulous Sources (BUNS)” and will use them to rate New York-based and national baseball writers. It’s not too far off the ground yet, but I hope he keeps this up.
BREAKING NEWS: Treasure trove of embarrassing photos of Cole Hamels uncovered
Big, big news today: Turns out Cole and Heidi Hamels have joined Twitter, and thanks to the @TheHamels account, I found the web home of the Hamels Foundation, the couple’s charity dedicated to educating inner-city youth and curing AIDS.
Now you might think such humanitarian efforts should afford one a respite from online humiliation, but then you’re probably not a downright awful person like I am. And the Hamels Foundation’s web site is a treasure trove of heretofore undocumented embarrassing photos of Cole Hamels.
There are so many goofy photos of Cole Hamels on the site that I had to focus on only the most embarrassing when updating the compendium here at TedQuarters. Check out that page for all of them, but here’s the clear highlight:
And perhaps my favorite part is that Jamie Moyer attends all these functions, and Jamie Moyer somehow manages to look awesome doing all the same things that make Cole Hamels look silly:
Justin Tuck’s taste in Christmas movies questionable
“It’s like recreating a bad Christmas movie.”
– Justin Tuck on the Giants’ week of travel.
Off hand, I can think of two holiday movies that included people taking circuitous routes to reach a destination by a certain deadline: Home Alone and Planes, Trains and Automobiles.
The latter, incidentally, is not a Christmas movie. Steve Martin’s character needs to make it home in time for Thanksgiving.
And both movies are excellent. I realize Home Alone is a bit cheesy, especially since we’ve all now seen it a billion times, but there are legitimate reasons it blew up when it came out. It’s eminently quotable and features some hilarious slapstick.
So while Justin Tuck is a good defensive end and reportedly a great teammate, he appears to have bad taste in movies, unless there is a movie with a similar theme that I am missing. A bad Christmas movie is Christmas with the Kranks.
Tedquarters 