I’m heading out of town so things will be pretty quiet here through the weekend.
This is a song about Detroit that I always get in my head when people talk about Detroit and its sports teams. Deceptively funky:
Programming note
Reply
Mets fan who is not me gets to visit Taco Bell test kitchen and mess around with stuff
Seriously, Taco Bell, what’s going on? I mean, that thing looks delicious and all, but give me two hours in there and I promise I could come up with like five marketable new menu items with clever names.
Wait… what?
The New York Yankees have held discussions with the Miami Marlins about a trade involving their third baseman in crisis, Alex Rodriguez.
Sources close to both organizations confirm the Yankees would pay all – or virtually all – of the $114,000,000 Rodriguez is owed in a contract that runs through the rest of this season and the next five. One alternative scenario has also been discussed in which the Yankees would pay less of Rodriguez’s salary, but would obtain the troubled Marlins’ reliever Heath Bell and pay what remains of the three-year, $27,000,000 deal Bell signed last winter.
None of the sources could give an indication as to how serious the discussions have already gotten, but one of them close to the Marlins’ ownership said he believed the trade made sense for both sides, and would eventually be made in some form.
That sounds pretty strongly worded for a rumor story, so maybe Olbermann — who’s not typically a scoops guy by any measure — either got something really juicy or isn’t accustomed to using the language needed to qualify these things.
Either way, it makes a hell of a lot of sense for the Marlins. They get a potential draw in a local guy pursuing a bunch of historic benchmarks, not to mention an upgrade to their woeful offense. And if A-Rod’s got a home in Miami he can’t get rid of, maybe it makes sense for him too.
What’s not really clear is how it works for the Yankees. Would they really pay all of the rest of his salary just to get rid of him? And if they were willing to do that, wouldn’t nearly every team in the Majors want him? Why only the Marlins — is that a function of his no-trade clause? Still, shouldn’t the Yanks hope to get something more than Heath Bell in return? Sure, A-Rod’s not the guy he was a few years ago, but he’s still a pretty good player. I mean, hell, if he’s free, let him play left field for the Mets.
As a Mets fan, I’m not opposed to A-Rod being sent south, no matter the deal. Though he would certainly make the Marlins better, he’d also make them indisputably more hilarious. Jose Reyes stealing bases, Giancarlo Stanton mashing home runs and making that ridiculous thing light up, and A-Rod sending clubbies into the Clevelander with “Do you like me? Check yes or no” notes for the dancers. I’m on board.
Playing the international market
Over at Amazin’ Avenue, Steve Sypa kicks off a three-part series on potential Japanese imports to help the Mets with a look at shortstop Hiroyuki Nakajima. Though, as Sypa concludes, Nakajima doesn’t seem the most logical fit for the Mets’ offseason needs, the team needs to bring in productive players on the cheap and should be exploring every possible angle from which it might do so.
To that end, I nearly made a post yesterday suggesting the Mets bring back old friend Lastings Milledge, who finished third in the Japanese Central League in OPS in 2012. L Millz will turn 28 in April. He bats right-handed and he plays the outfield, so he would appear a nice match for the Mets. Unfortunately, the Tokyo Yakult Swallows hold an option on his contract for 2013, and given his offensive success there, I’d guess they pick it up.
But here’s a dude: Former Mariners and Reds outfielder Wladimir Balentien finished second in the Japanese Central League in OPS this season and led the league in home runs for the second straight year.
Balentien, a native of Curacao, turned 28 in July. He plays the outfield and hits for power from the right side. The first 511 at-bats of his big-league career didn’t go so well, but he was younger then, plus playing in an awful offensive environment in Seattle. And he’s got a career .283/.351/.535 line in Triple-A and as far as I can tell his contract in Japan should expire after the season.
Presumably the Mets wouldn’t be the only team interested in giving Balentien another shot after his success overseas, but they might be the team most desperate for outfield help. So there’s that.
Who is Major League Baseball’s most likely ocelot defender?
If you told me a baseball player was involved in a legal dispute over the protection of ocelot habitats, I’d — and this is prejudice, I know — assume he was one of Major League Baseball’s legions of avid hunters and decidedly not on the same side as the ocelots in court.
If you next told me he was indeed acting on behalf of the ocelots and told me to guess who it was, I’d probably start with Prince Fielder. That’s mostly based on appearances, since Fielder looks cuddly as anything and once almost deked me into hugging him. But we also know that Prince Fielder at least dabbled in vegetarianism for a while, plus he plays on a team named for another endangered cat.
I’d round out the top five most likely ocelot defenders as: Cole Hamels, Brian Wilson, Albert Pujols and Mariano Rivera. That’s not based on much, just educated guesswork.
Then, if I had to go through all thousand-something guys on every team’s 40-man roster and rank them in order of the likelihood with which I’d expect them to go to court on behalf of ocelot habitats, I imagine I’d put Josh Beckett right down near the bottom of the list.
But alas, Beckett’s the guy. It turns out said ocelot habitat happens to be on his 7,000-acre Texas ranch, and Beckett is suing a pipeline company for bulldozing in an area where he has observed ocelots. Which is kind of nuts, if you think about it, since there are believed to be only 50 ocelots left living in the entire United States and ocelots are nocturnal and known for “reclusive behavior.” What are the chances that Josh Beckett, of all people, has seen them, and what are the chances they happened to be in the same spot on Beckett’s 7,000-acre ranch that this pipeline company needs to bulldoze?
I vote “pretty good.” As much as we might want to vilify Beckett for his purported roles in various Red Sox clubhouse meltdowns in the past couple of years, I’m just going to go ahead and guess he purchased the ranch specifically because of his interest in ocelots and his knowledge of the area as a potential ocelot breeding ground.
Also of particular note: The linked article features the headline, “Pipeline work leads to an ocelot of legal woe.” Also, both Beckett and Nolan Ryan have won a deer-hunting contest called the “Muy Grande,” which is Spanish for “very large.”
Finally (language NSFW):
Via Deadspin.
Status
I’m disappointed to hear the news that Strawberry’s Sports Grill is closing after two years in business. But it will live on forever in my heart as the place where Darryl Strawberry once bought me a sandwich, one of the highlights of my professional career.
Holdzing pattern
I know from responses to posts like this one that many of you don’t have much sympathy for the plight of the Minor Leaguer. And logically, I get that: These guys get paid to play a kid’s game, and even if that game can commodify them and dehumanize them and ultimately release them back into the real world often unprepared to do anything but the one thing they have just proven they cannot actually do, it’s all part of what they’ve signed up for.
Plus, no matter who told them what, when they were dominating in high school or college, about how much they’d eventually achieve and make in baseball, they should understand going into it that playing baseball professionally comes with a hell of a lot of risk, and do everything they can to set themselves up for life after baseball whenever that day comes. Pay attention in class, save your money.
And certainly, all due respect to the guys that do that, the players with the wherewithal or acuity or plain-old common sense to realize at 16 or 18 or 20 that no one can ever count on a career in baseball and prepare themselves in some way — mentally, emotionally, financially — for eventual failure. There are plenty of them, and if they get short-shrifted here it’s only because I’m a sucker for the sad sacks.
Which is to say that if you’ve got no compassion for a guy like John Holdzkom, a 24-year-old former fireballing fourth-round draft pick during the Omar Minaya era who recently called comedian Chelsea Peretti’s podcast to tell her about blowing his entire signing bonus on sushi and alcohol before blowing out his elbow, well, then we don’t have that in common. The transcript is worth reading, if only as your weekly or monthly or biannual reminder that baseball produces a lot more washed-up 24-year-olds looking for opportunities to play anywhere that’ll have them than it does millionaire superstars.
Drop everything
You might think nothing in the world could stop me from watching playoff baseball tonight. But then you failed to consider this, via the 700 Level:
Yeah…. yeah. Whoa nelly.
Kyle Kendrick shows up!
Hat tip to @ryankelly.
Things to know about Max Scherzer
“He was born with them,” said Jan Scherzer, Max’s mother. “Then he was 4 months old. I looked down at my baby, and he had a blue and green eye. Very clearly. I have pictures and everything. I took him to the pediatrician shortly after that, and he said, `They may go back and forth. They may change again this year.’ As the year went on, the blue eye got bluer, and the green eye changed to brown.
“And it was amazing. That night, on Johnny Carson, the actress Jane Seymour was on. She had different-colored eyes. It was just such a coincidence. She was talking about all the flak she’d taken growing up. She’s a beautiful woman. She did OK. We always made a big deal to Max that he was special, that it wasn’t something wrong.”
In grade school, when Max drew a cat or dog or giraffe, he always chose dissimilar colors for their eyes. On parent-teacher night, Brad and Jan could immediately tell which drawing hanging on the wall was their son’s.
– Jeff Passan, Kansas City Star, March 4, 2005.
If you haven’t noticed by now you certainly will sometime early in tonight’s Game 4 matchup between the Yanks and Tigers: Max Scherzer, the Detroit right-hander aiming to end the Bombers’ season, has heterochromia iridum, a 1-in-500 genetic anomaly that produces two different colored eyes. As Passan’s article notes, it prompted a lot of teasing until he started establishing himself as a pro-caliber athlete, much in the way I assume the name “Keena Turner” did. When you’re striking out more than a batter an inning with a fastball you can dial up to the high 90s, this looks especially awesome:
But that’s hardly the only interesting thing about Scherzer. In college, at the behest of his economics-major younger brother, Scherzer became interested in baseball’s advanced metrics — a Brian Bannister with the stuff to do damage.
In a 2009 article for the Arizona Republic, Nick Piecoro described Scherzer’s understanding of the whims of batting average on balls in play, a knowledge that likely helped him through some adversity in 2012. In front of the Tigers’ LOLtastic defense, Scherzer yielded a .333 BABIP, second highest in the Majors — trailing only teammate Rick Porcello. It’s hard to imagine a Major Leaguer would ever go on record saying as much, but perhaps it’s no coincidence that Scherzer’s strikeout rate spiked and ground-ball percentage dipped the same year the Tigers shifted Miguel Cabrera to third and imported Prince Fielder to play first.
The article notes that Scherzer’s brother occasionally teases him via text message about becoming a four-win (above replacement-level) pitcher. This year, per Fangraphs, he was worth 4.6 wins. By baseball-reference’s version of the same stat, he was worth exactly 4.
It also seems worth noting that Scherzer came to the Tigers along with pitchers Phil Coke and Daniel Schlereth and center fielder Austin Jackson in a three-way trade that sent Curtis Granderson to the Yankees and Edwin Jackson and Ian Kennedy to the Diamondbacks before the 2010 season. By Fangraphs’ version of WAR, the Diamondbacks’ acquisitions have yielded them about 19.7 wins in the three seasons since — 7.2 of them from Daniel Hudson, acquired in a trade for Jackson in the middle of the 2010 season. Granderson has been worth 13.2 wins to the Yankees.
Scherzer, Jackson, Coke and Schlereth have combined to be worth 26.6 wins to the Tigers since the start of the 2010 season. In that time, they have made, in total, about the same amount of money Granderson did this season alone. And all of them are under team control through arbitration for at least the next two seasons.
Tedquarters 