Excellent work by Jennifer Connic revealing the secrets behind the Milburn Deli’s “Gobbler” sandwich. I keep hearing about the Milburn Deli. It’s about an hour from my house but only about 20 minutes out of the way on my next trip to D.C. Worth it?
Even though he’s moved on from ESPN, Steve Phillips is still doing the goofy “pretend I’m a real-life GM” thing. Only now he’s not at a podium taking scripted questions from fake press, he’s sitting in front of a bookshelf talking to a webcam and showing a healthy dose of bare chest. The big reveal, of course, is that Steve Phillips owns books.
To his credit, Phillips’ objective is to fix the Mets for 2011 and not necessarily beyond. But the two major pillars of his offseason plan are trading Ike Davis for Prince Fielder and shelling out for Cliff Lee. Coincidentally, I have specifically argued against both of those moves in this space.
Both moves would inarguably make the Mets a better team in 2011. But Fielder is slated to be a free agent after 2011 and will require a hefty long-term contract extension to stick around, whereas Davis will be inexpensive and under team control until the latter part of this decade. Lee is awesome, but he is a 32-year-old pitcher likely to command a massive paycheck that could ultimately hamstring a team. Also, given what we know about the Mets’ payroll commitments for 2011 and their lack of flexibility, signing him seems completely infeasible.
In other words, Phillips’ plan to fix the Mets seems a lot like a reasonable way to further break the Mets. Yes, adding Prince Fielder and Cliff Lee (and Orlando Hudson) would make just about any team a lot more likely to contend in the short term. But it is the GM’s job to consider the future as well.
Really, there’s an almost stunning lack of insight in the video, considering Phillips is an actual former Major League GM. Every decision he suggests has been beaten inside out in the comments section of every Mets blog, and he appears to approach the team’s needs in terms of labels — No. 1 starter, “true cleanup hitter.”
At least he’s willing to keep Carlos Beltran around, though, despite his wholesale lack of “game-winning plays” and tendency to “lock up in a critical situation.”
Ron Artest pranks a Rockets’ post-game show. He also a) is a Mets fan who raps about Jason Bay and b) hosted a “Fcuk LeBron party,” not to mention his own championship parade in Queensbridge to celebrate his NBA title with the Lakers. FWIW, I pranked WFAN once about seven years ago when I was very bored. Made it on the air and got my joke in, which prompted an apology to the listeners from the host. I thought it was Adam Schein but he doesn’t remember it.
Because of the playoff structure, a wild-card team would have a treacherous road to reach the Super Bowl. There is no dominant team in the A.F.C., but there are five or six very good ones. If we assume a 40 percent chance of winning any road playoff game, the loser of Monday night’s battle may have to win three straight road games to earn a trip to Cowboys Stadium for the Super Bowl; the odds of winning three such games would fall below 7 percent. The winner, if it secures the No. 1 seed, will have to win just two home games. By those odds, that team would have a 36 percent chance of going to the Super Bowl. The winner would need only to hold serve — survive and advance, so to speak — while the loser would have to scratch, claw and pray for good bounces to dig out of a hole.
I should note that on Monday, Tom Boorstein suggested I figure out exactly the same thing for a TedQuarters post, and it was only while trying to put it together today that I found Stuart had beat me to the punch.
His odds are probably a little off because they assume that the winner of the Jets-Patriots contest will go on to win the division, and that’s hardly written in stone. The winner will be 10-2 and the loser 9-3, so the former could easily go 2-2 to finish the year and see the loser win out.
Incidentally, the Jets and Patriots have rather similar schedules for the rest of the season. Both teams will play the Bears, Dolphins and Bills. The Jets face the 8-3 Steelers in Week 15, while the Pats play the 7-4 Packers.
The Patriots probably have a slight edge in ease of schedule since the Jets’ two toughest remaining games — at Chicago and at Pittsburgh — come on the road. The Patriots will also travel to face the Bears, but they will host their contests with Miami and Green Bay.
But then, as Brian Bassett and I discussed on Monday, the Jets seem to play their best on the road, and have lost twice coming out of the bye week under Rex Ryan. That’s probably small-sample size randomness, but there’s at least some case to be made that the top seed isn’t as valuable to them as it might be to other teams. Of course, I don’t personally buy that and I don’t imagine Rex Ryan or many of the Jets would either. You pretty much always want the week off after 17 weeks of football.
So no surprises here, really: This game is very important. Stuart’s post charts the 17 times two teams with records of 9-2 or better have faced each other this late in the season. Ten of them featured the eventual Super Bowl winner, and 12 times the winner of the regular season game went on to play in the Super Bowl.
Let’s face it: Tom Brady’s pinpoint accuracy and Mark Sanchez’s uncanny last-minute exploits matter only for fleeting broadcast segments each week when the helmets are on. When the ‘dos are out parading the rest of the time, these two men compete directly, head on, for the unofficial title of GQ QB of the Year.
You don’t think this matters to them? Hah.
– Filip Bondy, N.Y. Daily News.
This isn’t even a contest. Anyone who thinks Tom Brady is a more handsome quarterback than Mark Sanchez is a philistine. Tom Brady is some weird exaggeration of a good-looking guy, with all the prototypical hot-guy features amplified to the point of vulgarity.
Mark Sanchez is beautiful. Look at this man. Ladies, he cares about your hearts!
The idea that New York would be especially bad for someone with Social Anxiety Disorder seems to me completely unfounded. Depression and anxiety are internal matters; they may be triggered to a greater or lesser extent by external factors, but an otherwise healthy isn’t likely to become clinically depressed because New York features a lot of media attention, while S.A.D. is a disorder precisely because its feelings of anxiety are not reflective of reality. Greinke might find New York stressful or he might not, might like it or not, but it’s unlikely that external factors would determine his mental health. I know plenty of people who deal with anxiety and depression and who find New York much easier to thrive in than their smaller hometowns.
Besides — though this may less true among athletes and sports fans than in the city’s larger culture — few places on earth are more accepting of psychiatry. Not to turn this post into a Woody Allen riff, but our shrink per capita ratio is off the charts, and New Yorkers talk about their therapists about as frequently as they discuss the weather (granted my view is probably a little warped from working in publishing and journalism, where psychotherapy is essentially mandatory).
Great points abound. Thanks to reports in the Daily News and elsewhere, I was operating under the assumption that Greinke wanted no part of pitching in New York. As Emma points out, that might very well be true, but it’s unfair for us to assume it’s the case just because he has suffered from social anxiety disorder.
Sean Smith of baseballprojection.com will not be updating his Chone projections or WAR pages this offseason because he has taken a job with a team. Good for him and for more nerds making headway in baseball, bad for those of us who wanted to see the projections. Where’s he going and what will he be doing there? “I can’t tell you which team, and I can’t tell you what I’m working on, so please don’t ask.”
Unsurprisingly, Albert Belle has a lot to say about LeBron James’ return to Cleveland. Surprisingly, it’s all pretty reasonable.
I PRAISE YOU 24/7!!!!!! AND THIS HOW YOU DO ME!!!!! YOU EXPECT ME TO LEARN FROM THIS??? HOW???!!! ILL NEVER FORGET THIS!! EVER!!! THX THO…
– Bills reciever Stevie Johnson, via Twitter.
You’ve probably seen Johnson’s postgame Tweet by now and have read all about how he lashed out at higher powers after a dropped touchdown pass. And odds are you enjoyed a good chuckle.
Twitter is a strange and funny place. Reporters use it to break news, some people try to convey reasonably complex opinions in 140 characters, and some — this guy, say — mostly use it to make jokes and solicit restaurant recommendations.
But most people — or maybe just most people I follow — seem to use it primarily as some sort of emotional sounding board, sort of an open IM to the world of their instantaneous reactions to the news the reporters just broke or whatever just happened on their TVs. And 140 characters are plenty for that.
And with more and more athletes signing on to Twitter, fans (and journalists, for that matter) gain a type of access to players that I’m not sure ever before existed. We are presented emotion unfiltered by newspapers and the postgame cliche fomalities, and insight into players’ lives outside their sport. A few feeds are obviously operated by publicists. Of the others, some turn out to be interesting. Others not so much.
Regardless, as I learn more about a player — even if it’s just the way he consciously chooses to portray himself to the world — I find that a funny thing happens: I feel like I actually know them, and because when push comes to shove I generally like the people I know, I start rooting for them in a different way than I would a guy whom I’d just seen in a few boring postgame interviews or read quotes from in a newspaper.
C.J. Wilson comes out to start a World Series game, I don’t just think, “hey here’s a lefty who converted from reliever to starter and had a pretty good season,” I think, “oh hey, it’s @str8edgeracer! I have a pretty decent sense of what this dude’s about, and even though we don’t have a ton of overlapping interests outside of baseball, I hope he succeeds because he seems like a decent dude.” Except I don’t really think it out in words like that; that would be weird.
I know now that Mark Sanchez, Dustin Keller and Nick Mangold like to rip on each other, and that Keller and especially Mangold make plenty of time to interact with fans (Sanchez, presumably, is busy eating Taco Bell, and that’s cool too). I know that Marlins first baseman Logan Morrison is a legitimately hilarious dude, and that Blue Jays outfielder Travis Snider — a man of my own heart — uses the handle @lunchboxhero45 and almost exclusively Tweets about food.
And now I know that Stevie Johnson is a bit of a bugout, prone to meet adversity with overreaction and vaguely existential meltdowns. I know people like that. And hey, we’re all human — his outburst only makes me like him more. Hell, I’ve spent plenty of time myself irrationally wondering if I were being punished for something. I feel you, Stevie Johnson.
So I fear that when the public at large reacts the way it did to Johnson’s freakout — ranging from mockery to sanctimony, but an undoubtedly loud response — we risk forcing athletes to become as guarded in this forum as they are in others. That’s a shame, because candid ballplayers interacting with fans in a public forum benefits all parties involved.
And look: I realize that Johnson’s outburst is indeed funny, and that the public overreacting to, well, public overreaction is pretty much inevitable, so I’m pretty much tilting at windmills here. Plus obviously an absurd tirade is a very different use of Twitter than Sanchez and Keller trading embarrassing photos, and that an athlete using the site responsibly will face no criticism.
I just worry that as more teams’ brass and media-relations types see the response to Johnson’s meltdown, “responsibly” will come to mean “blandly.” And that stinks, because I really like hearing about all the ridiculous things Travis Snider is eating.
Brendan Bilko is doing tremendous work rounding up photos of Cole Hamels. His latest find: A family using a cardboard Cole Hamels cutout as Flat Stanley. These are images of an image of Cole Hamels.
Tedquarters 