Obvious candidate for Awesome Fund

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University of Alabama: You’re doing it wrong. You absolutely do not fire a part-time staffer for pumping “Take the Money and Run” through the stadium while Cam Newton and Auburn warm up. You promote that man, because he is awesome. Amazing work of large-scale trolling. Also, “Son of a Preacher Man” is just a really good song.

Ollie as lefty specialist?

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That leaves the bullpen devoid of an experienced lefty, unless … dare we say it? OK, here goes.

The Mets should make Oliver Perez a lefty specialist next season. Or at least bring him to spring training with the hope that he earns the job, along with maybe Pat Misch (who might be needed at the back of the rotation). They should not — and, because Sandy Alderson and his men are rational types, probably will not — release him this winter to appease a bloodthirsty public.

– Andy Martino, N.Y. Daily News.

Many of Martino’s points in the article are reasonable — especially the excerpted one about how there’s no sense cutting Perez without giving him the chance to succeed (or fail) in Spring Training. They’re paying him whether they cut him now, they cut him in March or they keep him on the team all season.

But citing batting average as evidence that Perez is effective against lefty hitters is silly. Yes, he held them to a .214 average in a tiny sample in 2010. He also yielded a miserable .411 on-base percentage because, as we know, he doesn’t often throw the ball over the plate.

That’s a tiny sample, though. Of course, it’s hard to find a reasonable-sized sample because Perez’s career stats don’t really reflect the type of pitcher he has been for the last two seasons. Perez faced lefties 91 times in 2009 and was legitimately effective, holding them to a .200/.278/.313 line.

Across his career, Perez has yielded a decent but hardly Felicianoesque .691 OPS to lefty hitters. As a point of reference, Feliciano’s career OPS against for lefties is .580. Scott Downs’ is .631. J.C. Romero’s is .603. Randy Choate’s is .598.

Martino’s article includes quotes from a scout that suggests Perez drop his arm angle to be better against lefties, so maybe there’s hope that with an adjustment he can become an effective specialist.

I’m skeptical, though. Even when Ollie’s pitching well he’s wild, a terrible quality if you’re coming into games with runners on base. And does anyone — anyone — like the idea of Perez coming into a close game to face Ryan Howard in the 7th inning?

And while Martino suggests there “are no obvious substitutes” for Feliciano or Hisanori Takahashi in the farm system, I’m not certain that’s true. Well, I guess I should say I’m almost certain they are not substitutes for Feliciano and Takahashi because both of those guys were great for the Mets. But I’m not certain Ollie Perez is the best internal option.

Skinny lefty Mike O’Connor pitched to a 2.67 ERA in 70 1/3 innings in relief for Triple-A Buffalo in 2010 while holding lefties to a .289 on-base percentage.

The Mets put out a press release yesterday to say they re-signed him. If you’re into conspiracy theories you might assume that means they see O’Connor in some Major League role next year, since Val Pascucci’s return did not merit a press release. Of course, O’Connor — whom you might remember from one excellent start against the Mets in early 2006 — did not fare any better than Perez against lefties in his Major League stint, and also proved pretty wild. But he’s got a full year working out of a Triple-A bullpen under his belt and always exhibited excellent control in the Minors, unlike Perez.

Further, Buffalo southpaw Adam Pettyjohn pitched mostly out of the bullpen for the first time in his career in 2010, and though he yielded a 4.94 ERA, he did manage to hold lefties to a .313 on-base percentage. He seems like a less impressive candidate for the Major League bullpen than O’Connor, but if the competition’s Oliver Perez, then, well, you know.

So while the Mets absolutely should consider Perez for any role they feel he can capably handle — including a lefty-specialist job — I’m skeptical that he really could perform any better in the job than other options in the system, or, for that matter, a bunch of guys who might be on the scrap heap. Just because he’s better against lefties than he is against righties does not mean he’s actually good against lefties.

Only because the Grog and Tankard came up in the comments section yesterday

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My brother died on the first Tuesday of my senior year of college. Three days later, I got an email from the guy who played the bass in the Moo Shoo Porkestra, the band we had started up the previous semester,  with the subject line “EMERGENCY PORK NEWS.”

He wrote to inform me and the rest of the band that he had secured a gig at a local bar called the Grog and Tankard. Problem was, the only open spot in the schedule — at least according to the booking guy — was the upcoming Tuesday, so he needed to know if I could make it back to D.C. from New York by then.

It stands, to this day, as the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me.

We didn’t realize then that the Grog and Tankard almost certainly would have been able to book us a few weeks later. We didn’t know that the place kind of sucked, and that every kid in the greater D.C. area with a band played his first gig there because the bar would basically take anybody. We couldn’t recognize it as some weird, stubborn hemorrhoid weathering the ointment of gentrification, along with the strip club next door.

We just knew it was a real, authentic, beer-serving bar, and everyone in the band wanted badly to play a legitimate off-campus show.

There was nothing left to do in New York but sit and stew and curse everything and feel generally numb. I made it back to D.C. by Monday, just in time to practice the handful of songs we knew and figure out how to extend them out long enough to fill the two-hour slot we were charged with playing.

Because the bar sold Bud Light cans for $1.50 with only a $5 cover and was lax with ID scans, we drew about 150 people. We played our loose brand of funk for two hours. About 90 minutes deep, my lower lip split open and I played the remaining half hour with blood dripping down my chin from under my trombone mouthpiece. No one in the dancing, drunken crowd seemed all too grossed out.

When we finished, the bar’s owner took us into the tiny, fluorescent-lit linoleum glorified mop closet where we stashed our instrument cases and handed me a stack of cash. He called us “the next Chicago” — presumably only because we featured horns — and asked us to play a regular gig there on Thursdays.

We thought it was because of our talent, chemistry, stage presence, everything. We didn’t know yet that he mostly cared about the crowd we amassed — as seemingly all venue-owners do. We were floating.

My brother was dead only a week and I was suppressing all sorts of awful emotions I wouldn’t fully face until over a year later. But I was so damn happy. We thought that somehow, despite our lack of original material and constructive rehearsal, we were on the cusp of making it.

We played there every Thursday for the next six months. Crowds — especially when they’re half-full of drunken college girls — attract crowds. We made friends with the strange older men who started showing up and lurking in the back. From the stage, we stared in amazement when the strippers from next door would come in for a drink and dance with their clothes on. One time one of them flashed us. It was amazing.

We learned a bunch of new covers and eventually wrote a few new originals. On Halloween we dressed up as the Beatles and played our version of Abbey Road in its entirety. We met legitimate fans — people we didn’t know who actually seemed to like our music.

For six months we ignored the crappiness of the sound system and made due with the tiny stage. We suffered through the ever-present stench of vomit, knowing that we were often directly responsible. We made money, something we never could have imagined happening when we first started jamming the previous winter.

Eventually we started booking other gigs in better venues in hipper locations with even better drink specials, and the allure of the Grog and Tankard grew stale. We cut ties with the owner and played our final show there in February, in front of a small crowd that braved one of the worst blizzards D.C. had ever seen. We closed with our version of “Burning Down the House” and no shortage of pelvic-thrusting college-aged bravado.

I should remember my senior year in college as one of the worst times of my life. I lost my best friend and hero, and I threw myself into a whirlwind of activity because it was the best way I could figure to prevent my mind from straying in hellish directions.

But I think about it now and I struggle to conjure up all the loneliness and anger.

The lasting image I have of that year is looking out at a boozy orgy of dancing college kids in that narrow space, my friend Dan cozying up to whatever girl he would inevitably take home, sketchy Herb singing along to our shamefully rendered James Brown covers, and my roommate making a beeline for the toilet because he drank too much. And of course, I remember the camaraderie the band fostered with all those nights playing together in suboptimal conditions, something I had been searching for since high-school football, and something that could never replace but made a pretty respectable stand-in for brotherhood.

It was awesome.

Convince the Colonel to give you $20K in 140 characters or less

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KFC is offering a scholarship to the high school senior it deems most deserving. The catch: Your application is one Tweet, and you’ve got to tag it with #KFCScholar so you don’t even get the full 140 characters. My suggestion:

Please give me $20K so I can go to college, get a job and earn money with which to buy fried chicken. PS: The Double-Down rules! #KFCScholar

Exit, stage lefty

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Since returning from the East in 2006, Perpetual Pedro has pitched in 408 of the Mets’ 810 games — 50.3%, or more than half. This means that if you have watched any single Mets game in the past five years, there is a better chance than not that you saw Pedro Feliciano pitch in it. Since the beginning of 2009, only David Wright, Luis Castillo, Angel Pagan, and Jeff Francoeur — position players — have played in more games for the Mets than the lefty specialist. If you’ve been a serious Mets fan in the fairly recent past, Pedro Feliciano has become a bigger part of your life than you may have realized. He has represented quiet stability for a relatively unstable organization, and he is probably leaving just as things are becoming stable.

The Mets not having Pedro Feliciano is going to be like those observation tower fly saucers disappearing. He’s just a situational lefty, and they’re just awkward pieces of Robert Moses’ sixties. Everything will function pretty much the same without them. But the first time Ryan Howard comes to the plate against the 2011 Mets in the seventh inning, it’s going to feel really weird.

– Patrick Flood, PatrickFloodBlog.com.

Flood nails it here. It’s inarguably a good thing for the Mets that Pedro Feliciano declined arbitration today — with the front office now saying it will pay above slot for draft picks, the delicious sandwich-round pick is more valuable than a slightly overpaid lefty specialist. But it’s still going to feel really weird to watch so many Mets games without Pedro Feliciano in them.

At a game I was covering during the 2009 season (before it went to hell), the Mets called on Feliciano to face Howard and Ibanez with a runner on and no outs with a one-run lead in the eighth inning. He got Howard to ground into a double play and Ibanez to tap out weakly. Took him four pitches.

I waited in the Citi Field clubhouse to talk to him about it after the game, because I thought maybe he’d have something interesting to say about the inning, even if I didn’t have anything particularly interesting to ask.

Instead, he was just all, “yup, that’s my job — I get lefties out.” So I tried to follow up and ask him if he got especially excited to face a lefty like Howard, and he was like, “nah, not really, just gettin’ lefties out.”

It was awesome. And it made it seem really weird when he campaigned to be the “crossover” 8th-inning guy in the offseason.

Anyway, good luck to Perpetual Pedro wherever he lands. And good luck to Paul DePodesta with that sandwich-round pick. I suggest muffuletta. High upside.