From the Wikipedia: Sankebetsu brown bear incident

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Humans and bears have reached a tenuous detente. Most of our kind is now educated enough to know better than to mess with bears, and bears, in turn, probably see humans as too big to bother destroying. I mean, granted, one-on-one a bear could almost always take a dude, but the dude is big enough to be a pain in the bear’s ass to kill, and why would the bear bother when there are so many delicious fish available for so much less effort.

Plus humans have access to guns, and guns can kill bears, so if bears started overstepping their bounds people would probably clamp down on them pretty quick. This arrangement should hold until bears develop guns, at which point we’re pretty much f***ed.

Anyway, there was a time in the not-too-distant past, when our race was still manifesting its destiny and forging new frontiers and all that stuff, when our ancestors still had to live in fear of bear attacks.

And in our history, no series of bear attacks I know of has been as bloody, calculated and downright terrifying as the those that occurred in the small pioneer village of Sankebetsu in Hokkaido, Japan in the snowy December of 1915.

From the Wikipedia: Sankebetsu brown bear incident.

The Wikipedia page is a bit — pardon the pun — grisly for TedQuarters, so in lieu of a comprehensive summary I tried to just provide a timeline here. But then midway through I realized that even just a timeline was a bit more disturbing than I’d like to be on this site. Read the article only if you’ve got the stomach for horror.

The moral of the story: Bears are terrifying. This particular bear weighed 836 pounds, menaced a village for nearly a month and killed seven people — eight if you count the attack victim who died of complications three years later. It also outsmarted multiple teams of hunters. When they went so far as to bait it with a dead body, it appeared to recognize the trap and ran away.

Also, they had to talk an old, drunken bear hunter out of retirement to finally kill the thing. And the hunter maintained that he knew the bear, and that it had previously killed three women.

Over the course of the incident, the bear was shot six times, and finally died only when the old, drunk bear hunter found it sleeping and shot it twice.

Do not mess with bears.

Saddest promotion ever

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If you thought the time the Nets gave out jerseys of players on the other teams was the saddest promotion of all-time, think again.

Last night, the Orioles gave out Jason Berken t-shirts.

Never heard of Jason Berken? Don’t worry; very few have. He’s a 26-year-old right-handed pitcher having a decent year in his first season out of the Orioles bullpen. Sounds like precisely the type of guy who deserves a t-shirt night.

Fail

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Remember when I said I’d be back with “plenty more” this afternoon? You’ll probably have to downgrade that to “some more” or even “just a bit more.”

We got back from Yankee Stadium to find our office’s Internet down. It wasn’t an SNY thing and it had nothing to do with last night’s failures (I asked); apparently the whole building is out.

I’m set up at the studio now, which is good. My e-mail’s not working but I’m online. It turns out when you’re a web editor, there are very few ways to do your job without access to the web. I called Salfino back. That was about it.

Anyway, the upside to all this — and really the only reason you should care — is that the absent dude whose desk I’m using at the studio is apparently something of a Tsuyoshi Shinjo fan. I don’t know if he knows about ShinjoQuarters, but I hope he doesn’t mind that I snapped several photos of his bobblehead (that’s a Shinjo card over the Shinjo bobblehead’s left shoulder).

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Roy Oswalt has wanted a chance to play for a winner, and he mused to a friend earlier this year that he wants what Roy Halladay got in the offseason — a chance to land with a team capable of winning the World Series. And so it could be that today or tomorrow, if the Phillies and Astros work out a tentative agreement for the right-hander, Oswalt will have a chance to accept or reject the exact opportunity that Halladay had — to pitch for the Philadelphia Phillies.

In order to make this happen, and to balance out their budget numbers, the Phillies are in simultaneous talks with the Tampa Bay Rays about outfielder Jayson Werth.

But talent evaluators with other teams were asking an interesting question late Tuesday night, as ESPN reported the on-going talks: If the Phillies land Roy Oswalt, are they good enough to contend for the World Series?

Falling down

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After the loss, some tensions surfaced in the clubhouse as a group a media members and one or two players stood talking loudly and laughing in a corner of the room. An irritated Alex Cora snapped, “Show some respect. They just stuck it up our (…)” on his way out of the room.

– Andy Martino, N.Y. Daily News.

Cora’s remark is everywhere this morning, but Martino’s report is the only one I’ve seen that noted the infielder snapping at “a group [of] media members and one or two players” and not just “the clubhouse” or something vague that sounds like he was lashing out at his teammates in general.

Look: Say what you will about Cora (or say what I’ve said about Cora), I don’t blame him. It sucks when your team loses and the last thing you want to see is people joking around afterward. And yeah, it’s a 162-game season and it’s important to keep cool heads, but the Mets have been playing miserably and Cora’s understandably frustrated. One time I punched a high-school football teammate on the sideline during a 41-6 loss. Losing is upsetting.

But does this incident reflect anything about the Mets’ clubhouse chemistry or sudden lack thereof? No. It’s something that happened after a brutal loss in a string of losses, and it’s a lot harder for baseball players — or anyone — to get along when things are not going well in the workplace.

People have chalked up the Mets’ recent stretch of losses to the changes in the clubhouse prompted by the return of Luis Castillo and Carlos Beltran. That’s nonsense. Those guys may be rightfully and/or nonsensically disliked among the fanbase, but find me evidence that they’re not good teammates. Why should any member of the Mets not like Luis Castillo, a good soldier who plays through as much pain as anyone in baseball?

Cora’s blowup is the type of thing that resonates right now because the team is losing and we’re desperate to find reasons beyond randomness. The Mets aren’t hitting. That’s bad. But that’s all.

If they start hitting tonight and win a bunch of games, people will chalk up the turnaround to Cora’s clubhouse explosion, even though I’d guess it was hardly that — just one frustrated quip as he walked out of the locker room.

Or, alternately, if the Mets start hitting tonight and win a few, folks will point to how the team kept loose and could still laugh after rough losses like last night’s. Just depends on which players were laughing and the whims of perception.

But what matters is that the Mets start hitting. And — and I know this is hard to believe given the way things have gone the past week — they will. They will. When Josh Thole plays, the Mets have one of the deepest lineups in the league. That they’re keeping Thole around is a good sign. If everyone stays healthy, eventually they’ll start putting enough hits together to score a bunch of runs.

And then, suddenly, they’ll be getting along great.

UPDATE: According to the N.Y. Post, the player joking with reporters was Mike Pelfrey. Oh, the intrigue.

Henry Blanco: Pretty awesome

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Seems like people are lumping Blanco into the s*****ness that has become Rod Barajas, like they are a tandem.  The past week or so it’s ‘get rid of one of the righty catchers’ and ‘Blanco and Barajas are nothing more than automatic outs’ and yesterday on Metsblog they were both nothing more than glorified catching instructors, I believe.

– Chris M, via email.

I’m with Chris. Henry Blanco is pretty awesome for a variety of reasons. I don’t think he’s built to play every day at this point — especially since there were offseason concerns about his shoulder — but it certainly seems like he should be on the field more often, considering the way Barajas has played.

Blanco’s got a decent-for-a-catcher .727 OPS, and it’s not like that’s so terribly far off his past few years’ lines for us to assume he won’t keep it up.

Also, though Blanco is by all accounts a nice guy, he looks like a total badass. Really no way to put a value on that. He’s got ink everywhere and a sweet mullet. So few men can pull off the mullet these days.

Twitterer @RobertJamis and I, via a Twitter volley not too long ago, came to a pretty excellent idea: Someone should sell long-sleeved t-shirts in various skin-colored shades with images of Henry Blanco’s tattoos on the arms. Then you could wear that under a Henry Blanco jersey or player tee, to simulate the full Hank White experience. Tell me that wouldn’t be awesome.

But most of all, and maybe most importantly, Blanco is a stellar defensive catcher. He rates near the top of the league by objective and subjective measures. And he has a reputation as a good game-caller. Perfect guy to have around as a backup backstop.

So yeah, Blanco should not be lumped in with Barajas. It’s the Mets’ catcher’s struggles, not the Mets’ catchers’ struggles, if you will.

Actually, I kind of wonder if something’s up with Blanco that we don’t know about, considering how infrequently he has played this month. Blanco has only had seven at-bats in July and appeared in three games. Granted, part of that is due to the presence of Josh Thole, but you’d think the trusty backup would still see more at-bats, given the way Barajas has played.