On-base is a big help

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The Mets’ struggling lineup will receive a reinforcement Monday, as the team expects second baseman Luis Castillo to be ready for Monday night’s game against the Diamondbacks in Phoenix. Castillo has been on the disabled list since June 4 with a bruised foot, and was 2-for-13 with three walks in four rehabilitation games for Single-A St. Lucie.

“On-base is his big help,” Jerry Manuel said. “His ability to see a lot of pitches. It’s kind of something we have lacked. … There are not many guys that see many pitches. When Castillo is back there, there is that sense that the pitch count can go up from the opposition.”

– Andy Martino, N.Y. Daily News.

Jerry’s spot on here. On-base is Luis Castillo’s big benefit to the Mets right now. For a while, I thought Ruben Tejada might be able to hold his own with the bat enough to make him a worthwhile play over Castillo thanks to his better defense, but Tejada has since slumped and the Mets can’t score runs.

It’s not hard to figure out why: Last night’s lineup featured three guys with OBPs under .300. Different personnel, but same deal on Saturday.  The Mets have a number of good hitters in their lineup, but few teams can shoulder 3-5 out machines in their lineup every night.

Obviously these are suboptimal conditions. Castillo and Jose Reyes are hurt and Carlos Beltran cannot yet play in every game. Adding those three to the regular lineup will help, not only because of their offensive contributions, but because it will mean fewer at-bats for Tejada, Alex Cora and Jeff Francoeur.

And actually, if Castillo and Reyes are back tonight and Beltran and Angel Pagan start, the Mets will likely reduce the total to one out-machine in the lineup.

That’s kind of the thing: Everyone on the team and around the team raves about Rod Barajas’ contributions to the pitching staff, and those I don’t doubt. What I will continue to wonder, though, is if what Barajas adds defensively can make up for his downright putrid offense over the past couple of months.

Check it out: Since June 1, Barajas is hitting .169 with a .229 OBP and a .202 slugging. A .431 OPS. As a point of comparison, Mets pitchers have a combined .425 OPS in 2010.

It’s not good. It’s a burden the Mets might be able to carry if Beltran returns to being something like Carlos Beltran and David Wright remains awesome, but the frustrating thing is it appears the Mets actually have an in-house upgrade available. Generally when a starter struggles or gets hurt, the Mets must turn to guys like Cora and Tejada.

But young catcher Josh Thole has torn the cover off the ball in his short stint with the team, just as he did after a rough April in Triple-A. Thole’s not going to maintain his .524 batting average and isn’t even likely to match his cumulative .783 mark in Triple-A. But at this point, he’s a pretty safe bet to represent a significant offensive upgrade over Barajas.

Don’t get on me about the importance of a catcher’s leadership and game-calling and staff-handling. I know about that stuff. I promise. What I’m trying to say is that there are several ways to win baseball games, and scoring lots of runs is a solid one. The Mets would certainly lose something behind the plate by starting the inexperienced Thole more often, but they’d probably make up more than the difference on offense. That’s the point. Net gain.

Thole has options, so he’ll likely be shipped out of town at some point during the upcoming spate of roster moves. That’s a shame, as the Mets will likely be dispatching an upgrade to their Major League team.

Sandwich Week’s penultimate offering

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I wanted to eat more than one sandwich yesterday. I did. But sometimes there’s some sort of festival going on in Prospect Park and a bunch of amazing-looking jerk chicken on barrel smokers everywhere you turn, and, well, you know. So there was no sandwich for lunch. Totally worth it, though. Also, the chicken was from a stand called “The Jerk Center,” and they’re running out of you.

The sandwich: Maine lobster roll, Red Hook Lobster Pound, 284 Van Brunt St. in Brooklyn.

The construction: One of them top-loading hot dog buns that are flat on the bottom, lightly buttered and grilled, loaded with their “Maine lobster salad,” which is just lobster meat with a little mayo, scallions and paprika.

The salad, I should note, isn’t as finely cut or heavily mayoed as lobster salads I’ve had in the past. It was basically just huge hunks of claw meat with a little bit of mayo. That’s good — if you’re eating lobster and paying for lobster, you want to taste the lobster.

Important background information: Where to begin. I know David Foster Wallace wrote an essay called “Consider the Lobster.” I haven’t read it, but I’ve certainly followed the instruction. Not because David Foster Wallace told me so, either.

I spent parts of three summers and a few winter breaks working at a huge wholesale/retail lobster market on Long Island. It was tough work, it wasn’t terribly close to my house, and the pay wasn’t great, but the people were nice, I needed a job and this one came with a t-shirt that said “Lobstertrician” on the back.

It wasn’t the hours, the heat, the often obnoxious customers or the occasional bites that got to me. It was the smell. That stench. It was something people liked upon stepping into the place: Fresh fish, saltwater, and boiling lobster. When it’s shellacked onto your skin and singed into your nostrils it becomes a different thing entirely.

I would shower after work and use four different types of soap, trying to scrub the odor off me. Nothing worked. One time, after really scouring myself, I thought I would be OK to go to the movies with a girl I was seeing. And I remember putting popcorn into my mouth, and recognizing the scent, plain as day, on my hand. Inescapable.

The massacres were something else entirely. If you read these pages with any regularity you know I don’t get too bent out of shape about invoking our food-chain privileges, but something about dumping crates upon crates full of living creatures into boiling water will make even the most ardent carnivore wax existential. I killed so many lobsters. I thought about that a lot.

What it looks like:

How it tastes: As you might imagine, I found it difficult to eat lobster or most seafood for years after my stint as a lobstertrician. And it wasn’t that I ate too much lobster or anything like that. It was just that smell. Any hint of it and I wasn’t hungry anymore.

I guess I’m over that now. Time will do some tremendous things for your appetite. This was a really good sandwich.

If you’re putting lobster on a sandwich, you have to let lobster do the talking. No disrespect to all the other delicious elements of a sandwich, but who wants their lobster salad indistinguishable from chicken salad?

The bread was tasty, buttery and warm, but didn’t overwhelm. Neither did the mayo, paprika or scallions. This baby was about that lobster meat, and it was tender, well-prepared (trust me, I know), rich and delicious. It was lobster meat, after all.

It wasn’t very big, though I suppose that’s sort of expected with lobster rolls. Hit the spot, though. After the jerk chicken I wasn’t exactly starving. Plus the lobster roll came with potato chips, which I’m not here to complain about.

What it’s worth: Red Hook Lobster Pound, despite a couple of huge vats of lobsters up front, didn’t really have the smell. Not sure how they avoided it. So that’s good.

But part of my issue with lobster, beyond the personal-history stuff, is that I’ve never really understood why people pay so much for it. It’s delicious, no doubt, but there are many delicious things that cost a whole lot less. Is it just a conspicuous consumption thing? Is the price of lobster driven up by their rarity? The amount of work that goes into harvesting lobster?

I don’t know. This was a $15 sandwich though, and that’s a lot of money to lay down for something that hardly constitutes a full meal. There was a good amount of fresh lobster meat on there, so I don’t doubt it would be worth $15 to anyone who regularly pays market rate for lobster. Since I rarely do, the price seems a bit silly to me. Also, it’s a big pain to get to Red Hook, even from other parts of Brooklyn.

But again, it was delicious.

The rating: 90 out of 100. To some, the Maine Lobster Roll will seem great and a great value, to others, it will seem a bit overrated and too expensive. But it is inarguably excellent. Oh, and it’s from New England. Tom Glavine.

Did you hear about Pat?

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Thanks to this job, I’ve had some satisfying and enlightening conversations with baseball players, and a bunch of pretty boring ones, too. But I’ve never had a conversation with any player more awkward than the one I shared with Ike Davis after the cameras stopped rolling on this interview a couple of weeks back.

Davis seems like a real nice dude, but I wound up lying to him. And I think I bummed him out, too.

Some background: On the Friday before Independence Day, a well-built guy around 25 and a pair of pretty young women in tank tops sat down across the aisle from me on the Metro-North train.

“Did you hear about Pat?” the guy asked the girls.

“No,” one responded.

“He got cut from his Independent League team. Like not even a real, affiliated Minor League team this time; he got cut from this, like, semi-pro team he was on.”

“Oh my God, that sucks… Have you talked to him?”

“Nah,” he said. “I called him when he got cut by Seattle, but he never called me back. I don’t think he –“

“How’d you find out?”

“My dad just told me. He sent me this thing, from their website — from the team’s website — that said he’d been released.”

“So what’s he gonna do?”

“I don’t know… I guess, I mean, they say it takes 12-to-14 months to recover from that surgery, but if he can’t throw his pitches… his career… I don’t know.”

Their conversation changed course and drifted away from baseball, so I stopped paying attention. I’m hardly a serial eavesdropper, plus I was using my phone to search for information about some pitcher named Pat who had been cut by an Indy League team that day. I don’t know why I was so eager to know.

The only Pat I could find who had pitched in the Mariners’ system anytime recently was a guy named Patrick Ryan, who was indeed now pitching in Indy ball. But Ryan’s stats with the Bridgeport Bluefish were excellent and I couldn’t find anything on the team’s site suggesting he had been cut. Plus Ryan was from Illinois, so it seemed unlikely he’d have a trio of old friends riding Metro-North on a Friday afternoon.

But since I was already at the Bridgeport website, I clicked the only story that had been published that day, a press release about the acquisition of a catcher named Tom Pennino. The last sentence said this:

The Bridgeport Bluefish have also activated pitcher Luis Arroyo from the disabled list and, to make room on the roster, have released pitcher Pat Bresnahan.

Oof. Bresnahan was not the guy I was looking for, but he was clearly the guy in question. Indeed, further searching revealed he was born in Connecticut, had Tommy John surgery in April 2009 after a few seasons in the Pirates’ system, then got cut from the Mariners’ extended Spring Training camp this year.

The Bluefish signed him on June 25 and cut him on July 1. Sorry, dude, we know you just got here, but we’ve got to make room for 36-year-old Minor League lifer Luis Arroyo on the roster. You’re not allowed to play alongside Wily Mo Pena anymore. Not if you can’t get the ball over the plate.

And sure, you’ve got family and friends and even the families of friends tracking your career, and we know they all probably said you were headed for the Majors back when you were dominating Little League, but well, that’s not really our problem. Luis Arroyo’s got family and friends, too. Thanks for playing.

I noticed that Bresnahan played with Ike Davis at Arizona State, so for some silly reason I asked Davis about him after that interview. He smiled and said, “Oh yeah, Pat! How do you know him?”

I said Pat Bresnahan was a friend of friends, that I didn’t know the guy but I knew some people who did. That’s how I lied to Ike Davis. Then I told him that Bresnahan had just been cut by the Bridgeport Bluefish, a little over a year after Tommy John surgery. That’s how I bummed Ike Davis out. Terrible. Davis has been around the professional game more than most guys his age and certainly knows the way it goes, but his whole body language changed: his shoulders slumped and his head tilted downward.

Like I said, it was awkward. So then, mutually sensing that awkwardness, Davis and I started feeding each other half-hearted optimism.

“I mean, a lot of times guys come back even stronger from that surgery,” I said. “It just takes time.”

“Oh yeah, I’m sure he’ll be back to throwing his mid-90s heat in no time,” said Davis. “If I know Pat, he’ll catch on somewhere.”

Maybe he will. And look: I wouldn’t know Bresnahan if he punched me in the face, and I doubt he wants or needs my pity. The guy got a $200K signing bonus from the Pirates, plus the opportunity to play baseball professionally for several years. I’ll never get either of those things. Maybe Pat Bresnahan has no regrets, understands the way it shook out for him, and is perfectly satisfied with the spoils of his baseball career. What the hell do I know?

I caught part of the Triple-A All-Star Game on MLB Network on Wednesday. During the game, a 30-year-old catcher in the Pirates’ system, Erik Kratz, got the call to the Major Leagues for the first time.  When asked about his initial reaction to the news in an interview just moments later, he choked back tears and said he just wanted to call his wife. It was a stunning, heartwarming, beautiful moment.

But it strikes me as funny or strange or at least too often left unvoiced that for every feel-good story, every Kratz or Jesus Feliciano or Dirk Hayhurst who toils in Minor League obscurity and finally gets the call — and heck, every Ike Davis who flies through the Minors, too — there are hundreds of men who commit their youths to the game, and who shoulder the massive expectations of friends, teammates, relatives and entire towns, only to be reduced eventually to a single line in an Indy-ball team’s press release and a crestfallen did-you-hear-about-Pat.

Sandwich Week says farewell to Manhattan

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When I worked in Chelsea I used to pass this place all the time. And every time I thought, “hmm… Japanese fried chicken, huh? I oughta try that place.” I was right.

The sandwich: Chicken Katsu sandwich from Tebaya, 144 w. 19th St. in Manhattan.

The construction: Two deep fried chicken cutlets on a soft bun with cole slaw, miso sauce and homemade wasabi dressing.

Important background information: Cole slaw is a delicious sandwich topper. Great way to add flavor, moisture and crunch in one fell swoop. One of my go-to orders at delis is honey-maple turkey, bacon, muenster and cole slaw. You don’t need dressing when it’s like that.

What it looks like:

How it tastes: That’s a lot of chicken, fellas. A lot of delicious chicken.

Tebaya used dark meat, which I really appreciate. I’ve never understood why dark meat costs less than white meat, it tastes much better. Sure, it’s fattier, but that just means it stays moist better under heat. I suppose it was that choice that made Tebaya use two cutlets instead of one, since boneless thighs are generally smaller than boneless breasts and one alone might not have filled out the sandwich.

The chicken was amazingly crispy. The breading was thick — I assume it was panko — and it really crunched, especially when I first bit into it. They clearly fried it to order, which makes two chicken cutlets in a row for me. Sandwich Week rules.

The miso sauce — coating the chicken — was very good. Tasted like sweeter, gooier soy sauce basically, which I guess is what miso sauce is. The cole slaw was present, but it didn’t really have much flavor and whatever extra crunch it might have added was unnecessary thanks to the crispyness of the chicken. I didn’t taste any wasabi at all.

Still, the chicken in miso sauce on its own was good enough to carry the sandwich to excellence. But I couldn’t finish it, which says something. There was just a lot of food there.

What it’s worth: More than the $6 I paid, for certain. What a bargain! I could have cut this thing in half and made it two small meals. That’s like Taco Bell levels of reasonable. The subways came pretty quick, too, so I actually invested less time in this sandwich than any but the ones I made at home. And it was definitely worth it.

The rating: 88 out of 100. An excellent and exciting sandwich, if not a particularly dynamic one. And maybe a tiny bit too big for its own good, if that’s even possible. Prince Fielder?

Last night’s sandwich

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A small upside to Beltranzaa beginning on the West Coast last night was that, thanks to time zones DVR, I was able to take in the band CAKE in Connecticut and still catch the entire Mets game without first finding out what happened.

The show was at a gorgeous outdoor venue called the Ives, so the wife and I packed sandwiches and got there a little early to sit outside and enjoy them, the pleasant weather, and the bevy of hippies performing in various styles of equilibristics.

The sandwich I ordered: A modified version of the Berg’s Pepper Barge, my signature sandwich at the deli where I used to work: Pepper ham, pepper turkey, hot soppresata, fresh mozzarella, and oil and balsamic vinegar dressing on a hard roll. While the O.G. Berg’s Pepper Barge came from DeBono’s in Rockville Centre, I ordered this one from an A&S, which has various locations in the New York Metro area.

The sandwich I received: Pepper turkey, hot soppresata and fresh mozzarella on a whole wheat roll (they were out of regular rolls).

Important background information: Last night made me realize how important the human element is in sandwich rating. Unless you’re frequenting an eatery pretty often, there’s no way to know if you’re getting a true sandwich artist or a poser, or even some guy just working there for the paycheck with no distinct love of sandwiches. And heck, maybe the dude who made my sandwich at A&S last night is generally excellent and just had a bad day — or maybe made one anomalously bad sandwich. Even Albert Pujols strikes out sometimes.

I like to think I was a great and consistent deli man back in my day, but for all I know I screwed up people’s sandwiches with some regularity and never found out about it. How many times have you gotten the slightly wrong order someplace, and how many times have you actually taken it back? I was a half hour away by the time I realized I got the wrong sandwich last night.

What it looks like:


How it tastes: Too dry. As you can see from the photo, there’s a ton of meat on there. And I know the instinct is to say that a ton of meat is necessarily a good thing, but again, I can’t stress the importance of sandwich balance enough. And that the bulk of the meat was turkey left this sandwich begging for moisture.

That’s why the sandwich, as conceived, had oil and vinegar on it, not to mention pepper ham. Ham is a moister, fattier deli meat than turkey, so it alone would have cut the dryness by replacing some of the turkey’s volume. Also, pepper ham is a wildly underrated deli meat — it’s crusted in black pepper, which looks almost ridiculous and too peppery from the outside but works perfectly when it’s sliced nice and thin.

The mozzarella and soppresata ensured that the sandwich was still decent. Fresh mozzarella, if it’s good, is straight-up unbelievable on just about anything, and A&S makes it as well as anywhere. And hot soppresata is a spicy, fatty, flavorful meat that guarantees a sandwich will not be bland.

But as I ate it, I yearned for some sort of sauce, something to dip it in so it wouldn’t parch my mouth. Even without the ham a little oil and vinegar would have added a ton of flavor and much-needed wetness to the thing. But alas, it was not to be.

What it’s worth: $9 is steep for a sandwich that’s not what you wanted. Since the A&S is extremely close to my house and was essentially on the way to the concert venue, there wasn’t a lot of other costs though. Still, if I didn’t want the pepper ham I could have gone elsewhere and gotten a sandwich for less.

The rating: 42 out of 100. Above replacement level, but not what I hoped for and nowhere close to matching its potential. Elements of an excellent sandwich, but missing too many crucial aspects of greatness. Jeff Francoeur.

First night of Beltranzaa brings few gifts

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Here’s Carlos Beltran’s first hit of the 2010 season:

Nice to see and good for Beltran for getting off the schneid in only his second at-bat. His later plate appearances were less impressive, but it’s hard to look good when facing Tim Lincecum.

The part that stung was the caught stealing, a few pitches after that hit. Ike Davis swung on the pitch, so I’m not sure if it was a botched hit and run or Beltran taking advantage of his perpetual green light. Jerry Manuel said before the game that he wouldn’t be sending Beltran anywhere, so I guess it was the latter.

Carlos Beltran — the Carlos Beltran we love and appreciate — never gets caught stealing. Beltran is a historically great base-stealer. Even last year, hobbled as he was, Beltran only got thrown out once in 12 attempts.

And yeah, maybe it’s just an unfortunate coincidence that this year’s first caught stealing should come in his first game back. Buster Posey made a great throw, after all.

But, well, I don’t know. It was a little bit sad, is all. Like the time Donny didn’t bowl a strike, right before his untimely death in The Big Lebowski. And for it to come at the hands of Posey, a player heralded as part of the next crop of Major League stars, seemed devastatingly perfect. Carlos Beltran’s run of being one of the very best baseball players in the world is probably over.

Not because of one caught stealing, mind you. Because he’s now 33 years old with an irreparable bone-on-bone condition in his right knee. Some things are just too heavy for Superman to lift. The march of time is a real bitch.

Maybe I’m wrong. I hope I’m wrong. Baseball players have certainly remained exceptional deeper into their 30s. And Beltran, even if he’s not the player he used to be, will likely still be a very good player whenever he’s healthy.

I just get a feeling we’re never going to see the player he used to be again, and that’s a difficult thing to bear. It was such a sight to see, that minimalist art thing he did. And even though I know having him back is best for the Mets, I hate the idea of new images of a lesser Beltran clouding my memory of such a wonderful ballplayer.

Greatness is fleeting, is all. And fragile. And that sucks.