So I feel like I should weigh in on Jim Joyce’s blown call that cost Armando Galarraga his perfect game last night, not because you care or you haven’t read 1,000 other opinions about it already, but just to acknowledge a story that seems to have taken hold of the entire sporting world.
I’ve got no great insight, though. Here’s my take: That sucked. Sucked for Galarraga and it sucked for Joyce. It sucked for the Tigers and their fans, and now it kind of sucks for the commissioner’s office to have to come up with some response.
The guy screwed up. It happens. Sometimes no one notices, sometimes everyone does. He didn’t do it intentionally and by most accounts he’s a very good umpire.
I don’t think the league should overturn the call and award Galarraga a perfect game because that opens up a whole weird can of worms involving every other obviously blown call in the past and the future. I do hope it leads to a discussion about a reasonable way to further implement instant replay in games without slowing them down too much, because if we have the technology we might as well use it to make the games as fair as possible.
In his second consecutive column about Oliver Perez, Mike Lupica tells us not to get “overly worked up” about Oliver Perez. But that’s, well, whatever. That’s not what disgusted me about the column. Check out this part:
And we can all go ’round and ’round the mulberry bush about how [Perez’s contract] is the worst Mets contract this side of Beltran’s.
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh…
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…
Excuse me? All due respect, sir, but what the f@#$ are you talking about? Did you really just suggest that the three-year, $36 million contract handed to Oliver Perez — a guy who has posted a 6.62 ERA since inking the deal — is not as bad as the hefty one the Mets gave Carlos Beltran before the 2005 season? Is that what you’re saying? Because it really sounds like that’s what you’re saying.
And that’s ridiculous.
Look: I know everyone wants to get in their potshots at Scott Boras, because god forbid an agent be excellent at getting his players tons of money. And since Beltran’s hurt now it’s not as if his contract is a steal. But did you somehow forget the production he provided the team from 2006-2008, when he was one of the very best players in the Major Leagues on both sides of the ball?
Even if you’re on Team Phillips, that galumphing horde of ingrates unappreciative of greatness, you must recognize the difference between paying $12 million a year for Ollie Perez, a guy actively hurting his team, and paying even up to $18.5 million a year for Beltran, a guy actively hurting, but a guy who has only helped the Mets when healthy.
Wait, hold on, we have stats for this. Spreadsheets from our nerdery. Fangraphs converts WAR to a dollar scale to evaluate what a player should make in free agency. Over the course of his contract, even with his injuries, Beltran has already been worth $101.5 million to the Mets. That’s not including any value he might provide this year if and when he returns, or next year when he’s still under contract. So the Mets have already gotten nearly a full return on the $119 million they committed to Beltran before 2005, at least according to that stat.
Perez has been worth -$5.5 million since the start of 2009. Negative 5.5 million. Oliver Perez has been costing the Mets wins since they signed that deal. He cost them wins by pitching terribly, and now he is costing them wins by occupying a roster spot he doesn’t deserve. Oliver Perez should be paying the Mets for the right to pitch awfully, like some sort of absurd and masochistic vanity pursuit — the type you can afford when you’re earning $12 million a year for no reason in particular.
Whatever. Whatever. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I love watching Carlos Beltran play baseball, and so I am, as always, hopelessly biased. Maybe Mike Lupica falls in line with the Joe Benignos of the world, those that are sure Beltran hates baseball, and that he’s a lousy player who hasn’t brought the Mets championships and struck out looking one time to end an NLCS in which he hit three home runs.
Here’s what I know: I remember standing in the scrum of reporters around Beltran on the last Friday night of the 2007 season, after Beltran homered but the Mets lost to the Marlins and the team finally fell out of first place. Beltran faced the crowd and said all the right things, a bunch of words that couldn’t in any way convey the shock and horror on his face. With apologies to Tom Glavine, the dude looked devastated.
And I remember a night late in the 2008 season, when the Mets’ bullpen tried to blow Pedro Martinez’s last start with the team but Beltran wouldn’t let them, lining a walkoff single with two outs in the bottom of the ninth. Before that game, Beltran had told reporters that he learned to stay measured during the ups and downs of that strange season, but that his wife took the late-season losses hard. Then after the game, someone asked him how the missus would feel about the win. He paused for a moment, then burst into a mile-wide smile.
“It’s gonna be a good night,” he said.
You can tell me Beltran isn’t a winner, doesn’t care about baseball and isn’t worth is salary, but I just won’t believe you. And you can bombard me with conspiracy theories about his knee surgery and slow recovery, but I’ll remain skeptical. I have no idea what went down this winter in the he-said, they-said drama, but at this point, based on empirical evidence, I trust Beltran’s baseball instincts more than I do that of the Mets’ front office.
And if he’s only in it for himself and slowly working to come back so he can play for his contract, answer me this: Why the hell did he come back last September, with the team out of the race, with his bone-on-bone knee issue and everything else? I don’t know, but I think maybe Carlos Beltran really, really likes baseball. Or maybe it seizes him in some way I could never understand without being that good at something.
The Flaming Lips:
Tell everybody waiting for Superman
That they should try to hold on as best they can.
He hasn’t dropped them, forgot them or anything
It’s just too heavy for Superman too lift.
I should note before I get into this that there are two people commenting under the username “Ryan,” much as there are about 40 different users named Chris. One Ryan has been posting regularly on this blog since February and took care to distinguish himself from the Ryan whose comments are published below, who commented for the first time yesterday.
Pretty hacky stuff here Ted. Everyone knows Matt is a complete hack who never criticizes the team for anything because of his connection with SNY.
When you sell out (look yourself in the mirror) you lose the privilege to write defensive columns like the one above.
I replied:
Ryan, I look myself in the mirror all the time. It’s hard to pull my eyes away from a face like this one.
Seriously, though, you can call me anything you want, and I know you have no real reason to trust me, but I never, ever publish anything I don’t believe.
And if you think an affiliation with SNY prevents someone from criticizing the Mets, you must have missed the columns/posts where I called for Minaya’s head, blasted the process behind the Francoeur deal, implied the team lacked understanding of basic microeconomics, suggested that the Mets’ entire front-office was asleep at the wheel, and compared Minaya and Adam Rubin to howler monkeys bellowing nonsense.
Ryan:
Ahh, the always controversial opinion about the Jeff Francouer trade, the most boring trade in American history. And the always appreciated Mets company line that Omar was wrong but so was Rubin. Nice work Ted.
Ted, how about that none of your SNY blogs, even the flagship has even touched the Mets dropping payroll $22 million this offseason. No, lets not touch that one. That is not relevant to Mets fans, that is not a complete slap in the face. That’s the hackiness element, that’s the sellout who can’t write what he feels or thinks because his paycheck comes from the team he is covering.
Why also does Matt write like this…maybe it allows him to hedge his opinions…saying something without saying anything…so he doesn’t look access…maybe i dont know….maybe access to interview Kevin Burkhardt….the always hard-hitting Kevin Burkhardt…so that he can ask him…why Alex Cora…does all the little things right? …..Maybe I don’t know….
The article you linked below, why? You don’t mention Mets payroll at all. You certainly do not mention 22 MILLION DOLLARS. In fact the article stems from yourself being criticized for not being critical. Which is my point.
Me:
In that post, I linked and responded to an article that said the Mets have no money left, which pretty clearly relates to the Mets’ payroll. I didn’t mention 22 MILLION DOLLARS because it was February and I had no way of knowing if the Mets were done spending. Since I rarely obtain any inside, anonymous-source type information, I had no way to know whether the Mets’ decline in payroll was due to bureaucratic inefficiency or an actual lack of money. I still don’t.
Ryan (here comes my favorite part!):
To this day, Ted nor Matt have commented on the EXTREME amount of drop in payroll which is suspicious. Downright suspicious. Other Metscentric blogs have. SNY Sponsored Blogs have not.
Your article is not relevant to the conversation and it was not a good article anyway.
I am a big fan of SNY Mets broadcasts. The Big 3 can be very critical of this organization, which is great, and which they should be. There has not been a bigger disgrace of organization management in baseball than the New York Mets (Randolph Firing to Present) Metsblog and Tedquarters has not been critical, at all. They would rather talk (along with Burkhardt) about how Alex Cora does the little things well and Fernando Tatis provides veteran latino presence, all the while the team and the organization is imploding and frankly a joke to the rest of the league.
Me:
“They would rather talk (along with Burkhardt) about how Alex Cora does the little things well and Fernando Tatis provides veteran latino presence.”
And with that, I feel no obligation to respond to anything else you say since you’ve obviously never read this blog before.
I didn’t re-post the exchange here out of pettiness, though I am admittedly petty. I just think the irony is rich, considering the original post: Ryan entered this conversation with a strong bias. He was certain that me and Matt Cerrone and everyone writing about the Mets on the SNY.tv family of sites are shills for the team, even though he has since made it abundantly clear that he just hasn’t read a whole lot of my writing.
In that post, I wrote, “We see stories develop and we want them to be true, so we draw inferences and connect dots and work to confirm them as reality.” And here, Ryan has found one particular factoid on which I did not directly criticize the Mets and latched onto it as proof that I am a mouthpiece for the team without considering that I might just have missed the fact or glossed over it while I was busy ripping Alex Cora’s contract for most of the offseason.
Anyway, in case you’re curious, and I guess for posterity, the 2010 Mets do indeed have a payroll about $23 million less than it was last year, according to Cot’s. I don’t know why. I have heard team officials say they have the flexibility to add payroll in a salary dump trade at the deadline, and I could even argue that waiting to see how the 2010 Mets fared before bringing on high-priced players on multiple-year deals was a reasonable strategy, given all the uncertainty on the Opening Day roster. But I don’t know if that was the actual motivation.
And I could add that it hardly seems suspicious that a team coming off such a miserable year in a rough economy would struggle to match the previous season’s payroll, since it would presumably be much harder to sell tickets, advertisements and merchandise. I don’t know the exact details of the Mets’ budget, though, so spending too much time on it would amount to uninformed speculation.
What I do know for sure, though, is that $126 million — like $149 million or $137 million — in the hands of a capable front office should be plenty to field a competitive team. The problem has never been the Mets’ payroll, but the appropriation thereof.
Jonathan Mayo from MLB.com doesn’t expect the Mets to draft above slot. As he points out, that doesn’t make a massive difference when they’ve got the seventh pick overall, but it’s not great news to any Mets fan frustrated with the team’s recent drafting history.
Our friend Todd Drew passed away almost a year-and-a-half ago. In the days after his death, I coped with the sadness by staying busy. I didn’t want to sit with the pain. We talked about Todd on the site as the Banter sat shiva. What can we do? The rest of the Banter writers and I talked about it. What about a compilation of Todd’s work, from his blog Yankees for Justice, and his Shadow Ball columns here at the Banter?
Then Diane Firstman suggested that we compile the Yankee Stadium Memories series into a book. It would have a broader appeal. Made sense to me. So when Skyhorse approached me about doing just that, I knew we had the perfect farewell to Todd.
I didn’t know Todd Drew, but I loved his Shadow Games column on Bronx Banter. Belth tells me Drew was a champion of the working man and a fan of great sportswriting. Both were apparent from Drew’s writing.
I wrote a piece about Yankee Stadium 3.0 for the book, and by the time I was done with it, passing it back and forth with Alex for edits, I liked it a lot. That’s not a common phenomenon for me — usually after I spend a certain amount of time on anything, I get sick of it and determine it sucks by the time I actually finish it.
Even if you’re a Yankee-hating Mets fan, I recommend checking out the book. Alex got contributions from an amazing slate of writers, and I feel straight-up honored to be listed in the same table of contents (assuming there’s a table of contents).And there are a ton of your fellow Yankee-haters in there.
Plus I got to use uncensored expletives, which is a no-no here on TedQuarters. I actually got a little carried away with them the first time through and Belth had to ask me to tone it down.
Remember my Army of Mark McGwires scenario? Looks as though the McGwires themselves are doing their very best to realize it.
Granted, you may balk and point out that Stephanie McGwire gave birth to three female McGwires, but I am certain that any McGwire progeny, regardless of gender, will develop the capacity to crush monstrous home runs and play terrible defense. And I’d guess they’ll probably end up sporting some bushy red goatees, too. Sorry, girls. Here’s hoping for your sake you got your mom’s looks, but I assume your father’s DNA is overwhelmingly powerful and dominant.
The good news is that since Mark McGwire already had three children, the McGwires are now just one more set of triplets away from being able to field a full nine. Since, in the original scenario, the McGwires were interchangeable, Team McGwire would not have to worry about a bullpen or pitching rotation. They will simply rotate which McGwire pitches to make sure all the McGwires stay healthy enough to smash epic dingers.
Mike Pelfrey’s 2010 success is all the rage these days in the blogosphere and local papers, and probably comes as a surprise to all those who raged over his mostly defense-induced struggles from 2009.
So what’s made the difference? No surprises, really: Pelfrey’s getting a bit lucky, benefiting from a better defense, and using his new splitter to induce more weak contact and swinging strikes than ever before.
Big Pelf has yielded a .279 batting average on balls in play, well below his career .311 rate. That’s at least partly due to a slight uptick in Pelfrey’s trademark groundballs — he’s now inducing 52.5 percent, up from a career 50.3-percent rate. It also can’t hurt that the Mets’ defense has played, statistically, significantly above average this season after being third worst in the Majors last year.
Still, while Pelfrey is certainly enjoying the return of Jose Reyes behind him, it’s probably unreasonable to expect him to continue yielding so few hits. At some point, a few more balls will drop in or squeak by defenders.
The good news is Pelfrey’s better prepared to handle that situation because he’s missing more bats. The big Kansan will never be Tim Lincecum, but he’s striking out 6.5 batters per 9 innings, more than a full batter more than his career average.
That’s good, and likely largely due to Pelfrey’s new splitter. The pitch has been, on average, his most effective offering this year. It will be interesting to see if hitters learn to lay off the ball as it dives out of the zone once the new-look Pelfrey has been around the league a couple of times, but at the very least the effective splitter must make Pelfrey’s heater a bit more difficult to time.
All the fancy stats — FIP, xFIP and tRA — show that Pelfrey’s been pitching significantly better than he ever has before. That’s no stunning insight, of course, but the stats seem to indicate real improvement and not plain luck or random fluctuation.
This was supposed to be an SNY.tv column before I had some tech issues. It might be up there later, but I’m impatient, so here it is:
I could use this column to weigh in on Mike Francesa’s recent dismissive comments about Matt Cerrone and MetsBlog, but the post would be silly and my motivations transparent. If you read this blog or Matt’s blog with any regularity, you probably know that Matt is my colleague and buddy. Mike Francesa once read a report I wrote about Billy Wagner on his radio show word for word without crediting me or SNY.tv. So I am biased.
On that topic, though, I do feel an urge to respond to the outpouring of comments like this one that seems to follow any criticism — legitimate or otherwise — of MetsBlog or TheKnicksBlog or any new-media outlet that appears to straddle the line between journalism and fandom.
The image above is not a cube. A cube, by nature, exists in three dimensions and has volume. What you see there is merely a collection of connected lines that appear to have depth because of an optical illusion. You likely see one face of the cube in the foreground and the other in the background, and if you focus you can imagine them reversed. But it is difficult to look at the image as a series of lines on a flat surface without perceiving the illusion of depth.
Here’s the fascinating part: That’s not a universal phenomenon. It’s cultural. Because we live in a society awash with similar two-dimensional representations of depth — in art, on television, in advertisements, everywhere — our brains have learned to read depth into that image. But people from vastly different visual cultures would not see it the same way.
We are all biased in ways we never consider and rarely recognize. Our value systems, backgrounds, upbringings and experiences impact our perception just as our beliefs and opinions do. I am conscious of the specific source of my bias in the minor dustup between Cerrone and Francesa but not of the myriad deeply ingrained ones shaping the way I perceive absolutely everything.
There is no such thing as unbiased journalism because there is no such thing as unbiased anything. The ideal of disinterested reporting, though noble in theory, is misguided, especially with the world so dominated by randomness. We see stories develop and we want them to be true, so we draw inferences and connect dots and work to confirm them as reality.
That’s not to say journalists should abandon their pursuit of the truth, and I certainly don’t aim to suggest that most journalists are not conscious of any of their biases. Absolute facts must exist somewhere, and the journalist’s job is to wean them as best he can from the mire of his own perception.
And to me, the best possible first step toward that goal is honesty: exposing our affinities, reflecting as often as we can on our motivations, and disclosing the breadth of our intentions. That’s why, though I am naturally disinclined to being a company man, I believe in the work Cerrone and all of our SNY.tv bloggers are doing.
Admitting their fandom does not in any way prevent them from criticizing their favorite teams or those teams’ managements; it merely strips away the artifice that suggests people covering a team should have no vested interest in its success or failure. I know from reading TheKnicksBlog that Tommy Dee wants to see the Knicks win, so I trust that the moves he suggests and ideas he forwards are ones he believes will benefit the team. Certainly his perspective is skewed by the fact that he roots for the team, but he has never suggested otherwise.
I don’t mean this to slight traditional reporters, and I hope it doesn’t sound like any sort of pretentious new-media manifesto — I would be foolish to suggest I know what makes for a successful Web enterprise with the Internet still in adolescence. And I understand how anyone raised or trained in more traditional forms of media might struggle with the concept of fans providing news filtered through their own perspectives. But again, all media, and everything else, is filtered through someone’s perspective.
A common talking point among media-savvy Mets fans is the idea that reporters covering the team too frequently give passes to Jerry Manuel and Jeff Francoeur because they supply great quotes to fill newspapers. I will not argue that. But I will ask this: Is it conscious? Does a newspaper columnist lay off Francoeur when the right fielder is not hitting because he is aware that Frenchy makes his job easier, or is he, without knowing it, simply not inclined to rip a guy who just looked him in the eye, smiled and laughed at his joke?
I don’t know. I can’t answer for that columnist, just as I can’t speak for any other SNY.tv blogger. I only represent myself, and I know that the content on these sites, presented without pretense, does not bug me at all. Rather, it mostly strikes me as forthright, and eliminates any concern that the writer might be operating under anything but his stated motivations.
Go check out the graph at Beyond the Boxscore charting relief appearances per game for each Major League team. Then consider this: By ERA+, the Brewers, Pirates and Dodgers — the teams nearest the Mets at the bottom of the list — all have terrible to below-average pitching staffs. And the Dodgers are managed by noted bullpen-abuser Joe Torre. The Mets’ staff, hard as it may be to believe, has been slightly above average this season.
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…
In that post, I wrote, “We see stories develop and we want them to be true, so we draw inferences and connect dots and work to confirm them as reality.” And here, Ryan has found one particular factoid on which I did not directly criticize the Mets and latched onto it as proof that I am a mouthpiece for the team without considering that I might just have missed the fact or glossed over it while I was busy ripping Alex Cora’s contract for most of the offseason.
I wrote a piece about Yankee Stadium 3.0 for the book, and by the time I was done with it, passing it back and forth with Alex for edits, I liked it a lot. That’s not a common phenomenon for me — usually after I spend a certain amount of time on anything, I get sick of it and determine it sucks by the time I actually finish it.
Granted, you may balk and point out that Stephanie McGwire gave birth to three female McGwires, but I am certain that any McGwire progeny, regardless of gender, will develop the capacity to crush monstrous home runs and play terrible defense. And I’d guess they’ll probably end up sporting some bushy red goatees, too. Sorry, girls. Here’s hoping for your sake you got your mom’s looks, but I assume your father’s DNA is overwhelmingly powerful and dominant.
So what’s made the difference? 
Tedquarters 