Noted winner Alex Cora is referred to as “the ultimate loser.”
Aren’t we all in some way or another Jude Law’s love children?
Shocker: The Texas Cheese Fries at Chili’s are terrible for you. SPOILER ALERT: They’re probably also delicious.
I joined Matt, Greg and Steve on Seven Train to Shea last night to talk about the Mets’ early Spring Training news.
Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA system projects the Colorado Rockies to win the National League West in 2010 despite a quiet offseason in which the team’s biggest acquisition was part-time catcher Miguel Olivo.
Still, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise: The Rockies will return nearly the exact same team that won 92 games and the Wild Card in 2009.
There’s no doubt that it took their GM, Dan O’Dowd, a while to settle on the formula for success in Colorado. The early parts of his tenure were marked by mostly bottom-dwelling teams and, in Mike Hampton and Denny Neagle, a couple of awful, awful free-agent acquisitions.
But in his 10 years at the Rockies’ helm, O’Dowd has apparently learned a thing or two about how to construct a team to face the unique challenges presented by playing home games at altitude in a not-huge market, quietly assembling a staff of groundball pitchers and building a deep roster full of (mostly) homegrown young athletes.
I like O’Dowd because I feel like his work flies under the radar when the league’s best GMs are discussed, maybe because of how long it took him to get his team out of the cellar, maybe because of the Rockies’ simple geographic isolation. And I think it’s nice to be reminded that some front-office types, given enough time, can demonstrate the ability to learn from their mistakes, and to determine the appropriate approach to overcome the hurdles facing their franchises.
I reiterated my mancrush on O’Dowd on the Rockiescast with my old college friends, Scott and Ted, on Friday evening, then helped them preview the NL West a bit. Even if you’ve only got a passing interest in the Rockies or that division, it should make for a mildly entertaining half hour.
According to Adam Rubin, the Mets have an offer on the table to lefty Joe Beimel.
If the Mets are absolutely sure they need a second lefty specialist after Pedro Feliciano, Beimel’s a nice pickup. He has been, for the most part, brutal on lefties since returning to the National League in 2006 and, to boot, not absolutely terrible against righties.
Beimel actually yielded a slightly higher OPS against lefties last season than he did against righties, but since he held lefties to an on-base percentage below .300 in 2009, it was likely a blip caused by a few home runs and not any indication of a larger trend. It might be worth nothing, though, that Beimel’s fastball has been steadily losing velocity since 2006.
More importantly, Beimel is something of an Internet sensation. YouTube only yields two search results for Ron Mahay, but 91 for Joe Beimel, mostly because of this bit of West Virginian weirdness that started it all:
That video, as YouTube sensations often do, produced tons of responses, including this one that features a cameo from Joe Beimel himself:
And this catchy, weird song:
And perhaps most notably, Joe Beimel’s Wikipedia page says he warms up to Johnny Cash’s “God’s Gonna Cut You Down,” which is a pretty badass choice:
You might know Brian Boitano as a figure skater, and as the dude so revered by the South Park crew in their song, “What Would Brian Boitano Do?”
But what you might not know is that Brian Boitano is, in truth, every bit as heroic as that song made him out to be.
Check it out. Boitano’s got a newish cooking show out called — no joke — What Would Brian Boitano Make?, and in a recent episode, he treated a women’s roller derby team to a meal entirely composed of bacon-driven dishes.
Obviously Brian Boitano and I are of like mind.
In the video linked above, Boitano visits the creator of the Bacone, a concoction so amazing I can’t even think of how to cleverly describe it. It’s a cone made of bacon filled with eggs and a biscuit. The bacon is the utensil you use to eat the treat, but it’s also, of course, delicious bacon.
Perhaps even more amazingly, the Bacone was not the only dish Boitano made in that episode that featured bacon as a food delivery method.
How this man managed — or manages — to stay in decent shape eating foods like this is beyond me, but I think now I’m beginning to recognize the greatest purpose for the Winter Olympics: The Winter Olympics have brought Brian Boitano into the public eye so he could expose to the world the many awesome ways to make better use of bacon.
Lyrics NSFW:
I’m considering starting up a podcast, so I’m curious:
[poll id=”5″]
On second thought, some of the choices there might skew the results a little, so let me be more specific.
I’m considering starting up a podcast, unaffiliated with SNY (but certain to be shamelessly linked from this blog) with my former college roommate Ted Burke, one of the most entertaining people I know, and with whom I co-hosted a campus TV show in college.
We’d talk about sports some, for sure, but I’m hoping to pull off something more akin to a variety show format: some combination of scripted jokes and sketches, debate, and interviews.
[poll id=”6″]
The big news out of Port St. Lucie this morning? Oliver Perez’s mustache. Steve Popper:
Ollie shaves beard – leaves porn mustache. Its 1986 again.
And David Lennon:
Good Ollie, Bad Ollie … Porn Ollie? Perez shaved his beard and left the mustache. Weird.
I’m going to go with “Utterly Awesome Ollie,” and hope he keeps the ‘stache around for a while.
But it’s important to note that this is not the first time Ollie has rocked a mustache, and I believe I may be one of the only reporters to have noted it before. Check it out.
Don’t bother with the first two minutes of this video from 2008. In the final few seconds, as I’m wrapping with Eddie Kunz (in an interview I’m pretty certain jinxed and ruined his career), Ollie steps into the frame with a bold, beautiful mustache. I try, in vain, to ask him about it, but he bounds off into the bowels of Shea Stadium. The mustache wouldn’t return until today.
Nick Evans is a fellow burrito enthusiast. He just officially won my vote for the 25th roster spot.
Obviously Corey Stokes needs to learn a lesson about finding a more discreet location. Also, a buddy of mine in college once got a ticket for public urination on P Street in DC. Totally worth whatever the fine was.
A-Rod was playing last season with a “humongous gorilla” on his back. He’s into all sorts of freaky stuff.
Finally, my buddy Ron sent along the following video, and if you live in the L.A. area, you should probably check out Ron’s brand-new business. It’s a good idea, and he’s a good guy, plus I’m writing the ad copy. Anyway, clearly Chiranjeevi is the OG Jason Statham. I’ve never before seen anyone pull off a controlled slide on horseback:
Alex Remington, continuing his stats-based series of columns for Yahoo!’s Big League Stew, asks, “How many more wins will a healthy Reyes and Beltran bring the Mets?”
It’s a good writeup, but Remington is only trying to piece together two pieces of the giant puzzle that is attempting to project how the Mets will fare in 2010. Big pieces, mind you: The Mets’ success is certainly all wrapped up in the health of Carlos Beltran and Jose Reyes.
But Remington neglects to include how many more wins they’ll gain from a fully healthy Johan Santana, John Maine and Oliver Perez, not to mention returns to form from David Wright and Mike Pelfrey and improvement from Daniel Murphy.
And who could blame him, really? That would require way more analysis than could fit in a 600-word piece, plus would probably be a fool’s errand anyway. None of those things is necessarily a safe bet to happen, though we can hope for all of them.
Remington’s big finish:
It’s a good bet that they’ll get back those six games that they lost with Reyes and Beltran out last year, if not a few more. And that’s pretty close to the prediction offered by Baseball Prospectus’s PECOTA, which predicts the 2010 Mets to finish 78-84. And if they can get just three more wins above that, with Jason Bay’s help, they’d be a .500 ballclub. That’s a tall order, but a win total in the high 70s is eminently reasonable for a team with such pitching problems once you get past Johan Santana.
All of this assumes, of course, that Reyes and Beltran actually are healthy next year. And with the record of the Mets medical staff as of late, that’s a heck of an assumption.
Sounds pretty gloomy to Mets fans, I realize. PECOTA is generally among the most accurate projection systems in baseball — or heck, anything — but I find it difficult to believe that these Mets, if healthy, will only manage 78 wins in 2010.
Then again, I find it difficult to believe these Mets will stay healthy in 2010. Injuries to baseball players often seem to forebode more injuries, and it seems downright delusional to expect the Mets’ top 4 starters to produce 800 innings, as one “Mets higher-up” suggested recently.
Still, assuming Reyes, Wright and Santana break camp healthy and Beltran is on schedule, I’ll take the over on 78.
The bottom line is that projection systems are only that, and though I don’t pretend to understand the mechanics of PECOTA or any other system, I imagine the 2010 Mets are about as hard a club to project as any in history, given the amount of uncertainty.
We can hem and haw all we want about what could go wrong and what might go right, but we won’t know if they’re any good until they start playing games.
All the REO Speedwagon talk the past couple of days made me think of the following video, courtesy of my some of college roommate Ted’s high school buddies. It was their entry for a Denver-area radio station’s contest to create its new commercial, and somehow I don’t think it won. Something about them not actually playing REO Speedwagon on that station:
Jeff Francoeur said this to Kevin Kernan of the Post yesterday:
“One of my big goals is to have better pitch recognition…. Sometimes you try to say it doesn’t bother you to swing at a bad pitch, but it does. I’m human. I want to get better because I know if I can get better at that the rest of my game will follow. If I can mix in 50-60 walks, I become a totally different guy.”
Sounds awesome, right? Better pitch recognition seems like exactly what Frenchy needs to maintain the level of production he posted in his half season as a Met and avoid slipping back to the sub-replacement level player he was for his final season and a half with the Braves. After all, there’s no doubt he can crush the ball when it’s thrown over the plate.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution doesn’t have a great archive, but thanks to commenter named “Kyle S at work” at Baseball Think Factory, we can find evidence (most pointing to AJC articles) that Francoeur has actually set out to better recognize pitches in each of the last four offseasons:
His career walk rates:
2005: 4.0%; 2006: 3.4%; 2007: 6.0%; 2008: 6.0%; 2009: 3.6%.
It’s great that Francoeur knows he needs to walk more. The problem is, there’s no evidence he has the ability to do so. He’s still only 26 — which is sort of amazing given how long it seems like he’s been around — so there’s hope he can finally pull everything together and starts recognizing pitches the way he apparently hopes to.
He’s a Met, so I’ll be rooting for him.
Tedquarters 