According to Mark Sanchez’s Twitter, the young quarterback is:
Out of surgery. Doc says it went exceptionally well.
Of course it did.
Sanchez, in case you missed it, had an operation today to fix a patella-stabilizing ligament in his left knee.
Now Mark Sanchez’s patella will remain in place. The rest of Mark Sanchez will continue to roam free, like a wild stallion.
Hat tip to D.J. Short for pointing out this article in the Times today, about how Topps is giving baseball-card collectors an opportunity to win, among others, original Mickey Mantle rookie cards.
I have thousands of baseball cards, sitting in binders and boxes and bags in my parents’ basement. There’s nearly a whole storage room dedicated to them, the fruits of years of labor by my brother and me in the late 80s.
But what’s funny to me is how much time is spent valuing baseball cards, because I wonder how many baseball-card collectors, when push came to shove, could actually bring themselves to sell their once-prized possessions?
And I wonder if the actual, price-guide value given to the cards has anything to do with how much we, the owners, actually value them?
I have no idea what a Kevin Mitchell 1987 Topps rookie card is supposedly worth. I do know that it’s one of the most awesome cards in history — featuring Mitchell crossing home plate in a cloud of dust — and that when Mitchell’s career took off in 1989, my brother and I spent hours plumbing the depths of our collection to pick out every single one had — and we must have had 30, no joke — and put them in our binder of valuable cards, right next to the Pete Incaviglia and Mike Greenwell rookies from the same year.
But what did we honestly expect to get from that? College tuition? A car? A house? Did we ever really plan on selling the things? I have no idea.
I know that if now, someone came up to me and offered me twice the Beckett price-guide dollar value for all those Mitchell rookies, I’d say, “hell no.” I don’t even think I’d sell him one. And I have no idea why. I haven’t even looked at the things in years.
Collections, and the instinct to collect, are strange to me now. Sure seemed to make a lot of sense to me when I was a kid, though.
Everything about this interview is awesome. It’s awesome that Brian Cashman gave it, the questions are awesome, and the answers are awesome. I’m so jealous of Yankee fans right now.
The Mets are reportedly making “a hard push” for Rod Barajas. I’m already seeing Twitter snark about how they’re adding yet another catcher, but if it’s on the cheap, I don’t see why they wouldn’t. He’s less likely to completely collapse than Omir Santos.
Tommy Dee is holding down the NBA Trade Deadline fort. Sounds like the Knicks are up to something, though it’s unclear exactly what.
King Tut apparently died of malaria. Interesting.
Apparently the first-base competition isn’t the only open one in Mets’ camp this year. According to Brian Costa at the Star-Ledger (with hat-tip to Matt Cerrone), Omar Minaya has deemed the Opening Day catcher’s job up for grabs between Omir Santos and Josh Thole.
Again, I don’t want to read too much into anything, since Spring Training hasn’t even actually started yet. But if I can hope that the first-base stuff isn’t true, I’ll hope that this catcher stuff is.
I know the conventional wisdom says Thole needs at least a half season more to learn the job in Triple-A. But I wonder why, if Thole is going to learn how to catch somewhere in 2010, he can’t do it at the big-league level.
After all, Cerrone has been reporting all offseason how he hears that Mets pitchers don’t much care for pitching to Extra-Base Omir. And while I don’t love getting into the buzz game nor put too much stock in the nebulous “game-calling abilities” so often credited to veteran catchers, I’ve heard the same thing (quite likely from the same people).
So if they’ve got one guy the pitchers don’t like throwing to after a full season behind the plate with little offensive upside, and another guy the pitchers haven’t yet thrown to with a little bit of offensive upside, why not opt for the latter and hope he can learn on the job?
A midseason call-up for Thole, while it would provide him with some time for Minor League seasoning, would also mean he’d have to get accustomed to the whims of all the Major League pitchers on the fly. And the Mets’ pitchers have a whole lot of whims.
Obviously that’s not all there is to catching, of course. Santos actually scored pretty well in Driveline Mechanics’ attempt to rate catcher defense earlier this offseason. In a small sample, Thole wasn’t as great, though he didn’t entirely embarrass himself either.
Joe Janish — a guy who knows a whole lot more about the position than I ever will — has maintained all offseason that Thole is nowhere near ready for prime time.
Still, I imagine Joe was holding Thole up in comparison to potential free-agent options and not just to Omir Santos. And since luminaries like Bengie Molina, Yorvit Torrealba and Rod Barajas are not walking through that door, it strikes me that Thole might now appear the Mets’ best option to start the season.
Moreover, Thole hits left-handed — something Jerry Manuel himself identified as important earlier this offseason. The addition of Jason Bay to a lineup that already included David Wright and Jeff Francoeur made the team’s batting order pretty heavily right-handed, especially if it will include Santos. Thole gives Manuel another option to break up the righties in the lineup, and, more importantly, another hitter who might not represent an automatic out.
That’s no guarantee, of course. Thole hit well in his brief audition with the big club in 2009 and can boast a .379 Minor League on-base percentage, but his 59 plate appearances in the Majors were his first above Double-A.
Still, it probably won’t be hard for Thole to offensively outperform Santos. Not only did the latter post a brutal .260/.296/.391 line last year, but since he actually bettered his career Minor League OPS, there’s reason to believe he was playing a bit over his head.
So it boils down to whether Thole will be able to hit enough to make up for the defensive difference with Santos. I don’t know that he can, but I’m sure it’s worth considering.
We shall see, I suppose.
[poll id=”4″]
We left Mohegan Sun around 11 p.m. on Saturday night because we had seen all we wanted to see, we were down five bucks, and we had a long drive back to Westchester ahead of us.
But we didn’t realize we were leaving at precisely the same time a Kid Rock there let out, so we got to share the shuttle bus back to the parking lot with a group of Kid Rock fans. That alone was an interesting a sociocultural experience as the trip to the casino itself, and so, you know, two for the price of one.
Kid Rock fans — at least the ones in the shuttle bus back to the Winter Lot at Mohegan Sun — are, for lack of a better term, hicks. I don’t know what they’re doing in the middle of Connecticut or how they got there, whether they were uprooted from the middle of America in search of work on the East Coast, live in some small pocket of cowboy territory in New England, or simply traveled from afar to see Kid Rock.
But it’s intriguing to me, because Kid Rock, from what I understand, is not really a hick. I saw his Behind the Music. His real name is Bob Ritchie, and he grew up in an upper-middle class suburb of Detroit, the son of a wealthy auto dealer.
Actually, Kid Rock got his start in Detroit’s hip-hop underground and was signed to his first record deal as a rapper, but it fell through — if I recall the VH1 show correctly — because Vanilla Ice blew up and blew over, and Kid Rock’s act was too deemed similar.
I guess that makes a little bit of sense. The only Kid Rock song I can think of offhand is his first big single, Bawitaba, and that certainly incorporates some rapping, if you could call it that.
I don’t really care for Kid Rock’s music, but I think Kid Rock is awesome. A lot of this stems from when Kid Rock came into the wholesale/retail lobster farm I worked at on Long Island, bought a couple of lobsters and tipped me four bucks. That was cool — not everyone knew to tip their lobstertrician, so I appreciated it. Thanks, Kid Rock.
Also, it seems like Kid Rock was just sort of hellbent on stardom from an early age, and so, you know, good for him. You could probably accuse Kid Rock of selling out for abandoning his hip-hop roots in favor of whatever it is he’s doing now that appeals to all the people in cowboy hats on the shuttle bus, but I don’t think it really counts as selling out if your whole goal in the first place was to sell places out.
Also, I’m pretty certain Kid Rock was the first non-Cher person I ever heard use auto-tune in the manner it has since become popular, so kudos to Kid Rock for trendsetting, or at least trend-foreshadowing or something.
Lastly — and this was my main point about Kid Rock, and it took me 500 words to get here — a few years ago someone released a sex tape featuring both Kid Rock and Scott Stapp of Creed. I wrote about it at the time on a now long-forgotten blog. I was going to revisit the same topic again, but I’ve already written too much about Kid Rock, so I’ll instead just excerpt some here:
Scott Stapp and Kid Rock. Who even knew they knew each other? Like, how did that come about? I gather that they were touring together at the time, so I guess that puts them in the same place at the same time, but, well, how did they first broach that subject? Are Kid Rock afterparties the types of places where orgies just break out? I mean, I guess it’s entirely possible, since it’s not like I have any frame of reference here. Orgies certainly don’t break out at the parties that I’m attending, maybe that’s just how it goes in Kid Rock’s circle.
The thing is, by appearing in a porno video, Scott Stapp — a purported Christian — proved himself a hypocrite. By appearing in a porno video, Kid Rock proved himself an honest man. Nothing Kid Rock ever said or did made any claims that he wouldn’t, if given the opportunity, film himself having sex with several women and with other dudes around too, because hey, that’s just the way Kid Rock rolls.
Thus, one porno video somehow made Scott Stapp less cool and Kid Rock moreso, and, to tell you the truth, that’s cool with me.
I haven’t seen the video, but I’ve heard it’s pretty filthy. In fact, from what I understand, it’s the single most vile, most disgusting, and most morally debased product of the mass media since Kid Rock’s second album.
Zing!
Oh, me in 2006. Anyway, in conclusion, Kid Rock is cool, even if his music isn’t. So here’s to you, Kid Rock.
Finally, I would be remiss if I mentioned Kid Rock without linking to his amazing collection of mug shots. No one in history has ever been so happy to be arrested outside of a Waffle House.
Josh Alper calls Omar Minaya “the Optimism Killer” at NBC New York today because of Minaya’s recent suggestion that Daniel Murphy and Mike Jacobs are in an “open competition” for the first-base job, something I’ve weighed in on here already. Alper writes:
If you’re willing to put a scrub like Jacobs into an open competition with a player that you already know, why wouldn’t you go after a halfway decent player? Or, getting really crazy here, signing a righty bat to platoon with Murphy so that you limit Murphy’s downside and make the Mets a better team? We won’t even bother wondering why there’s no such challenge provided for Luis Castillo at second base.
Alper’s post is a good read and he makes some good points. And I’ve seen similar around the blogosphere today — a general sense of worry that Mike Jacobs, Mike .297 on-base percentage Jacobs, could beat out Daniel Murphy, Daniel means-business Murphy, and end up the Mets’ starting first baseman.
I know Adam Rubin’s excellent blog post today sparked some of the talk, too. And Jacobs is appearing on Mets Hot Stove on Thursday, so that should fire up Twitter once more.
Still, I’m guessing it’s nothing. I’ve never met Jacobs, but I’m betting he’s a nice guy and a good quote, and so writers and show producers without much other material to work with are lining him up for conversations. So we’re hearing his name a lot.
And Rubin’s story is a great one. The bit about Pedro throwing a fit when the Mets tried to send Jacobs down after a pinch-hit home run, with Dae-Sung Koo as the villain? It’s a must read. Of course Rubin wants to recount that story. He’s a writer — he is paid to tell stories.
Maybe I’m in denial, of course. Maybe this is really some sort of nefarious plot by the Mets’ uber-savvy media-relations department to implant Mike Jacobs into our unsuspecting minds, forcing us to fall in love with him in spite of his offensive and defensive shortcomings.
Color me skeptical. Smart money says Murphy’s still the guy and Minaya used the term “open competition” out of some combination of wanting to light a fire under Murphy, not wanting to denigrate Jacobs — who has been a Major League regular for most of his career — and not knowing what else to say.
That’s what I’m hoping, at least.
Of course, if you believe the “Mets are foisting Mike Jacobs upon us” conspiracy, you also recognize that I work at SNY and thus am part of the machine. And in that case, clearly this post is just misdirection meant to distract you from the Mets’ actual genius master plan to load up their lineup with guys with tiny on-base percentages and no range.
Tom at the Rational Mets Fan expounds on some things I wrote last week with some thoughts of his own. He’s even a bit more bullish than I am.
Robots building robots. I know how this ends.
Remember my “hey, maybe all sorts of terrible things will happen to the Braves this year” thing from yesterday? Jair Jurrjens is getting an MRI.
Words cannot describe how awesome Darrelle Revis is. Darrelle Revis is ineffably awesome. Hat tip to Brian Bassett for this one:
Back in the early days of TedQuarters, one of the most lively comments-section debates came in a post about cheesesteaks and how they’re overrated. Chris M, Intrusivity, Catsmeat and Will all confirmed the existence of the grease trucks at Rutgers, and something called the fat sandwich.
Yesterday, I had one. And it was good.
Good enough to make the trip to Rutgers worth it even despite the awful, awful beating my Georgetown Hoyas took at the hands of the miserable Scarlet Knights, and despite the terrible, constant buzzing noise emanating from the rafters of the Rutgers Athletic Center.
Fat sandwiches are, by definition, some awesome combination of hilarious meats and fried things, and basically every combination of things the grease trucks offer on sandwiches is available under one name or another.
The sandwich I had was called the Fat Kushion, and — get ready for this — it featured:
Cheesesteak, bacon, chicken fingers, mozzarella sticks, french fries, jalapenos and hot sauce. I got mine with ketchup.
It was exactly as good as it sounds. It looked like this:
The key to the fat sandwiches is that they’re not really as overwhelming as they sound. Having so many items on them does not mean they’re tremendously stuffed with stuff — the sandwich makers understand proportion. That’s good, and it’s important. One thing we stressed when training new workers at the deli was the appropriate proportion of meat:cheese:other stuff.
You can’t really tell from the above picture, but there were probably two chicken fingers, two mozzarella sticks, two slices of bacon, a couple thinly sliced steak-umm meat pieces and a few jalapenos in there. Then they topped the whole thing off with french fries. Delicious. I probably should’ve taken another picture while I was midway through the thing, but I was too busy cramming it into my mouth at disgusting speeds.
You can’t really distinguish any of the things inside it while you’re eating it. I definitely feel like I sensed a little bit of mozzarella stick flavor at one point, and I certainly tasted hot sauce. Mostly, it’s just a giant messy heap of delicious meatpile, and it’s totally amazing.
So next time you’re in New Brunswick, New Jersey, go to the grease trucks on College Ave. Buy one of these things and eat it. Unless, of course, you hope to live past 50. In that case, you’re on your own.
My wife and I drove to Mohegan Sun on Saturday night out of curiosity and boredom. We blew five dollars, ate delicious burgers, and passed time walking around the endless rows of slot machines, mesmerized by the flashing lights and digital clanking and all the people gambling away their money.
They sit, in earnest, pumping cash into the same machine over and over, hitting the same button again and again, hoping they’ll finally hit the jackpot. A precious few actually do. Way more don’t.
But they keep trying because, presumably, they’ve already committed so much money to the damned bandit and believe the only way they’ll recoup their losses is to keep feeding the thing bills until their luck turns around.
And because just about everything makes me think about the Mets, it made me think about the Mets.
It’s not a perfect metaphor, of course, because the outcomes of baseball games — unlike slot machines — are not entirely random. They’re largely affected by randomness, but not wholly dictated by it.
But with the Mets’ pitchers and catchers set to report to Port St. Lucie on Thursday, and the deluge of newspaper stories previewing the team’s season already streaming in, I’m struck by how much the team’s fate is wrapped up in fortune.
This is nothing new, and not even anything atypical. All successful baseball teams benefit from some measure of luck. Look at what the 2009 Yankees got from so many older players, and what the 2008 Phillies got from their bullpen arms. Those squads shouldn’t be faulted for it, either; they were good teams, and good fortune catapulted them to greatness.
These Mets, though, appear to be shooting for something more like slot-machine luck. To win in 2010, they will need healthy performances from several players who were injured last year, rebound performances from several players who underachieved last year, and breakout performances from several players who stunk last year.
The odds are long. And if luck, as Branch Rickey suggested, is the residue of design, then it’s hard to argue there was much in the Mets’ offseason blueprint that significantly improved the Mets’ fortunes for 2010. Jason Bay will add power to the lineup. Beyond that, the Mets, paradoxically, refused to take many gambles while heading into a season that amounts to a massive gamble.
That’s it, really. That’s the official TedQuarters Spring Training-is-starting piece right there. I wish I could offer more, or something different than what I’ve been saying all winter. I can’t, though: For the Mets to compete and win in 2010, they’re going to need a whole lot of things to fall their way.
And it could happen. Jose Reyes could hit 30 triples this year and steal 80 bases and win the MVP, and Oliver Perez could stay in the best shape of his life long enough to be Good Ollie all season long and recapture his 2004 form.
Or maybe Hisanori Takahashi’s screwball will be so baffling that he’ll go all Fernando Valenzuela on the National League and carry the team on his able 35-year-old shoulders.
Or heck, maybe the Mets can just benefit from a whole lot of bad luck to the Phillies and Braves and slip into the playoffs with 83 wins like the Cardinals did in 2006, only to then slip by the far-superior Cardinals in the NLCS when Albert Pujols doesn’t swing at a 3-2 curveball.
It’s all possible now, with Spring Training just getting underway and a full season’s worth of highlights and lowlights yet to be determined. We can project and object like we have all offseason long, but in truth, we have no idea what happens next.
Sure, like all Mets fans, I wish the team I root for seemed more like the guy in the sunglasses behind the big stack of chips at the poker table, or even more like the seedy dude with the cigar scribbling furiously on his pad at the race book, and less like one of the hordes feeding dollars into the slots. That would be cool.
But still, there’s something very entertaining about playing the slot machines. Indeed, the 20 minutes my wife and I spent pushing the button and watching the wheels spin round were well worth the five dollars it cost us.
I guess the thrill is in all the possibilities, and in knowing that, with just the push of that button, and so little skill or foresight or planning on your part, the wheels could all land on sevens and make you much, much richer.
The Mets’ front office spent this offseason in front of the same slot machine it has been playing for a long time now. The cash has been entered and the button pushed, and finally, after four months of winter, the wheels are spinning.
Now, we wait to see where they land.
Did that really happen? Ugh. I know it did, for I was there. Ugh.
Patrick Flood has muppets and insight.
Kerel Cooper catches up with Larry Tye, author of a newish book about Satchel Paige. I just got it for my birthday and I’m psyched to dive in.
Steve Lombardi speculates about how much Derek Jeter’s next contract will be worth. Oh, to be a Yankee fan.
Tedquarters 