Items of note

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Well the Jets won, but holy crap, how bad is Kellen Clemens? I mean, granted he hasn’t played in a long time and he never got any real rhythm going, but one time he dropped back and fell down. That’s no good.

Dan Graziano weighed in on what the Jets need to do to make the playoffs.

For what it’s worth, I think I’m in love with Darrelle Revis. And it’s so awesome that Thomas Jones is the son of coal miners. Badass.

Speaking of the Jets, their old home, Hofstra University, announced yesterday that it’s cutting its football team. Too bad. My high school coach was good friends with Joe Gardi, so we used to get to work out with the Hofstra guys some times. It was cool to have a reasonable program nearby, even if it wasn’t exactly Penn State.

The Mets made the Henry Blanco deal official. Apparently it’s for $1.5 million, which seems a little excessive, but like I said yesterday, Blanco’s not bad. Sam Page expounds.

Let’s invent a trade rumor

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OK, so we learned yesterday that several Major League teams are interested in Angel Pagan.

The White Sox, it has been reported, are looking for a center fielder and a leadoff hitter and would prefer to fill their offseason needs with trade acquisitions over free agents, since they can’t add much payroll.

The Mets, we know, need starting pitching depth and could look to fill that need via trade.

The White Sox, meanwhile, have Jake Peavy, Mark Buerhle, Gavin Floyd, John Danks and Freddy Garcia set to be in their rotation next year.

Beyond that, they have 26-year-old Carlos Torres, who started five ineffective games for their big-league club last season but dominated Triple-A.

I don’t think Torres is enough to get a deal done, even if the Mets severely undervalue Pagan due to his mental hiccups. So maybe the White Sox throw in a member of their reasonably deep bullpen, like, I don’t know, say D.J. Carrasco.

Carrasco fits the mold of former Mets’ bullpen targets in that his success appears to be unsustainable based on his high WHIP, plus he brings the Jorge Sosa factor of experience pitching in many different situations.

Is that a reasonable deal? Angel Pagan for Carlos Torres and D.J. Carrasco? I’m not asking if you’d do it — I wouldn’t — only if it seems like something that could happen.

And for kicks, I’ll put it this way, with appropriately vague language:

The White Sox are looking for an inexpensive center fielder and leadoff hitter and could be interested in Angel Pagan. The Mets would likely seek pitching depth in return, possibly in the form of Triple-A righty Carlos Torres and versatile reliever D.J. Carrasco.

Jets video preview

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Here’s me and Brian Bassett talking Jets-Bills. I’m laughing at the beginning because I stumbled so many times in the opening part. Also, I probably need both a shave and a haircut. Two bits.

Loving the process

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Here’s a really interesting read from Full Count Pitch, courtesy of the Baseball Think Factory.

Billy Campione, the writer, attended a WFAN-organized question and answer session with Brian Cashman in which Cashman details the process that led him to hire Joe Girardi as manager.

According to Campione, the interview process took eight hours per candidate and included a written test. An excerpt:

One example cited by Cashman presented each applicant with a statistical breakdown of three anonymous players. They were asked who they would prefer to have on their roster and why. Cashman said some managerial hopefuls were obviously ignorant of what some of the advanced statistical measurements even meant. Another query asked the contender to create a lineup to face CC Sabathia on June 1 using the current Yankee roster. They were then asked what lineup they would use against Sabathia in the playoffs. Cashman found fault with the applicants who would sit their lefties in June yet start them in the playoffs. He wanted a consistent approach to do what it takes to win, regardless of hurt feelings among veterans who may face the indignity of sitting against a tough lefty in the postseason.

Cool.

Now I should mention that I have no idea the process by which other teams hire a manager, so maybe this is standard fare. Plus, I know plenty of Yankee fans who would say that whatever method arrived at Joe Girardi was an imperfect one.

The article mentions that Cashman called Cleveland GM Mark Shapiro, among others, for advice, which lends a lot of insight into why the Indians hired Baseball Prospectus reader Manny Acta this offseason.

And it’s reassuring to hear that at least one team goes through a process like this to make important internal decisions.

Cheese perverts

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Former roommate and current Rockiescast host Ted Burke passed along this bizarre article from the Associated Press, and nominated the following for his “favorite one-sentence paragraph ever in a news piece”:

Efforts to reach Christ for comment were unsuccessful.

That’s definitely funny, but my favorite is still the lead paragraph in this piece, which reads, simply:

Say cheese, pervert.

This makes me laugh for the ridiculous gravity of the statement, but also because, if someone actually came up to me and said, “Say cheese, pervert,” I’d definitely respond, “Cheese pervert!”

And every time I think about the phrase “cheese pervert,” I giggle incessantly for the next five minutes or so.

Plus, I can say with some certainty that the Daily News sentence was written in a wholly unironic fashion, whereas it would not surprise me to learn that a bored AP copywriter knew his sentence would be funny when he put it in his story.

I know this because I have been, in the past, a bored copywriter, and I used to try to slip funny things in headlines, blurbs and captions all the time. My best work came on the now-defunct olympic-sports site WCSN.com, when, after some Romanian dude won a gymnastics apparatus event in Europe, I wrote:

Romanian Impresses With Apparatus Showing

You get it? There are multiple meanings.

The photo I ran with it was priceless, too, as it featured the Romanian guy standing on his hands on top of the pommel horse with his back to the camera, facing a big crowd of gasping fans.

That was before I could blog when I needed to entertain myself at work. You have to get through the day somehow.

Henry Blanco: Not actually terrible

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OK, so I’m being a little hard on Henry Blanco. By all accounts, including Driveline Mechanics’ system for evaluating catcher defense, he’s a good defensive player. Plus, for whatever reason, he has posted his career best single-season OPS+ totals in the last two seasons (with limited at-bats, mind you) at ages 36 and 37.

Essentially, if you’re committed to signing a 38-year-old catcher, you could do a whole lot worse than Blanco.

In fact, if it was clear the Mets were signing Blanco as a defensive replacement, veteran mentor and occasional right-handed platoon partner for Josh Thole, I’d be all for it.

I recognize that Thole needs to improve defensively, but it’s not like he was terrible behind the plate in his limited time last year. And I’d guess, offhand, that Thole’s bat could at least play to the Major League average for catchers — a .254/.321/.396 line last year — while saving the Mets money to spend elsewhere.

But by all accounts, Blanco is not joining the Mets to caddy for Thole, he’s joining them to back up the free-agent catcher they ultimately sign — likely Bengie Molina.

So I apologize for misdirecting my hostility. It’s not Henry Blanco’s fault the Mets signed Henry Blanco, and Henry Blanco is probably still a decent backup catcher.

That’s all he is, though. He’s certainly not likely to get any better, and it continues to bother me that the Mets rarely seem committed to finding bench guys who might become more than that.

Items of note

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At SNY.tv yesterday, both Sam Borden and Mike Salfino presented the possibility of the Jets running the table and making the playoffs. My bet? They’ll finish 8-8, because the Jets are doomed to perpetually finish 8-8.

Bravo, James. This picture says it all.

Joe Janish runs down a list of potential high-reward free-agent starting pitchers.

The Mets are obviously going to sign Henry Blanco, and good thing: It’s important that they have an old, bad backup catcher to fill in for the old, bad starting catcher they’ll inevitably sign.

This is incredibly interesting. Real-life Memento story.

Culture Jammin’: Brandy of the Damned

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Being a member of the Strokes must suck. You have to deal with having tons of fans, playing sold-out shows all the time, suffering through endless praise from critics, and sleeping with models on top of giant piles of money.

Actually, I’m being sarcastic. That wouldn’t suck at all.

And yet apparently none of the Strokes are happy just being members of the Strokes. It feels like they’ve all got solo projects going, because another terrible thing about being in the Strokes is that you can record just about anything you want and get some major label to distribute it.

While driving around upstate a couple weeks back listening to the excellent EQX, I heard, for the first time, Strokes bassist Nikolai Fraiture’s new band, cleverly named Nickle Eye. Get it?

The song I heard, presumably the band’s first single, is called “Brandy of the Damned.” It features three minutes of essentially one repeated reggae-inspired riff. It’s not a terrible groove, for what it’s worth; it’s vaguely reminiscent of The Police.

The lead singer, I assume Nickle Eye himself, sounds bored, maybe because his song is just the same thing over and over again, or maybe because recording detached and bored-sounding vocals is a hip thing to do, or maybe because he’s bored with the trend of sounding bored and is aspiring to some sort of meta-boredom.

Anyway, the lyrics go like this:

Don’t let them get you down.
They’ll step on you to get to higher ground
All my life I’ve been a working man.
I’ve been working for the man.
In this life you only get one chance.
Music is the brandy of the damned.

That’s it. Those are all the lyrics to “Brandy of the Damned.” They repeat a couple of times, but it’s got to be the easiest karaoke song of all time. Nearly every line is a cliche, and the only one that’s decidedly not — “Music is the brandy of the damned” — is a quote from George Bernard Shaw.

Also, it’s hard to really empathize with the lead singer, because we know he’s in the Strokes and has decidedly not spent his entire life as a working man, working for the man, just sitting around rhyming “man” with “man.”

I guess he’s singing in someone else’s voice or whatever. Whatever.

Maybe I’m missing something here. Maybe Nickle Eye is super cool and awesome, and I just have bad taste in music. I prefer my brandy a little more interesting.

Francophilia

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An e-mail in Marty Noble’s inbox this week went like this:

How could you pick John Franco over Armando Benitez as a closer? Franco petulantly ran Jeff Kent and Scott Kazmir out of town, undermined Valentine and Art Howe behind their backs and bad-mouthed Benitez to the local media. He also lost a staggering 56 games and never saved 40 games in any year as the Mets’ closer.

There are a few parts of this argument I fundamentally disagree with, but the whole thing mostly just makes me sad.

So many Mets fans, it seems, lack fond memories of John Franco.

But I loved John Franco when he was on the Mets. Loved him.

He had such a hilariously brazen mound presence. Here was this tiny little Italian dude standing on the mound, looking like a caricature of some shmo from my block on Long Island, throwing changeups over the plate and basically daring his much more imposing opponents to swing.

It somehow embodied the outer-borough aesthetic. Franco was a quintessential Met.

He was booed with some frequency, but that always made perfect sense to me. Made me like him more sometimes, even when I was participating in the booing. New Yorkers boo, and what better target than this other New Yorker.

John Franco got kicked out of John Franco day. I was there. He was honored in a pre-game ceremony, then got booted for his part in a bench-clearing brawl in the fifth inning. Classic.

Franco also, I firmly believe, is the person responsible for the “Lar-ry” chants used to tease Chipper Jones at Shea. I was at a game sitting in the last row of the Loge, right above the Mets dugout, and Franco was on the perch yapping back and forth with some fans. A fan asked what Chipper’s real name was, and Franco told him. A few weeks later, the chants started.

Maybe it’s a coincidence, but I like to credit Franco.

And now he’s mostly a punchline to Mets fans, probably due to some combination of his last couple of years in Queens and his rumored role in the Scott Kazmir trade.

Franco has since downplayed that talk, but even if he did recommend Kazmir’s departure, that really shouldn’t be on him. It’s not the lefty reliever’s job to make personnel decisions. Plus I’m certain he wasn’t the person who suggested trading Kazmir straight up for Victor Zambrano.

I’ve never heard John Franco linked to Jeff Kent’s trade before, but maybe Mets.com reader Tom C. from the Bronx knows something I don’t. Either way, I hated Kent when he was with the Mets, probably more than any other Met in my lifetime. I’ve made my opinion on Kent perfectly clear: The guy might be a Hall of Famer, but he will always suck to me.

So if John Franco ran Kent out of town, good. Sorry if it bothers Tom C. so much; I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for the guy.