This space is not about politics, nor do I ever intend it to be.
But could you imagine not being allowed to join the ranks of Dan Snyder, Jerry Jones and Al Davis because the things you’ve said and done have offended too many people?
Yikes.
Does the fact that the Phillies topped the Mets three seasons in a row get you down? It bums me out, for sure.
But every time I feel a little depressed, I look at these photos of Cole Hamels, and suddenly nothing seems so bad anymore.
Here’s Cole Hamels and his wife, in an ad for luxury condos in luxurious Philadelphia:
Here’s Cole Hamels carrying a dog in a bag, telestration courtesy of Phillies blog The Fightins‘:
But how do we know for sure that’s Cole Hamels? Back to the luxury condo:
Note that it’s clearly the same dog.
UPDATE: Oct. 15, 2009
Excellent reader Chris has provided more embarrassing photos of Cole Hamels.
There’s this (Get it? Coal Hamels!):
And, of course, this:
UPDATE, 6/28: Today perhaps the most embarrassing photo of Cole Hamels yet hit the Internet. It’s a tiny bit NSFW, so I’ll just point you over to the Fightins instead of posting it here.
Actually, come to think of it, it’s not nearly the most embarrassing photo of Cole Hamels yet. That’s got to be the one with the kids in the bed.
UPDATE, 4/21/11: And then there were two! A second image of Cole Hamels’ naked backside emerges, also from The Fightins.
UPDATE, 8/17:
UPDATE, 10/21/10: Brendan Bilko from Surviving the Citi pointed me to a whole slew of heretofore unseen embarrassing photos of Cole Hamels. First, three from a particularly J.C. Penney-ish modeling shoot:
Then this sneer-tastic shot from photographer Bruce Weber:
And finally, playful, cheery Cole Hamels:
UPDATE, 12/1/10: One more, this time courtesy the Twitterer @JWerthsBeard, via Brendan Bilko again.
Because I am not above poking fun at a man’s charitable efforts, here are some more embarrassing photos of Cole Hamels courtesy of the Hamels Foundation‘s web site.
UPDATE, 2/15/11: Cole Hamels is super-duper-psyched about the Phillies’ 2011 rotation:
UPDATE, 3/14/11: 58% of TedQuarters readers feel the following photo of Cole Hamels is embarrassing enough for this archive, so I am including it, with reservations.
UPDATE, 4/5/11: Two more embarrassing photos of Cole Hamels uncovered. The first, and more embarrassing:
Sexy Cole Hamels:
This one’s just weird:
UPDATE, 5/18/11: Via Ryan, Cole Hamels with a dolphin. Not even really embarrassing, unless you consider that he’s obviously reenacting all his favorite scenes from SeaQuest DSV:
UPDATE, 5/18/11: So I guess Microsoft Bing’s image-search formula must switch up more often than Google’s does. Just found these:
UPDATE, 6/3/11: The people have spoken, and this photo of Cole Hamels in an Affliction shirt has been deemed embarrassing enough for this archive. So here it is. Hat tip to Paul:
UPDATE, 6/28/11: Cole Hamels apparently pitched with a band-aid on his face to cover up a zit. I’m pretty vain myself, but I’d say this is good enough for the archive. Via the always-vigilant Hamels-photo archivists at The Fightins:
UPDATE, 7/29/11: From Seth, via Kim, from the Citizens Bank Park scoreboard. Generally Photoshops are frowned upon for purposes of this archive, but since this one appears to be officially sanctioned, I’ll allow it:
UPDATE, 8/26/11: This man is currently tops in the NL in WHIP, fourth in ERA+ and third in K:BB ratio, and the active Major League leader in embarrassing photos:
UPDATE, 9/26/11: TedQuarters hero Valentino Pascucci crushed a game-tying pinch-hit home run off Hamels in the seventh inning of the first game of the Mets and Phillies double-header on Saturday, 9/24. This isn’t the most embarrassing photo of Cole Hamels but there’s just no way I’m leaving it unarchived. Hat tip to Catsmeat for the grab:
UPDATE, 9/27/11: Our man Patrick Flood located a disarmingly abundant wealth of embarrassing photos of Cole Hamels at ColeHamels.com, enough to probably render this site obsolete.
UPDATE, 11/21/11: From the Good Phight, via Tina:
UPDATE, 12/8/11: This one barely counts, but it’s been sort of a dark week for Mets fans and Cole Hamels himself Tweeted it last night. Here’s Cole Hamels in some leopard-print slippers:
UPDATE, 1/18/12: Happy New Year, Royce Hamels!
Photographer Sean Patrick Watters did a photoshoot with Hamels that’s definitely worth checking out for anyone interested in embarrassing photos of Cole Hamels. It includes this:
UPDATE, 3/19/12: Here is Cole Hamels and his favorite tailor:
UPDATE, 5/1/12: Maybe the most embarrassing photo of Cole Hamels yet for reasons specified here, but probably not:
UPDATE, 5/10/12: I’d say this counts. Donate to the Hamels Foundation.
UPDATE, 6/19/12: Yup.
Via multiple Twitterers, including @meechone, @juliaquadrinoo, @happyhank24 and @crashburnalley.
UPDATE, 8/14/12: A reader who requested anonymity passes along this, from a Cole Hamels charity cooking event. It’s not the event itself or even the apron that makes this embarrassing, I think, but Hamels’ expression combined with the apron, plus the leery look on the beefy dude’s face that implies whatever Hamels is saying is without question embarrassing:
Y’all realize by now that I’m a terrible person. So I’m not above pointing you to this photo of Cole Hamels — who seems like he’s probably a good person — celebrating his foundation’s $300,000 gift to an elementary school. It’s the juxtaposition of his expression and that of the little girl to his right on the front riser:
Please donate to the Hamels Foundation.
UPDATE, 10/1/12: Cole Hamels can’t hear us.
From Brett.
UPDATE, 1/2/13: ALL NEW FOR 2013!
Alex Belth and Cliff Corcoran from Bronx Banter let me fill in for the amazingly mustachioed Jay Jaffe for the Bronx Banter playoff preview. Here’s our take on the NLCS:
Yeah, that’s a Virginia Woolf reference. What of it?
So apparently Charles Wang is refuting earlier reports and insisting that the Lighthouse Project to rebuild Nassau Coliseum and develop the area around it is still on.
I haven’t been following this story that closely, but I grew up about 10 minutes from the Coliseum, and when I think back on it, it still sort of blows my mind that I lived so close to a professional sports team and almost never went to see it play.
Part of that is definitely because the Coliseum is such a drab hellhole, for sure.
I also worked right around the corner from the Coliseum, at Nassau Community College, for a while, and I can attest that outside of the occasional congestion on the Meadowbrook Parkway, traffic never gets that terrible in the area. Nothing like the corner of Flatbush and Atlantic, where the Nets are supposedly going, anyway.
But based on everything I heard about the Nassau County and Town of Hempstead governments in my time living and working there, Wang probably shouldn’t hold his breath on those zoning board rulings.
The important thing, as James K. pointed out earlier, is that Wings N’ Things, down Hempstead Turnpike, is preserved. That place is amazing.
According to the Daily News, Rex Ryan held a closed-door meeting with his defense that Kerry Rhodes deemed “PG-13.”
The good news is the rating means Ryan almost certainly didn’t take his shirt off.
But seriously, this type of thing is pretty run-of-the-mill in football, it seems. A coach gets angry and lights into his players in a profanity-laced rant, because that’s what football coaches do.
And so it always makes me think of the Tony Bernazard situation, in which he apparently tore his shirt off and challenged everyone on the Mets’ Double-A team to a fight.
I mean, as I’ve said before, that’s pretty crazy. And it’s almost certainly not the Assistant General Manager’s job. But is it as big a deal as the Daily News made it out to be?
I don’t know. I know that it always seemed like everyone wanted to either expose or target Bernazard as the problem in the Mets’ organization, and I have no reason to believe that wasn’t the case. But I’ll point out again that the Mets didn’t immediately turn their season around on the back of a unified clubhouse after Bernazard got canned.
My suspicion — and this is pure speculation — is that Bernazard is something of a jerk that rubbed the beat reporters the wrong way, and Rubin found the first opportunity he could justify to expose Bernazard for it. And he picked a pretty hilarious one, and did a good job with the details.
Part of the difference between what Ryan did and what Bernazard did, I suppose, is that Ryan was taking on grown men with giant salaries while Bernazard was essentially scolding a group of 21- and 22-year-olds.
Still, I used to do some stuff as a JV football coach that almost certainly should’ve gotten me fired. I would line up at cornerback — without pads, mind you — and play bump-and-run to knock receivers to the ground. And I’d play quarterback on the scout team, then lower my shoulder and steamroll the kids dumb enough to try to tackle me.
In retrospect it seems pretty violent and unnecessary, but I still like to think and hope I was making them better at football. And most of them seemed to still like me.
I guess I’m saying that, in isolation, many things a coach could do to motivate or better his players might seem a little bit over the line. But in context, what Bernazard did might not have been quite as insane as we now assume it to be.
In a post to NY Baseball Digest, Mike Silva asks, “Can Ike Davis change the offseason?”
That’s all well and good, but here’s what I want to know:
Can Ike Davis change… THE FUTURE!?
After reading this New York Times article, it has become abundantly clear to me that the events of the past four seasons preventing the Mets from winning a world championship have not been just an unfortunate series of coincidences.
Clearly, if these Mets were to win a world championship, something extraordinarily bad would follow, and so agents from the future have come back in time to ensure that the Mets do not win.
I mean, think about it: It’s marginally reasonable that one year, in one seven-game series, Jeff Suppan could allow only one earned run over 15 innings and Jeff Weaver could pitch like a competent Major Leaguer.
And I’d believe that a team could blow a seven-game lead with 17 to go, even if the odds were overwhelmingly stacked against that happening.
And maybe once a collection of otherwise reasonable-seeming Major League pitchers could all crumble at once and form the worst bullpen in human history.
And perhaps I could comprehend that a team could, in one season, suffer debilitating injuries to nearly all of its best players.
But c’mon. Four consecutive years? I’m all about the role of luck and randomness in baseball, but at some point — just like those dudes in the Times — even the most understanding and patient of baseball minds have to consider ideas that they might otherwise deem crazy to explain a series of events as unlikely as this one.
And I think it’s pretty clear: someone, or some group of people, from the future has been charged with coming back in time and making sure the Mets don’t win. I don’t pretend to understand how they’ve done this, either to get back to the past or, once they get here, to make sure the Mets don’t win. Don’t expect me to wrap my head around future technologies.
How, you might ask, could they know that the Mets’ success would bring doom if clearly by the time the future comes it hasn’t? It’s a time paradox, stupid. It will always be this way. They are always charged with making sure the Mets don’t win. It’s just how it works.
So the Mets are not only battling the Phillies and the Marlins and a wholesale lack of organizational depth. They’re up against destiny, the entire plotted course of human events, and maybe the universe itself. That’s a whole lot of adversity, even for Carlos Beltran.
[poll id=”2″]
Paul drops more John Olerud facts at Section Five Twenty-Eight.
Lots of good stuff from Adam Rubin today. First and foremost, Manny Acta could return as third-base coach next year.
Second, Manny Ramirez hopes to enjoy a postgame beer with Pedro Martinez. That’s a conversation I’d kill to be a part of.
Slim Pickens at TheNoonerBlog breaks down what went wrong for the Jets on Monday night.
The Lighthouse project to revamp Nassau Coliseum has gone strangely dark. I hope that, whatever they do, they don’t affect the array of amazing fast-food fried chicken places on Hempstead Turnpike.
“Wow, this burrito is delicious, but it is filling.” H/T to grad-school buddy Amanda for the link.
Little-known fact: I’m something of an expert in Table Tennis.
I don’t mean in terms of actually playing the game. I’m just OK at that. What I mean is that I’m probably one of the very few people to have ever been paid to write articles about table tennis, thanks to my old job editing the now-defunct WCSN.com.
And though that website’s new home at Universal Sports has archived such hilarious masterpieces as “Wathelet shocks show jumping world” (read it, it’s pretty amazing), for whatever reason my numerous articles on the techniques and history of table tennis are now somehow no longer available on the Internet.
Anyway, I think table tennis is fun as hell, because it is. And when I read an item in the Daily News’ Gatecrasher section today that the cast of Gossip Girl was seen at Susan Sarandon’s new table-tennis club, I was intrigued.
Now I recognize that I’m not exactly running in the same social circles as the cast of Gossip Girl and any club they’re hanging out at is probably not my speed, but I figured maybe that would be a cool trend to trickle downhill to schlubs like me: a bar filled with Ping-Pong tables.
Why not? All my favorite bars are the ones with something to entertain me in them (besides, you know, booze), like a pool table or skee-ball machine or even, in times of desperation, Trivia Whiz or Photo Hunt.
And Ping-Pong is more fun than all of those things, with the possible exception of skee-ball, so having a bar where I could play it would be sweet. Plus it’d become a pretty obvious place to host beer-pong tournaments, which I never participate in but frequently bet on at parties.
But it turns out, Susan Sarandon’s new table-tennis club is not a “club” in the bar sense of the term “club,” but a “club” like a golf club or a polo club. Check it out: It costs $1000 to join.
Look, Susan Sarandon: Table tennis is awesome. We all agree on that. But part of what makes it awesome is that it’s kind of silly. Yes, it’s really fun to posture after Ping-Pong matches and act like you’ve won something actually important. But it’s not something actually important. It’s Ping-Pong. And you’ve taken that posturing way too far, Susan Sarandon.
And yeah, I recognize that it’s played on the Olympic level and it’s taken really seriously in places that are not the U.S. or Canada. I get that. But people take show jumping and curling and the two-man luge seriously, and those are all really silly too.
Oh, and apropos of nothing other than the interplay between Ping-Pong and sillyness: One of China’s top table-tennis players is named Wang Liqin. No disrespect, but how unfortunate.
If you missed it earlier this week, I added my five most-trafficked SNY.tv columns to the right column of this page, mostly just so I could have something there. But I promised to add my five favorite SNY.tv columns, and so here’s that.
Most of them are from this year, which I suppose makes sense if I’m theoretically improving with practice.
One alarming trend I noticed was that most of my favorite columns came within a month-long period from April 21 to May 21 of this season, so maybe I’ve already peaked.
Anyway, in no particular order:
Other things Steve Phillips said, May 21, 2009.
The less-read companion piece to “Things Steve Phillips said.” Way too long, but it summed up a lot of how I feel about baseball in general. It narrowly beat out a similar article from the previous May.
Moving out, moving on, Feb. 2, 2009.
This is my recap of the fan-organized funeral for Shea Stadium over the winter. It was sad, and I was sad, and I had to spend a ton of time de-wimpifying the column. Still turned out quite wimpy, though.
Mind games, April 30, 2009.
A call to stop speculating on players’ mental states based on what we see of them on the field and through the media. Basically a rehashing of what I always write, which is basically that I know nothing and probably neither do you.
Gone to market, Jan. 15, 2009.
I was trashed for this one in message boards by people asking how I expected Omar Minaya to tell the future, but it’s a solid summary of what have been my main criticisms of Minaya.
Abraham Nunez?, June 6, 2008.
Honestly, I have no idea how I didn’t win a Pulitzer for this epic. This one cracks me up, because it’s a clear case of what happens when I remove my mask of sanity. Chris Carlin bashed it on Loud Mouths, and maybe rightfully so, because it’s about Abraham Nunez. But the Mets’ bench really did suck that year.
Those have been added to the sidebar. I have also added, as per Anit’s suggestion, a link to the embarrassing photos of Cole Hamels post for anytime anyone needs a pick-me-up. Being a Mets fan is tough, and New York City can be a cold place, but neither is anything that a picture of Cole Hamels with his dog in a backpack can’t cure.
Lastly, I’ve added two videos to the “About Ted” page. One of them got me in trouble for drinking on camera, and then got me an Emmy nomination (!?). The other one allowed me to just go mess with people in Shea Stadium.
A couple of readers in the Voice of the People section in today’s Daily News, apparently responding to some earlier discussion that I missed, suggested that Johnny Vander Meer’s record of two no-hitters in a row is the baseball record least likely to be broken. 
That could be true, but — and not to diminish the accomplishment, because it’s amazing — it sort of feels like a bit of a novelty record, no? I mean, Vander Meer’s dominance over those two starts is crazy, but it also feels like a crazy run of luck. It’s a pretty safe bet that no one’s ever going to break Fernando Tatis’ record for grand slams in an inning, either.
I feel like the record least likely to be broken that is often overlooked — and this is a pretty record-ish record — is Cy Young’s ridiculous 511 wins. The game has changed drastically since Young played, and so we almost look at that like a footnote more than anything — a novelty itself — but it’s no less amazing. Walter Johnson is the only other pitcher to break 400.
Basically, for anyone to even come close to Young’s record at this point, teams will have to radically change the way they use pitching staffs in some unforeseen way. I strongly doubt anyone is ever again given the opportunity to throw 400 innings in a season — and rightfully so, since so many of the circumstances have changed.
But that dude must have had some kind of arm.
Tedquarters 