The Dickensian aspect (of trolling)

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In celebration of its 175th anniversary, the Baltimore Sun named the Top 175 Maryland athletes, culminating with No. 1…. Babe Ruth.

Ruth is a Baltimore product and his role in popularizing (and just being awesome at) baseball is unimpeachable, but Ruth was a Yankee and the Orioles play in Baltimore. Readers, based on the comments at least, seem upset with the choice.

I say it’s a fine one, and hardly even trolling. If you’re including guys born in Maryland on your list, you’ve got to include Babe Ruth. And then, what… you’re going to put Babe Ruth somewhere other than No. 1? C’mon.

Via Ian.

 

Sandy Alderson on Jenrry Mejia’s future

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Well right now, Jenrry will be going to Binghamton for a couple of starts; he’ll probably go to Buffalo for a couple of stars. We’re still in a sense in a rehab phase with Jenrry. He’s only a year out from surgery. I did talk to the doctors as recently as a couple of days ago. He’s a very quick healer and he’s done very well. But as the same time, we need to continue to allow him to pitch on four-five days rest so he has a routine, work on all his pitches so that he has better mastery of them, and then when we get to the end of that, say, two-to-four-start cycle, then we’ll decide what he’ll do in terms of role and where he’ll do it. You know, we have other guys that are coming along — Beato should be ready by the time his disablement ends — and others that are also performing pretty well at the Minor League level that aren’t on the roster. Right now we want to preserve that roster space and see how our guys at the Minor League level develop over the next three or four weeks.

– Sandy Alderson.

There has been a lot of speculation and some anticipatory hand-wringing over what the Mets will do with Jenrry Mejia once his rehab from Tommy John surgery is done and he’s ready to re-join the big-league club. Alderson doesn’t sound overwhelmingly sure he’ll make Mejia a big-league reliever just yet, plus the situation is a bit different than it was a couple years ago for a variety of reasons.

Which is to say: I’ll wring my hands when it feels appropriate. This front office seems pretty committed to handling its prospects with the requisite care and it’s not on the thin ice the last one was when it made Mejia a Major League mop-up man at 20. Plus, though the Mets should try to get the best from all their prospects, they do have more than just one well-regarded pitching prospect in the high Minors now. So it’s not — to re-use a metaphor I used at the time — putting all your eggs in one basket then vigorously shaking that basket.

Today in burying the lead

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So this rather limber walk-off steal of home in a high-school game is pretty awesome, and made Deadspin and Last Angry Fan:

But you know what neither of those blogs spent much time on? This walk-off steal of home came on behalf of Lick-Wilmerding High School. There’s a Lick-Wilmerding High School! Every weekday morning from September to June, legions of giggling teenagers and tortured teachers show up at Lick-Wilmerding. Dan the Automator is a Lick-Wilmerding alumnus.

That’s baseball

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Yeah, we did [consider leaving Bobby Parnell in for the eighth inning after he threw only five pitches to strike out the one batter he faced in the seventh]. But this is what we’ve been doing. We’ve been using Jon, he’s been pitching very, very well in the eighth inning, and that’s what we’ve done thus far this season, so we wanted to go and do it again tonight.

– Terry Collins, after the Mets’ 6-3 loss to the Reds last night.

Good thing the Mets’ relievers have such defined roles. Could you imagine how bad their bullpen would be if they didn’t?

Hindsight is 20/20, naturally. But leaving Parnell in for another inning after he faced only one batter, when he’s been the Mets’ best reliever this season and the team had nearly been burned by the exact same thing two days earlier, seemed like the right move there. Of course, I’m no manager, and neither are any of the guys on my TV who doubted the choice at the time. But it seems like Terry Collins is doing his bullpen no favors, and vice versa.

Man enough to bunt

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Among average to poor hitters, the breakeven point is that much lower.  Whereas the breakeven point for a great hitter is 45% to 50% success rate on bunts, for an average hitter, it’s all the way down to close to 40%, and for a bad hitter, it’s around 35%.  And, we’d expect average hitters to be able to bunt better than great hitters (because of experience), and similarly, the bad hitters may be the best bunters (because they need to learn whatever to survive as hitters).

So, to shift against an average or worse hitter is about the worst defensive alignment you can imagine, and the average or worse batter needs to bunt any chance he gets, when the bases are empty.

– Tom Tango, The Book Blog.

Tango makes the case that the smartest counter to aggressive infield shifting is to bunt against it every time. It’s an interesting read, though I wonder if the expected success rate for bunting for base hits, even against shifts, is as high as he suggests. At the very least, more frequent bunting against shifts would likely make defenses more hesitant to use them, allowing the hitters in question to go back to swinging away.

Today in awesome home-run events

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The Naval aircraft carrier USS Yorktown participated in Pacific Theater battle campaigns during both World War II and the Vietnam War. Next month, the old battleship will serve as a launching pad of a different kind.

On June 18, the Class A South Atlantic League plans to stage the first round of its Home Run Derby on the flight deck of the Yorktown, which since 1975 has been a museum ship located at Patriot’s Park, which sits at the mouth of the Cooper River in Mount Pleasant, S.C., a suburb of Charleston. The championship round will then be held the next day as a lead-in to the Sally League’s All-Star Game.

– Dom Consentino, Deadspin.com.

Get your sea legs, Travis Taijeron.

Teenagers be teenagers

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After a few minutes, I noticed that someone had drawn a bunch of d—s all over the grease board by the door. So I pointed at them and asked, “Hey, who drew all the d—s?” One of the sound engineers immediately jumped up, ran over, and erased them with his sleeve. This is the new and mature Bieber. We can’t have d—s being drawn all over the place. People might get the wrong idea about filthy-rich 18-year-old pop stars.

– Drew Magary, GQ.

Magary’s profile of Bieber for GQ is good and worth reading for Beliebers and skeptics alike. I felt silly censoring it, but you have to pick your battles. Also, it reminded me of something:

It doesn’t matter where or when, but once, while I was waiting in a dugout to interview a particularly young Mets Minor Leaguer, a chagrined media-relations dude emerged from the clubhouse.

“Yeah, ahh… I’m really sorry, this is going to take a minute,” he said. “He’s, ahh… he’s drawing d—ks on stuff.”

Later, I saw his handiwork. On a chalkboard in the clubhouse, a coach had drawn a stick figure. presumably as part of some demonstration. Once that drawing and the chalk were left behind for a group of college-aged guys, it was only a matter of time before someone added a huge cartoon wiener. From there, it appeared something of a wiener-drawing contest developed, with my interview subject and some of his teammates competing to draw the best or silliest one, or something. The payoff was a big chalkboard o’ wieners of all shapes and sizes, and, of course, a reminder that the prospects we track and follow and hype and debate and anticipate are still, in many cases, in their prime wiener-drawing years.

Kids.

This is a theme I hit on with some frequency, and there’s no strong conclusion here except to say that when you’re pouring over the stats of guys in their late teens and early 20s, it’s probably worth considering that they’re still very much guys in their late teens and early 20s, and there’s a lot of emotional and physical and mental development ahead of them. And it seems like, well, just a d–k thing to do to crap all over a guy with whatever platform you have when he’s still young enough to be drawing wieners on stuff without it seeming bizarre.

And I know some might point out that baseball players make the choice to play baseball professionally, and they sign up for the scrutiny when they do. And that’s definitely true. But they also make that choice at wiener-drawing age, right?

This

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And when I say things like “that doesn’t mean it’s the right call”—thinking that it’s unlikely to have much if any benefit is not the same thing as being certain it has no benefit. It takes nothing away from the serious study of baseball—and in fact adds quite a bit to it, in my estimation—if we can be humble enough to admit that we aren’t certain when we shouldn’t be certain. In this case, there is still some unresolved doubt, and the Angels probably ought to have the benefit of it.

– Colin Wyers, Baseball Prospectus.

This is why Wyers is among my favorites of the numbers-heavy baseball writers going on the Internet these days. The borderline-to-downright arrogant air of authority that comes with much of the contemporary sabermetric analysis bothers me, because if anyone knew everything there is to know about baseball there’d really be no reason to keep studying it. Maybe it weakens conclusions to admit you might be wrong about something — and it doesn’t seem like there’s much accountability anyway — but I prefer honesty and humility to confidence where it should not exist.