I know I promised no more than one non-sports post a day, but I don’t think this constitutes breaking that promise. This horrifying bit of news is entirely connected to sports:
The price of chicken wings is skyrocketing.
More on this will certainly follow in the coming days, but I must now go to ShopRite to start hording. I recommend you do the same. Boneless wings are not wings.
The second in the From the Wikipedia series highlights Godwin’s Law, which states that, as any threaded online discussion continues, the probability of a comparison involving NAZIs or Hitler approaches one.
This is both hilarious and pretty obviously true. People love nothing more than comparing one another to Hitler to make their points. And it’s funny because it’s such a pointless thing to do and a bad way to prove an argument.
One of the reasons I’m really excited to have this blog is that it provides a forum through which to more directly interact with readers, because I’m certain that’s where journalism is going. And I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the volume of comments so far, considering this blog technically hasn’t even launched yet.
But please, keep it civil. Hitler, I promise, is not lurking in the comments section of sabermetrically inclined New York sports blogs. Let’s assume that the people who make their way here are smart, reasonable humans with interesting and worthwhile opinions, and let’s not call each other morons until we prove it to be so.
I’m looking for content with which to fill out the sidebars here, and I got the idea from Alex Belth and the folks at Bronx Banter to link up some of my greatest hits, so to speak, from SNY.tv.
I realize that’s a bit self-serving, but so is this entire blog, so, you know, whatever. Anyway, I figured I’d break in down into two groups of five: The five most trafficked, and my five personal favorites.
It’ll take me a while to figure out my five favorites, especially since I’m rarely thrilled with the stuff I write and I’ll be biased against the columns that have turned out wrong. But here are the five most popular:
1) Things Steve Phillips said, May 18, 2009.
If my life’s greatest accomplishment turns out to be defending Carlos Beltran from Steve Phillips, I’ll be fine with that. For whatever reason, many of my most popular columns, it seems, are the ones written in blind rage, and this was one of those.
Probably because I was the only person with the patience to transcribe the nonsense Phillips spewed, the column got linked all over the place, including by Joe Posnanski, one of my favorite sportswriters, and by Maxim Magazine. I guess it had a broad appeal. Plus, it got me quoted in the New York Post. It was weird.
2) What’s next for Minaya, Jan. 30, 2008
My reaction to the Johan Santana trade. This one was so popular, I’m certain, because of the surge in traffic to this site and MetsBlog.com surrounding the deal.
This is funny to me for a number of reasons. I obviously can’t contain my excitement over Santana, but the column gets at a lot of the main points I always make, about the importance of not trading the farm and searching the scrap heaps for cheap talent. Mostly, it’s funny because there are copy-editing mistakes aplenty, and because it’s the first time I mention Val Pascucci — except I spell his name wrong.
3) Why I like Carlos Beltran, July 9, 2008.
More Beltran love. This one I liked. The only one here that could be a crossover candidate for the five personal favorites. (Sneak preview: It won’t be, only because it’d be weird to have it linked twice.)
4) Help from the Far East, Oct. 16, 2007
This one, a rundown of the available Japanese pitching talent, comes with a funny anecdote. Apparently it was so loaded up with falsehoods and general ignorance that it inspired Patrick Newman to start his fantastic English-language Japanese baseball site, NPB Tracker. As someone who spends so much time rallying against ignorance in the mainstream media, I humbly appreciate the irony.
In my defense, NPB Tracker obviously didn’t exist at the time, so I was attempting to do what I could with the data available to me. I caught up with Patrick for an interview a year later.
5) An egging most baffling, July 10, 2009
Another column penned quickly in anger. I remember I was on the B Train heading over the Manhattan Bridge to Brooklyn after work when I got a text message from my buddy Jake Rake, just saying, “Jeff Francoeur, really?” The train was back underground before I could figure out what he meant, but I obviously knew something was up. By the end of the 10-minute walk from the station to my apartment, I had the bulk of the column written in my head, and it was on the site about an hour later.
Obviously, Francoeur played a lot better than I expected. A lot. So maybe it’s egg on my face once more. And I know a lot of Mets fans are now sold on the guy. I’ll know better than to totally thrash a deal like this next time, but I’m definitely not willing to say I was wrong yet.
Mike Silva, in a post to New York Baseball Digest, reminds us that Mr. Rocktober, Yorvit Torrealba, was nearly a Met.
It’s true. And Torrealba deserves credit for coming through in the clutch a bunch of times after a brutal year in which his son’s kidnappers made fun of his batting average.
But I suspect there’s a whole ton of randomness at play here. Torrealba did knock the crap out of the ball in 36 high-leverage at-bats in 2009, according to baseball-reference.com, but a) it’s 36 at-bats and b) across his career, Torrealba has been slightly worse in high-leverage situations than in others.
Torrealba had a nice season for a catcher, hitting .291 with a .351 OBP and a .380 SLG, but he posted a .355 batting average in balls in play. Considering his career BABIP is .296, I’m willing to bet there was a little bit of luck involved. Granted, Torrealba’s line-drive rate increased, too, but I, for one, wouldn’t bet on him maintaining either.
In the two years since the Mets backed out of their Torrealba deal and obtained Brian Schneider, Torrealba has posted an 81 OPS+ to Schneider’s 80. Schneider has played a good deal more over that time, though Torrealba obviously had a lot to deal with off the field this season.
Straight up, Torrealba overcame some horrific personal adversity to have a decent season and should be lauded for that. Maybe the run of apparent good luck at the plate was some sort of karmic repayment toward the debt of what happened to his family. But he’s not a better hitter than even Schneider, so it’s hard to get too upset that the Mets missed out on him.
Of course, I’d like it if the Mets could have kept Lastings Milledge, but I fear I’m in the minority there.
Pat Lackey, in an awesome article for Fanhouse, examines Jim Tracy’s decision to let Huston Street face Ryan Howard last night.
As Lackey points out, Street is the Rockies’ closer, and so no one doubted Tracy. But Howard demonstrates a massive platoon split, and lefty Joe Biemel was available in the bullpen.
The whole concept of the one-inning closer makes no sense to me. It seems like the entire role has been developed to serve the save stat, and the save stat is an imperfect one. Is there anything more surreal than seeing the Yankees score a run to go ahead by four, instead of three, in the top of the ninth and watching Mariano Rivera stop warming up?
Check it out: In the 20-year period after Tony La Russa popularized the one-inning closer in 1988, teams won nearly exactly the same percentage of games they were leading in the ninth inning as they did in the 20 years prior.
It’s nice to have a closer that shortens the game, as they say, but all too frequently guys incapable of that job are pigeonholed into it for lack of a better option. And even worse, in the toughest situations — often in the sixth or seventh inning, when the starting pitcher has tired — teams frequently rely on their middle men, almost by definition the worst pitchers on the staff.
The problem is, the best relievers, obviously, want to be paid accordingly, and the way to do that is to accumulate saves. So relief pitchers demand to know their roles, and no pioneering team has yet had the nerve to tell them their role is to retire all the batters they face.
There now are stats that weigh the importance of a situation into which a reliever has been called and his ability to succeed in those situations. Stats Tom Tango creates, like Leverage Index and WPA/LI could help us understand the highest-leverage situations in a ballgame, and the pitchers who best succeed in them.
But I’m getting away from my point. There’s no reason the best pitcher in the bullpen should be limited to the ninth inning in games while his team is winning. Some shrewd team needs to break the mold and stop assigning so much importance to saves and the isolated ninth inning.
It won’t be the Mets, for sure, or likely any team so concerned about public perception. But it will happen eventually, once some smart GM decides not to pay such a premium for 70 innings and instead to find or groom a versatile reliever who can be equally effective in any situation.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: The era of the one-inning closer should end. It brought us one beautiful, awesome pitcher of transcendent greatness: Mariano Rivera. When he hangs ‘em up, so should the entire institution.
Bassett and crew break down the Jets’ breakdown at TheJetsBlog.com. Long story short, they’re going to need to work on their run defense. The Jets, that is, not Bassett and crew.
The Dodgers and Mets are clashing over Jose Reyes’ treatment. That makes sense, since the Mets pretty much threw the Dodgers’ doctors under the bus, and the Mets are ultimately responsible for making decisions on their own players’ injuries.
If you’ve been frustrated with Chip Carey, don’t worry. It only gets worse.
Look, it’s Rafael Santana, and he’s doing stuff!
Wallace Matthews says A-Rod derp de derp derp derp.
Speaking of people doing stuff, I hosted a couple of podcasts this week. First, the NYMetscast with Mike Rudner, in which we break down all the things that went wrong in 2009 and give an overview of the offseason. Second, Perpetual Post Radio with Howard Megdal, the crew from the Perpetual Post, and audio difficulties.
