Brian Bassett from TheJetsBlog.com gets on the phone with this guy to grade the Jets at the midway point:
Jets’ midterm evaluations
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Daily Archives: November 9, 2009
Culture jammin’*: Aerosmith doubles down on sucking
Little-known fact: When I was in sixth grade and had just discovered rock and roll, I loved Aerosmith. Loved them. I had nearly all their albums on cassette.
I have no idea how I even became familiar with their music, though I suspect it had something to do with Beavis and Butthead or Wayne’s World or just watching tons and tons of MTV in the early 90s.
Anyway, during the next school year — Christmas of 1993, to be exact — I got my first CD player, and Get a Grip was among the first CDs I purchased (the others, which included Nevermind, In Utero and Alapalooza, were far less embarrassing.)
I nearly wore the album out. In seventh grade, I thought Aerosmith was about the coolest group of guys imaginable. They played distorted guitars in blues scales and sung songs with double entendres, and to top it off put Alicia Silverstone in their videos, thrilling seventh-grade boys everywhere.
By the end of calendar year 1994, my entire musical paradigm had shifted. First Kurt Cobain died, then the original Punk-O-Rama came out, then I figured out how much Aerosmith sucked.
Part of it was due to their ubiquity, no doubt, but most of it, I think, was that I realized they were creating music tailor-made for seventh graders.
Not completely terrible, to be honest. Just achingly unoriginal and overloaded with silly rock and roll affectations, from their music to their wardrobes. I’m reasonably certain Joe Perry doesn’t even own a shirt.
By the end of the 90s, after my musical tastes had completely splattered and I was listening to funk and ska and hip-hop and lots and lots of Rage Against the Machine, I began involuntarily emitting a noise whenever Aerosmith songs came on the radio.
My friends call this my “Aerosmith Sound.” It’s a high-pitched and nasal exclamation of panic, an anxious “AAAAH!” unleashed to let whoever is controlling the radio know it’s time to change the station. There’s probably a little bit of shame mixed in there, too, because I always do it knowing that at one point in my life I couldn’t get enough Aerosmith.
Anyway, that’s just a long introduction to the news that apparently Steven Tyler himself has finally had enough of Aerosmith.
The lead singer has pulled out of the band’s upcoming South American tour to focus on solo work and — no joke — promoting “Brand Tyler.”
How “Brand Tyler” will differ from “Brand Aerosmith” remains to be seen, but smart money says it will also suck.
Perhaps even more hilariously, Joe Perry, Brad Whitford, Tom Hamilton and Joey Kramer (I didn’t even have to look their names up, which bothers me) will apparently try to carry on without Tyler as Aerosmith, meaning we could very well be faced with twice as much terrible music in the upcoming years.
Anyway, I’m sorry if you like Aerosmith and are not a seventh grader. Very sorry, actually.
*- The phrase “Culture Jammin'”, as used here, refers to a series in this blog that I’ll occasionally use for my no-more-than-once-per-day non-sports item, and not the practice of culture jamming. While I appreciate large-scale hoaxes and well-intentioned subversion, I recognize how ironic it would be to advocate anti-consumerism on this SNY.tv blog.
The Mets’ No. 1 free-agent target
I’m really not trying to be snarky about this, but I can’t help myself. If the Mets should target a single free agent this offseason, it should be this one:
Thinking, “we should pursue Randy Wolf now that his value is high because we missed out on him when his value is low,” is akin to saying, “well, I really missed the boat on buying Microsoft stock when I thought about it in 1986, so I better recoup that by purchasing a lot of it now.”
It’s not that difficult a concept to grasp, and I’m certain it’s covered in Mankiw’s introduction to microeconomic principles.
Also included, I’m sure, is an explanation of sunk-cost economics, which would help them understand why they might move on from Omar Minaya instead of keeping him around because they owe him $3.5 million dollars.
But hey, if the Mets’ front office is too busy to do that much reading this offseason, I understand. In that case, they can simply hire my old roommate and namesake, Ted Burke.
Ted works down in Virginia now and hosts a Colorado Rockies podcast, but I’m certain he’d be happy to relocate for a job in a Major League front office.
I know he’s qualified because he was a total stud economics student in college. I know that because every time I introduced myself to some other econ student, they would curse me out for always ruining the curve, and I would have to explain that they meant to curse out my similarly named roommate, who probably wasn’t showing up for too many classes but managed to get the highest score on most of the econ tests.
Basically, they could just sit him at a desk somewhere, and whenever they were thinking about making a move, they could explain their reasoning and say, “Hey, Ted, does that makes sense?” and he could tell them if it did or didn’t.
Also, he’s doing some groundbreaking work in the field of facial hair.
A terrible reason to sign Randy Wolf
If you’re familiar with my work at SNY.tv, you know that I don’t believe anything I read in the offseason with regards to player movement.
But I do like weighing in on potential moves, which launched the Wireless Calling series last offseason. So this is that, I suppose, updated for the blog format.
Wireless Calling: Randy Wolf
Tim Dierkes at MLBTradeRumors.com sees the Mets signing Wolf to a three-year deal in excess of $30 million dollars. Tim admits he’s guessing, of course, but there have been reports linking the Mets to Wolf.
Most of those reports focus on the fact that the Mets feel they “missed out” on Wolf last offseason.
That, my friends, is a terrible reason to sign Randy Wolf.
Wolf had a great year for the Dodgers. He threw over 200 innings for the first time since 2003 and posted a career-best 129 ERA+ and 1.101 WHIP.
He turned out to a terrific signing for Los Angeles, who took advantage of the market and inked him to a one-year, incentive-laden deal that ended up costing them around $8 million.
That’s not the situation now. Now, Randy Wolf is as valuable a commodity as he has been in a long, long time, and Dierkes is right to expect him to land a deal similar to the one Oliver Perez got last year.
But before 2008, Wolf hadn’t stayed healthy for a full season since 2003 and before 2009, he hadn’t been appreciably better than average since 2002.
So to sign him, at age 33, to a three-year deal befitting the second-best free agent pitcher would be foolishness of the highest order.
The chances of Wolf repeating his 2009 success are slim. This season, he yielded a .254 BABIP (batting average on balls in play), well below his career .294 mark. That means he probably got a bit lucky and benefited from good defense behind him, neither of which is likely to repeat itself with the Mets in 2010.
If Wolf’s stock drops and it appears likely he’ll sign for far less than the deal Tim suggested, then sure, the Mets should be a player. He’s not a bad pitcher, and he’s coming off two straight healthy years.
But signing him to a longterm deal coming off a career year could be an epic buy-high mistake. And if the Mets did that just because they felt they missed out on him last year, it’s an inexcusable example of operating in hindsight rather than foresight.
This year is not last year. Randy Wolf is no longer a good bargain-bin pickup. Signing Wolf to a three-year deal because he’s coming off a couple of good seasons would not undo their mistake. More likely, they’d be signing him instead of someone better and less expensive, and so they’d just be making the same mistake again.
Items of note
The maelstrom of hot-stove nonsense is upon us. Marty Noble tosses out a slew of names in an MLB.com article. Some would be OK, some wouldn’t. Depends on the cost for most of them, really.
Neil Genzlinger at the New York Times gets a bit sanctimonious over Fox’s coverage of the NFL from Afghanistan. I feel like I’ve read a billion stories bashing athletes and broadcasters for comparing sports to war, and not a single one has ever included the perspective of an actual soldier who’s offended.
People compare stuff to war all the time — the most elementary card game is called “War.” I’d like to imagine the troops are smart enough to distinguish real war from metaphoric war and have more important things to worry about than being offended by Fox’s coverage.
A visibly undead Sammy Sosa surfaced this weekend. Color Omar Minaya intrigued.
Baseball America published its annual top-10 list of Mets prospects. Their site is currently screwy, so here’s the list from Mets Minor League Blog. Anyway, I try not to get too nitpicky about this stuff, because though BA does a great job tracking prospects, trying to order them in any specific way seems like an exercise in futility. Also, beware of spin.
Tedquarters 