Monthly Archives: February 2010
The Mets are considering trying Eddie Kunz as a starter. Interesting.
“Clutch is what the Yankees need from him. Perhaps now more than ever.”
Blasphemy aside, Joe Janish makes a good point about the whole Sandy Koufax-in-camp thing: I’ve read this story before.
I really don’t want to make light of Shin-Soo Choo’s terrifying military situation, but man, it really adds a lot of gravity to the 2010 Asian Games.
A few people have alerted to Bob Klapisch’s piece for Fox Sports last week, weighing in on confident statements from David Wright and Johan Santana suggesting that the Mets expect to win the World Series in 2010.
I appreciate the tips; I’m certainly not above taking writers to the mat when I feel the need arises and I reserve the right to call out members of the media for fallacious things they write in the future, but I’m having trouble mustering up enough to get too upset over this one.
There are plenty of fundamental arguments in the column I disagree with — most notably that no team in the league has “the guts” to take down the Phillies in 2010 and that Carlos Beltran is “hardly Winston Churchill” — but outside of the headline, there’s not much in Klapisch’s piece that’s too incendiary.
Wright and Santana said exactly what anyone should expect them to say. They’re professional athletes and they set their goals high. Sure, it might sound a little crazy given the way things went for the Mets in 2009, but “we expect to win the World Series” is a much more reasonable thing for a ballplayer to say than, “yeah, we suck. We’ll be lucky to win 80 games.”
Klapisch must realize that, and it actually comes out in his piece. He concludes by writing, “So Wright and Santana can be forgiven for the over-heated imagery. Call it the audacity of hope.”
Besides, it’s hard to kill the guy for killing the Mets because, frankly, who isn’t killing the Mets right now? Whether the front office could not or simply stubbornly chose not to overhaul the 2009 roster, they did not. The Mets return much the same team they trotted out last year, with all the same warts and without an additional starting pitcher.
Do I think there’s a chance they’ll be a whole lot better than they were last season? Of course. I have to be optimistic because I’m a Mets fan. And half the team was injured in 2009, anyway.
But for better or worse, the Mets did nothing to change the dialogue around their club this offseason and so, for the time being, they’re stuck with it. Rex Ryan has not walked through that door. This is the bed that they’ve made. They’ll lie in it until the season starts. If they win some games, the talk will change. If they lose some, it will grow louder.
The truth is, I imagine Klapisch was writing on deadline — from Tampa, no less, as per his dateline — and there wasn’t much else to write about. Until the games start up and the positional battles become a bit more clear, the only storylines to go on are these nebulous ones: leadership, confidence, delusion.
Players express confidence, columnists express doubt, and the wheels keep turning. Until the things that matter start happening, all we’ve got is talk: idle words and speculation and bandwidth.
It’s gray in New York today, cold and rainy and gloomy, and the best we’ve got to get us through our workdays are hazy columns about cloudy concepts. But things will clear up soon. We’ll have a sharper picture of what’s happening in Port St. Lucie and, in short time, a better sense of where to direct the thunder of our rage.
I watched two movies this weekend, Blade Runner and The Running Man, which were both made in the 1980s and both set in the year 2019.
Neither 2019 reality appears entirely likely to happen, but I’ve made this helpful chart to sort the two out. Hat tip to Eric Simon at Amazin’ Avenue for the HTML tablemaker gadget.
Here is what the end of this decade will look like, according to Blade Runner and The Running Man:
| Blade Runner | The Running Man | |
|---|---|---|
| What we should fear | The government, corporate greed | The government, sensationalist reality television |
| Thing it seems like we should fear but that doesn’t turn out so bad after all | Replicants (“more human than human” automatons) | Jesse Ventura |
| Flying cars | Yes | No |
| Cell phones | No | No |
| Jet packs | No | Yes (on Fireball) |
| Edward James Olmos | Yes | No |
| Manipulative, untrustworthy media | Not specified | Yes |
| Video pay phones | Yes | No |
| Computers | No | Yes |
| Advanced digital enhancement technology | Yes, on a hilariously crappy TV | Yes |
| Rebel leader | Roy (a replicant) | Mick Fleetwood |
I’ve made no secrets of my dissatisfaction with the future here, but it’s probably best that things don’t appear to be going down either of these paths.
Still, nine years is a long time, and I wouldn’t put anything past sensationalist reality TV producers.
The big talk in Mets camp today is that Jason Bay showed up. Adam Rubin has a full recap of the outfielder’s Q&A with reporters. Some highlights:
What happened to the Canadian hockey team?
“I knew that was coming. That stung a little bit. They beat us. We were almost kind of out-hearted a little bit. I mean that last goal, that empty-netter by Kessler, kind of proved it right there. Outshot, what, 45 to 19 or 20 or something like that? If this were a medal game we were talking about, I’d probably hang my head a little lower. Being as we have a pretty good shot to get in tonight, I’d still take our chances.”
But you became a U.S. citizen. Root for USA?
“No way. I can’t do that. And I’d never be able to go back home. I’m still a Canadian through and through.”
You have MEDIUM EST NUNTIUS written on your T-shirt. What’s that mean?
“I have no idea. I bought it at Nordstrom’s before I came. I needed some T-shirts for the spring.”
You’re really into curling?
“I played a couple of years when I was in high school. They needed an extra guy. I wasn’t any good. It’s more of an excuse to go out on the ice and sweep around for a couple of hours and get a little exercise, and then drink a couple of beers afterward. I don’t have high school baseball where I’m at.”
OK, so let’s recap: A bunch of hockey info teeming with optimism, followed by the very redundant “I’m a Canadian through and through” quote, and then, of course, the admission that in high school he liked to “go out on the ice and sweep around” then “drink a couple of beers” afterward. Molsons, I assume.
My favorite part, buried among all the righteous Canucking, is the note about his t-shirt. Jason Bay had to buy a bunch of t-shirts right before Spring Training, presumably because his lumberjack wear was inappropriate for the Florida humidity.
Anyway, the Internet tells me that “MEDIUM EST NUNTIUS” actually is Latin for “the common good is the message,” which sounds a bit socialist to me. Even when haphazardly picking out t-shirts, Jason Bay is drawn to vaguely Canadian ideals.
Jason Bay: He’s your guy, buddy.
I apologize to any Canadians who may be offended by this post. I actually love Canada. It’s beautiful and fun and the people are pleasant, and often themselves beautiful. And I’m sure curling is a fantastic sport if you understand the rules.
(Jason Bay image courtesy Patrick Flood.)
There are times when even Mets fans have to give kudos to members of the Phillies, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t credit Jayson Werth for his excellent offseason beard.
Beautiful German biathlete Magdalena Neuner, who will break your heart then gun you down with pinpoint accuracy, feels mistreated by anti-doping officials.
W.T.F. Some fool must have hit the wrong button and dropped LT by accident in the Yahoo! league. Now’s the time to scoop him up if you’ve got the top waiver spot. Quick, before the commish overturns it.
Carlos Beltran’s feelings have healed. Good.
Carlos Beltran arrived in Port St. Lucie today, and HardballTalk’s typically excellent Craig Calcaterra writes that, though it’s great that Beltran’s knee and relationship with the Mets appear to be progressing nicely, his sense of style is lacking:
Less than hunky dory was Beltran’s fashion sense, as evidenced by these pictures by Howard Simmons of the Daily News. Note the ugly shirt tucked into jeans! Behold the two-hole-deep white belt which was EXACTLY like one your old man had back in the 70s! Note also that Beltran, not content to rock a mere trucker’s hat, rocks what appears to be a very expensive takeoff on a trucker’s hat.
Look: We here (by which I mean “me here”) at TedQuarters are not above judging professional athletes for their fashion choices. It is clearly my right; just look at Shane Victorino’s stupid suit.
But doubt Carlos Beltran at your own peril, Craig Calcaterra. I certainly don’t dress like Beltran does here — these clothes are not available at Old Navy — nor would I necessarily advocate doing so, but I’ve come to assume that whatever choices Carlos Beltran makes are the correct ones, even if they may seem wrong on some surface level.
So when Carlos Beltran elects not to slide into home plate, I like to assume he had some good damn good reason — like maybe somehow he instantly calculated that his chances of scoring would actually be lessened by sliding in some way we, mere mortals of baseball-understanding, could not possibly conceive. Or, perhaps more likely, he was playing injured and considered the possibility that a collision with the catcher could have hastened his inevitable trip to the disabled list.
Probably Beltran’s tucked-in t-shirt and white belt are so outrageously hip that folks like me and Craig Calcaterra can’t even process how awesome they are, and we’ll only begin to understand in several years, when the rest of the world stylistically catches up with Carlos Beltran.
And yeah, I recognize that the vaguely Affliction-style t-shirt and trucker-ish hat he’s wearing have already come into vogue, but you gotta understand: Beltran’s so far ahead of the curve that he’s actually wearing them for the next time they’re in fashion, in some much hipper way. It’s not something I can fully grasp because I am not Carlos Beltran.
OK, sorry about that. I’m pretty excited about Beltran, is all.
OK, I apologize for the lack of posts today, but some minor good news:
The “categories” linked on the right column of this blog have been broken since the start. Until today, when you clicked them, you could see the entries in those categories, but not the titles of those entries, making them pretty much useless.
Today, with some nifty copy-and-paste work and way too much time spent staring at code, I fixed them. So now you can more easily browse the things I’ve written about Taco Bell.
Also, last week I added an e-mail link to the box to the immediate right of this post. Please, if you see anything hilarious or awesome that you feel merits a TedQuarters post, send it along.
Here’s what Jerry Manuel had to say on Sunday, when asked if he saw Jenrry Mejia pitch:
“Oh, lord, did I see him. Don’t get me started on him. This press conference is over, Jay. Oh, it’s tough not to get excited about him. That’s real electric stuff.”
(Quote courtesy Matt Dunn of SNY.)
There’s been early talk, some of it stemming from Manuel himself, about Mejia breaking camp as the Mets’ 8th-inning guy.
That’d be exciting, for sure, and as a Mets fan I’m definitely psyched to see the electric stuff everyone keeps raving about.
I’m not sure it’s such a good idea, though.
Mejia’s only 20 years old, and since he walked 4.7 batters per nine innings in his stint at Double-A, it’s a safe bet he needs a little more work on his controlling his pitches before he’s unleashed on Major League hitters.
And, perhaps more importantly, he just needs to pitch more.
Mark this down: A good starter is more valuable than the best 8th-inning man in baseball. I promise. I could delve into way more detail, but just think of the difference in total innings: A good starter throws about 200 in a season. A good reliever throws about 80.
So ultimately, unless the Mets feel Mejia is no more than a late-inning reliever, they should want him to become a starter. And by all accounts, they do.
The so-called Verducci Effect states that young pitchers suffer regression after increasing his innings load by more than 30 from one season to another. There are inherent flaws in the notion, as my colleague Michael Salfino has been pointing out for years, and as Jeremy Greenhouse examined in detail at The Baseball Analysts last week.
Still, despite all that, no one would argue that teams should throw caution to the wind and haphazardly handle young pitchers. The Mets will — and should — want to be careful with Mejia’s workload. He threw only 94 2/3 innings last year in a season partly shortened due to a middle-finger injury.
The Mets will likely want to up that in 2010 to prepare him for the rigors of a full season as a Major League starter in 2011. Starting him out in the bullpen will not do that. Starting him out in the bullpen will push his innings count in the wrong direction.
Beyond that, hard-throwers like Mejia can rely mostly on their fastballs in relief roles, even at the big-league level. I don’t know how good Mejia’s secondary arsenal is currently, but I know that to succeed as a Major League starter, a pitcher needs more than one pitch. He should be given the opportunity to develop his full array of weapons as a starter in the Minors instead of risking letting them atrophy under the pressure to perform as a big-league reliever.
If, as Mejia approaches his 2010 innings limit later in the season, the Mets have a need in the bullpen, then sure, call him up and use him conservatively in late-inning work. Plenty of great starting pitchers have gotten their first taste of Major League action in bullpen roles.
But no matter how good Mejia looks this Spring, the Mets cannot afford to rush him into a big-league relief role to start the season. Simply put, it’s way easier to find a good 8th inning guy than a 20-year-old prospect with “electric stuff,” and there’s no reason to hinder the development of the latter for one season of the former.
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