If Bronson Arroyo beats your team, your team sucks. The Mets suck, apparently.
There’s a rumor afoot that the Reds are interested in Scott Rolen. That would be nice (and expensive). Edwin Encarnacion is terrible.
Not a good sign for the Royals that they would go to some trouble to trade for another guy who doesn’t understand the strike zone.
They seem to almost be cutting off their nose to spite their critics. “You say we suck at getting guys who can get on base! WEll, watch THIS!!! HA HA HA! This guy would take a cut at a pickoff throw!”
Fucking fuck fucker fuckity fuck fuck.
Fire Omar Minaya. Won’t someone please think of the children, and fire Omar Minaya?
Jerry Manuel always said he didn’t want guys with those statistical numbers…
I think the stolen bases or lack thereof weren’t so much an issue. Some guys just aren’t good at stealing bases, despite having the speed. What the M’s and their fans have been seeing is a guy with the speed to score from first on a base hit (keep in mind that he’s been batting in front of Ichiro for most of his career) who just wasn’t getting on base as much as he should, and thus wasn’t scoring runs. A lot of people, judging by the call-in show after the games and listening to the post-game analysts, and including management, were just fed up with Yuni coming to the plate with men on and one out swinging at the first pitch he sees and grounding into a double play. Opposing pitchers learned quickly to just throw him garbage on the first pitch, because they knew he would swing at anything.
Mental lapses in the field didn’t help, either. The collision that ended the season of M’s left-fielder Endy Chavez should never have happened - there was no reason for Yuni to be running that far out of position to field a fly ball, and definitely no excuse for his not yielding when Chavez was calling him off the ball.
Some amusing Wikipedia “vandalism”:
I’ve gotta wonder if it was a Mariners fan or a Royals fan who wrote that. Do they serve garlic fries at Kaufmann Stadium (is it still called that?) like they do at Safeco?
Hey, i wish i could swap with you.
I’m a “late to bed” kind of guy, and since moving out to the west coast one thing i hate is that all the baseball is over by 10.00 p.m. When i lived on the east coast, i used to love the fact that i could watch the east coast games from 7-10, and then i could tune in to a west coast game right up until about 1 a.m.
Don’t worry. We now have Angel Berroa too!
Jeff Francoeur has an OBP of .282. Two eighty two. I can’t process this. Ryan Church is having a bad year - you’d be having a bad year, too, if your manager inexplicably benched you every time you got two hits in a game - and his OBP is still fifty points higher than that. I mean, are the Mets really going to offer arbitration to Francoeur and keep him beyond this year at $4M+? Or are they going to non-tender him and let him walk? If the latter, what was the point of this trade? If the former, then is Omar Minaya on drugs?
Grit, baby.
Attitude.
The thing of it is, Church could have been a useful trade piece, sensibly used. Evidently Jerry Manuel is such an idiot that he simply will not play him regularly, so he had to go, OK, fine, fuck me, fuck you. But are you seriously telling me that you couldn’t have called up the Nationals and offered them Church and a few mid-range prospects for Adam Dunn? The Nats are going to have to pay Stephen Strasburg, like, six kajillion dollars to sign. They’re going nowhere in the next three to four years. Getting rid of Dunn and getting something useful in return would be ideal for them, and Dunn would fit into the Mets lineup well both this year (hey! No more freaking Fernando Tatis in left field! Huzzah!) and in the future (because he could be switched over to first base once Carlos Delgado shuffles off into retirement.
And I sure am glad we dumped all that money into Ollie Perez instead of signing Orlando Hudson for $3M to play second base. Sure dodged a bullet there, Omar.
If the Mets lose 90 games, is there even a chance they’ll fire their GM? Almost certainly not, since ownership doesn’t want to pay somebody to not work for them and they gave him an ill-advised extension and now we’re stuck with years and years and years of this “sign a bunch of injury-prone and old guys and then be shocked, shocked, when they turn out to be injury-prone and old” routine and Jerry Manuel and his bizarre vendettas against useful players is never ever going to leave and I hate baseball.
If you’re talking defensively, Dunn would be no upgrade over Tatis. Dunn is good for three things: hitting homeruns, striking out a LOT and drawing a fair share of walks. That’s it. He is a huge liability in the outfield because he’s such a lumbering mass. And he’s terribly expensive for the one thing he does well, and that’s jack the ball out of the park (and when he was with the Reds, he only seemed capable of that when nobody was on base and we were losing 8-1 in the 7th inning).
Is it *all *his fault that everybody’s injured?
Most of his signings looked pretty good at the time.
I was at the Colorado Rockies - Atlanta Braves game last night and saw the disgusting broken leg of Alan Embree. He came in after a rain delay in relief and got two outs when Martin Predo hit a low liner straight back at Embree and it hit him straight on the shin. The contact sounded like an echo of the ball hitting the bat - crack-crack. Everyone in the park knew immediately that his leg was broken.
I had a hard time sleeping last night as the sound kept sounding in my head. I refereed a soccer game years ago where a kid right next to me broke his leg, and the sound is unforgettable and creepy.
Hi, my name is Reds pitching, I am surprisingly good for a no-market team.
Pitching, meet non-existant offense,
Pitching and non-existant offense, we can’t hang out and be friends.
I had a friend break his leg sliding into third whilst playing baseball as a kid (whatever you call the baseball you’re playing at age 15-16. It’s not Little League.) We were sitting in the first base dugout and could hear the crack.
Baseball may not be as brutal as football or hockey, but it’s very, very hard on a person’s legs.
I went to play softball a few years ago. We were waiting for the game ahead of us to finish. The sun was low in the sky and in the fielders eyes. A guy hit a hard linedrive the fielder lost and it hit him in the head. It sounded like a watermellon being hit with a hammer. They took the ambulance right on the field to take him away. That sound still sticks in my mind.
Wait, what?
By far his best three moves as Mets’ GM were the signings of Carlos Beltran and Francisco Rodriguez and the trade for Johan Santana. None exactly required a genius-level IQ. I’m pretty sure most general managers in baseball, given the Mets’ budget, would have managed to throw tons of money at the top free agent centerfielder and top free agent relief pitcher in years when the Mets had no centerfielder and had no closer, respectively. The Santana deal was a good one, and actually Kris Benson-for-John Maine-and-Jorge Julio (the latter turned into Orlando Hernandez) was not a terrible one.
But let’s review some of the rest of the man’s record:
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Signed Moises Alou to play the outfield (2006). Moises Alou was 40 years old at the time, and had been injured for big chunks of the previous two seasons; Omar, of course, was shocked - SHOCKED - when Alou got hurt in 2007 and played only half a season. But not to worry! The Mets had a $7M+ club option on Alou for 2008, which they exercised, I guess assuming that magic pixies would fix Alou’s collapsing body; he collected about 50 plate appearances in 2008 before getting hurt again and ultimately, retiring. Yay Omar!
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Traded Health Bell to the Padres (with Royce Ring) for John Adkins and somebody whose name I forgot. Bell will be an All-Star this year; his ERA is under 2.00 and he leads the NL in saves. Adkins is now in Japan and I forgot the other guy’s name.
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Traded Brian Bannister the Kansas City Royals for reliever Ambiorix Burgos. Bannister is a mediocre major league starter; Burgos is out of baseball.
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Traded Matt Lindstrom (horrible this year, excellent in 2008 and 2007) to the Florida Marlins for, I don’t know, some guys who suck.
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Traded for second baseman/millstone Luis Castillo, admittedly for basically nothing, then signed Castillo to an inexplicably stupid 4-year, $25M contract. So they will pay Castillo, who is terrible and drops fly pops, nearly twice as much as the Dodgers will pay Orlando Hudson, who is an All-Star and just a much better player.
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Traded Lastings Milledge to the Nationals for Ryan Church and Brian Schneider. OK, Milledge played badly for Washington and was subsequently shipped to Baseball Siberia, but he’s only 24 years old and if you’re telling me Jeff Francoeur has potential, surely Milledge still does as well. But maybe you have to be a Mets’ fan to understand why this one is so infuriating. For years, we heard about Lastings Milledge - how he was the next big thing, he was the prize prospect, he was untouchable. In 2006, going down the stretch, talk was that the Mets might obtain Roy Oswalt or some similar number one starter - but the Mets never did, in part because potential trade partners always wanted Milledge, and Milledge was untouchable. Then, barely a year later, we learn he is touchable after all, and the bounty we got back? Roy Oswalt? Roy Halladay? Rich Harden? CC Sabathia? Tim Hudson? Nope: it was a fourth outfielder and a 30-year-old catcher who can’t hit at all.
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Ran Ramon Castro, another one of Jerry Manuel’s inexplicably hated players, out of town for a non-prospect pitcher, in spite of the fact that of all the hundreds of catchers the Mets run out there, Castro was the only one who could actually hit at all.
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Learned from his mistake trading for Alou, a veteran coming off a major injury, by trading for J.J. Putz, a veteran coming off a major injury. Deal included Endy Chavez, a useful bench player over the last few years, and Joe Smith, who compiled a 3.55 ERA last season. Putz, shockingly, is hurt.
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In an offseason where Derek Lowe, among others, was available, paid Oliver Perez $36M over three years. I really hope this move speaks for itself.
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Assumed that Ryan Church, Dan Murphy, and superfluke Fernando Tatis could hold down corner outfield spots for a pennant winner.
You can give Minaya a pass due to the injuries the Mets have suffered, but I say no way. Part of the problem with Minaya is he’s happy to address big-picture, big-ticket items - re-signing Jose Reyes and David Wright, signing Beltran and Carlos Delgado - but he’s terrible at putting an actual team together. The Mets have been hit so hard by injuries precisely because Minaya assembled a roster with an amazing top five and a terrible bottom 20. There is no depth. They went into this season with below-replacement level choices at second, catcher, left and right field; of course a few injuries were going to submarine them. A good GM builds a quality roster that can endure injuries because there is depth, because there is solid talent that can pick up the superstars, at least in the short-run.
Minaya sucks.
FoieGras, I realized a long time ago that you and I were irreconcilable on our opinion of Adam Dunn. A man who consistently gets on base more than 38% of the time, who slugs .500 every year, and who can be a perfectly passable first baseman and a better defensive left fielder than Dan Murphy, anyway - that guy is worth way more than the $10M a year. He is a valuable hitter, and he’d be especially valuable for the Mets in the new NoHomer Park, because most of his home runs are no-doubters that would make it out of any park.
So he’s followed through on the most obvious opportunities, overpaid a guy or two, taken a chance on some injured guys, and made some other moves that have been pretty much inconsequential either way. Color me unconvinced.
Compare that to the Red Sox giving Julio Lugo $8M/year right after paying to get rid of Edgar Renteria, and brutally overpaying for Daisuke Matsuzaka. They’ve signed just as many injured guys, too - this year, it’s Baldelli, Smoltz, Penny, and Saito, all of whom have been contributing. Nobody, obviously, is calling for Theo Epstein’s head, though. Maybe the difference is superior management of the medical cases, notably their famous “shoulder program” for pitchers. So you can fairly nail Omar for not hiring a superior training staff, perhaps.
As for the Mutts’ late-season collapses of 1964 Phillies proportions, you have to point at the manager first. You can fairly nail Omar for hiring and sticking with the wrong Manuel.
Sounds like the cupboard is bare in Buffalo, right? Okay, that’s getting to be Omar’s fault too - scouting, drafting, and development are absolutely critical front-office functions, maybe the even most critical.
So I’ll agree with your conclusion but not your reasons. Fair enough?
No, but the Met’s injury management has been horrific and that’s on him. They constantly bring guys back before they are ready, and believe the cortisone shots are the solution to all of life’s woes. You had a concussion? Sure you can play through that. You are a speedster who has history of injuring his hamstring, an injury that is easy to reaggravate or cause other cascade injuries. You had a few days off why don’t you try coming back. What you got hurt again? That is stunning.
Not all Mets injury was caused by bad luck. Some were predictable and some by terrible handling of players. I disagree with Story on Alou being a bad signing, even on his option, but you do know he is going to get hurt at some point. Minaya had no backup plan. Minaya had no plan when Delgado got hurt this year, again not an unforeseeable event. He has been lousy at building depth, overcommits on short sample sizes, and gives useful players away for little or no return.
HUH? Pedroia can’t make the All Star game so Joe Maddon looks long and hard and picks…Carlos Pena??? Does Madden need some remedial math? Pena is a 1st baseman and Pedroia is a second baseman. Ian Kinsler should have been picked to replace Pedroia.