A-P "So You Think You're A Sportswriter" Thread

[Guest Mark Healey]

You guys may remember Al Cohn, and if not, you might still get a kick out of his work...

http://www.gothambaseball.com/news/1162099273.php

]One short series undoes the accomplishments of 162 games and a playoff round victory. It's childish. It's selfish. It's myopic. It's also incorrect. Playoffs included, the Mets finished with the best won-lost record in baseball, first day to the last. And that's just for starters.

Enjoy...

[MFS62]

Mark, that's like saying "other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the show?"

Later

[Guest Edgy DC]

I disagree.

[Guest Yancy Street Gang]

It was a fun season. It didn't have a happy ending, but the Mets provided seven months of fun, including ten post-season games.

I was able to rewatch the bottom of the ninth from Game 7 the other day, and it was only mildly painful. I'm pretty much all healed.

[Guest Mark Healey]

MFS62 wrote: Mark, that's like saying "other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the show?" Later

Actually, I think that, like Al, that this past season can be like 1985, the start of something bug (and hopefully more satisfying)..

Hopefully the days of venom for Mets fans are over -- at least as far as the offseason is handled...Omar is far more proactive than his predecessors, and hopefully the fan base will follow suit...

[soupcan]

Mark Healey wrote: ...that this past season can be like 1985, the start of something bug...Omar is far more proactive than his predecessors...

I'm taking solace in Omar's proactivity as well and I agree with Mark.

Except that I think it will be the start of something big rather than bug.

[Guest Johnny Dickshot]

That eckstein peice is well-done.

[Guest Edgy DC]

I'd prefer to take solace in Minaya's judgment. I disagree that Minaya's prececessors weren't proactive. Phillips sure was in the 2001-2002 offeseason. Duquette (or whoever was pushing him) was proactive at the 2004 trading deadline. They just weren't right enough.

[Guest Mark Healey]

lol...I guess I mean proactive with a clue and the ability to evaluate talent

[MFS62]

First game, new season, new hopes.
Same old Filip Bondy.
He never saw a balloon he didn't want to prick.
Too bad. He's certainly qualified.
Later

] Every season, the Nets swear on a stack of unsold tickets that Jason Kidd will play a more modest chunk of the game, that their franchise star will pace himself and his weary tendons until the playoffs.

and

] There is real hope in Williams, who just may be the steal of the 2006 NBA draft. No pun intended there, though Williams surely would not be a Net if he hadn't been nailed for trying to sell two laptops stolen by a friend when they were back at UConn.

[metirish]

Like Wally I can't believe no one thought of this before...

] Omar, Sori's your guy November 3, 2006 Sometimes the solution to a seemingly complex problem is so simple, so obvious, you can't believe someone hasn't thought of it already. And you figure there must be some logical reason why it can't be done. In this case, the problem is the Mets' lineup holes in leftfield and at second base. The solution is Alfonso Soriano. It's so simple, so obvious, it can't be real. But try as I might, I am unable to talk myself out of it. Not only is it real, it is ridiculous. The Mets have the needs. Soriano has the goods. Omar Minaya has Fred Wilpon's money. If there's a reason why this shouldn't happen, I'm listening. Soriano is a free agent who happens to play both positions the Mets need to fill. He prefers second base, but even playing a reluctant leftfield for the Washington Nationals in 2006, he led the league in assists. Imagine if he actually liked the position he was playing. He also was a leadoff hitter for a last-place team who knocked in 95 runs and hit 46 home runs while playing half his games in a ballpark as big as Arlington National Cemetery. Imagine what those numbers could be at Shea, batting fifth or sixth in a lineup behind the likes of Jose Reyes, Paul Lo Duca, David Wright and the Carloses. Other than the salaries, nothing in baseball is guaranteed, of course, but you can be sure that had Soriano been at the plate in the bottom of the ninth inning with the bases loaded and the season on the line in NLCS Game 7, he would have swung at that 0-and-2 pitch from Adam Wainwright. And the 0-and-1 pitch, and the 0-and-0 pitch. That is the way Soriano plays. Fearless, aggressive and maybe a tad reckless. The odds are good that, like Carlos Beltran, Soriano would have struck out to end Game 7 and send the Mets and their fans into an offseason of disappointment and uncertainty. But at least Soriano would have gone down fighting, something the Mets did not do at the end of their season. Four of the last six outs were by strikeout, two of them looking, the last one on a curveball that cut across the zone for strike three to end the season with the bat sitting on the Mets' most expensive shoulder. If it were up to me, Soriano would bat fifth in next year's lineup, after Carlos Delgado, or sixth, behind Wright, who just got his first important postseason hit. Too bad for the Mets it came in an exhibition game in Japan. What the ninth inning in Game 7 called for was a little more aggressiveness, a little less caution. That is what Soriano brings to the Mets, along with a little more excitement to a team that left with a cloud of disappointment and uncertainty hanging over an otherwise brilliant season. Although his team won 97 games and its first division title in 18 years, Mets general manager Omar Minaya has a winter shopping list as long as Julio Franco's career stat line, and it ought to start at the doorstep of Soriano. He will not come cheap - think Beltran money for five years at least - but if Minaya wants him as badly as he wanted Pedro Martinez, Tom Glavine and Beltran, there is little to stand in the way. Soriano knows New York and likes it here. He still owns an apartment in the area. And unlike the rest of the Mets and most of the Yankees, he is a proven postseason performer, or have you forgotten his home run off Curt Schilling in the eighth inning of Game 7 of the 2001 World Series? That broke a tie at 1 and left the Yankees six outs away from a fourth consecutive world championship, if only Mariano Rivera could have held the lead in the ninth. That was done when Soriano was 25 years old and comparatively puny. Now he is one of the most feared hitters in baseball, a man who can play two positions capably, and both of them are positions in which the Mets are lacking. Last year's leftfielder, Cliff Floyd, is an expensive, often-injured free agent. His time here is up. His replacement, Endy Chavez, is a wizard with the glove whose theft of Scott Rolen's bid for a home run forestalled the inevitable in Game 7. The Mets can get by with his bat at the bottom of the lineup if they opt to return Soriano to second, his position of choice. If they believe $15 million a season is too much to spend on a second baseman, they can send him to left and pursue free agent Julio Lugo to play second, or even ancient Ray Durham, who hit 26 homers for the Giants. Either way, Soriano adds a dimension to the lineup that was missing at the moment it was needed most. The Mets had better not begin their offseason the way they ended their postseason: caught looking.

[metirish]

Given the choice I would still want Beltran at the plate in that situation.

[Guest Edgy DC]

]Other than the salaries, nothing in baseball is guaranteed, of course, but you can be sure that had Soriano been at the plate in the bottom of the ninth inning with the bases loaded and the season on the line in NLCS Game 7, he would have swung at that 0-and-2 pitch from Adam Wainwright. And the 0-and-1 pitch, and the 0-and-0 pitch.

A lot of enormous holes in that thinking.

[HahnSolo]

Hitting a gimpy Floyd with 2 on and no out, was cautious, not aggressive?
C'mon Wally.

[Guest Edgy DC]

Oh, I should have read on!

]If they believe $15 million a season is too much to spend on a second baseman, they can send him to left and pursue free agent Julio Lugo to play second, or even ancient Ray Durham, who hit 26 homers for the Giants.

Fella, he's worth more as a secondbaseman, if he can hack it, not less.

[Frayed Knot]

[soapbox]Have I ever explained how much it is I hate this thread and want to see it join Elvis? (assuming he's really dead)

Nothing against the original idea of this thing neccesarily, but - like the 'Brogna' thread last year - I hate what it's become and the length of time that it's lived.

The signing (or not) of a FA the magnitude of Soriano is a topic that SCREAMS for it's own thread where it can be discussed and/or disgusted. But, instead, it'll wind up getting lost in a 6-month long, 30-whatever page thread simply because it was once mentioned in a newspaper column the same way the whole Bobby V leading his team to the Japan Championship was buried in a mega-thread because someone was under the impression that they were "supposed" to put it in the ex-Mets thread on account of Bobby having once been a Met.

You're allowed to let old threads fade away and start new ones folks ... and you don't even need special permission to do so.
[/soapbox]

[metirish]

And to think I spent over ten freaking minutes looking for this thread.....seriously I really didn't think the ramblings of Wally warrented a new thread.

[Guest Yancy Street Gang]

Good point, FK. I started a new thread.

[Frayed Knot]

="metirish"]And to think I spent over ten freaking minutes looking for this thread.....seriously I really didn't think the ramblings of Wally warrented a new thread.

It's not like I want to seem like just because I've been here longer than a lot of others here that I'm trying to tell everyone else how to post - but this topic has been bugging me for a while now and I just happened to pick your post to tee off on it.
And it's more I case that I want to squash this idea that there are strict rules around this place about where folks are allowed to put things or that you need some kind of senoirity before you can start new threads..

Maybe Matthews doesn't deserve his own thread but shirley Soriano does.
Hey guys, what do you think of signing Soriano? That dork Matthews thinks we HAVE TO [linky here] but we all know that he rapes farm animals in his spare time
... Something along those lines is a whole lot better IMO than seeing it buried in a multi-purpose thread simply because the topic started with a column.

And again, I'm trying to get away from rules not make them. But it's not only perrnitted, but often an improvement, to let old threads die and start new ones up. "RMPL" is a joke that stems from an old board where there were people so interested in being the one to "break news" that they wouldn't even read the front page before starting a new thread on a topic that already had 5 concurrent discussions going. A minor amount of common sense avoids that, and if you start a thread that no one's interested in they'll simply ignore it. Ain't no biggie.

[Willets Point]

Frayed Knot wrote: [soapbox]Have I ever explained how much it is I hate this thread and want to see it join Elvis? (assuming he's really dead) Nothing against the original idea of this thing neccesarily, but - like the 'Brogna' thread last year - I hate what it's become and the length of time that it's lived. The signing (or not) of a FA the magnitude of Soriano is a topic that SCREAMS for it's own thread where it can be discussed and/or disgusted. But, instead, it'll wind up getting lost in a 6-month long, 30-whatever page thread simply because it was once mentioned in a newspaper column the same way the whole Bobby V leading his team to the Japan Championship was buried in a mega-thread because someone was under the impression that they were "supposed" to put it in the ex-Mets thread on account of Bobby having once been a Met. You're allowed to let old threads fade away and start new ones folks ... and you don't even need special permission to do so. [/soapbox]

I love you man!!!

[Guest Yancy Street Gang]

This thread is probably getting to a length where it ought to be padlocked anyway so that it can fade gently into the archives.

[Willets Point]

Lock it baby lock it!!!