Dispatches from the Blogosphere 2012

[Edgy MD]

Yeah, that shtick --- and that's a good word for it --- was out of the Randolph playbook, I think. I'm sure he'll have a private conversation with Tejada along the "Here's why I said what I said" lines. Doesn't really make it right.

Here's a more positive way to answer the "Are you pissed that Player X isn't here?" question.

"I've really got too much to work on with the players that are here to dwell on that. Look*, we have a mandatory reporting date for a reason. Our two rules are (1) be here on that date, and (2) be ready to work very hard. What you guys need to understand is that while players who report early should be commended, it doesn't mean players who report on the due date haven't been working their tails off up until that point. Carlos Beltran wasn't one to get to camp early, but he was there on time, and when he got there, he was a month ahead of some guys."

He also would have done well --- if he insisted on contrasting Tejada's attendance with that of another player --- to cite an in-house example rather than a Yankee one.

*President Obama is a master of prefacing his media redirects with a "Look... ." It has a great way of implying that somebody's got to be the reasonable adult in the room, without actually saying that.

[Guest LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr]

Edgy DC wrote: Yeah, that shtick --- and that's a good word for it --- was out of the Randolph playbook, I think. I'm sure he'll have a private conversation with Tejada along the "Here's why I said what I said" lines. Doesn't really make it right.

Randolphian, yes... but also early-period Collinsian, no? Being a stick-up-the-ass with legs was the ostensible reason players chafed under his watch in Houston and Anaheim, wasn't it?

And I like your answer, but there were several dozen ways he could have addressed it without dumping on a guy for showing up on time and sounding like the Friday's manager from "Office Space."

[G-Fafif]

Really good one from Ted Berg.

Rooting for a team means emotionally investing in something, and that brings with it the risk of some pain �- not lasting physical pain, but pain nonetheless. But when that pain comes like it has the last few years, what�s the sense in wallowing in it?

Passage best read in context...so go read it in context.

[Fman99]

Thanks, that was a good read.

[metirish]

Yeah that was great, Lewin linked to it yesterday on twitter.....

[Edgy MD]

I was going to link to that today. It's a lovely open metaphor. A lot of folks can take different things from it. Hopefully not only self-affirming things, but yeah.

I was also going to kick this one out today: "Dick Tidrow."

OE: Holy crap, a response from his legendary brother.

[Edgy MD]

Pitchers and Poets thinks fantasy baseball is the enemy of baseball cards.

No No-Hitters looks at yesterday's game and is reminded of the Curse of Clay Kirby.

The Kranepool Society celebrates the home-grown-iness of the Met lineup, but spells mercenaries with an apostrophe.

[stevejrogers]

Click on my sig around 6pm EST to see a blogger attempt to live blog from Citi Field on his mobile device!

[G-Fafif]

"The mornings are always chaotic on MetsBlog, because the news cycle seems to be different every day."

-0dXUkKHXVY

[Ceetar]

my arm briefly makes an appearance if you know where to look.

[Edgy MD]

Underneath your shoulder at the side of your torso, I would guess.

[G-Fafif]

WAITER: How did you find your steak?
CUSTOMER: I merely looked under my baked potato and there it was.

From Mad magazine, sometime in my childhood.

[Edgy MD]

Murray Chass, not above grabbing cheap photoshop jobs off the internet.

[Edgy MD]

Yells for Ourselves marks the 13th anniversary of the Mercury Mets.

[Guest Mets � Willets Point]

Did anyone ever capture the image of Rickey Henderson-come-alien? I've never seen it.

[batmagadanleadoff]

Mets � Willets Point wrote: Did anyone ever capture the image of Rickey Henderson-come-alien? I've never seen it.

I definitely have screen shots of Rickey's first at bat as a Mercury Met (which was necessarily the first at bat by any Mercury Met) on my hard drive, but I can't seem to find them. Rickey was, no doubt, surprised to see his altered image including an alien third eye between his human pair on the left field Diamond Vision scoreboard. But his expression was more astonishment than anger, I thought.


As for me, my vitriol for those uniforms has tempered considerably over the years. With lotsa hindsight, I can see clearly now that the Mercury Mets were just a one-off novelty, and so no need to get so hot and bothered over the ugliness of it all.

[Guest John Cougar Lunchbucket]

Turn Ahead the Clock was one of those league wide promotions through Century 21 which was one of the MLB-wide sponsors. There were only a few teams that didn;t participate: The MFYs, Dodgers and Cubs, I think.

I thought it was a fun idea but it was executed badly, and the Mets' real sin in it all was doing it more enthusiastically than anyone else. I'm sure there was a rea$on for that because it's not often the Mets are out front on anything, and I'm sure they are loaded with self-pity about how they're considered a joke for their part in it.

[batmagadanleadoff]

Here's a Mercury Mets uniform trivia question:

The Mets wore these caps for their Mercury themed game with Pittsburgh.



At bat, though, they wore their standard issue 1999 batting helmets over their Mercury caps. But two Mercury Mets batting helmets were produced for the game. Which two Mets wore the Mercury helmets?

[Edgy MD]

Fuck it. I just changed the name of my rock band to the Mercury Mets. We got us a symbol and everything.

[batmagadanleadoff]

Here's a Mercury Mets uniform trivia question: The Mets wore these caps for their Mercury themed game with Pittsburgh. At bat, though, they wore their standard issue 1999 batting helmets over their Mercury caps. But two Mercury Mets batting helmets were produced for the game. Which two Mets wore the Mercury helmets?

Hey Paul Lukas: If you ever lurk here, I'll betcha that this one'll stump you.

[Ceetar]

Turn Ahead the Clock was one of those league wide promotions through Century 21 which was one of the MLB-wide sponsors. There were only a few teams that didn;t participate: The MFYs, Dodgers and Cubs, I think. I thought it was a fun idea but it was executed badly, and the Mets' real sin in it all was doing it more enthusiastically than anyone else. I'm sure there was a rea$on for that because it's not often the Mets are out front on anything, and I'm sure they are loaded with self-pity about how they're considered a joke for their part in it.

See, I love all this stuff. go over the top. be entertaining and quirky and different. it's a freakin' one off game. Go all out, don't give us half-assed star wars trivia and call it Star Wars Night. Change everyone's image to a wookie or a jedi or photoshop lightsabres instead of bats. There were bloggers BEGGING to help you out with this. Read The Apple made cards and sent them to you, all you had to do was load them into the scoreboard app.

[Guest John Cougar Lunchbucket]

Just guesses: Matt Franco and Agbayani

[batmagadanleadoff]

Turn Ahead the Clock was one of those league wide promotions through Century 21 which was one of the MLB-wide sponsors. There were only a few teams that didn;t participate: The MFYs, Dodgers and Cubs, I think. I thought it was a fun idea but it was executed badly, and the Mets' real sin in it all was doing it more enthusiastically than anyone else. I'm sure there was a rea$on for that because it's not often the Mets are out front on anything, and I'm sure they are loaded with self-pity about how they're considered a joke for their part in it. See, I love all this stuff. go over the top. be entertaining and quirky and different. it's a freakin' one off game. Go all out, don't give us half-assed star wars trivia and call it Star Wars Night. Change everyone's image to a wookie or a jedi or photoshop lightsabres instead of bats. There were bloggers BEGGING to help you out with this. Read The Apple made cards and sent them to you, all you had to do was load them into the scoreboard app.

If not for your age, I'd be convinced that you were on the Mercury Mets planning committee.

[batmagadanleadoff]

John Cougar Lunchbucket wrote: Just guesses: Matt Franco and Agbayani

Because I love being a hardass on these trivia questions, I'm gonna say that you're wrong, without saying whether both or just one of your guesses are wrong.

[Ceetar]

Olerud? Due to the "wears the helmet in the field" thing? and..Piazza?

[batmagadanleadoff]

Ceetar wrote: Olerud? Due to the "wears the helmet in the field" thing? and..Piazza?

Pens down. Game over. Hats off to Ceetar. We have a winner! Baseball rules require that the team in the field (i.e., the defense) be attired uniformly. This includes headgear. Because catchers wear helmets in the field for protection, a Mercury Mets helmet was produced for Mike Piazza, so that his headgear would match the soft Merc caps worn by the other Mets fielders. Another Merc helmet was made for John Olerud, who always wore a helmet, even in the field, because of his prior brain aneurysm. Ironically, Olerud did not play in the Mercury game, the only game he'd miss all season. Still, Oly could be spotted wearing the Mercury hardhat in the Mets dugout.

[G-Fafif]

On his online home, Sports on Earth (sort of a Grantland without the frills), Joe Posnanski pays tribute to longtime Braves blogger Mac Thomason who just passed away. He prefaces the obit portion of his piece with what I think is a good contextual description of the genre.

We used to live in a world where, if you were this sort of person (and I was), you could let the static-suffused voices of baseball play-by-play announcers pull you out of your own humdrum childhood and into another life. You could sit in a car in your driveway -- an antenna rising from the hood like a conductor�s baton -- and turn the dial slowly, let Bob Prince take you to Pittsburgh, hear Ernie Harwell tell you the comical names of the people catching foul balls in the stands of Detroit, let Jack Buck pull you into downtown St. Louis, catch Herb Score saying improbably that once more in Cleveland it was a beautiful day for baseball. In another part of the country you could hear Vin Scully, the master, tell you a story, or Dave Niehaus shout that baseballs in Seattle were flying away. You can still do this sort of thing, of course, in fact you can do it more effectively than ever -- you don�t even need an old Chevy Nova. The radio voices from all over the country come across your iDevice, your Sirius radio, your computer, your phone, and those voices aren�t covered in static, and they don�t fade away when the wind changes course. This is better, no question. And, maybe, at the same time, it�s also less of an adventure. And I think the point for us car-parked radio explorers was the adventure. You know what I think is an adventure now? Baseball blogs. Every team�s fans have them, of course, there are hundreds and hundreds of them out there, lurking in between error pages, waiting to be found in the midst of the spam and the politics and the family photos and the naked pictures. The blogs are all passionate, every one of them, because who else but a passionate fan would start a baseball blog? But passion is where the similarities end. Some are hopeful and some are angry, some are vicious and some are playful, some are shrewd and some get every detail wrong. Some are astonishingly well written and some use a lot of exclamation points so that you get the point!!!

[Edgy MD]

I stumbled on this tribute to Thomason the other day. Loved it.

This post from Ephemeral New York, but the day after Labor Day is as good a day as any to remember the Straw Hat Riots.

[Edgy MD]

Covering the Mets ruins the Mets!

[Guest John Cougar Lunchbucket]

He'll be back.