Benjamin Grimm

Well, as La Russa seems to want to put it, now the story is "not all sweet."

Now you have two votes for Feliciano! sharpie wrote: Easley 2.5 Beltran 2.5 Wright 1 Lo Duca 1 Heilman 1 Feliciano 1 Alou 0.34 Schoenweis 0.33 Feliciano 0.33

Sharpie, you voted for Heilman twice for the May 3 game: http://cybermessageboard.ehost.com/getalife/viewtopic.php?t=6267 Please edit when you get the chance. Thanks!

Interesting. I tally everyone else's votes, but I don't keep a running tally of my own. Anyway, final notice for the May 1 (Pelfrey vs. Florida) game. Voting will close on Friday: http://cybermessageboard.ehost.com/getalife/viewtopic.php?t=6248

I liked that name. They would have/could have/might have been the only team to wear grey on their home uniforms.

I looked up some names of former minor league franchises, and Dallas has, historically, been home of the Rangers. Sometimes known as the Dallas Rangers, sometimes as the Dallas Fort-Worth Rangers. Somewhat surprisingly, I didn't find any minor league teams in Tampa. Phoenix had been the home of the Giants (which they obviously couldn't have used) and the Firebirds. Kansas City was the home of the Cowboys and the Blues. Their Negro League team was the Monarchs. (I wish the AL expansion team had used that name and let the Montreal team use Royals.) And way back in the Federal League they had the Packers. Toronto had the Canucks and the Maple Leafs. Seattle had the Steelheads, the Siwashes, and the Rainiers, plus the Indians and the Angels. Source: http://www.jessearquette.com/baseball_teams.html

I would have named them the Phoenix Firebirds, after the longtime AAA team.

Pitchers who led the Mets in strikeouts: http://leaptoad.com/mets/yrleaders.php?cattype=p#so A few lefties on the list: Al Jackson, Koosman, Sid, Leiter, and Falcone.

I agree. I like the color scheme, don't like the solid colored jersey. The only color a jersey should be is white or grey, although I guess I can accept black for road uniforms.

I just checked in on this game for the first time. I see that through 2, Perez has walked none and struck out four.

This story has had a couple of twists that we haven't acknowledged yet in this thread. The following is from this morning's Philadelphia Inquirer: ="Phil Sheridan"] Truth might have saved Hancock Phil Sheridan Inquirer Columnist Tony La Russa wants to talk about agendas. That's his word: agendas. The St. Louis Cardinals' manager said he warned his players about the media and possible "agendas" as reporting continued on the death of relief pitcher Josh Hancock early Sunday morning. Reporters, he said, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, might "want to turn this into . . . some kind of story that's not all sweet. I've already seen signs of that. I'm sitting here listening." La Russa gestured with the fungo bat he happened to be holding. "The first time I hear insincerity," he said, "I'll start swinging this fungo, because it doesn't have its place." Let's keep it sincere, then, when we examine La Russa's own agenda and how it might have factored into the events that led to Hancock's fatal accident. The Post-Dispatch reported in yesterday's editions that Hancock was involved in another serious accident about 5:30 a.m. Thursday. That's a little under three days before he died. According to police officials, Hancock's SUV rolled into an intersection on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River and was struck by a tractor-trailer. Hancock, 29, was not cited by the officer on the scene. He was driving near a cluster of nightclubs and strip bars that stay open until 5 a.m. - three hours after last call on the Missouri side of the river. The truck sheared off Hancock's front bumper and damaged his radiator. That's why he was driving a rented SUV when he died. "Just another inch or so and he could have died two days earlier, because that tractor-trailer was traveling about 45 to 50 m.p.h.," the police chief of Sauget, Ill., Patrick Delaney, told the Post-Dispatch. The Cardinals had a day game Thursday. Hancock was late for it. Teammates, remembering all too well the sudden death of pitcher Darryl Kile in 2002, nervously called Hancock a number of times. When he showed up, team sources told the Post-Dispatch, he was too hung over to pitch. It is not clear whether La Russa knew the full story of the Thursday accident. He declined to answer a direct question about that on Monday. According to the paper's story, Hancock told people he was fined $500 for being late. The official word from the Cardinals on Thursday: Hancock thought the game was later and, having just purchased a new, comfy bed, simply overslept. La Russa himself, according to the Post-Dispatch, said: "It's not worth discussing. It's personal and not baseball-related." Toxicology reports from the night of Hancock's fatal accident are not yet ready. But the newspaper's account of the hours preceding the crash, citing eyewitness accounts, reads like any typical night out after a major-league game. The pitcher had been seen drinking in one bar-restaurant - the manager felt compelled to ask if he wanted a cab, which tells you something - and left for another. He was on his way to meet teammates at a third when the SUV crashed into the back of a 26,000-pound tow truck. It is part of the game's culture. You play hard, you go out and drink. Sometimes you drink too much. It is also part of the game's culture to cover up when someone makes a mistake. Hung-over players are sometimes scratched from the lineup for some vague reason. A sore ankle. A case of the flu. The point is that everyone went out of his way to cover for Hancock on Thursday. Reporters with their agenda - to find out what really happened and write about it - were given a cheerful lie. Keep that in mind if you're uneasy about reporting what unnamed sources said. The team had a chance to be forthright, and chose not to. Here's the picture that emerges. After a scary near-miss that may have involved alcohol, Hancock went out drinking two nights later and got killed. There is no "sweet story" here, whatever La Russa thinks. Of course, on Thursday, he thought Hancock's absence from the ballpark was "not worth discussing." A few months ago, La Russa was cited for driving under the influence while in Florida for spring training. The publicity that caused had to be a terrible, humbling experience for such a proud man. Could that make him want to spare a young player from the same kind of experience? Maybe. Or maybe he really didn't know what happened. It's possible. You wonder if a newspaper story about Hancock's first wee-hours accident, or a DUI arrest, would have changed his behavior just a couple of nights later. You wonder if, had the agenda been to hold him accountable instead of to cover for him, things might have been different. You wonder how many rules were bent for him before Hancock ran into some of those rules that don't bend for anyone. It's enough to make you want to swing a fungo bat at something.

We can still use a few more votes for the April 30 game against the Marlins: http://cybermessageboard.ehost.com/getalife/viewtopic.php?t=6239 Voting will close tomorrow and the Schaefer Mets Player and Pitcher of the Month for April will be announced.

iramets wrote: Is yours in list form? Or is it just "the Mets who debuted in 1962" (which may not reflect lineup order, but that's okay because you never claimed they were in any order of appearance) plus "the Mets who debuted in 1963" etc.,? If the latter is the case, anyone could just verify that our 1962 is the same as yours, and be scrupulous about who appeared (as we've defined "appearing") in a game first. Yes, exactly. You can verify it yourself by looking at the 1962, 1963 etc. pages and checking the box score and, if necessary, the Retrosheet game accounts for any tie-breakers when two or more players share the same debut date.

iramets wrote: Two years apart, no less. I hope Yancy, whose database is Biblical, is checking our list against his for such errors, hopefully on our part. Nope, sorry, I haven't been.

Nah, I've done that too many times already. I appreciate the help, but I'm not really in face-collecting mode right now. If I see something I want I'll grab it but I'm not spending any time thinking about mug shots.

The Mets were down three runs before they even came to bat because of their sucky offense.

I've had that Aaron Sele shot up there for a couple of weeks now.

Yeah, but they did abandon the 2B search immediately after Lugo slipped away. They didn't even talk to Marcus Giles. It seems anyway that in their view Valentin was the second best option out there, after Lugo.

Park is 807, Gotay is 808. I'm not aware of the Les Rohr controversy. I used to get a lot of e-mails saying stuff like,"Why isn't my neighbor in your database? He told me he played for the Mets in 1974." The link I put on the roster page seems to have put a halt to those kinds of questions. I wonder now how many of those inquiries might have been for people who are now in the database as minor leaguers.

I think Paul Shaffer should just choose everybody's song.

Well, that explains that, then. I was afraid that our Kevin had beheaded another kitty.

Is there a rumor going around that Kevin Mitchell is dead? He's getting a lot of UMDB hits today, so I checked the logs. There have been several searches on "kevin mitchell dead" A few others for "kevin mitchell reds" so I wonder if the report, if such a report exists, may have come out of Cincinnati. Anyone hear anything?

Jose Reyes stole 17 bases in the month of April this year. That tied for the third best stealingest month in Mets history, and the most stealingy month of Reyes' career so far: +-----------------+-------+------+--------+ | lastname | month | year | sb | +-----------------+-------+------+--------+ | Cedeño | 05 | 1999 | 23 | | Wilson | 08 | 1982 | 19 | | Coleman | 05 | 1993 | 17 | | Reyes | 04 | 2007 | 17 | | Coleman | 05 | 1991 | 16 | | Johnson | 07 | 1996 | 15 | | Reyes | 06 | 2006 | 14 | | Cedeño | 06 | 1999 | 14 | | Henderson | 06 | 1999 | 13 | | Johnson | 06 | 1996 | 13 | | Reyes | 08 | 2005 | 13 | +-----------------+-------+------+--------+

It's not as high as it was at the beginning of last season, but it's higher than at the end of last year, when we were down to 7 faithful voters. We're already seeing a slight dropoff in 2007 though. We're averaging about two fewer voters per game in the second half of April as opposed to the first half. But we're still doing better than the 7 that 2006 ended with. 4/1/2007 20 4/3/2007 20 4/4/2007 18 4/6/2007 15 4/7/2007 13 4/8/2007 13 4/9/2007 16 4/11/2007 13 4/12/2007 16 4/13/2007 12 4/14/2007 11 4/17/2007 13 4/18/2007 14 4/19/2007 14 4/20/2007 12 4/21/2007 14 4/22/2007 12 4/23/2007 15 4/24/2007 17 4/25/2007 11

Voting for all three of the weekend games at RFK will close on Wednesday morning. Friday's loss: http://cybermessageboard.ehost.com/getalife/viewtopic.php?t=6219 Saturday's win: http://cybermessageboard.ehost.com/getalife/viewtopic.php?t=6225 Sunday's win: http://cybermessageboard.ehost.com/getalife/viewtopic.php?t=6230 And on Thursday, when voting for tonight's game closes, I'll be announcing the winner of the Schaefer Mets Player of the Month award for April 2007. Tell all your friends!