G-Fafif

M. Donald Grant has competition for worst person to have ever served on the Mets board of directors.

Bartolo-intensive excerpt in GQ. The description is to die for. Five pitches into Bartolo Colón's first start in a Mets uniform, I was smitten. I had simply failed to account for the visceral joy of watching a man shaped like a large ball throw a much smaller ball. Colón bulged like a human bouncy castle. https://www.gq.com/story/bartolo-colon-home-run-mets-so-many-ways-to-losehttps://www.gq.com/story/bartolo-colon-home-run-mets-so-many-ways-to-lose

Carrasco's elbow is better...but his right hamstring, initially reported as strained, is apparently torn. That's six to eight weeks at least.

Ed Armbrister, Big Red Machine cog, 72.

Khalil Lee and Sam McWilliams get optionAAAd.

Jake is on SNY administering the punishment Rob Manfred didn't to the Astros.

Another mouth-watering excerpt, this one focusing on the Bobby Bo sinecure, in which the inevitable snark is well-nuanced. Dennis Gilbert, Bonilla's agent at the time, had Mets ownership by the throat. They could either pay Bonilla to poison their clubhouse next season, or they could pay him to go away quietly. Gilbert says the Mets approached him first and that authorship on a contract like that is impossible to untangle. “It wasn't a five-minute call, put it that way,” he said with a laugh during an interview via FaceTime from one of the gardens on his estate in Malibu, Calif. He's cagey about who had the original idea for the arrangement, but it was pretty clearly his. Soon after this deal, he went back to the insurance business because, he told me, there's way more money in it than representing superstar professional athletes. Evidently he is right. In any case, the idea could only have come from the mind of an insurance salesman: What if we defer the remaining money on Bonilla's deal for a really long time, like a decade, and until then you don't pay my client a cent—but then you start cutting him a big check every year for a much longer period of time? Like, say, 25 years. The Mets could spend Bonilla's $6-ish million however they wanted, and then when he was in his 40s and retired and maybe his bank account could use the fresh influx, he and the Mets would be back in business together. They haggled a bit on terms, and here's where they landed: Bonilla leaves for nothing, now, as in, right this minute—GTFO—but starting in 2011, the Mets agree to pay him precisely $1,193,248.20 every July 1 for 25 years, until 2035, when he would be 72 years old. For the rest of his life, basically. That's a grand total of $29.8 million, which is a lot more than $5.9 million. In exchange for waiting a decade to collect a penny, he was asking for an additional $24 million. It was an easy call for the Wilpon family. Their investment portfolio was booming. Their money guy was killing it. They could free up room in their budget and go get their front-line starter, and all they had to do was bankroll Bonilla's retirement. The Mets said: Where do we sign? Bonilla said: Where do I sign? Includes a little Hampton-bashing to make JCL happy. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-03-16/bobby-bonilla-contract-was-good-for-baseball-s-new-york-metshttps://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-03-16/bobby-bonilla-contract-was-good-for-baseball-s-new-york-mets

Sports Illustrated bestows its blessing and hopefully not curse on your highest-profile 2021 Met.

For those who claim Kevin McReynolds lacked moxie.

Nick Markakis has retired.

Swoboda mentioned living in Syosset in his 2019 memoir Here's the Catch. Nothing about the South Shore.

Norm Sherry, catcher for your 1963 Mets, 89, on March 8. https://www.mlb.com/news/norm-sherry-ex-catcher-manager-dies-at-89https://www.mlb.com/news/norm-sherry-ex-catcher-manager-dies-at-89

You hear “dead arm” and you're told it's nothing. You here “sore arm” and you're told we'll see. Not a sore arm here, per se, but soreness is in play.

All players participating in Mets major league camp, please step forward. Not so fast there... RHP Matt Allan, RHP Oscar De La Cruz, RHP Ryley Gilliam, RHP J.T. Ginn, RHP Harol González, RHP Trevor Hildenberger, RHP Tylor Megill, RHP Stephen Nogosek, RHP Marcel Rentería, RHP Jared Robinson and LHP Tom Windle. Catcher Francisco Álvarez, OF Pete Crow-Armstrong, INF Brett Baty, OF Drew Ferguson, INF Ronny Mauricio, Catcher Nick Meyer, Catcher Hayden Senger and INF Mark Vientos.

Your New York Mets report RHP Franklyn Kilome, RHP Sean Reid-Foley and LHP Thomas Szapucki have been optioned to the Triple-A roster.

Sam McWilliams walks three, follows with three deep-count outs to close.

Though “he was good in Korea” comes off as the baseball equivalent of “my girlfriend in Canada,” Seattle Mariner Chris Flexen is making the most of it. When baseball came to a halt last spring, the Mariners were still in Arizona. Many of their professional scouts were on the road, watching high school and college players. Soon enough, though, everyone was back home. There were zero games to watch, to scout and to write reports on. At least not stateside. “We found ourselves with a scouting staff that didn't have a lot to do. Our guys were dying to work. They were desperate to do something … to feel like they were making an impact,” said Mariners assistant general manager Justin Hollander. “So rather than sit around, we had video of KBO (Korea Baseball Organization) and the NPB (Nippon Professional Baseball) games that had already started.” What were the Mariners looking for, exactly? Well, that was sort of the beauty of going through this exercise: They didn't know, which was completely fine. The performances (and data) would shape their interest. When you're looking under rocks, you have to sift through a lot of basalt in hopes of finding a ruby. “We asked our pro scouting staff to go through all the video and look for U.S.-born players who had gone over there and foreign-born players who may have come over for the first time, just to get a sense of who were the guys we wanted to track and also monitor all season,” Hollander said. Flexen certainly fit that mold. He had an 8.07 ERA in parts of three seasons with the Mets (2017-2019) and had gone to Korea with the hopes, really, of rebuilding his resume in case the big leagues came calling again. Pitching for Doosan, Flexen didn't just find his big breaking ball — a pitch that got a lot of positive reviews and awkward swings — in Korea, but he also found himself as a pitcher. Across the board, his stuff jumped. Flexen posted a 132-to-32 strikeout-to-walk ratio, saw a bump in his velocity and had a 28 percent strikeout rate, which caught the eyes of the Mariners. And because of the pandemic, the Mariners could allocate more of their scouting resources than in a typical year to evaluate players like Flexen. That led to more eyeballs and opinions and, the Mariners believe, better decision-making. “This was born out of opportunity. Before (the pandemic), we may have had two or three looks, mostly analytical. But we would not have had the breadth of different evaluators take a look at him like we did,” Hollander said. “Between those early-season reports, midseason reports and end-of-season reports, I want to say we had six reports on Chris from last year from different evaluators. Then, at the end of the season, we were able to run our analytical work on the NPB and the KBO, and Chris popped in both of those lenses.” https://theathletic.com/2422823/2021/03/09/finding-flexen-how-scouting-the-kbo-led-the-mariners-to-sign-the-revamped-starter/https://theathletic.com/2422823/2021/03/09/finding-flexen-how-scouting-the-kbo-led-the-mariners-to-sign-the-revamped-starter/

Dillon Gee, not on Sesame Street, but a good bit nonetheless.

Jose Martinez won't be around for a while.

Rheal Cormier, 53, from cancer.

The black unis were officially retired for the 50th anniversary 2012 season. Still, the home all black top version was worn twice in 2012. I guess ending bad habits is hard to do. They were worn on June 3, 2012, probably at John Franco's request as that was John Franco Day -- and the Mets celebrated Franco's induction into their HOF. The all-black home tops were also worn on July 21, 2012. Edgardo Alfonzo bobblehead day. As with Franco's big night, it was thematically on point. They were also worn once or twice in 2013 and 2014, but right now, I can't figure out exactly when and I'm not putting in the time to get those answers. I don't believe they've been worn since 2012. As with bat flips, pro or con, the occasional return of black eludes me as a hot button issue. Would be fine with me if ThrowBlack Friday became a thing. Wouldn't bother me if we never saw them again except in highlight form.

=kcmets post_id=57500 time=1615085069 user_id=53] Is there ever going to be a game on TV or one to DVR?

Jake Odorizzi, no longer a Met target, lands with Astros.

=batmagadanleadoff post_id=57453 time=1614979696 user_id=68] We should ask that Greg to make the same chart, but going in reverse order, as if the Mets last game was the first and the first game, last. Then, Duda and Hundley and Oledud and Conforto would've all made the list at some point. Alonso, too.