G-Fafif

Brock Pemberton, sipper of mid-'70s cups of coffee, passed away last week. His family moved to southern California in 1968 where it was the wildest of times and the best of times (with burning leaves). Brock graduated from Marine High School in 1972. At that time he earned co-player of the year in California for baseball and was drafted with the New York Mets in the 6th round. He played in the minor leagues from 1972-1974 during his Triple AAA season he won the Golden Glove award. He played 1 year in the Majors and then became player/coach for the Mecon Georgia Peaches Triple AAA Club. Brock found his passion in New Mexico working as a Professional Landscaping and Commercial Irrigation Supervisor at State Parks, State and Federal Indian Reservations and Colleges. Brock was a free spirit. He loved the outdoors, fishing, hunting and gardening. He was also a fabulous baker and cook. He was married for 22 years and moved to Ardmore, OK in June of 2011.

Best of all, he vastly preferred baseball to fooball. “More fooball! Oh shit! Fucking bullshit… unfuckingbelievable…baseball, that’s what I want to watch. I don’t wanna watch fucking fooball on the plane Fuck! Fooball, fooball, fooball.”

That's a good UMDB look!

Brandon's out of the boot, but likely to start the season on the DL.

Refused to take it off for years, apparently.

Let Marlins back into a blowout in his first week, never got it together thereafter. Good night, funnyman.

His last Met AB produced a key PH in the only Met World Series win. Nice way to go out.

Word from Facebook Baseball Player Passings page, citing Jim Gosger, as a source, is Kevin Collins died today, Feb. 20, in Fla. Was a Met at 19; at 22 he was the only MLBer sent to the Expos to secure Donn Clendenon. RIP.

One particularly great moment for Phillips as a Met that I was fortunate enough to be in attendance for early in the star-cross d September of 1998. RIP to someone who goes far too young.

Starting pitchers, particularly of the left-handed variety (Leiter, Hampton, Gl@v!ne, Niese), seem to have a knack for not so subtly letting it be known it wasn't their fault when things don't go well. Even if Niese absolutely believes taking that start in July and intermittently getting extra rest is what brought him down -- even if he's absolutely correct in his assessment -- it's rarely a good look to say it out loud. He said his piece the same day Duda said "my bad" for the lousy throw home in Game Five. Nothing about the noise of the crowd or the blur of shirts in the stands or the demands on his time in the postseason or the wear and tear from having to play several extra weeks. I appreciated the accountability. I'd have appreciated a better throw, of course, but you can't have everything.

Pd9oTGr_1DA In introducing the trailer to his 1986 feature film debut She's Gotta Have It, Spike Lee indicates his diehard baseball loyalties, and did I mention the year the movie was released?

Jon Niese blames sucking in second half last year on everybody and everything but himself (though this could be from any thread in any recent year).

Y'know that bunch of bananas you bought that went from inedibly green to sadly brown without ever being delectably yellow when you actually wanted one? Parnell was briefly a top banana, but spent a lot of time working out the kinks on either end of ripeness. High point: First half of 2013, when I thought (for a spell) he might get an All-Star nod considering it was going on in his home park. Finished up the ten-inning nose-bleed one-hitter for Harvey in early May. Saved three of the five games during the week the Mets swept four from the MFYs. Low point: The temptation is to say Opening Day 2014, when he let the save and his season get away (sure he's lost a few miles off his fastball, but he'll be fine), but sadder was his inability to contribute to his first extended pennant race a year later. Wasn't bad as a setup man until late July, but when he couldn't do it anymore, he really couldn't do it anymore. Lasting image: That expression of his that indicated he was certain something somewhere was about to go very wrong. Maybe it comes from being part of a family of firefighters.

Some fine work being done at the Shea Bridge Report.

Thoughtful, non-amneisac piece from Ted Berg. If the particular circumstances of my life and career were different, I might be shocked or angered by the news, or I’d be right there with all those joking about how anyone could be so stupid as to continue taking steroids after already getting popped for them twice in one year. I mean… how could anyone be so stupid? But the particular circumstances of my life and career include six years covering the Mets exclusively and three more covering them fairly frequently, and as such, I’ve dealt with Mejia a bunch of times. I hardly know him personally and I really am not qualified to speak to his intellect or his character, but he certainly never seemed particularly dumb or terribly evil. Unlike a lot of Dominican kids, Mejia didn’t even like baseball growing up. He shined shoes for $8 a day at a cafe in Santo Domingo, and prided himself on earning money without resorting to pickpocketing like some of his friends did. As detailed by Brian Costa at NJ.com in 2010, Mejia took up baseball only after learning that his countryman Pedro Martinez had signed a four-year, $53 million free-agent deal with the Mets in 2004. Mejia started playing baseball to make money, then, by getting himself banned, left about $1 million in prorated 2016 salary on the table, money he would have earned upon his return from suspension no matter how he performed. The Mets signed Mejia as an amateur in 2007. Armed with preternatural movement on his fastball, he blitzed through the low levels of the minor leagues. I first met him when he was a 19-year-old in Class AA Binghamton in 2009. I don’t remember much about our conversation, except this: While many of Mejia’s Spanish-speaking teammates on the B-Mets spoke to me with a coach translating, Mejia — only a couple of years after he was shining shoes for a living — insisted on conducting the interview in English without a translator because he was dedicated to learning the language. He spoke it haltingly, but seemed determined to do it well, and drawn to the spotlight much in the same way Matt Harvey would be while coming through the same system a couple of years later. And now you’re telling me that same guy, driven enough to want to speak English in an interview despite no pressure from me or his team or anyone besides himself to do so, is so reckless as to ruin his career by choosing to take steroids three times in the same freaking year. It’s impossible to rationalize.

On the positive (and I don't mean testing) side, a few things stick with me: --His comeback from elbow oblivion in the summer of 2013 as a starting pitcher, when after the breakout of Harvey and the debut of Wheeler, Mejia's sudden success indicated that there really might be something to this pitching depth we'd been hearing about. --The one-night controversy when he did that reeling in the last out of a rare win over the Nationals in 2014. It was supposed to get Washington mad. Eff them, I thought. I liked the kid's moxie. --The planned back end of the 2015 bullpen, when it briefly came into focus, looked like it was gonna work: Mejia in the 7th, Parnell in the 8th, Familia in the 9th. Three closers, no waiting. --Jenrry's last accomplishment was stranding Jimmy Rollins on third in the Sunday game against the Dodgers in late July, the one that began with the Mets breaking Greinke's scoreless streak and ended with Uribe driving in the winning run in the tenth. Mejia was the winning pitcher that day. It was, pre-Cespedes, arguably the biggest Met victory of the season to date. There's no getting around the "why do you think they call it dope?" aspect of his career, but he was Familia before Familia became Familia (if markedly more stressful to watch), and in the context of the development of a contender, he played an important role. Parts of five seasons as a Met, covering six years, it's hard to believe he's only 26, younger than Harvey and deGrom.

30 Granderson 29 deGrom 28 Cespedes 27 Familia 26 Harvey 25 Murphy 24 Duda 23 d'Arnaud 22 Flores 21 Syndergaard 20 Wright 19 Colon 18 Niese 17 Tejada 16 Lagares 15 Conforto 14 Robles 13 Clippard 12 Plawecki 11 Johnson 10 Uribe 9 Matz 8 Cuddyer 7 Gilmartin 6 Nieuwenhuis 5 Reed 4 C. Torres 3 Campbell 2 Blevins 1 Verrett This was a lot more fun to rank than the years that preceded it. On FAFIF, I chose Cespedes as team MVP, for reasons you can guess (and read if you're interested). Here, understanding the mission is a little different, Granderson seemed the most reasonable choice to top the chart. He was the only everyday player who was never nudged nor absent from his position and he got better as the year went along. DeGrom came in second in deference to not just how good he was but how important starting pitching was to this team. Despite Cespedes's shall we say limited 2015 Mets tenure, his impact was ginormous to the point of legendary. I've never known what to do with closers exactly, but having seen what not having a reliable one can do to a team made me value Familia's pre-World Series contribution that much more. On a pennant-winning team whose trajectory was in ascent very early, middling or worse for a long time and then out of sight in August and the first half of September, I found it challenging to weigh big moments versus soaking up playing time, the latter of which isn't meant as derisive. Those who contributed mightily in the ascendant moments tended to get a little more love. It got Jerry Blevins 2 points, for goodness sake, and he wasn't around nearly as much as Eric Campbell or (more damningly) Michael Cuddyer. The one guy I could not get an experiential handle on was Erik Goeddel. I know he had nice numbers, I don't remember him notably blowing up at a notably inopportune time (even if his one postseason appearance was nightmarish for him) but I also can't place him in the 2015 narrative. Guys like Carlyle and Alvarez, though they don't appear here, made an impression because without them, this or that key game would have been lost. Erik didn't quite in my mind, which is why I gave what could have been his spot to Verrett, who was asked to do something specific -- give Harvey a breather in Colorado -- and did it impeccably.

His arrival was yuuuge, to put it in the contemporary political vernacular. Lost, perhaps, in the excitement over Cespedes and giddiness over Flores and the power barrage that buried the Nationals as July became August and second place became first place was how enormous the bullpen was in the series against Washington: 8 2/3 innings, 0 R. Clippard was a big part of that performance and, more generally, the stabilization of the bullpen. But his last two batters as a Met, in Game Four against the Royals, will stay with me in unwanted fashion for quite a while. That's why, though I wish him well, I'm not sorry to see him go.

Carlos Tsuris! His presence on the mound usually indicated there was some trouble bubbling, often preceding his entrance into a game. Not only admirable but durable. Once he was elevated from Vegas in June of 2013, he never left the active roster...until the postseason of 2015, as his luck would have it. Became the first Met reliever to score a run in extra innings in 27 years.

On HBO's new animated series Animals, two "PDNY" horses discuss the unlikelihood that there'll ever be a Mets parade in which they can march, while one of them remembers his grandfather was part of the '86 Mets parade (and that Doc Gooden offered him "blow"...which would be tough, considering he's not there, but here I am, analyzing a talking cartoon horse's penchant for accuracy). Came across this gem... UEicZnTrWYA ...via Jonathan Schwartz's annual Super Bowl Sunday Salute to Baseball, The St. Louis Browns, from 1972, by Skip Battin. Pertinent lyric: "The St. Louis Browns were a baseball team. And they lost more than the Mets could ever dream." Former presidential candidate Chris Christie invoked his desire to order a pizza, open a beer and "watch the Mets" during the Saturday night debate in which he devoured Marco Rubio. At this point, the context hardly matters.

Perhaps some of you recall the word on Doc during his prodigy years was not only was he a good hitter for a pitcher, but he insisted he could hit even better from the left side, except management didn't want him exposing his right elbow. Maybe you even remember that on the final day of the 1993 season, Doc, who'd been on the shelf for more than a month, came off the bench to pinch-hit a triple in Miami (a game, fittingly enough, that endured a rain delay in the ninth inning and was eventually called, putting a perfect capper on a perfect year). FYI, this was the game. Now, does anybody remember if on that occasion Doc was finally allowed to hit from the left side? I didn't see the game (I was out of town) but could swear I heard it referred to at some point in the years that followed as the time they let Doc hit lefty. I can find no evidence that I'm not imagining this, not in game stories, UMDB memories, career stats distinguishing this AB from all others or from the 22-year-old memory of one eyewitness I queried (who didn't kibosh it, he just didn't remember). It's quite possible it didn't happen, but I can't shake the idea that it did. Why I wanted to know this in the first place barely matters to me anymore. I just want to know definitively. Any morsel beyond "I don't know, either" is greatly appreciated.

What an awesome time capsule. The most diligent beat guy then, the most diligent beat guy now.

[fimg=400:1e627avz]http://c7.alamy.com/comp/DJW199/20-april-2010-new-york-mets-right-fielder-jeff-francoeur-12-laughts-DJW199.jpg[/fimg:1e627avz] Bay, Francoeur, Pagan I liked this combo for a few weeks.

Benjamin Grimm wrote: In an earlier episode, Jake mentioned how once Mr. Met came to his birthday party and did number 2 in his bathroom. Sources say lots of misters did No. 2 in the MFY bathroom.

Mets Pop Culture Alert: Matt Harvey visits Late Night With Seth Myers in the next hour or so.