G-Fafif

It gets correct early here. 1. 2. 3. 4. Cleon Jones 5. Bud Harrelson 6. 7. 8. 9. Darryl Strawberry 10. Dwight Gooden 11. 12. 13. 14. David Wright 15. 16. 17. Daniel Murphy

The Mets' awesomeness starts at the scouting stage when one of their men with a clipboard, a stopwatch and a keen eye for talent signs an amateur player who will eventually become an All-Star for the Mets. This has happened 17 times in the 53-year history of the franchise. How about naming, one at a time, a purely homegrown Met All-Star? 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

Benjamin Grimm wrote: G-Fafif wrote: These Colon 69 and 72 cards are even better than the ones Topps for him 45 and 42 years ago. Seriously great. Thanks! It occurred to me that I should have made a 1973 card for Colon; opportunities to make a card for a player from the year in which he was born are going to become fewer and fewer unless I move into the 1980s, which I doubt that I'll do. Oh, and that's a 1970 card on the far left, not a 1969. I sometimes instinctively think of the 1970 set as 1969 because I loved reading the backs when I first got them and learning more about the previous season, which was one I couldn't get enough of in the immediate rearview mirror. But, yeah, duh, of course, slaps forehead. Good point about birth years of players and the card sets that welcomed them into the world. Hopefully Bartolo will offer up more opportunities, via bat, arm and baserunning legs. On behalf of posterity, thank you for fixing Lucas's June bona fides.

It's also possible Jack Fisher wandered into Shea in a fugue state in 1969, not knowing what uniform, cap or stadium he was in and the Topps photographer just happened to snap him looking totally lost.

batmagadanleadoff wrote: G-Fafif wrote: Benitez in '03 was super token. I should've remembered. That was the year Benitez kind of imploded at the end of his Mets run. I was at one of AB's last games as a Met, where he walked four batters and threw a wild pitch all in the 9th inning to blow a save against the MFY's. The Mets lost that one. I felt bad for the guy, watching that meltdown. Mrs. Fafif was experiencing a stress-induced indigestion issue that took her out of bed and into the living room to sit up for the conclusion of that game. Through discomfort that would lead us to the emergency room a few hours hence, she watched the scene you describe and earnestly asked, "Why don't they just get rid of him already?" I'm not convinced her brief hospitalization and Benitez's Subway Series swan song were wholly unrelated.

Wheeler 3.0 Recker 2.5 Nieuwenhuis 2.0 Familia 1.5 Tejada 0.5 Granderson 0.5

Youngblood was batting .359 at the "break" in 1981 (the strike-enforced break) and didn't have quite enough ABs to qualify for the league lead, but they needed somebody. I seem to recall Dave Kingman and Neil Allen seeming like legit candidates, albeit to my starry 18-year-old eyes.

Benitez in '03 was super token. That was the first year of the current selection system wherein the players pick along with the fans and whoever isn't accounted for after that falls to the manager's prerogative. Dusty Baker (managing the N.L. in a Cubs uniform, of all things) took Benitez, who wasn't used...and then the Mets sent him packing before the "second half" commenced. AB was a helluva lot better than is generally credited for, but at no point in 2003 did his performance exude All-Star stellarness. He went with 21 saves, 7 blown saves and the last of his goodwill long expended. If Piazza hadn't gotten hurt in May, chances are he would've been elected per usual and nobody would've thought to have named Armando. Also super token was Ed Kranepool in 1965: 7 HR 37 RBI .287 BA at the break. Eerily similar to Murph right now: 7 HR 35 RBI .294 BA. But leading the league in hits is leading the league in hits. And there's nobody else. A couple more wins for Niese (no matter what one thinks of the value of pitcher's wins) and a healthier shoulder and I think he would've/should've gotten the nod. All that said, good for Murph. Homegrown kid turned vet before our eyes, dates back to Shea, carried the Mets name to the White House, epitome of what you'd call a team man. I'm very happy that for the rest of his days he will be referred to as All-Star Daniel Murphy. To be joined in Minneapolis by former teammate Frankie Rodriguez, former systemmate Carlos Gomez and guy who would've been a Met had not something happened Scott Kazmir.

d'Arnaud 1.5 Lagares 1.0 Edgin 1.0 Colon 0.5 Granderson 0.5 Abreu 0.5 Nieuwenhuis 0.5 Murphy 0.5

David lives! Campbell sits! Granderson-9 Murphy-4 Wright-5 Abreu-7 Duda-3 Lagares-8 d�Arnaud-2 Tejada-6 Colon-1

Sighted 26 years after the fact: Kid in hardware store wears adjustable Mets cap in hardware store in the unfortunately existing Arthur 2: On The Rocks (1988).

d'Arnaud 2.5 Campbell 2.0 Torres 2.0 Duda 1.5 Murphy 1.0 Black 0.5 Abreu 0.5

These Colon [crossout:k3g5nq67]69[/crossout:k3g5nq67] 70 and [crossout:k3g5nq67]72[/crossout:k3g5nq67] 73 cards are even better than the ones Topps for him 45 and 42 years ago. Seriously great. Lil quibble: Duda couldn't have hit a w/o HR at Philadelphia unless he was a Phillie.

http://www.uni-watch.com/2014/07/03/mlb-releases-2014-all-star-game-caps/ All-Star game caps. For the game, not BP. Based on the Twins batting helmet design of 35 or so years ago, which I had no idea was that iconic. Pretty sure it's an homage to selling more stuff.

Black 1.0 deGrom 0.5

For the first time since September 1, 2013 (62-73), the New York Mets (37-48) are precisely eleven games below .500.

Remember David Wright? Before he went off to rest his aching shoulder, he was a hot-hitting son of a gun (as reflected in his recent Schaefer PotW win). Howard Megdal spoke to David about how he got out of that horrible slump that preceded the streak (Bobby Abreu chimed in, too). Apparently lot goes into hitting a baseball when you haven't been hitting one. NEW YORK -- David Wright, who recently snapped the longest slump of his career, didn't feel like he was in a slump, if you only evaluated his process. "A lot of times when I go into slumps, which are inevitable, I feel very uncomfortable in the box," Wright told me in the Mets clubhouse, prior to Wednesday night's game against the Athletics. "I don't see the ball very well, I swing at a lot of pitches outside the zone. Therefore I strike out a lot. "You know, this last time, it wasn't like that," he continued. "I felt comfortable. I wasn't getting the results that I wanted. I was having some decent at-bats, without results, so maybe I started tinkering with some things I shouldn't have, instead of just riding it out for, you know, two series, seven or eight days, just riding it out. But I think maybe by tweaking some things, changed some things I shouldn't have changed, I might have prolonged it, maybe dug myself a deeper hole." Wright hadn't been hitting with his customary power for the Mets, but he still posted a .304/.349/.415 line through May 28. Then, from May 29 to June 16, Wright hit .130/.256/.159. The guy who started the year with a career .888 OPS saw his 2014 mark drop to .678. His peripheral numbers back up the assertion that his process wasn't broken. Even through that awful 18-game skid, Wright still walked 11 times and struck out only 16 times in 82 plate appearances, in line with his career rates in both areas. "Right, that was one of the things I checked for," Wright said. "We have a lot of numbers guys here, so I'll check for: Am I chasing pitches outside the zone? What am I doing? And my chase rate was about normal for what it's been throughout my career. So that gave me comfort, at least, knowing I'm not getting myself out." Still, expecting Wright to sit still in the face of poor results is probably silly. He may not be quite the same person he was in the minor leagues, when the Mets noticed he was hitting far better on the road than at home, eventually determining that Wright was tiring himself out with extra batting practice in his home park. But he's just not the patient sort, and it's fair to assume that at age 31, he never will be. It's worked out pretty well for him so far. Through age 31, Wright has the seventh-best OPS+ of any third baseman, ever (minimum 1,000 games). Of the six ahead of him, five are Hall of Famers: Eddie Mathews, Wade Boggs, Mike Schmidt, Home Run Baker and George Brett. The sixth, Chipper Jones, should join them in Cooperstown soon. "Well, I know one thing. I know he's been in slumps throughout his career, everybody does," Mets manager Terry Collins said prior to Wednesday's game. "But he went after this one pretty hard. About three weeks ago he started. He was here early, he was in the video room constantly, comparing swings from the past to now, working in the cage, trying to get it worked out." Wright seemed to question his own hyperactive approach to troubleshooting, and Collins endorsed it. Veteran Mets outfielder Bobby Abreu came down somewhere in the middle. "He's a hard worker," Abreu said, sitting in front of his locker. "He knows how to make adjustments. He's hit for his entire career. So it's going to be about getting back to his normal approach. He'd been making good contact, so it was just a question of, sometime soon, the balls are going to be getting down. And in St. Louis, he became the same guy we all know." Abreu said something else that other major league hitters point out as well. There's a moment that comes before the point when the balls start falling in (or flying out of the park) when you know, as a hitter, that you've latched onto something. "You see it when things start to happen," Abreu said. "For some reason, it happens sometimes when there are runners in scoring position, and everything starts to turn around your way � You've just been working on the field, trying to do everything right. And it's just like a little click, that turns around everything." Abreu smiled as he said it. Still, both Wright and Abreu, with 4,107 career hits between them, acknowledged that actually getting the results on the field is what makes you feel truly unburdened. "You can tell yourself all you want that the process itself is what's important," Wright said. "But if you don't get the results � this game is based around results. So I think that's the thing that gives you the confidence." Abreu echoed this. "This is a different emotion, because everything is starting to go your way, the way you want it to be," Abreu said. "You just enjoy every single part. Every single part, you just enjoy, you just be a part of all the good things that happen to you." For the manager, that click isn't audible. He needs to see the results to know the slump is over. "I think it just started to pay off in St. Louis," Collins said of Wright, "when he hit those balls, his bat stayed in the zone longer, hit more balls on the barrel." For his part, Wright appreciated that Collins gave him the space to figure things out on his own. "I think sometimes, it works against you, too, if people start talking to you about this and that," Wright said. "Because, you know, you never get called into the manager's office when you're going well. You never get called to the manager's office to have him say, 'You know, you're swinging the bat really well.' So when you get called to the manager's office, it's usually something not so good. So I think Terry does a good job of giving you your distance." Collins probably had an easier time making that call with Wright, of course, since he's hardly in need of motivation. "I think it all came from that he worked extra hard to get to that point," Collins said. "'Cause it's not easy. It's not easy. And when you're that good, you get in a slump, you're bound and determined to get out of it. And the great ones? They get out of it. They figure out a way. And he figured out a way." Still, Wright smiled and shook his head sadly, when asked if he'd learned anything from this slump and how it ended, when it came to avoiding the next one, or even if he could help himself when it came to pushing back against the on-field results. "No. I mean, I always tell myself to just stay the course, just go with the ride," Wright said. "It's a roller coaster ride, the whole season's not going to go the way you want it to. And you always tell yourself that. But when you get in the midst of it, you want to do something proactive to get yourself out of it."

Chris Young is the Mets' clubhouse DJ, so that's worth $7.5 million. Tim Rohan reports. PITTSBURGH � After every Mets home win, the players pour into the clubhouse, bobbing their heads as the hip-hop song �Get Like Me,� by David Banner, thumps through the speakers. For 15 minutes, music blares and the mood is light. Then the clubhouse is opened to the news media, and the players go their separate ways. Chris Young coordinates the party. He is the Mets� unofficial disc jockey, meaning he puts on music before most games and after the Mets win. It is a role he takes seriously and, his teammates say, is quite good at. In his tumultuous first season with the Mets, this is how Young has found a way to fit in. Last off-season, perhaps unknown to the Mets� front office, the position was open and still somewhat undefined. From 2005 to 2008, the team�s manager at the time, Willie Randolph, apparently influenced by his years as a Yankee, did not allow music in the clubhouse, said David Wright, the longest-tenured Met. Under Randolph�s successor, Jerry Manuel, the ban was lifted, and it has remained that way during Terry Collins�s tenure. Jose Reyes, now with Toronto, used to play music at his locker, Wright said. Justin Turner, a backup infielder, then took over the job without any official designation. He seemed to be well liked in the clubhouse, but the Mets let him go in the off-season; he signed with the Los Angeles Dodgers. About three weeks into spring training, a few players milled about the clubhouse, asking if anyone had an iPod with him. Young eagerly volunteered. It so happened that Young was qualified. He grew up on hip-hop in Houston, and in his more than seven years in the majors, he came to appreciate other genres, even techno and country when the mood struck. He had about 4,000 songs on his computer and was constantly updating his iPod with playlists. �I�m the guy with the loud music, singing in the car,� Young said. When he made his debut with the Arizona Diamondbacks in 2006, he was too young to play music. He had to wait a couple of years, he said, until he had enough standing. In 2010, he hit 27 homers, drove in 91 runs and made the All-Star team. But as the team D.J., he played hip-hop every day and ignored most requests. �In Arizona, I did it wrong,� he said, shaking his head. Young�s production declined the next two seasons, and before the 2013 season, he was traded to Oakland. There, he said, Coco Crisp, a veteran who had established himself as a team leader, controlled the music. At the plate, too, Young looked out of place. He batted .200, with 12 home runs and 93 strikeouts. This off-season, he was looking for a place to redeem himself, to rediscover his power swing, and he figured he would play every day with the Mets. Yet nothing has seemed to go right for him. He spent about two weeks in April on the disabled list and started his season in a deep slump. At home, he was roundly booed after every poor at-bat. Even in Pittsburgh on Friday, a handful of fans booed him. Collins had essentially started benching Young, who is hitting ,203 this season, against right-handed pitchers, and the Mets had reportedly discussed releasing him. But Young had some hope. Last week, at spacious Citi Field, he crushed three home runs in two games, two off right-handers. �I was really happy for Chris,� Collins said. �He�s a first-class guy.� Young has had an easier time with his responsibilities in the clubhouse, now that he has learned from his mistakes. He actively seeks out requests. After wins, he plays what he called �Lil Jon-style music.� Before day games, he plays something lighter. He has noticed that everyone seems to enjoy hip-hop like Notorious B.I.G. and Outkast. Michael Jackson Sundays have been a big hit, too. �I try to play something different every day, something that appeals to everybody as much as possible,� Young said. �Doesn�t matter if I like the music. Normally, once you get it going, people aren�t really hearing it too much anyway.� Young understands that music can enhance team chemistry, setting the tone before games and reflecting the players� moods after. Before Friday�s game, a few players sang along with the Chris Brown song �Loyal.� �It�s easy these days,� Young said. �You used to have to create a playlist and think of songs. Now, all you need is Pandora. Pay that monthly subscription. Don�t have to worry about commercials. Just put it on a station people want, and let it roll.�

Dirk Hayhurst writes about the strange things managers like Robin Ventura say and why it kinda works. I doubt that Cubs manager Rick Renteria remembers the day that, back during his minor league managing tenure, he told my High-A team that our opponents, the San Jose Giants, bent us over and stuck it up our collectives asses. I remember. As a matter of fact, it's hard to forget when a man as relentlessly positive as Renty loses his cool and, in lieu of the normal postgame chitchat, pounds his fist violently into his open palm screaming, "Boom, boom, boom! No grease!" That's right, No grease, because if the image of getting sodomized by the other team wasn't stark enough to paint a picture of how you badly you've failed, knowing they didn't even respect you enough to use lube should drive the point the rest of the way. No pun intended. Ironically, none of us thought too hard about Renty's words at the time. We didn't dwell on the symbolism or substance. The point of the lecture wasn't the words themselves, it was that we played bad, beat ourselves and that the other team had no reason to respect us because we didn't respect us. We all sat at our lockers, heads down, tails between our legs, whimpering at Renty's words, not because we necessarily agreed with the analogies used to describe us, but because our master was angry and he only gets angry when we do wrong. Days later, when the team righted its bad play, we thought about the words more. The meaning, the implication, even the humor -- Did he really scream no grease? I mean, who on God's green earth uses grease for what he was implying? Goose grease? Axle grease? That's hardcore, bro. How could a man yell something that silly? Stranger still, how could something that silly be so impactful? I mean, we were playing better because of it. You may find this odd, but very few managers talk to their teams on a regular basis. They much prefer to be seen and not heard. Managers represent the ultimate authority on a baseball team and, when they're yelling, it doesn't really matter what they're saying -- it's bad. If they're yelling at you, you played bad. If they're yelling at someone else, they played bad. It's a simple system. But it's a system that can very easily break down if overemployed. The baseball season is 162 games long. That can make for a lot of yelling. A manager must pick and chose his times to put down a hard line. If he does it too frequently, the players will actually start to hear the words. They'll consider and measure them against their own feelings instead of simply taking them as a psychological whipping. They'll learn to resent those words. If a manager picks and chooses his times, however, he can call out, challenge and motivate the player and still keep weight behind his rants -- even if the rants are ridiculous. Recently Robin Ventura, the skipper for the White Sox, said, "Baseball's tough. You've got to put your big-boy pants on and go out there and win a game. That's a fact." Duh. Well, duh in theory. I mean, profit sharing has helped out loads of teams, amiright? And the new competitive balance option kinda rewards your club for taking a big steamy pile in your big boy pants, just to ensure the best draft picks are a possibility. But, for argument's sake, let say "yes," the goal of every game is to win. But big boy pants, really? Strip out the machismo aspect of baseball and its loving obsession with euphemisms and you've got the manager of a multimillion dollar group of elite athletes saying that the business essentially boils down to whether his group of super humans (with Adam Dunn playing the Hulk) is willing to put on their big boy pants and win a game. Big boy pants = winning. Which is crazier: that a manager made such a comment believing it actually said something insightful about the game, or that his players believed it said something insightful about the game, nodded their heads, and rallied around it? If there is one thing my Kent State communications degree taught me it's that the definition of a thing is in the receiver, not the speaker. Case in point, Adam Eaton said that Ventura doesn't talk much, but when he does, players listen. Even if it's about their pants. That's not just Ventura and the Chi-Sox, that's all managers and player. Looking in from the outside, you might think pants to passion is just another fragment of evidence in the grand case to prosecute baseball for aiding and abiding idiots. But the truth is, managers are not professional monologue givers. They don't have a glass box in their office that holds inspirational speeches marked, "break in case of team inertia." What they have is a changing mass of men, with a changing mass of motivators, at all ranges of their careers, many of whom are making more money, have more time in the game, and more success than they do. They're supposed to lead them to victory anyway! Thus, mystery becomes a manager's best friend. It's ingrained in the player that the manager is a powerful force in his life. If the player signs a monster contract, that may change, but until then, it's in the best interest of the player to make the manager happy. The best thing the manager can do is show no indicators of what creates his happiness besides winning. The less the manager shows the player, the more the player is likely to be intimidated by the manager and do what he's told without thinking. Unless a manager is some kind of neurotic chatterbox, they're not going to address the team every night to discuss the granularities of winning and losing. Nor should they. The more words they throw out there, the more they show their humanity and a manager shouldn't be human. He should be the kind of person who says, "Put on your big boy pants before they bend you over and stick it up your ass with no grease," and the players should all be rushing to the training room to ask the clubby for a set of custom, Majestic brand big boy pants. Some managers get away with being more personable with their players. But these managers have shifted the ultimate authority from themselves to some other source to which they expertly control access. Joe Maddon, widely regarded as one of the best player's managers in baseball, is very personable. I went into his office once and came out with a list of books to read and suggestions on what wines and cheeses paired well. But he commands his locker room all the same because he is a master at manipulating a player's sense of pride and ego -- what it should look like, how champions behave, what young men want from the game and how to get it. He manipulates using less contrast and more paint colors than some managers, but the composition his players exist in is very much his, despite any similarities to the real world. During a 162-game schedule, the biggest opponent a player will face is not who's on the other side of the field. It's himself. More specifically, it's the little lapses in judgment, the unavoidable loss of focus, the inertia. One hundred sixty-two games means no individual game feels like it actually means anything at all. In fact, managers will often cite the long season truth as a reason for why a team should not care about a particular result. The number one postgame speech I heard from managers in my career, if I heard anything at all: "Get 'em tomorrow, boys." Another way of saying, "Stay calm until I tell you not to stay calm." Perhaps it would be better to think of a team's entire season like that of one pitcher's individual outing. You can't teach a pitcher how to pitch in the middle of an outing, and you can't teach a team how to play world-class baseball in the middle of a season. They must know these things going in. All you can do is keep it on the rails. And like a pitcher's outing, you only get so many mound visits, so many calls to the bullpen, so many chances to inspire, soothe or scare, or sermonize. You have to use them well, or manage in such a way that gets you more chances. The train is in motion, you can't overhaul it -- you can only bump it back on course with the crude instruments you've got. In my day, it was no grease. This week, it was big boy pants. Next week, who knows what the hell it will be. But the next ridiculous meant-to-inspire speech is coming, and when it does, it will work. Because the players want it to work, because baseball is a closed circle with its own language, meaning and values. And the best managers can use the values to shape and direct team -- just not too much, lest the team starts thinking about what is actually being said.

Jared Diamond had a nice article on this phenomenon last week. PITTSBURGH�In recent days, the Mets have taken to twirling towels over their heads in the dugout whenever one of their teammates gets a hit. That's how valuable every hit is for the Mets. Outfielder Curtis Granderson started the celebratory custom, inspired by his days as a child in the early 1990s watching the Chicago Bulls wave towels from the bench. It quickly caught on, and now the entire team does it�even the relief pitchers in the bullpen. "I guess every team needs some sort of gimmick now," team captain David Wright said. "I guess that's ours." There is just one problem: The towels are white. So now, whenever something good happens, it looks like the Mets are waving a white flag, an internationally recognized sign of surrender. Considering the Mets' place in the standings (battling for last with the Phillies) and their struggles to generate offense (they entered Friday 27th in the major leagues with a .238 team batting average), this ritualistic admission of defeat in the early innings might be a good way to speed up their impending misery. But even a squad as disappointing as the Mets wants to at least give the illusion of trying to put up a fight. Asked about the Mets' unorthodox and unintentionally pitiful choice of iconography, Wright insisted that the irony of the situation isn't lost on him. He had his doubts about using the white towels, but managed to reconcile them when he noticed that they are adorned with Gatorade logos. So "they're not exactly white." "Actually I thought about it, I looked at it, and I was like, 'Yeah, you know, white towels, I'm not sure,'" Wright said. "But there's some color to it, so�" Backup catcher Anthony Recker rejected that rationale and offered a different, even more curious explanation, instead. "It's a metaphor," he said. "We're scoring runs, and now the other team should be waving the towel. We're saying, 'Hey, you guys need to wave the towel.'" Either way, the Mets seem content to go ahead with this as their unofficial rallying cry. And maybe that's OK. Dave Martucci is the former president the North American Vexillological Association, one of the world's largest groups dedicated to vexillology�the study of flags. In a telephone interview this week, he said the Mets shouldn't worry too much, since the white flag has only been used as a formal sign of surrender for about 300 years, a blip in human history. "The white flag is a long-standing thing," he said. "But not as long as some people think." From the late 1600s into the middle 1700s, the French military used white flags in its conflict with the British in North America. When the British army prevailed, Martucci said, its soldiers "began a campaign to honor a white flag brought to their lines as a symbol of holding their fire." "It was sort of basically a British insult to the French," he said. From there the tradition stuck, although Martucci emphasized that the white flag doesn't necessary represent surrender. More accurately, it means that one side wants to parley, or hold a discussion that could ultimately lead to a truce. To this day, the white flag continues to hold that connotation. Still, not the best message to send from the dugout. "If you showed up with a group of people with a white flag, in theory the other side should stop shooting at you," Martucci said. "I guess it depends on who you're up against." There is some good news for the Mets, however. White towels might have a negative association, but as infielder Eric Campbell explained, "we don't see it that way." Nor should they. Scot Guenter, a professor of American studies and a vexillologist at San Jose State University, said the Mets "don't see it as funny, as the meaning is contextual." Because the Mets wave the towels so aggressively, he said, they are clearly not surrendering. More important, Mets fans have come to recognize the white towels as a rallying symbol. Granderson, for instance, said that fans have started asking him to toss towels into the stands so they can wave them, too. "The dugout is the sacred place," Guenter said. "If someone's getting the white flag that was passed from where the players themselves are sitting, and the players are their heroes, then it means something," Still, it probably wouldn't hurt the Mets to consider rethinking the white towels and going with a blue or an orange set. Martucci said that "would be a lot better. It would make more sense." So if this keeps up, don't be surprised to see some colorful rally towels on sale at Citi Field in the near future. On the other hand, the Mets rank near the bottom of the major leagues in hits, so why bother.

Jim Brosnan, 84, Redlegs pitcher and Bouton before there was a Bouton when it came to the ballplayer diary.

Company softball teams are fading, says WSJ. Softball gives Patricia Thornton the rare excuse to get out of her Midtown Manhattan office early, where she works into the evening most days "power-lawyering," she says. As she and her colleagues took batting practice and waited for the opposing team to show last Thursday, a tougher opponent loomed one field over: 20-somethings playing kickball. The New York Corporate Athletic League in which Ms. Thornton plays had about 30 teams in 2008. Now it has eight. Summer has long been prime time for company softball leagues. They give workers a chance to relax outside the office, compete together for industry bragging rights and mingle with everyone from top executives to file clerks. But nationwide, fewer companies are choosing this traditional antidote to office drudgery. Despite its perks of fresh air, good times and an early exit from the office, company softball is an increasingly difficult sell, according to league commissioners and former players. From kickball to distance running, options have exploded as free time has shrunk, they say. Just 12% of U.S. organizations sponsor a company athletic team, down from 29% seven years ago, according to the Society for Human Resource Management. The Amateur Softball Association doesn't track corporate leagues, but says its adult-team registrations in 2013 had dropped 56% in 20 years. Jon Deutsch's @companysoftball Twitter feed is frozen on July 14, 2010. The coed team of employees from Richmond, Va., marketing firm Royall & Company disbanded after repeated struggles to coax players away from family commitments and other interests, Mr. Deutsch says. A spokeswoman for the company declined to comment. Graham Maloney is a partner at Greene Radovsky Maloney Share & Hennigh and the longtime commissioner of the San Francisco Lawyers Softball League. Over four decades, the league has helped melt tensions between teams of public defenders and district attorneys, as well as lawyers from competing firms, he says. But after peaking in the mid-1980s with 82 teams, the league is down to 21, despite the city's population of lawyers surging 65% in the same span. "We all think the current generation of younger lawyers who would have played softball grew up playing soccer and playing less baseball," says Mr. Maloney, who is 65. He says his profession's rising requirements for working hours also make lawyers less inclined to knock off early. Peter Eisenman of Eisenman Architects says the firm's standing in a softball league featuring prominent New York firms was so important in the 1980s and '90s that the sport "was part of our hiring process. We wanted the best architects and the best players." He recalled one employee who had played in the Boston Red Sox's minor-league system. Eisenman hasn't had a team for years. Most of its work is in Europe and the Middle East and its architects are more interested in the World Cup than in softball, Mr. Eisenman says. "I miss it," he says. Ancillary businesses are feeling the pinch. Alex Cosgrave, general manager of the Mad River Bar & Grille near New York's Central Park, says he's seeing fewer company teams coming in after games, and that team captains no longer toss their corporate cards on the bar and spring for the whole tab. As a result, per-player expenditures are about half what they were before the financial crisis, Mr. Cosgrave says. In recent years, competition has come from so-called sport and social clubs that appeared in the last 10 years in nearly every major and midsize city, offering a range of playground sports like Wiffle ball. At Richmond's River City Sports & Social Club, the club's mascot is Sudsy, a smiling-faced mug of beer hoisting another mug of beer. Its sales pitch is "a tall order of socializing with a splash of sports," owner Sean Small says. More than 6,000 people register for a River City team each year, mostly as individuals. Most sport and social clubs offer softball, but without the interpersonal risks of playing on a company team, says Galen Beers, executive director of the Sport and Social Industry Association. "I think if you're smart, you might think twice about getting too social with your co-workers," Mr. Beers says. "You want to not have to worry about what someone's going to say you did or said at your next company meeting." Some companies are even outsourcing their softball teams to sport and social clubs, or hiring them to organize activities such as volleyball tournaments, says Steve Stoloff, CEO of a San Diego sport and social club called VAVi. At some companies, softball teams have been replaced by broader health and wellness programs that emphasize inclusion, says Jeff Galloway, a 1972 Olympic runner who designed an eight-week fitness program for companies to prepare employees for 5-kilometer races. "There's no limit on this, and there's a limit to how many people can get involved on one of these [softball] teams," Mr. Galloway says. "There's also a skill threshold that's needed. There's no skill threshold in running and walking." Industrial softball leagues thrived in the early and mid-20th century as companies sponsored teams that generated publicity and boosted employee morale. As manufacturing jobs ebbed in the 1970s and '80s, leagues in white-collar fields like architecture and accounting grew. Now they're dwindling, too. The coed team at Verdasys, a Waltham, Mass., software firm, was a big part of the company's culture, employees said. The squad made photo cameos during the CEO's quarterly speeches and even steered Internet traffic: Late last year, Google first suggested "Verdasys softball" when people searched for the company. But after the 2013 season, the league Verdasys played in folded. The closest comparable league was about an hour away. Waltham city recreation supervisor Anna Connelly says the longtime corporate league was done in by an increase in work-at-home and flextime employees, younger people's interest in other activities and companies declining sponsorships over worries about worker liability. Verdasys team manager and team webmaster Andrew Wolan laments the lost camaraderie fostered by softball. "We don't have that connection anymore, that little silly thing you talk about on the side," he says. The website Mr. Wolan created and stuffed with statistical minutiae ("Rainbows observed: 2") remains a recruiting tool for the expanding company, which has about 150 employees. "I would say 50% of candidates who walk in the door have seen that website and comment on it," Verdasys chief marketing officer Connie Stack says. Its softball numbers may be down, but the New York Corporate Athletic League, where Ms. Thornton's team plays, isn't going quietly. Its basketball league is thriving. Last year it added Skee-ball, kickball, bocce and dodgeball. It promotes them on a separate "Play Big Apple" website with photos of grinning teammates and promises of free beer parties. "We're diversifying," league commissioner Steve Frenchman says. "It's what the people want."

Richard Sandomir dives deep into Lou Gehrig's speech as its 75th anniversary approaches. The speech has been dubbed, with some hyperbole, "baseball's Gettysburg address." The connection to Lincoln is strained, perhaps, but the speech is still so good and so concise that it suggests a ghostwriter, perhaps a pal like Fred Lieb of the Sporting News. There are many nice touches, and there is nothing hackneyed. Gehrig spoke of "grand men," "that wonderful fellow" and "that smart student of psychology." Three sentences begin with "When you have," emphasizing his message through parallel structure. Notice the short phrases that followed the dash in five sentences: "that's something," "it's a blessing" and "that's the finest I know." By breaking up each thought, he let his thankfulness linger, as if he were punctuating those thoughts with a "Wow!" In the last sentence, he returned to his misfortune, elevating his disease to a "tough break" yet still minimizing its severity. "The speech resonates, because it speaks to everyone who has suffered illness or lost a loved one," said Jonathan Eig, author of Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig, a 2005 biography. "Gehrig says we shouldn't think about ourselves and whatever troubles we might have. Instead, we should think about all the good fortunes we've had in life. To die is to lose everything, everyone we've loved, but he looks at it from another angle and says death helps him see all he has been blessed with -- his family, his friends, his teammates, his career. He chooses life. He chooses optimism." Newspapers did not provide transcripts of the speech. Gehrig was beloved, but no newspaper would have sent a stenographer in anticipation of a memorable speech. Eig's book includes a different version, patched together from newspaper accounts and newsreels, but the differences are not major, and Gehrig may have deviated from the text he'd prepared. In The New York Times, for example, John Drebinger seems to have mashed up the opening and closing of the speech, making the most memorable line less potent in the process: "You've been reading about my bad break for weeks now. But today I think I'm the luckiest man alive. I now feel more than ever that I have much to live for."

Figured out who the oddball guys were. Edgy yesterday linked to a piece I wrote about this in 2007. Thought I'd repost the protected guys portion, in which each players' place on the list was examined. Mind you, Tom had turned 39 the previous November 17, so he wasn�t quite in Cy Young trim any longer. Still, he had given the Mets a pretty good show in 1983, beginning with his triumphant walk in from the bullpen at Shea on Opening Day. The W-L was tepid (9-14 on a 68-94 club) but the ERA was respectable (3.55) and the 231 innings were hefty � led the team, in fact. Plus he was Tom Seaver, a Hall of Fame head attached to a capable arm linked to a stature second to none among New York Mets. �As soon as I got their list, I looked to see which kids they protected,� White Sox GM Roland Hemond said in Jack Lang�s The New York Mets: Twenty-Five Years of Baseball Magic. �But when I saw the list and saw that Seaver was not protected, I almost jumped out of my seat. Seaver, in my mind, was still a quality pitcher who could win ten or fifteen games. Where are you going to get someone who can guarantee you that? That�s the reason we picked Seaver.� Still, if you had to choose between protecting 39-year-old Tom Seaver and 19-year-old Dwight Gooden (who turned 43 on Friday, though I contend he�ll always be 24-4), there was no question you�d go with Doctor K. You�d have to see some kind of doctor if you didn�t. Gooden, Ron Darling, Sid Fernandez�these pitchers were clearly the future of the team. Of course you wouldn�t risk exposing them in a draft, even one that was cockamamie. But didja see some of the other names, names of Mets players who were protected instead of Tom Seaver? I do believe the acronym �WTF?� was invented for just this scenario. As we are almost 24 years beyond Debacle II, we know a few things. We know it was right to hold Doc and Ronnie and El Sid in abeyance. We know you wouldn�t have dangled Keith Hernandez or Darryl Strawberry if your life depended on it. We know Jesse Orosco had just come off a legitimate All-Star season and was, save for Bruce Sutter, the best closer in the N.L. at the time. In January 1984, these six Mets were unquestionably untouchable and history bears out that designation. That leaves twenty Mets considered less expendable than Tom Seaver. Two of them, Hubie Brooks and Mookie Wilson, had established themselves as regulars, though neither was quite untouchable at this juncture. Brooks was an adequate third baseman with not a lot of power. Centerfielder Wilson didn�t get on base enough for a leadoff man (new manager Davey Johnson would drop him in the order). But they were regulars and in the spirit of Hobie Landrith, you were going to have a lot of balls get by third and through center if you lost your starters at those positions. Hubie and Mookie had plenty of good baseball left in them, so we can�t argue with reserving their spots. That brings us to 18 Mets, several of whom had shown promise in 1983. Doug Sisk � don�t laugh � was a sharp setup man in his first full Met year. Somebody had to get the ball to Orosco in 1984, and Sisk would indeed be very good at that for a while. Junior Ortiz was considered something of a coup when he was acquired the previous June, an outstanding defensive catcher who was penciled in to get most of the work behind the plate in the coming year. Jose Oquendo was just a baby, having turned 20 in �83 and had longtime starting shortstop written all over him. Walt Terrell, while not in the sensation class of Gooden, Darling and Fernandez, showed flashes of dependability in his midseason callup (and, as everybody who was a sentient Mets fan then probably remembers, he hit three homers as a rookie). Let�s give Cashen those four players in the context of January 1984, which leaves us 14 Mets to consider instead of Seaver. Really 13, because before you can say �Craig Swan was clearly washed up by 1984,� he had a no-trade clause, which made him poolproof. So you couldn�t replace Seaver with Swannie on the unprotected list even if you wanted to. Some guys clearly look like very bad choices in hindsight, but let�s try to think in January 1984 terms. Five of the remaining 13 protected players had been top picks in a fairly recent June amateur draft. Just as you wouldn�t take a chance on giving up Strawberry (1980) or Gooden (1982), it was reasonable for the Mets to keep their hands on Eddie Williams (their No. 1 and fourth in the nation in 1983) and Terry Blocker (same status, 1981). You could argue they were not genius picks in the first place, but that�s another story. You can�t risk them while they�re still practically in utero. Likewise, Stanley Jefferson (�83) and John Gibbons (�80) had been first-round picks in years when the Mets had a surfeit of first-round choices. Those two still had a real shot at big league success. The other top June pick was Tim Leary, the Mets� first selection in 1979, a hard-throwing righty who had gone through all kinds of arm-rehab hell to get back in the Mets� plans by 1984. In fact, he was supposed to become Tom Seaver once and, as he was only 25, perhaps again. So let�s give the benefit of the doubt to not making available these five youngsters thought to have high ceilings entering �84. That brings the total down to eight players the Mets protected instead of Tom Seaver. Since I don�t think we have to think too hard about Lenny Dykstra and Kevin Mitchell given what they would contribute in short order and become in the long term, we�re really down to six Mets. Let�s examine them individually. Floyd Youmans was a second-round amateur pick the same year Gooden was selected in the first round. In fact, he was Gooden�s pal. He hadn�t put up hellacious numbers in the minors like Doc, but he was the same age as Dwight. You can�t be risking Floyd Youmans in January 1984. Herm Winningham was the Mets� first pick in the old January amateur draft in 1981. He swiped 50 bags at Lynchburg in �82. That�s a lot of stolen bases in an era when speed was highly valued. You can�t be risking Herm Winningham in January 1984. Kevin Brown, one of twelve different Kevin Browns who have been drafted by Major League clubs since 1981 if not nearly the most famous of them, was a first-round January pick in 1983. In his first professional season, at Columbia, he struck out 221 batters in 170.2 innings. Though he would never rise above Double-A, you can�t be risking this particular Kevin Brown in January 1984. Frank Cashen is pardoned for those three. In fact, he�s pardoned for everybody mentioned in the preceding paragraphs, which encompasses 23 of the 26 Mets who were protected instead of Seaver. Some contributed big-time to the Mets of �84, �85 and especially �86. Three � Brooks, Youmans and Winningham � helped bring Gary Carter to the Mets, not a bad historical consolation prize if we�re talking Mets Hall of Famers. Some did nothing but sure looked like they�d do something. You can�t fault Cashen for not having the clearest crystal ball on the block. But the remaining three? The three who had to be kept at arm�s length from the White Sox instead of Tom Seaver? Ensuring their continued Metliness in lieu of Seaver�s was worse, worser and worst. In terms of risking Tom Seaver, they were January 20, 1984?s Worst Decisions in the World. 1) The Mets took precautions to reserve Dave Cochrane instead of Tom Seaver. Who the hell was Dave Cochrane? Dave Cochrane was a third base prospect chosen in the fourth round by the Mets in 1981. He wasn�t quite 21 on the day Tom Seaver was plucked by the White Sox. Would have Dave Cochrane been chosen instead? Cochrane did show pop in the low minors: 22 homers in 70 games at Little Falls in �82, then 25 in 120 at Lynchburg. Of course he struck out more than 100 times in both seasons. The Mets had Hubie for third base, though as mentioned, Hubie wasn�t much for homers. Hmmm�you know, the White Sox would eventually accept Dave Cochrane in a trade for Tom Paciorek in 1985 (the Jeff Conine of his day, as our friend CharlieH put it to me this past September), but that seemed more an out-of-it team dealing a veteran for whomever they could get swap than Dave Cochrane as holy White Sock grail. Cochrane�s Met stock dropped like a rock after Howard Johnson came aboard. It kept dropping as Dave journeyed through five American League seasons, accumulating about 500 at-bats with the Sox and Mariners and homering only eight times. Couldn�t have known that in �84, but scouting�s got to be worth something. The Mets were never satisfied with Hubie Brooks or third basemen in general, yet here we have to go with hindsight. It was a bad call to protect Cochrane over Seaver. 2) The Mets took precautions to reserve Wes Gardner instead of Tom Seaver. Who the hell was Wes Gardner? Wes Gardner is the first Met prospect I can recall being groomed (or at least hyped) as a potential closer. Drafted in the 22nd round of the June 1982, draft, the righty struck out around a batter an inning at Little Falls and Lynchburg, saving 15 while used exclusively in relief in 1983. He would be 23 in 1984, when he eventually made it to the big club off a big year at Tidewater (20 saves, 1.61 ERA). It was almost foresightful of the Mets to think in terms of cultivating a reliever instead of just converting a failed starter. I almost can�t blame the Mets for being certain they would hold onto him. I can definitely understand the attraction. And Lamp, the guy who started all the trouble, led the White Sox in saves in �83 with 15. Chicago needed to replace him. But freaking Wes Gardner proved to be freaking Wes Gardner when he actually got a chance in New York, and if you can remember freaking Wes Gardner when he got his chance, you know he was totally freaking Wes Gardner. After 37.1 mostly dispiriting innings in �84 and �85, Wes was shipped north to Boston as part of the deal that brought us Bobby Ojeda. As the Red Sox had tired of Ojeda after �85, I have to believe Gardner wasn�t the make-or-break element of that key trade. It was a bad call to protect Gardner over Seaver. 3) The Mets took precautions to reserve Ron Gardenhire instead of Tom Seaver. We knew who the hell Ron Gardenhire was. And you have to be totally kidding me that Ron Gardenhire was protected from the compensation pool instead of Tom Seaver. For that matter, Ron Gardenhire was protected instead of Calvin Schiraldi, Mike Fitzgerald, Brent Gaff, Tom Gorman, Wally Backman, Brian Giles, Ed Lynch, Mike Torrez, Rusty Staub, Danny Heep, Ron Hodges, John Christensen, John Stearns and George Foster to name a whole bunch of 1984 Mets who, whatever their perceived liabilities that January or in retrospect, I would have protected over Ron Gardenhire. The Mets protected Ron Gardenhire over Dave Kingman, who was still rotting on the roster in wait of his inevitable release, and I would have kept Kingman � no matter that he was completely obsolete as a Met after the acquisition of Keith Hernandez � over Gardenhire. Ron Gardenhire hit .062 for the Mets in 1983. He drove in one run. He stole no bases. He lost his shortstop job early to Oquendo. What was clever on his part that year was by getting demoted to the Tides, he wound up catching the eye of Davey Johnson, who totally dug his spit and vinegar. Ron Gardenhire remastered Triple-A in 1983 after having done the same in 1981. Gardy became a Davey special in �84, like Backman, like Kelvin Chapman, like Jerry Martin. He hit .246, ceded short to Rafael Santana after an injury (before Santana got hurt and gave way to Brooks who had given way to Ray Knight at third down the stretch) and wasn�t a regular or semi-regular again. Where the unforeseen revival of the Mets in 1984 is regarded, Gardenhire wasn�t on the same map as Wally Backman, was less of a help than the shockingly resuscitated Kelvin Chapman and not that much more of a factor than the legendarily useless Jerry Martin, no matter how much spit and vinegar he displayed at Tidewater a year earlier. He would eventually become a heckuva manager for the Twins, but protecting Ron Gardenhire over Tom Seaver was a hellaciously bad call by the Mets general manager. Cochrane and Gardner at least had promise attached to them. Gardenhire had peaked in the minors and hadn�t proven anything in the majors. And who the hell, given the chance to peruse 25 organizations� depth charts, was going to skip over everybody else available in all of baseball to grab a 26-year-old middle infielder of limited range in the field and no particular accomplishment at bat? Admittedly, the White Sox were no great shakes at short (though the combination of Scott Fletcher and Jerry Dybzinski had just helped them to a division title in �83), but they did have Ozzie Guillen developing in the minors. In other words, there was no legitimate chance in this or any life that Chicago would have chosen Ron Gardenhire instead of Tom Seaver�or any of the couple of thousand players left unprotected by every other club. None. And even if they had, so what? But the Mets protected Ron Gardenhire and left Tom Seaver hanging on the vine. And as Seaver himself would learn in his future endeavors, you always pick the most enticing grape you see. The White Sox thrived on starting pitching in 1983, and adding Tom Seaver figured to make them that much stronger. It didn�t, but it wasn�t Seaver�s fault. Seaver went to a new league and won 15 games in 1984 and 16 more (including his 300th) in 1985. Even at ages 39 and 40, he clearly had Amoco Unleaded left in the tank.

Torres 3.0 Murphy 2.0 Granderson 2.0 Lagares 1.0