batmagadanleadoff

Ceetar wrote: Ceetar wrote: Ceetar wrote: I sorta liked Citi of Nope as a headline, but then they went all negative slant and showed Granderson inset of all players so Nope. Maybe they shoulda stuck in a picture of Matt Franco singling off of Mariano, instead. The picture's fine without the negatively slanted blurb. Together it implies Granderson's an anemic bum. If you really want to put a Mets player dejected, there were better options. (Unless they didn't have access to a better pic?) They got no-hitted for christ's sakes. What did you expect, the Ed Charles dance of joy with Koosman and Grote in each other's arms on the mound in the background? how about crediting Heston instead of mocking the Mets? It's just poorly constructed, so I didn't vote for it. I could care less what you voted for. But having spent your whole life in this metropolitan area, I just don't get what your expectations are from a NYC tabloid covering the local laughing stock baseball team that just got no-hitted by a no-name no-fanfare rookie.

Ceetar wrote: Ceetar wrote: I sorta liked Citi of Nope as a headline, but then they went all negative slant and showed Granderson inset of all players so Nope. Maybe they shoulda stuck in a picture of Matt Franco singling off of Mariano, instead. The picture's fine without the negatively slanted blurb. Together it implies Granderson's an anemic bum. If you really want to put a Mets player dejected, there were better options. (Unless they didn't have access to a better pic?) They got no-hitted for christ's sakes. What did you expect, the Ed Charles dance of joy with Koosman and Grote in each other's arms on the mound in the background?

John Cougar Lunchbucket wrote: Tipping my cap to the ... Post for a punny headline that was also accurate in DOUBLE EXCEL. My fave, too. Not too many other votes for that headline.

Ceetar wrote: I sorta liked Citi of Nope as a headline, but then they went all negative slant and showed Granderson inset of all players so Nope. Maybe they shoulda stuck in a picture of Matt Franco singling off of Mariano, instead.

I thought it was the bathroom.

It's the Mets we're talking about, so if anything, the Crane Pool Pool will be something like this:

cooby wrote: Hey! The Cranepool Forum Club! Then they'd have to put a swimming pool on that porch.

d'Kong76 wrote: RC Cola would be more nostaligic. Yeah, sure. So the next time the Royals visit, they could bring their WS trophy and team pose with it under the Royal Crown Cola sign.

Remember when Torres tried to steal Batman's cowl? [fimg=544:3uge1ihb]https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5687/22344973573_739dd50d1f_o.jpg[/fimg:3uge1ihb]

Centerfield wrote: Good article. I don't know if he's right, but I like the size of the contracts he is predicting for the top line guys. None seem overly stupid. I don't get the buzz around Desmond. .674 OPS with 27 errors. A team with Ian Desmond should be looking to upgrade by getting a guy like Wilmer Flores. Desmond is the archetypical post-Madoff Mets free agent acquisition: a player on the downside who has a decent chance of sucking, so he won't cost as much -- this is the main consideration -- but with enough of a history in the rear-view mirror that makes the Mets getting lucky just a tiny bit plausible. Ian Desmond, meet Michael Cuddyer. It's shopping in the damaged goods section.

The Amway Bamway.

I also noticed this and the photographer, as soon as I find out who took the pics, is my new offseason nemesis. Not surprised. You have a knack for getting the pictures at the instant they're posted to the web. That Royal in the foreground still in his game jersey -- what is that around his neck: Bob Dylan's harmonica?

[youtube:2wchui7c]K-nxdzgQH8U[/youtube:2wchui7c]

I was making Topps style playoff cards for most of the post-season, but didn't get around to completing the World Series cards until a few days after the series ended. When I finally got around to making one of those standard winning-team-celebrates cards [fimg=263:19i04d7b]https://farm1.staticflickr.com/585/22737205560_f17d78425f_o.jpg[/fimg:19i04d7b] I came across these pictures during my search for a suitable photo: [fimg=544:19i04d7b]https://farm1.staticflickr.com/718/22480285689_255741f53a_o.jpg[/fimg:19i04d7b] [fimg=544:19i04d7b]https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5832/22480285719_6b2822f556_o.jpg[/fimg:19i04d7b][fimg=544:19i04d7b]https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-VMh5NsXMu7A/VkFYmSmsLWI/AAAAAAAAi7o/MkKe3wmknDQ/s632-Ic42/download.jpg[/fimg:19i04d7b] That can't be coincidental, right? The Royals set up on top of the Mets on-deck circle logo, with the WS trophy, and deliberately spread out around the logo so that it would be visible for the assembled photographers. They rubbed it in, no? Here's the whole WS set, including some before-the-presses-stopped cards. [fimg=460:19i04d7b]https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5702/22350521828_58ae8058c2_o.jpg[/fimg:19i04d7b] [fimg=304:19i04d7b]https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5629/22694172661_f93ab90649_o.jpg[/fimg:19i04d7b][fimg=304:19i04d7b]https://farm1.staticflickr.com/708/22343818734_54c5a6bbf3_o.jpg[/fimg:19i04d7b][fimg=304:19i04d7b]https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5797/22909708715_992a028456_o.jpg[/fimg:19i04d7b][fimg=304:19i04d7b]https://farm1.staticflickr.com/731/22909708665_2c715d8444_o.jpg[/fimg:19i04d7b][fimg=304:19i04d7b]https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5631/22909708625_9d250b12cc_o.jpg[/fimg:19i04d7b] [fimg=460:19i04d7b]https://farm1.staticflickr.com/762/22930638011_8da46aaa87_o.jpg[/fimg:19i04d7b] [fimg=460:19i04d7b]https://farm1.staticflickr.com/728/22465884969_a880fb6837_o.jpg[/fimg:19i04d7b]

Edgy MD wrote: That's an agenda post. My statement stands. Talking to me? What the hell is an agenda? That the owners are fucking broke but if anyone dares mention it, it's an agenda?

Edgy MD wrote: Vic Sage wrote: I don't know, maybe Jones isn't the right guy, but I'd kind of like the Mets to be working the trade angle more than the FA angle here. i don't understand that view. Why give up players instead of $$, if you don't have to? How often does a 26-27 year old 5-tool stud OFer come onto the open market? I'm less convinced that he's a stud so much as the best available guy on the market. Coming into his prime, though. Like the Wilpons are gonna pay for a stud. It's obvious that they can't even afford Murphy or Cespedes, let alone Murphy and Cespedes, but hardly anyone could admit that so instead they blame the market because there aren't any Willie Fucking Mayses out there. Like the Mets could afford a Willie Fucking Mays.

Ceetar wrote: Not as much as Niese being a talented lefty pitcher that's not old, has a friendly contract (in terms of value per $ anyway) and the Mets have some depth. He's worth more to another team and the Mets might be able to leverage that to fill positions that can't fill as easily by buying a free agent. On fourth thought, there's also Verrett and Montero in the wings. This cut towards Niese going. I agree that Niese's contract is "friendly". It's the going rate, in fact. If a team wants a starter with Niese's experience (i.e., service time) who's demonstrated that he's worthy of being in the regular rotation and deserving enough innings pitched to qualify for the ERA title, $9M is about what a team's gonna pay, and that's just for a regular pitcher, not a star. But for the Mets, $9M a year is like $20M for another team. What kind of a player do you think the Mets can get for Niese (putting salary aside for now)? And don't tell me Mike Trout.

That would be a case of what goes around coming around, except the Wilpons stayed afloat by using the Mets and the team-owned media partner SNY as their personal piggybank. I'm not sure what this is meant to suggest. The author is "suggesting" that the Wilpons used Mets money to pay non Mets debt. So's this author. The World Series is over. Back to shitcanning the Wilpons. Sports biz report: Where�s that extra Mets money going? By Howard Megdal 10:12 a.m. | Nov. 6, 2015 For the past several seasons, as the New York Mets' owners have struggled to finance a crippling debt load and maintain appearances for their major league ballclub, a public promise took shape, something more palatable from a PR perspective than Bear with us, we don't have the money. And so, instead, a sort of pledge took shape, from Fred Wilpon at his last public press conference in February 2013 to something periodically uttered by general manager Sandy Alderson: Once the fans show up, the team will spend more. It was, of course, ridiculous. Fans don't show up ahead of teams spending money; spending is actually correlated with attendance spikes more significantly than winning. And typically, teams don't ask for the support before providing the product. And yet, for the low, low price of what the Mets had already committed to spend, but became available for various unexpected reasons (David Wright's contract was insured and he missed 115 games, Jenrry Mejia was suspended twice without pay for PED use), the Mets added enough talent in July �Yoenis Cespedes, most notably, but also Tyler Clippard, Juan Uribe and Kelly Johnson as well � to pair with those already on board for a magical few months. You might have heard about it. The result? A veritable money bath: as much as $45 million in extra revenue, per the Post, or as high as $60 million, according to baseball economist Andrew Zimbalist. Nor does that take into account the significant additional windfall that the team's owners, who also hold a 65 percent share in SNY, can count on thanks to higher ad revenues from Mets games with dramatically higher ratings, or the greater demand (and thus, higher prices) for sponsors generally. To be clear: The sum total of the Mets and SNY already provided plenty of revenue � the Mets had enough to finance debt against the team, the network and twice-annual debt balloon payments on Citi Field bonds at a total comparable to their payroll. (An easy way to play the game of Where's That Mets Money is to add up their annual debt service and team payroll. You end up at roughly what the Yankees spend on just payroll because, right, no Madoff effect in the Bronx.) So the hope has been, essentially, that adding an unexpected windfall to this equilibrium tolerated by Major League Baseball for some reason � a siphoning of team and network revenue for parent company debt that hadn't abated, but had at least stabilized � and that extra cash could go toward adding talent to maximize the team's unheard-of collection of front-end starting pitching under team control for years. It's the kind of opportunity few teams ever get. The early indications aren't great, though. The Mets have already put out word � in fact, didn't even wait until the World Series ended to do so � that the team will not be pursuing long-term deals with either Daniel Murphy or Yoenis Cespedes. There are baseball arguments for not doing so in both cases, though failing to offer Murphy a one-year, $15.8 million qualifying offer by Friday's deadline would be pure negligence. But the reasons proferred have less to do with whether these players would help the Mets (they clearly would, specifically in 2016) and more about value for the money. All of which is fine, if evaluated purely as a binary pursuit. But that's not how the sport works. The Mets play in a salary cap-free league. Is Yoenis Cespedes worth $120 million over six years? That depends: who can the Mets get instead? Will they spend that money at all? And would Cespedes be making $20 million on a roster with a $101 million payroll, like last season, good for 21st in the sport, or on a team with a payroll commensurate with playing in the largest media market in the country, for owners with a massive stake in the television revenue associated with a team that also just received tens of millions of dollars in a postseason run? Alderson, at a news conference announcing that manager Terry Collins was receiving a two-year extension, said that he "hoped" payroll would be "somewhat higher." And when pressed on whether the increase in attendance meant payroll would go up automatically�you know, as per the years of promises by the team � Alderson's response was, "Automatically? I think it makes it easier. Absolutely. And I think that's kind of what we said over the last two or three years. As I indicated, I do think our payroll will start at a higher level this year than it started last year." That's a statement with a ton of ambiguity in it, though. The team's payroll has been artificially low already, even given relatively sparse attendance at Citi Field until the recent magic. So if the team adds as much revenue as laid out above, but takes payroll from $101 million on Opening Day 2015 to, say, $110 million on Opening Day 2016, it means that ownership has taken almost all the extra money, not to mention the extremely rare opportunity that comes with the current crop of young, elite pitching, and pocketed it instead. The team has significant needs, too. Consider that prior to adding Cespedes, the Mets were at the bottom of the National League in runs scored, and that was with Daniel Murphy. Losing both players puts the team in a hole going into the offseason, and there are plenty of other concerns, from David Wright's degenerative back condition to Travis d'Arnaud's trouble staying healthy to Juan Lagares' troublesome throwing elbow to the news Thursday that Curtis Granderson had surgery to repair a torn ligament in his thumb. That's a lot of potential problems, and the only counter the Mets have internally to throw at all the issues are a full year of Michael Conforto and the hope that the talented but young Dilson Herrera is ready to perform now. The same issues hold in the bullpen. The postseason revealed a difficulty in getting outs beyond Jeurys Familia, Tyler Clippard is a free agent, Addison Reed is useful but only with the bases empty and the team lacks a lefty specialist under contract or much in the way of depth. Alderson expressed a need to address both the offense and the bullpen at Wednesday's presser, and the thing is, that's all going to cost money, either in trades or via free agency, especially if the Mets don't use their starting pitching inventory to address it. And the Mets enter the offseason with obligations of roughly $92 million before adding anybody to the roster. There's one additional expense that complicates their ability to operate like a real team, beyond the annual debt service � the first half of the money owed by 115 separate entities (but essentially a group of people and companies within the Sterling Equities umbrella) to Irving Picard, the trustee for the Bernie Madoff victims, comes due in June 2016. And according to a source familiar with the settlement, the total owed is likely to be higher than the $29 million, total, it appeared the Mets owners would have to pay, maximum. The short version is, without any further disbursements from Picard, the Mets owners and associated parties will owe just over $30 million in each of the next two years, or a total of about $61 million. Another way of looking at that? It's right around the same amount of money as the high end estimates of Mets 2015 postseason revenue. Meanwhile, addressing team needs realistically is going to cost quite a bit of money, even if the Mets want to add secondary pieces in areas of need. If the Mets had solvent owners? Pairing the best free agent in the class, Jason Heyward, with the starting pitchers who are roughly the same age as Heyward would bring Mets payroll up to roughly 15th in the league while insuring the team a dramatic defensive upgrade and elite hitter. The Cubs, off an NLCS performance and with plenty of hitting already, are rumored to be in on Heyward. The Cardinals, who won 100 games last year, eagerly hope to retain him. The Mets? No one believes they can afford him. One way or another, a team with owners with the wherewithal to make strategic investments would take advantage of such an opportunity, an extra windfall, an open window with young pitching and perhaps most of all the desire not to break a years-long promise to a fan base that came back in droves at the merest hint that the team was ready to start competing again. Those are the stakes. Now we have a winter to find out whether anything has changed in Queens. http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/city-hall/2015/11/8582058/sports-biz-report-wheres-extra-mets-money-going

Centerfield wrote: Thanks KC. You know, as I re-read Sandy's quotes from last week, I don't think Carig is right. I don't think Sandy would say payroll would be higher unless he planned on delivering. I totally agree with this. Privately, I've been thinking that the Mets will increase payroll for 2016, not only because they're coming off about as good as possible a season as they could've had -- but mainly because Alderson said he hopes the 2016 opening payroll will be higher than last year's opening payroll. I figure that Sandy wouldn't say that if he wasn't sure about the Mets willingness to spend for 2016. He's not, I figure, gonna make a public statement that has the potential to make the owners look bad. I figured that Sandy purposely set a low bar knowing in advance that payroll will increase and the owners, for once, will get to look like heroes for exceeding Sandy's modest wishes. Centerfield wrote: Plus Fred Wilpon has said publicly that once attendance goes up, so will payroll. This I totally discount. These words are meaningless. Fred's an out an out professional bullshit artist.

John Cougar Lunchbucket wrote: Too bad for Carlos. Great year in relief 1983' He was great in 1985 too, maybe even better than in '83. I remember this because I was in a NL only Strat-O-Matic draft league with 1985 cards, and Diaz was in my bullpen. I was all set to draft Sid Fernandez in that league ... I was ready to pick Sid ... only one pick stood between me and Sid ... and then that guy, with that pick right before me, picked Sid. Bimbo for Bambi. Good one, Willets.

Edgy MD wrote: batmagadanleadoff wrote: If Murphy accepts the QO, the Mets payroll goes to about $110M, before a single free agent is signed. Good luck with that. Look for the Mets to salary dump Niese and his $9M no matter what happens. Well, you said that last year too. I'm guessing it's a moot point. Murphy likely won't accept it because nobody does. Well, I said it with respect to Gee, who got a reprieve because of Wheeler's injury. But on second thought, the Mets might not be so quick to move Niese, especially since Wheeler isn't scheduled to return until at least a few months into next season. But on third thought, Niese is the Mets highest paid pitcher (by a lot) and the 4th highest paid player overall. So given that Niese plays for a team that, unfortunately, places a disproportionately high emphasis on money concerns when making roster decisions, well that cuts towards Niese going.

Isn't he the shortest Met ever?

If Murphy accepts the QO, the Mets payroll goes to about $110M, before a single free agent is signed. Good luck with that. Look for the Mets to salary dump Niese and his $9M no matter what happens.

Centerfield wrote: In the 80's, only 2 teams made the playoffs. I read someplace that if there were four divisions and Wild Cards, the Mets would have made the playoffs every year from '85 to '90. That's 6 Octobers. You'd think they would find a way to get back there at least once (imagine '85 Gooden in the playoffs? Wow). '85 Doc in the playoffs is definitely a "wow" to think about. Plus Doc saved his best for the end of the regular season, just like Mike Scott did the following year. Any carry-over and Doc singlehandeldy might've carried those Mets. But extra playoff teams in the 80's cuts both ways. If there were more teams qualifying, both the '86 crown and pennant are now at risk because the Mets woulda hadda win an extra series. And because all baseball playoff series are essentially coin flips, even if one of the teams won 108 regular season games ....

Though we didn't foil the Royals, we did foil our interloper gamers. Our World Series interloper is Dennis Ribant, whom the Royals sold to St. Looey one week before the start of their inaugural 1969 season. Never a Royal, Ribant nevertheless holds the distinction of being the first player ever to appear on a Topps baseball card in a Royals uniform -- a record that still stands today. Thank you for playing. We'll be back next week with another card thread featuring Mets who once played for the current opponent. [fimg=555:1hck65b3]http://img.comc.com/i/Baseball/1969/Topps/463/Dennis-Ribant.jpg?id=4dddea65-4b20-4608-8994-6fd2e00e5ba3&size=original[/fimg:1hck65b3]