batmagadanleadoff

Ceetar wrote: Ceetar wrote: No, I just don't jump to preconceived conclusions based on a single statement from a Brewers beat writer presented with no evidence against actual quoted statements about Gomez having a bum hip and statistical trends of declining performance consistent with injury. Of course you don't. You, instead, jump to preconceived conclusions based on whatever Wilpon and the Mets say. Your definition of "facts" is whatever Fred and Jeff Wilpon say. I've never once quoted either of those people, nor do their quotes appear on baseball-reference.com or fangraphs.com. Neither of them is the manager of the Brewers either. Of course Gomez had injury issues. That's what gave the Mets a plausible bullshit cover story. They're not so stupid that they were gonna announce that they backed out because Gomez puts ketchup on his hot dogs instead of mustard.

Ceetar wrote: Ceetar wrote: . Also, I believe the Gomez version of the nixed deal that sez the Mets backed out over money. It's the most logical version and extremely consistent with, well, everything. So that's where my head's at, and that's what informs my opinions. Except, you know, facts. Like you know the facts. There's no doubt that this issue is just another Rorschach test -- and I expected you, faster than anyone else to pop in here to defend the Great Wilpons. No, I just don't jump to preconceived conclusions based on a single statement from a Brewers beat writer presented with no evidence against actual quoted statements about Gomez having a bum hip and statistical trends of declining performance consistent with injury. Of course you don't. You, instead, jump to preconceived conclusions based on whatever Wilpon and the Mets say. Your definition of "facts" is whatever Fred and Jeff Wilpon say.

Ceetar wrote: batmagadanleadoff wrote: . Also, I believe the Gomez version of the nixed deal that sez the Mets backed out over money. It's the most logical version and extremely consistent with, well, everything. So that's where my head's at, and that's what informs my opinions. Except, you know, facts. Like you know the facts. There's no doubt that this issue is just another Rorschach test -- and I expected you, faster than anyone else to pop in here to defend the Great Wilpons.

Centerfield wrote: A look back at the 2015 numbers: http://deadspin.com/2015-payrolls-and-salaries-for-every-mlb-team-1695040045 As was pointed out, that's the payroll as of Opening day. Yes, the Mets took on Cespedes's salary for August and September, and yes, the Mets added more payroll to deepen the bench and bullpen. But the Mets got practically a free pass on their biggest payroll liability when the insurance policy on Wright's contract kicked in. And they didn't have to pay Mejia, either. So overall, I don't know that the Mets really added any payroll at all, and from the stuff I've been reading and ownership's past practices during the Madoff era, my personal opinion is that they didn't add anything at all and were able to take on Yoenis thanks to the payroll windfalls they received. Just my opinion. Also, I believe the Gomez version of the nixed deal that sez the Mets backed out over money and that the Gomez's health angle was just a bullshit coverup Sandy was straddled so that the owners could save some face. It's the most logical version and extremely consistent with, well, everything. So that's where my head's at, and that's what informs my opinions. That Cespedes's Ruthian HR tear isn't sustainable (obviously) isn't really the point. Because sustainable or not, the Mets got a Ruthian number of HR's from just a single player in an incredibly short amount of time and that production impacted their season tremendously. And they're gonna have to replace that offense because who knows if the Mets win the division without Cespedes's Bambino imitation.

Edgy MD wrote: 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.

I figured that the bad headlock photoshop was done intentionally, for effect. What effect? I'm not sure.

Which Loathsome Owner Is Your World Series Favorite? We're two games into the 2015 World Series�halfway over, if you're an optimistic a Royals fan or a pessimistic a Mets fan�but there are still a great many questions hovering over this match-up. Here is perhaps the most challenging one: Who do you want to have a ring, Kansas City Royals owner David Glass, or New York Mets owner Fred Wilpon? To put it another way: Which is worse, having been the chief executive of one of the most virulently anti-labor and anti-worker corporate blights in history, or having participated in a massive Ponzi scheme? Your first response might be yet another question: "Why should I give a damn about who owns a team when it comes to the actual drama of the game?" The wienery answer to which is that I've seen you complaining online about this team or that team's fans, and those people have far less to do with what's happening on the field than the men who own the ball clubs, so don't give me this purity of the game shit. The better, nicer answer is that you're not choosing to root for the Kansas City team or the New York team, not really. You're choosing to root for David Glass's Royals or Fred Wilpon's Mets, which happen to play in those cities. Professional sports clubs have spent a lot of time and effort portraying themselves as, to borrow Craig Calcaterra's phrase, "quasi-public trusts." The way they slipped into that perception was as much accident as it was intentional misdirection, perhaps more so. The municipality of Kansas City has no staked interest in the baseball team that proudly bears its name besides, perhaps, lease agreements with the private company that constitutes the Royals. It is not a minority owner of the team, and has no input into any of the decisions that the team makes. The same is fundamentally true of the New York Mets, with a couple of distinctions-without-difference with regards to the lease on the six-year-old Citi Field. Professional baseball in Asia, with its Nippon Ham Fighters and Chinatrust Brothers, has been remarkably honest about this for just about its entire history: teams are private businesses, run by companies, for profit. That's what "professional" means. Acknowledging that fact hasn't diminished the ability of Japanese and Taiwanese fans to enjoy their chosen teams. So, between David Glass and the Wilpons, who you got? Up until about three years ago, Glass was one of the most reviled owners in baseball, a miser who couldn't make his penny-pinching work and didn't seem to care. After his ascension to chairman of the Royals' board in September 1993, the team would not have another winning season until 2003, when they eked out 83 wins and a third-place finish in the AL Central before slipping back beneath the waves for another full decade. Glass was also vociferously in favor of using scabs to break the player strike of 1994-95 and of locking the players out until they agreed to a salary cap. Of course he was: his previous resume centered on growing Walmart into the malignant and metastatic thing it is today. If anything, his persistent loathsomeness was reassuring�more proof that God knows how to write a consistent villain. Two things rescued Royals fans: Glass finally backed into a good hire in then Braves executive Dayton Moore, and the analytical revolution in baseball happened. Suddenly any idiot owner able to hire a decent scouting department had a good blueprint for tanking their way to success. After spending only $38 million on the team in 2011, at the nadir of the Royals tank�at the time, most everyone saw it as fumbling, blind futility, and Moore as a buffoon�Glass has steadily invested more money in the team. This is not charity: with the ballooning media deals and postseason payouts that have come to the league as a whole and to the Royals specifically, Glass can now afford to spend money on the club while maintaining his margins. When the team's current window closes, the payroll will drop again. Glass has always been very transparent about what matters to him, and what doesn't. If Glass is no saint, he's at least a typical American sinner. Who can be surprised that a career executive is dedicated to kneecapping labor at every turn? Who among us is shocked that the man running a business cares more about the margin of profit than the customer experience? The difference between Glass and most any other owner or ownership group in pro sports is one of degree, not kind. No, for hideousness that separates itself from the crowd, you need a Wilpon. The Wilpons hardly need any introduction in this space, but let's give them one anyway. They made their fortune by being tax-dodging real estate speculators during the 1970s and 80s; they lost much, if not most, of that fortune to the one-two punch of the 2008 housing market crash and the collapse of Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme. 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. As recently as this August, while the Mets were storming up the standings, the Wilpons leveraged their stake in the team, in which they bought a controlling interest in 2002, to refinance over $700 million in outstanding debt. Former Dodgers owner Frank McCourt was run out of the league for less blatant financial shenanigans, and he was somehow permitted to purchase one of the league's marquee franchises with the leveraged debt on some parking lots. Then there are the Mets' constant, mindboggling, insulting scandals. Jeff Wilpon, a team president whose only claim to legitimacy is his surname and with no claim to competence at all, should have been reassigned to a paper job in the organization by his father a long time ago�a position where he could still be paid a crass salary while being kept far away from anything important. Instead, he is all over everything, and the most obvious (and self-defeating) Anonymous Team Official quote in the game. The Mets' GM, Sandy Alderson, took the job at the behest of former commissioner Bud Selig, and the success of the current roster is in spite of the machinations of his employers, not because of it. Anyone who needs further proof of that after the Mets' near-disaster at the trade deadline isn't paying attention. The likely outcome of this thought exercise isn't picking either Glass or the Wilpons as less bad than the other; it's throwing up one's hands at the stupid insidiousness of how professional sports conduct themselves in an age when teams are worth billions. No one's saying that you have to give up your team because of its owner's conduct. Hell, maybe you hate unions, too. Life is a rich tapestry, and there is always something to get upset about if you want it enough. It is 2015, and everyone who cares to know understands that professional sports teams are not engaged in morality plays. Professional sports teams, like everything else in this country�like everything else in the world�are engaged in business, and play by its stark rules. Perhaps the behavior of the men who own and operate them should influence how we view the products they're selling. And if this casts an unpleasant pall over the consumption of those products, perhaps we should think about whose fault that really is. https://sports.vice.com/en_us/article/which-loathsome-owner-is-your-world-series-favorite

I would've voted for Fred Alert even if there was no picture to go with the text.

Edgy MD wrote: batmagadanleadoff wrote: But fielding ... everybody's gotta field. The Mets have big problems on the field. Well, it follows that when you're whiffing more batters than most everybody else, and walking fewer, you don't have to field as much. That, I think, is part of the philosophy (if a tertiary part). The Mets got away with that for much of the year. It just didn't work against the Royals. Yeah. I don't even blame the Mets defense. I think they were victimized by freak plays. Murph's error was a very tough play. Murph had to charge that ball if he wanted to give himself the chance of getting even one out on the play. The ball rolled slowly, unevenly and met Murph at the infield lip. The inside the parker -- both outfileders converged under the ball and either one could have caught the ball if they were determined to do so. I guess Duda could have made a better throw, but the Mets had just three hits up to that point -- two hits against Cueto. They didn't hit enough, and the Royals had all the luck. I think the Mets were being punished for the incredible luck they had in past WS -- the Buckner grounder, the shoe polish play, JC Martin's out of bounds run, the amazing catches in '69.

batmagadanleadoff wrote: John Cougar Lunchbucket wrote: All well and good to get the Royals-style high-contact, low-K players in the lineup but the WS should also have convinced you the Mets would be better off with the Royals-style steady-glove players. This. I get it by now for the 500th time that the Royals have an approach to how they do things as an offense. Great. There's more than one way to skin a cat. The Royals contact game isn't gonna make the HR obsolete. Chicks will always dig the long ball. But fielding ... everybody's gotta field. The Mets have big problems on the field. It's not that they're overloaded with bad fielders but that they could stand to get better at two out of the three toughest positions to field -- the middle infield. They're bad in the wrong spots. BTW -- rumors are starting to circulate that Murph might now command $70-80M instead of the $30-40M that insiders were predicting four or five weeks ago.

John Cougar Lunchbucket wrote: All well and good to get the Royals-style high-contact, low-K players in the lineup but the WS should also have convinced you the Mets would be better off with the Royals-style steady-glove players. This. I get it by now for the 500th time that the Royals have an approach to how they do things as an offense. Great. There's more than one way to skin a cat. The Royals contact game isn't gonna make the HR obsolete. Chicks will always dig the long ball. But fielding ... everybody's gotta field. The Mets have big problems on the field. It's not that they're overloaded with bad fielders but that they could stand to get better at two out of the three toughest positions to field -- the middle infield. They're bad in the wrong spots.

Edgy MD wrote: What's relevant is that I'm sure The Murph is jonesing to give the Mets one of those HTDs so he can keep living in Astoria or Montclair or Mamaroneck or wherever the deuce he lives.[/list] According to that SI with Murph himself on the cover, he lives on the Upper East Side, those newfound homers aren't exactly flukes, he's made a deliberate attempt to increase his power this season, he might not hit 'em at the rate of six every six days but he might have morphed into a 20+ HR a year guy, he was hitting HR's at an increased rate (for him) over the last 6-8 weeks of the season but hardly anyone noticed because Yoenis happened, he was the toughest guy to strike out in 2015, he's always making contact, and he thinks that David Wright is better looking.

Benjamin Grimm wrote: In response to your pointing out the obvious: the Mets are gonna let him go no matter what we say. They'll let him go even if we all wanted him back. I was just being goofy with that line. It's not as if I thought that that really needed to be explained.

FWIW, all of the throws on fangraphs showing Duda throwing out a runner on his way to second were force plays. Duda didn't have to concern himself with putting the middle-infielder in a decent enough position to make a tag on those vids. But again, I don't wanna sound like a broken record, but this is much much ado about just a single play. It's great to analyze the play within the context of the game, and then, the whole series. But to make sweeping statements about Duda's overall fielding chops from just that one play is overkill. But the writers gotta write about something, I guess. Jeez, the Royals were up three games to one. Hosmer wasn't taking nearly the risk that a Met woulda took if it was a Met in that position. It's easier to play any game when your back isn't against the wall and you have plenty of margins on any error.

LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr wrote: Barnwell's stuff will find an audience somewhere. So will Keri and Baumann and the rest of the pretty damn excellent baseball writing staff. I believe that. Already, I must've googled Barnwell and Mays about a half a dozen times this week, figgering they've gotta be writing somewhere.

Frayed Knot wrote: batmagadanleadoff wrote: Grantland's demise couldn't have come at a worse time. ... Their football writing was so refreshing, so groundbreaking, so far ahead of the field, I thought, that it made practically all other NFL pieces seem as if they were written by the kids that write restaurant reviews for their High School newspapers. More like written by those who fear getting on the bad side of the NFL and feel they can't risk losing access or find themselves uninvited to future reindeer games. Yeah, definitely a lot of that too.

Do you think it's so obvious?

Benjamin Grimm wrote: Really? Huh! I guess there's not much point discussing anything at all then, is there? Why do you say that?

I agree too. But I'll add that the Mets are gonna let him go no matter what we say. They'll let him go even if we all wanted him back. In fact, I'd say that the Mets are gonna let Cespedes go even if they themselves wanted him back. [fimg=555:1b4ab6vz]http://d3vsdfvkxh87qp.cloudfront.net/articles_images/v7/1420502128717/image.jpg[/fimg:1b4ab6vz]

batmagadanleadoff wrote: Edgy MD wrote: The Mets led in every game. The Mets should lobby for shorter games. I was thinking the same thing. If they played seven inning games, the Mets'd be going for the crown tonight. If they played seven inning games and someone catches the "inside the parker", the Mets are your 2015 World Champs.

Edgy MD wrote: The Mets led in every game. The Mets should lobby for shorter games. I was thinking the same thing. If they played seven inning games, the Mets'd be going for the crown tonight.

Centerfield wrote: batmagadanleadoff wrote: Everyone's all of a sudden trying to redo the Mets bullpen. Really? In this thread? I'd go as far as to say no one is trying to redo the Mets bullpen here. Some people are trying to redo some things. And all based on the Mets last five games. And I'm not necessarily talking about anybody on this forum. I'm talking about articles in the press/media. You know ... the talking heads.

Everyone's all of a sudden trying to redo the Mets bullpen. Familia was fine, more or less. Gordon HR'd off him but that'll happen. Nobody's infallible. That freak error aka the inside the parker was the real killer in Game #1. I wish people wouldn't try and extrapolate so much deep meaning from five games. I find all this over- analysis so tedious and tiresome, I barely read any of it anymore. I'd rather just enjoy the WS for the spectacle that it is and the history that it'll make and leave it at that. I don't know that the Royals are better. What's better? The teams'd have to play each other hundreds of times head to head to figure that one out. And if they did and the Royals ended up winning, say, 154 out of 300, would that settle anything? The Mets absolutely demolished the Cubs in the NLCS. Made mince meat ouf of them. Does anybody really think the Mets are that much better than the Cubs? If at all?

Grantland's demise couldn't have come at a worse time. Not just because the Mets were in the WS. Their football writing was so refreshing, so groundbreaking, so far ahead of the field, I thought, that it made practically all other NFL pieces seem as if they were written by the kids that write restaurant reviews for their High School newspapers. [fimg=533]http://www.thenation.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Grantland_2_sg_img.jpg[/fimg] Goodbye to Grantland, ESPN�s Home for Actual Sports Journalism For this former ESPN ombudsman, Grantland was a beacon in a field of sludge. By Robert Lipsyte Yesterday 11:55 am A genial windbag named Grantland Rice was the pre-eminent voice of America�s first golden age of sports, larding his newspaper columns, radio shows, speeches, and newsreel appearances with metaphors and pseudo-classical allusions that included this famous (though typical for him) lede: �Outlined against a blue-gray October sky the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as famine, pestilence, destruction and death. These are only aliases.� He was covering a 1924 Notre Dame football game. A century later, in 2011, flush with the profits of another golden age, ESPN created a boutique website in its enormous souk for the current pre-eminent multi-platform performer, Bill Simmons. I had bad feelings when ESPN, apparently over Simmons�s objections, called it Grantland. The new site, after all, had edgy promise; it was going to be an innovative, diverse, literary grab-bag of pop culture takes, long non-fiction, and wonky but smart sports talk. Bill Simmons called his podcast the B.S. Report. Last Friday, ESPN announced it was chopping this proud pinkie off its ham hand, only a few months after declaring its commitment to Grantland despite having just fired Simmons. Without its beneficiary and editor-in-chief, ESPN had no need for an entertaining and prestigious niche that made little or no money. Imagine if Playboy magazine, in its �60s �class-and-ass� period, had kept the air-brushed nudes but dumped the Updike, Gordimer, and Baldwin short stories. Without its editor-in-chief, ESPN had no need for an entertaining and prestigious niche that made little or no money. The Internet reaction was mostly outrage lost in the busiest weekend of the sports calendar. The shrewd timing was vintage ESPN, an important revenue source for The Walt Disney Company (Hearst also has a 20 percent share). ESPN is currently besieged by the rising cost of buying the rights to show sports events, the declining profits in audience fees and advertising revenue as people cut their cable cords, and Disney-ordered budget cuts. Earlier last week, ESPN had laid off more than 300 employees. It was facing an annual $1.4 billion bill for NBA rights alone. Perhaps that made it too hard to justify maintaining its class act. But Grantland represented more than just another media contraction. Sports is a stealth definer of social values, particularly among young people, and ESPN, the self-described World Wide Leader, is sports�s 24/7 purveyor on countless radio stations, TV channels and websites. How ESPN covers (or fails to cover) gay and transgender athletes, concussions, domestic abuse, gambling costumed as fantasy leagues, and e-sports, for example, will have an impact on how Americans regard the widening racial, economic, and class divides between them and the gladiatorial castes that perform for them. Grantland�s unconstricted willingness to tackle topics that afflicted ESPN�s business partners�especially the NFL and the NBA�was a beacon in a sludge field. Fine writers like Bryan Curtis, Holly Anderson, Wesley Morris, Rembert Browne, and Molly Lambert were able to make connections between sports and pop culture that were rarely made elsewhere. Their writings turned college students on to journalism. One shining legacy of Grantland was proving that its audience would read 10,000-word stories on their screens; the so-called long form has been taken up all over the Internet. Grantland�s generational fief was not the same as ESPN�s radio, TV, and digital audience. The mail I�ve received from the network�s consumers, over my past two years serving as ESPN�s ombudsman, may have come from two different planets. The Grantland audience seemed to be primarily a white male millennial who felt that Bill spoke for him. I came to appreciate Simmons�s breezy style, if not his self-referential bravura; his navel was the true arena and all events were seen through his reactions to them. I was too old and traditional a sportswriter for that, but the millions who followed him seemed almost cultish in their belief that Simmons actually spoke truth to power. When I criticized Simmons for calling NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell a liar without at least some video of his pants on fire, I was inundated with e-mails proclaiming Simmons�s gut the only evidence he needed. In that same dust-up, Simmons dared ESPN�s president, John Skipper, once his main booster, to punish him for speaking his mind. Skipper suspended him and eventually went on to win the battle of egos by firing him last May. Simmons moved on to HBO. Meanwhile, the regular ESPN audience, usually complaining to me that �social issues� were invading the games, was typically a middle-aged Southeastern Christian who regarded sports on his family room TV a sanctuary from the real world. Last year, when Michael Sam became the first openly gay player drafted by the NFL, ESPN cameras lingered long on the celebratory kiss he gave his boyfriend. My e-mail exploded. Viewers felt betrayed by �liberal� ESPN for �promoting the homosexual lifestyle to my children.� It was impossible to explain that ESPN, which has no moral center, was in many respects merely selling itself with provocative clickbait. In recent years, ESPN�s journalistic integrity has taken justified hits for its slow response to stories that reflected poorly on star players; for broadcasting The Decision, a selfie for LeBron James when he left Cleveland for Miami; and for removing the company�s brand from a joint enterprise with PBS on the documentary League of Denial, which covered the most important sports story of our time�the deadly concussions in the NFL and the accompanying cover-up. On a daily basis, ESPN�s main energy seems directed toward cranking out trade rumors and speculation about coaching changes to keep fans engaged, while its top broadcasters engage in squabbling packaged as debate. An attempt to launch a Grantland-style site devoted to African-American sports issues has been mired in what seems like bad faith and subversive mismanagement. Perhaps it�s simply naive to expect a network that actually owns bowl games, has entire channels devoted to major college sports conferences, and runs a revolving door for sports figures who want to try their voice at broadcasting also maintain a reliable journalistic presence. Now without Grantland, ESPN is left with a modern version of its namesake�s four horsemen�clich�, scuttlebutt, squawk radio, and conflict of interest. http://www.thenation.com/article/goodbye-grantland-espns-home-for-actual-sports-journalism/

cooby wrote: My son just texted to send his condolences (Indians fan, not Mets) and said he's been having flashbacks to Franco and Benitez. Now I know why you like Chief Wahoo. [fimg=433]http://beltmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Screen-Shot-2014-06-19-at-5.25.24-PM-640x767.png[/fimg]