batmagadanleadoff

But maybe not quite yet. Adam Rubin/ESPN "It's all in the rearview mirror," Wilpon said about past financial woes Wednesday after arriving at the team's spring training complex. "... The family is in great shape. The family really is in great shape. Sometimes luck is the residue of design." [...] There's no one in my family -- there's the Katz family, the Wilpon family, kids -- [that now] has any personal bank debt. Zero. Everything has been paid. We don't owe a dollar to anybody. We have mortgages on buildings and stuff like that, but we don't owe a dollar. Eff and Jeff Wilpon might not be carrying any personal debt, but the team and SNY still owe a combined $billion. Mets Owners Are Debt Free But Team And Its Network Owe Over $1 Billion New York Mets owner Fred Wilpon recently told ESPN that he and his partner, Saul Katz, no longer have any personal debt. But don�t expect the New York Metsto begin spending like a big-market team any time soon. The baseball team and the regional sports network of which it owns 65%, SportsNet New York, have over $1 billion in debt combined, according to sources. The Mets have about $430 million of debt while SNY has near $750 million of debt. Of that $750 million, the owners of the Mets are on the hook for some $450 million, putting their total obligations near $900 million. A phone call and email to the team for confirmation of the debt figures were not returned. With the combined enterprise values of the Mets and SNY around $2 billion, leverage is above 50%. Moreover, the team pays $50 million a year in annual ballpark PILOT bond and rent payments that come from Citi Field�s revenue. Attendance at Citi Field is down significantly the past three years. Standard & Poor�s stated in a December report in which it downgraded Citi Field�s bonds one notch, to two levels below investment grade, �The negative outlook reflects our expectation that the project cash flow will have slight cash flow declines in the near future before it begins to stabilize.� Despite signing David Wright in the off-season to a $138 million extension, the team�s payroll will likely remain in the middle of the league the next few seasons. GM Sandy Alderson has his work cut out. http://www.forbes.com/sites/mikeozanian/2013/02/14/mets-owners-are-debt-free-but-team-and-its-network-owe-over-1-billion/

I'm not necessarily taking sides here, whether it's Piazza against Vin Scully or Piazza against the MVP voters of '95 and '96, (although why he doesn't gripe about '97 is beyond me; I'da voted for Piazza as MVP in '97 no doubter) but for all of his outward politeness, Piazza strikes me as the spoiled kinda guy who can't cope with not getting what he wants. He probably never had a bad day in his life. He was raised fabulously wealthy, by a family rich enough to buy a major league baseball team. And then, Mike Piaza grew up to become Mike Piazza.

Edgy MD wrote: Creating, what's known in the design world, as the "infinite regression." Anybody here know about the folding Land O Lakes butter trick? Pay attention, FMan.

Fred Wilpon on David Wright: �A really good kid. A very good player. Not a superstar.� The New Yorker, Madoff's Curveball, May 30, 2011

metirish wrote: Mike Puma ?@NYPost_Mets Collins just told The Post he plans to tell Bobby Parnell tomorrow to start working out at closer because of Francisco's elbow swelling How does a reliever work out at closer, as opposed to working out as a regular ol' non-closing reliever? What the hell's the difference and if that Collins quote doesn't illustrate the absurdity of designating a reliever as a closer, then I give up. I suppose this means that now, Parnell's gonna really really really try to get the opposing batters out.

This sounds like a terrible book by an uninteresting guy. Harsh, but probably true. I don't expect that I'll ever read this one. I used to read all Mets related books, but when Lenny Dykstra "wrote" a book and I couldn't bring myself to read it, it broke the spell for me. I buy most of them, eventually, especially if the player appears on the cover in a Met uniform. But this is mostly out of habit and my collectiblilty bug. I don't read all of them. Here's a few that I own and might never get around to reading: The Yogi book is mostly Yankee-centric. After the Mets acquired Yogi in '65, an extra chapter was added to reflect Yogi's new association with the Mets, a new Metly cover replaced the original MFY version, and the new edition was rushed to release.

Anybody here read the book yet? It's available for shipping on Amazon as of today. So's this one:

Bargain-basement Mets miss out on Michael Bourn By Howard Megdal 10:53 am Feb. 12, 2013 Like most of the moves the Mets have made since Sandy Alderson took over as general manager in October 2010, the decision not to sign Michael Bourn makes sense on a certain level. Bourn, who agreed to a four-year, $48 million contract with the Cleveland Indians on Monday night, is 30 years old, with his value tied up in his legs and the elite speed and defensive ability they provide him. Furthermore, signing Bourn likely would have cost the Mets the eleventh pick in the 2013 draft, along with approximately 40 percent of their league-allowed allocation money to sign draft picks. But this is the Mets. So there's a lot more to the story. The 2013 Mets have a substandard outfield. Don't take my word for it. Take the word of Alderson himself, who joked about it in November ("What outfield?", he asked reporters in response to a question about his unit) and complained about it on WFAN in January, as if he was just another disgruntled fan and not, you know, the general manager. This weakness was a carryover from 2012. The presumption was, if Alderson was so comfortable joking about it, he'd also do something about it. The situation is such that even some low-cost, short-term free agents could have improved the outfield significantly. So once the Mets began to publicly declare their interest in Michael Bourn, who is likely to produce more in 2013 than the entire outfield under contract to the Mets, fans got excited. Not because Mets fans are in love with Bourn, but because he would have made the team significantly better. Raising the stakes further, Alderson publicly declared that the Mets would either sign Bourn or go into spring training with the current outfield, the one he'd disparaged all winter. Bourn was, then, the last helicopter out of Saigon, not just as far as the hot-stove media was concerned, but according to the Mets themselves. But even as this reality took hold, the Mets were playing their usual games. This ownership group likes its bargains, to the extent that they sometimes appear incapable of arriving at any other kind of deal. They don't just make agreements; the Mets have to "win" them. So they'll invest all of their money with Bernie Madoff, then borrow against the investment and invest with Madoff some more. They agree to a deal with financier David Einhorn to inject capital into the team, then go to the commissioner to try and get a better deal behind Einhorn's back. They try to defer so much of the money they offered to David Wright, the franchise icon nearly walked away from $140 million in guaranteed money. Even the offers they ultimately make so often turn out to be laughable in the context of the actual baseball marketplace. They offered Vladimir Guerrero $30 million of guaranteed money after he'd been offered more than $70 million by the Baltimore Orioles back in 2003. They reached out to Jose Reyes with parameters of fewer years and less money than he'd already been offered by the Miami Marlins. They responded to R.A. Dickey's team-discounted offer with an even lower one, then traded him when he understandably didn't accept it. Particularly in the latter two cases, the team's dire finances likely mean the offer was for public consumption only, and not meant to be accepted. Bourn was no different. The Mets worked overtime the moment he signed elsewhere to declare that they, too, had offered four years, $48 million to Bourn. Ah, but. The Mets offer was conditional upon an independent arbitrator interpreting the collective bargaining agreement to mean that the Mets could keep their first-round draft pick. That process could have taken weeks. Spring training has begun. Bourn needed a team. And he certainly didn't need to wait weeks to find out if the Mets' offer really was an offer. The Mets could have initiated this arbitration weeks earlier, it has been reported by Adam Rubin. They declined to comment last week, via email, when I raised the question of whether they could have done so, and why they hadn't. According to Rubin's source, the Mets chose not to do this so they wouldn't lose leverage with Bourn in negotiations, raise expectations of fans, and have to follow through with their phantom offer. But the Mets had no leverage. Only if Bourn truly had no other suitors could their ploy have worked. But the Mets are still negotiating like they have all the leverage, even though they are in poor financial shape and aren't close to contending. That's why Jose Reyes, R.A. Dickey, David Einhorn, now Michael Bourn are all elsewhere. Only David Wright, after public pressure forced the Mets to improve their offer to him, has been willing to bother negotiating under Wilpon rules for years now. And the shame of it is, if the Mets had simply resolved the draft-pick issue (assuming they were negotiating in good faith to get Bourn in the first place) they apparently could have gotten him for the four years, $48 million they say they intended to offer. Given what other outfielders signed for this offseason (Angel Pagan, older and far less durable, went for four years, $40 million, while B.J. Upton, not at Bourn's level as a player, signed for five years, $75 million) 4/48 for Bourn is better than market value for a center fielder. Even a modest aging for Bourn probably means he'll be worth his contract. His past four seasons, per Fangraphs, were worth $88.1 million. He could be half the player he was and still be worth the money. If it feels like an overpay, that's because the Mets are still living year-to-year just to stave off the reckoning of debt. How they've done so each of the past two winters is by tapping into their only remaining asset with some collateral left in it: S.N.Y. In March 2012, the Mets sold minority shares in the team. Most of these went to S.N.Y., where the Mets owners have a 65 percent interest. And as part of that deal, the Mets extended their deal with the network to carry Mets games at a rate that is quite favorable to S.N.Y., keeping the network in the black while depriving the ballclub of the cash infusion locL television money has given, or will shortly give, every other team in M.L.B. In December 2012, that minority share money spent to pay back some (but by no means all) loans and service debt on others, the Mets' owners borrowed against their ownership share of S.N.Y., this time to clear $160 million in money to again, service debt and pay day-to-day expenses. The $320 million owed against the team, due in 2014, still looms, as does the even larger debt, which had been $450 million prior to the additional borrowing against S.N.Y., due in 2015. These are the numbers that will dictate whether ownership can spend on players, or even hold onto the team. Nothing else. And what did the Cleveland Indians, in one of the smallest markets and rebuilding, do while the Wilpons cannibalized their television network to stave off a financial reckoning? They went out and got Nick Swisher, then Michael Bourn. And they can thank the money they got when Indians ownership purchased Fox Sports Ohio. It allows them, like virtually every successful rebuilding team, to improve the major league roster and the farm system at the same time. That's the real problem for the New York Mets. In this era of massive television money and league-limited draft spending, the options are to spend $12 million per year for a center fielder, or go without a center fielder until your scouts come up with one. At the moment, there isn't any such player in the Mets' system. Perhaps the Mets can draft one with their eleventh pick, but if so, it probably won't be a player to help them until 2016 at the earliest. In the meantime, the Mets still have the outfield they had when Sandy Alderson joked about it back in November. Helpfully, the incumbents are already forced to answer questions about why their own team's general manager believes they aren't legitimate major leaguers. Maybe they'll use it as motivation, but the problem is that Alderson was probably right. And the so-called rationalists can debate the merits of not signing Bourn, or anyone else, since many free agents don't age well. If a team never signs a free agent, it will miss out on numerous poor contracts each year. Also, all the good ones. The problem isn't that the Mets missed out on Michael Bourn. The problem is that ownership's extraordinary money problems mean the Mets have missed out on everybody this winter who could have fixed a part of the team their own general manager considers a joke. http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/sports/2013/02/7709987/bargain-basement-mets-miss-out-michael-bourn

A Baseball City to Be Divided on Opening Day By DAVID WALDSTEIN Published: February 10, 2013 Over in Queens, the Mets will host the San Diego Padres in what some will liken to a junior varsity event. Oh, fuck off already. I have no problem with this quote from Waldstein, above. I do have a problem with Strawberry, who seems to be hedging his loyalty to the Mets: For those who have experienced both opening days as a player, it is hard to say which would be better. Darryl Strawberry, one of the best position players to wear both uniforms, said that picking one would be too tough. �I wouldn�t be able to choose,� he said. �I think that�s a day for a fan to stay home and watch on TV and switch back and forth.� Do fans remember Straw as primarily a Yankee?

A Baseball City to Be Divided on Opening Day By DAVID WALDSTEIN Published: February 10, 2013 At its core, spring training is a seven-week dress rehearsal. The entire enterprise is aimed at opening day, and the rehearsal begins this week for the Mets and the Yankees. For Mets and Yankees fans, this opening day will be like no other. Owing to a whopper of a scheduling quirk, the teams will open their seasons at home on the same day, at the same hour, for the first time, according to the Elias Sports Bureau. At roughly 1:05 p.m. on April 1, barring poor weather, a Yankees and a Mets pitcher � probably C. C. Sabathia and Johan Santana � will unleash their respective first pitches of the season on mounds less than 10 miles apart. For the Yankees, it will be another dazzling marquee event, made even more so because the opposition that day in the Bronx will be the Boston Red Sox as the teams� rivalry reaches its 110th year. Sure, the Red Sox have fallen on hard times. But they are still the Red Sox, with players like David Ortiz, Jacoby Ellsbury, Dustin Pedroia and Jon Lester � probably Boston�s starter that day. Over in Queens, the Mets will host the San Diego Padres in what some will liken to a junior varsity event. The idea that the Mets, usually an afterthought in New York, will have to vie for attention with the Yankees isn�t one either team relishes, especially the Mets. �Nobody is particularly happy about it,� said Katy Feeney, Major League Baseball�s senior vice president for scheduling and club relations. �But it�s unlikely to happen again anytime soon.� Normally, the Yankees and the Mets do not play at home at the same time, on opening day or otherwise. There have been the occasional series when both have played in New York at the same time, including last season. According to Feeney, the simultaneous home openers resulted from several factors. First, this is the first year with two leagues of 15 teams each and the first year there will be an interleague game nearly every day, causing some scheduling difficulties. That trend starts with the Los Angeles Angels visiting the Cincinnati Reds on April 1 for the first interleague opening day game. The Mets-Yankees situation was also caused by a change in the date of the All-Star Game, which is normally the second Tuesday in July. This season it is scheduled for July 16, the third Tuesday of the month, and when every other factor was taken into account, the only way to make it all work was to have the Mets and the Yankees play at home on the same day, Feeney said. The last time two New York teams opened their seasons at home on the same day was in 1956, when the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers did so. In those days, with three teams in the city, it was much more common. And so on April 17, 1956, the Dodgers lost to the Phillies, 8-6, at Ebbets Field and the Giants beat the Pirates, 4-3 at the Polo Grounds. Feeney was not positive, but she said she thought she was at that game at the Polo Grounds because her father, Charles Feeney, known as Chub, was the Giants� head of baseball operations, and most opening days were a free pass to leave school and head to Coogan�s Bluff. So, what is a New Yorker to do? Michael R. Bloomberg already has a plan for his final opening day as mayor. He will attend both games, according to his spokesman, Marc LaVorgna. No word on which game Bloomberg, who grew up outside Boston, plans to attend first. Maybe it will depend on whether either team asks him to throw out the first pitch. For those who have experienced both opening days as a player, it is hard to say which would be better. Darryl Strawberry, one of the best position players to wear both uniforms, said that picking one would be too tough. �I wouldn�t be able to choose,� he said. �I think that�s a day for a fan to stay home and watch on TV and switch back and forth.� Sounds like a plan. Unless it snows. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/11/sports/baseball/for-first-time-yankees-and-mets-will-open-season-at-home-on-same-day.html?_r=0

LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr wrote: From his first hit of ice to his last MDMA? �I found it hugely insulting that people believed I�d go so far out of my way � living with Playmates, vacationing with actresses, showing up at nightclubs � to act out a lifestyle that would amount to a charade... If I was gay, I�d be gay all the way.� What he said. What they said.

If Piazza wants to go into the HOF as a Met, it seems to me that he ought to have appeared on his book cover in a Met uni. I suppose his publisher preferred the neutral look so as not to alienate the LA market.

Edgy MD wrote: Let's check 1991-2000 for gigglez: [...] Wow! What a miserably un-meaningful data set I selected! But to the extent that it can be construed as meaningful, #60 wins, 12.3 WAR to 8.4! Congratulations to all Draft Position #60 supporters everywhere! These findings don't surprise me. I think I already posted what I'm about to write in an older thread, but I couldn't give a flying fuck about the amateur draft and the anticipation over it unless the Mets have one of the very top picks in a year where they have a chance at picking one of those precociously special phenoms that come along once or twice a decade. Like a Strawberry or a Griffey or an A-Rod or a Strasburg.

smg58 wrote: I'd sooner take hitting tips from Rey Ordonez. Slowly I turned ... step by step ... inch by inch ...

Edgy MD wrote: �If Jerry Grote played for the Reds, I'd be playing third base.� --- Johnny Bench (supposedly) I had always known about that Bench comment. But I was never able to track down the source, or origin of the quote. And I've tried.

Three lifetimes.

At least he wasn't gone fishin'. New York Mets 1B Ike Davis (ankle) confessed that his bout with valley fever last year left him very fatigued. "I had to limit a lot of things last year as far as workload," Davis said. "I didn't have a beer all of spring training last year. I went home and laid on the couch. And I usually fish for another six hours every day (after Mets workouts)." Davis' ankle wasn't fully healthy at the start of last season, either. Now, he feels a noticeable difference in his ability to push off during batting practice and described it as an "explosion." 2013-02-08 11:50:39 | Source: ESPNNewYork.com - Adam Rubin Read more: http://www.kffl.com/gnews.php?id=838046-mets-ike-davis-admits-to-fatigue#ixzz2KLAVPrFd

G-Fafif wrote: Defensive WARlords, per B-B Ref, contains some overlap, but looks very different: 1. Bud Harrelson 13.6 2. Jerry Grote 11.2 One of the reasons Donn Clendenon was glad to be traded to the Mets was because of what he perceived as the Mets' dominant defensive strength up the middle, particularly the outstanding defense provided by Grote, Harrelson and Agee. In fact, Clendenon had already decided, before coming to the Mets, that Grote was the best defensive catcher in all of baseball. Better even than Bench. Ask Lou Brock. He'd agree with Donn. About Grote.

G-Fafif wrote: Anyone have Chris Cannizzaro in the defensive WAR Top 10 pool? Me. I knew that because I had stumbled upon that fact in the last few months while looking up something else about CC. Wanna know what's even more amazin' about CC's Mets dWAR than that he's even in the top 10? He accumulated his career Mets dWAR in about one full season's worth of plate appearances. So CC might have the best Mets career dWAR pound for pound.

The Good Dude.

Todd Hundley

Sheesh, ceetar, poke the bear, whydon'tcha? xxx ?? Rey Ordo�ez: -0.4 Whoosh. Saved myself a coupla c-notes. Rey O is my personal Susquehanna Hat Company. But I hadda look up "poke the bear", though. THZV5g1CNZM

Ceetar wrote: Ordonez? He put up some nifty defensive WAR and was here a while. Oh please. Put a noose around my neck and shoot me in the head. If Ordonez has a lifetime Met WAR of as much as two, I'll buy you a pair of seats behind home plate to any Met game you choose. And you won't have to go with me if you don't want to. This fraud was the worst baseball player I ever had the misfortune of seeing in my lifetime. And the asshole in the front office that threw his weight around to ensure that Rey played every day can still go fuck himself. I know it wasn't Bobby.

These numbers, like most Mets offensive career leaders numbers, are pathetic.