metirish

Not to be taken lightly is the issue of who among this group can handle the unique pressure of playing in NY . I do believe Livan can handle that. SC turned all the way up to 11

With one big hit Wright is now a clutch player.....unbelievable World of confidence ] Now, about David Wright's inability to produce in the clutch ... The Hall of Fame people called the Mets third baseman yesterday. They want, and will receive, the bat Wright used to deliver the game-winning, two-run single in Tuesday night's World Baseball Classic thriller. Many of you don't care, of course, and understandably so. Call you, you say, when Wright gets a big hit in October, not March. Well, perhaps eventually, we'll be able to look at Tuesday night as a starting point. Or, to be more accurate, a relaunch, because Wright - who said he bruised his left toe and cracked a nail after fouling a ball off his left foot in last night's seeding game at Dolphin Stadium - was never so horrible as some of us decided. "I don't necessarily feel like I have to go out there to prove anything to me," Wright said earlier yesterday. "I know what I'm capable of. I know what I'm able to do. "Everybody wants to come through in the clutch. Everybody wants to get that big hit. Unfortunately, the game doesn't work that way. It can be a very humbling game. You do everything right, and you hit a bullet right at somebody. Or you have a terrible at-bat, and you bloop one in. Sometimes the baseball gods are smiling down, and sometimes they're not. " ... When you do get those big hits, it allows you to take a deep breath and maybe not put as much pressure on you the next at-bat." What a night it was for Wright and Team USA. Trailing Puerto Rico by two runs entering the ninth inning, they loaded the bases with one out, with one run already in, when Wright stepped in against Fernando Cabrera. Wright didn't hit a bullet. But he came through with a nice piece of hitting. He reached his bat out to an outside fastball and put it in the perfect spot, a couple of feet from the foul line in rightfield. Brian Roberts came home with the tying run, and Jimmy Rollins, of all people, scored the winner, and Wright had an accomplishment that he called "right there at the top. "I got more phone calls and text messages in the last 24 hours than I had the last 24 months." No team supports the WBC more than the Mets, and maybe that will come back to bite them. Venezuela manager Luis Sojo's use of Francisco Rodriguez alone must send some heartburn up I-95 to Port St. Lucie. However, K-Rod looks on top of his game right now, as did Carlos Beltran and Carlos Delgado in their play for Team Puerto Rico. And Wright has a career highlight, and a strike against those who label him a choker. The myth, of course, lies in the notion that Wright struggles in the clutch. You can crunch numbers on the ride from Flushing to Miami, and you'll confirm that assertion only one way: By looking solely at his Sept. 24 ninth-inning strikeout against the Cubs, with Daniel Murphy on third base, no outs and the score tied, in a game the Mets proceeded to lose. Otherwise, Wright's career numbers - in September, with runners in scoring position, in close games late - are all more than presentable. To say that he suddenly became nervous last year, when he did hit relatively poorly with runners in scoring position, challenges common sense. The campaign to restore common sense is under way. "High-pressure, big-situation at-bats in March can only help you out in April, and hopefully beyond that," Wright said. "You're talking about the game on the line, when you're wearing those three letters across your chest, you're carrying a lot of weight on your shoulders." Given what has gone down the last two years, it must feel even heavier in Flushing, no? Wright wants to sign up for the 2013 WBC right now. "I'd be the first one on the list," he said. If he can generate a Mets' dog pile to match Team USA's from Tuesday night, then Mets fans just might lead the charge for this country to support the WBC.

Got to say I agree with his sentiment . I hate the "can;t handle NY" angle. I think some players get dragged in to that conversation too when they answer such questions regarding handling the NY pressure by saying that they like all the media attention. Maybe the media people like to hear that though.

Wright has a cracked big toe nail....hurts like hell especially when he puts his weight on it. X-Rays were negative. Francisco Rodriguez did in fact pitch , with his team up four runs. Luis Sojo said Rodriguez asked to pitch because if he didn't then come the next game it would have been four days since his last outing and that would be too long.

I'm watching this and thinking in a regular season game the tarp would be on...WTF Bud?

In a game with meaning only for seeding they are playing in the rain and it's slated to rain all night. In his first AB Wright fouls it hard of his toes , looked sore.....Rodriguez no matter what will not pitch tonight says his manager.

Bartolo Colon ?

I like the opening paragraph. That scout for the Marlins talking about the Koreans using BP to work on moving runners over and hitting to the opposite field is what Manuel was preaching at the start of camp. I wonder if that is still a big part of BP for the Mets. Scouts See Works of Art in Asian Teams� Workouts ] By ALAN SCHWARZ Published: March 18, 2009 SAN DIEGO � He could see Meadowlark Lemon turning two, almost hear �Sweet Georgia Brown� whistling through vacuous Petco Park. As Japanese and Korean infielders gobbled up grounders during infield practice Tuesday and whipped the balls among themselves in bouncy syncopation, Mark Weidemaier sensed he was watching a different sport, a different show. �They�re the Harlem Globetrotters,� said Weidemaier, who has spent this week scouting the San Diego bracket of the World Baseball Classic for the Los Angeles Dodgers. �They�re not flashy or showy, I don�t mean that. But the footwork and timing. They�re going full bore, full speed. They go through every play that needs to be made in the game. They�ll get more ground balls than a big-leaguer takes in a week.� Baseball scouts are known for watching games, but the best in the business focus just as much on pregame practice, sometimes more. Three games can pass without getting to see how a shortstop can flash into the hole, or how well a second baseman charges a slow grounder. But when top Asian teams take batting practice, a scout�s inner aesthete awakens to the beauty of the game. Tuesday night � when Korea beat Japan, 4-1, to advance to this weekend�s W.B.C. semifinals � presented a double shot for the two dozen scouts in attendance. All of them want to be prepared in case any player becomes available to be signed, and both teams� hour of pregame drills had oodles to eyeball. �Korea has a B.P. routine they use where it�s more about moving runners over and hitting to the opposite field,� said Orrin Freeman, a longtime scout for the Florida Marlins who has watched international baseball since the 1980s. �You watch a major league team in the United States take B.P., and most of the guys are just playing home run derby.� As Japan and Korea practiced before Tuesday�s game, Freeman watched from the loge seats behind first base. He saw a distinctly Korean defensive drill in which any ball that goes beyond outfielder depth draws an infielder deep onto the grass to take a relatively short cutoff throw, in large part because third-base coaches tend to hold runners if cutoff men already have the ball. After Korea left the field, Japanese infielders took fungoed grounders at almost infield-in depth, pushing their reflexes so that the real game would feel easier, not unlike how a hitter might swing three bats in the on-deck circle. Rob Ducey, a former major league outfielder who scouts for the Toronto Blue Jays, sat beside the third-base dugout and enjoyed a sonata of skills rarely seen in the majors. He saw Japanese shortstop Yasuyuki Kataoka field grounders in perfect position to turn double plays, and other infielders moving to balls on angles that would make Euclid proud. Korean third baseman Bum Ho Lee charged grounders with the intensity of October, which for many foreign players this W.B.C. might as well be. �They work their craft a whole lot more than we do,� Ducey said. �They work on their swings instead of being pull, pull, pull.� Asked how a typical major-leaguer might respond to pregame practices as intense as those of Asian teams, Ducey said: �They�d feel like it was overkill � �I don�t want to get gassed.� Major league players, not all of them, but they do enough to get by because physically they�re such gifted athletes.� Not unlike how Asia�s practices are more rigorously exacting than those in the major leagues, several scouts said that Japan�s infield drills are generally more taut than Korea�s, a difference they ascribed to Korea�s having larger players with more power and less reliance on basic run-at-a-time fundamentals. Cleanup hitter Tae Kyun Kim packs 220 pounds on his six-foot frame, while first baseman Dae Ho Lee stands a downright behemoth 6-foot-4, 264. Japan has only one regular who weighs as much as 205: catcher Kenji Johjima, who perhaps not coincidentally makes his living with the Seattle Mariners. �The Japanese, they are far superior fundamentally,� said Ducey, the Blue Jays� coordinator of Pacific Rim operations. �They take thousands of ground balls a week, not just the young guys, all of them. The Japanese run hard down the line all the time. Koreans, it�s a little haphazard at times. And Koreans are generally more physical, more aggressive at the plate. They�re more suited for our game.� And still, a few hours later, the Koreans proved that they were plenty fundamental, more so, on this night, than Japan. They beat Japan on execution alone, all in the first inning. It started with the first two batters of the game: second baseman Keun Woo Jeong grabbed a high chopper and threw to first to barely nip Japan�s speedy Ichiro Suzuki, and on the next play, first baseman Tae Kyun Kim dived to his right for a hard ground ball and threw to the pitcher hustling over to cover first. Rather than an early first-and-second, no-out jam, the inning soon ended peacefully. And in the bottom half of the inning, Japan looked uncharacteristically clumsy. After a leadoff single, second baseman Akinori Iwamura double-clutched a ground ball in the hole for what was ruled a single; later, with Iwamura trying to start a double play, Kataoka could not handle Iwamura�s low throw and got no out at all. Two batters later, Korea�s Jin Young Lee stroked a beautiful opposite-field single through the left side for two runs, a 3-0 Korea lead and San Diego�s best imitation of Tony Gwynn in years. With the loss, Japan left itself having to play Cuba on Wednesday night to stay alive in the tournament it won three years ago. Disappointing for Japanese fans, but a treat for American scouts. Just another day at the symphony. �Watching the Japanese fungo hitters is great,� Weidemaier noted. �They�re hitting every type of ball that can happen to an infielder: to the left and right, backhand, sharp one-hoppers, backspin, top spin, slow rollers. Rat-a-tat-tat, they�re so precise in all their movements. To me, that�s what makes this game so beautiful.�

I think he needs better guidance, or half a brain or something.

Great pictures , if that guy didn't have an arm injury surely he wold after lugging that thing around.

Brian Roberts said it all right here.... ] "I heard David Wright's face was in the dirt and every Met fan in the world was panicking."

Jeter made the out......as hard as that is to believe...IIRC he fluffed it with the bases juiced earlier in the game.

Didn't I just hear Gary do a hockey game on Versus?

That was exciting....I mean I didn't really care about this tourney but that game was worth watching.....

Please stop in the booth with the excuses about the USA roster....

There are times when words are not enough with this guy.

Is this like the normal procedure when the old team decline the player , apart form having a cool name has he any upside?

Rick Sutcliffe remarked that Wright going in like he did to break up that DP was inspired by Jeter - " just by being around Jeter and being exposed to him has brought David to a higher level , he's a wonderful young man....Wright too"

Great news. ] Mets' Santana throws four innings without incident BY DAVID LENNON | david.lennon@newsday.com 1:41 PM EDT, March 17, 2009 PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. - More than any one pitch, the best indication of Johan Santana's mindset as he prepares for Opening Day came during the second inning of Tuesday's minor-league game on Field 7. Santana was so sure he had Scott Grimes struck out on a changeup in the dirt that he stormed off the back of the mound to argue with the umpire behind him. That's right. Scott Grimes, who was playing for the Worcester Tornadoes last season. Santana buried a changeup, and Grimes -- not used to that kind of pitch in the Can-Am League -- clearly did not check his swing. Which is why Santana was annoyed. "Oh yeah, this is a game," Santana said. "You have to do whatever it takes to even win that game and get ready. Because that's the thing, when Opening Day comes, there's not going to be any practice. You've got to be ready. "So that's what we're trying to do now, focus on throwing all of the pitches, on controlling the strike zone and throwing changeups and sliders. I think we're pretty good. We're on the right track." The irritated Santana finished off Grimes with a fastball that he missed for strike three -- no discussion there -- and completed his four-inning stint without incident. Overall, Santana allowed six hits and two earned runs, with five strikeouts and no walks. He threw 56 pitches, 40 for strikes, and his fastball stayed in the 87-89 mph range. With three more starts to go, Santana figures to build up more arm strength and the velocity should increase as well over the next three weeks. "We're still working," Santana said. "I don't work by percentages or anything, but I think we still have some room to improve and to get better and that's what we're focused on right now."

I love it , how do you ever think this stuff up. ] We're a winner! From July 29, 1967 to September 28, 2008 we are! Other franchises may define their success by championships or whatever, but that's too much forest and not enough trees, especially after your first several seasons were comprised of acorns falling on your head.

I've enjoyed watching Francisco Rodriguez doing his thing, I'm all pumped up myself. Tom Martin couldn't have been further away form the WBC and he fell down a stairs, things happen.

I knew someone would pick up on Ralph..

Can't let the fact that Fman has a Zune slide by without mention , I have only ever met one person who has one. What's she like?

Interesting review here , especially of Citi Field , gets general good marks but some digs are given in regard to celebrating Mets history. by Paul Goldberger HOME New stadiums for the Yankees and the Mets. The Mets� new home echoes the famous entrance of the Dodgers� Ebbets Field. The new Yankee Stadium�s grandiosity is tempered by the energy of its urban setting. ] n 1921, Colonel Jacob Ruppert, the co-owner of the New York Yankees, needed to get his team out from under the thumb of the New York Giants, his landlords at the Polo Grounds, in Harlem, and build his own stadium. Having looked at a plot occupied by an orphan asylum in upper Manhattan, some land in Long Island City, and an area on the West Side, over the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks, he settled on the Bronx. Just across the Harlem River from the Polo Grounds, he erected the largest and grandest stadium in baseball. Yankee Stadium, which opened in 1923, was a haughty structure designed to give the game a feeling of permanence lacking in earlier, scrappier ballparks, like Fenway Park, in Boston, Wrigley Field, in Chicago, and Ebbets Field, in Brooklyn. Unlike the builders of older ballparks, Ruppert didn�t have to contort the stadium to fit the lines of city streets. The stadium could spread out and lift high; it was the first ballpark to have three full tiers of seats. Nestled beside elevated subway tracks and across from the playgrounds and basketball courts of Macombs Dam Park, Yankee Stadium rose above its surroundings. There is nothing so revolutionary in Yankee Stadium�s replacement, which opens just to the north, across 161st Street, on April 3rd, when the Yankees host the Chicago Cubs for an exhibition game. (The first regular-season game is on April 16th, against the Cleveland Indians.) The new Yankee Stadium, designed by the architectural firm HOK Sport, is effectively an attempt to atone for the brutal 1973 renovation of Ruppert�s building, which removed the historic ambience without adding much in the way of modern amenities. HOK has reincarnated the old stadium, but with clearer sight lines, luxury suites, plenty of places to eat, and, finally, sufficient bathroom facilities. It has tried hard, very hard, to make us think of its predecessor, with sumptuous architectural effects that have the self-important air of a new courthouse built to look as if it had been there since William Howard Taft was President. When you first go in, you find yourself in the so-called Great Hall, an enormous space covered with a translucent roof, and from there you move into the concourses and toward the seats. Lest you forget that you are there not only to watch a baseball game but also to soak up the stadium�s noble lineage, there�s a reproduction of the famous scalloped frieze that adorned the old stadium�s upper deck. Outside, there is a fa�ade of limestone, granite, and cast stone, with high, narrow arched openings and entry portals that seem designed for the ceremonial arrival of the Pope, Queen Elizabeth, or at least George Steinbrenner. Also about to open is the New York Mets� new home�the first time that two major-league stadiums have opened in the same city at the same time. Citi Field, which people are already calling TARP Field, or Bailout Park, opens on March 29th, with a college game. (The Mets play an exhibition game there on April 3rd and their first regular-season game on April 13th.) Like the new Yankee Stadium, Citi Field is right next door to its predecessor and was designed by HOK Sport. The firm has pretty much cornered the market in sports facilities in recent years; in 1992, it designed the most influential ballpark of modern times, Baltimore�s Oriole Park at Camden Yards. The Orioles insisted that the new park have the ambience of an old-fashioned one and feel connected to the city, and HOK, scrapping an earlier design, obliged. Camden Yards launched a generation of so-called retro-classic ballparks, a style to which both of New York�s new stadiums conform, even though they look vastly different from each other. The previous home of the Mets, Shea Stadium, opened in 1964, at a time when architects seemed to think that their mission was to purge baseball fields of asymmetry, idiosyncrasy, and anything that seemed remotely related to a park�s surroundings, and to offer up instead gigantic doughnuts of concrete that looked like highway interchanges. (Other notable examples of the genre sprang up in Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Cincinnati, and St. Louis.) Citi Field is pleasanter in every way than the harsh stadium it replaces. The park has a casual feel, with warm red brick inside, lots of amenities, great sight lines, and a layout that�s easy to navigate. There are forty-two thousand seats, fifteen thousand fewer than Shea had, all a calm dark green and arranged in somewhat irregular tiers, bringing you much closer to the field than before. The complex has an energetic composition of brick fa�ades, and dark-gray steel elements, which are said to have been designed with the great steel arch of Hell Gate Bridge in mind, and give the place a feel that is as much industrial as retro. As for the retro-classic side of Citi Field, the Mets, having no ancient ballpark of their own to evoke, have appropriated someone else�s. The architects, whose Camden Yards design incorporated features of several historic ballparks, have here wrapped an imitation of the fa�ade of the much mourned Ebbets Field around the southern corner of the new structure, and the old Brooklyn stadium likewise inspired the form of the entry rotunda. The Mets treat the National League�s New York history as if it were abandoned property, which, in a way, it is. But does that mean it is there for the taking? True, the identity of the Mets�whose colors combine the blue of the Dodgers and the orange of the Giants�has thrived on a magpie element, but there�s something a bit dishonest about naming the rotunda for Jackie Robinson, who never wore a Mets uniform. A pastiche of the Dodgers� former field in Brooklyn pasted onto the fa�ade of a different team�s twenty-first-century ballpark in Queens is less a historical tribute than it is an act of make-believe. istorically, ballparks have been urban places, gardens in the middle of the city. The greatest of them�Wrigley, Ebbets, Fenway, Forbes Field, Shibe Park�emerged out of the form and shape of their cities. Fenway has the Green Monster, the thirty-seven-foot wall that compensates for the truncation of left field; at Griffith Stadium, in Washington, D.C., the center-field wall was notched inward because the owners of houses next to the stadium refused to sell. Ballparks weren�t the same because the urban places they belonged to weren�t the same. One football gridiron is identical to another, but a baseball field, once you get beyond the diamond, is not�which is part of the reason that even the ugliest ones are loved so fiercely by the fans and become such repositories of civic feeling. A baseball outfield, technically, has no outer limits, just as a baseball game has no set time to end. The outfield stops where the stadium�s builders decide it will stop. Urban ballparks had fa�ades in front, to fit in with neighboring buildings, but were usually left low and open in the outfield, which had the effect of weaving the park into the neighborhood, so that, from the right place, you might catch an enticing glimpse of the green paradise within. At the old Yankee Stadium, that place was from the elevated tracks of the Lexington Avenue subway, and one nice feature of the new stadium is that that, too, has been re-created. There is a break between the right-field stands and the scoreboard, and you can see the trains sliding by. The new stadium feels more tightly woven into the fabric of the city than the old one did. (It will feel even more so once a Metro-North station opens there, later this year, and once the city finally makes good on its obligation to replace the Macombs Dam Park facilities lost in construction of the new stadium with parkland on and around the site of the previous one.) If you approach it by driving along Jerome Avenue, you see a couple of the Bronx�s finest Art Deco apartment houses across the street from the west fa�ade, and you get a hint of the subtle counterpoint that once existed between a baseball park and an urban setting. The stadium is bigger and more imposing than everything around it, of course, but it seems to grow out of its surroundings, and this somehow rescues the building from its own pomposity. In a way, the apartment houses on Jerome Avenue, the jumble of storefronts and bars under the elevated tracks on River Avenue, and the constant presence of street life shape the stadium as much as its designers have. At Citi Field, conversely, the Ebbets Field fa�ade, stuck in the middle of acres of parking (as Shea was), seems more like a theme park than it would if it were in the middle of the city. HOK has tried to make the stadium feel more urban by placing a long brick building, containing the Mets� offices, just beyond right field, along 126th Street, where it faces a favela of auto-body shops in Willets Point. But, since the site is defined mainly by expressways and parking lots, the architects are fighting a losing battle. It�s a pity that the Mets didn�t build on the far West Side of Manhattan, where Colonel Ruppert first thought of putting Yankee Stadium, ninety years ago, and where the Jets recently tried to build a football stadium. A football stadium doesn�t need to be in the middle of a city, but a baseball park, smaller and used much more often, does. A stadium is a stage set as sure as anything on Broadway, and it determines the tone of the dramas within. Citi Field suggests a team that wants to be liked, even to the point of claiming some history that isn�t its own. Yankee Stadium, however, reflects an organization that is in the business of being admired, and is built to serve as a backdrop for the image of the Yankees, at once connected to the city and rising grandly above it. ♦ review

I'm certain I read somewhere that Pudge always wanted to be an Astro.