Frayed Knot

Fman99 wrote: And the hits just keep on coming! Mark Teixeira shut down for two weeks after hearing a "pop" in his wrist, team very concerned, back to NY for tests. And the WBC takes down yet another player!

Is his defensive rap that bad? I know little about him except for a brief comment from Gary Cohen during the one or two innings of ST ball I've seen so far where he mentioned Hicks having a great arm.

NYM Player of the Decade (so far -- 2010-2012) as per CPF Rankings Project 1 - R.A. Dickey 2 - David Wright 3 - Jonathan Niese 4 - Ike Davis 5 - Jose Reyes 6 - Daniel Murphy 7 - Johan Santana 8 - Angel Pagan 9 - Carlos Beltran 10 - Lucas Duda 11 - Ruben Tejada 12 - Jason Bay 13 - Mike Pelfrey 14 - Dillon Gee 15 - Bobby Parnell 16 - Francisco Rodriguez 17 - Josh Thole 18 - Scott Hairston 19 - Chris Capuano 20 - Hisanori Takahashi 21 - Justin Turner 22 - Matt Harvey 23 - Manny Acosta 24 - Chris Young 25 - Jeff Francoeur 26 - Jon Rauch 27 - Rod Barajas 28 - Kirk Nieuwenhuis 29 - Pedro Feliciano 30 - Tim Byrdak 31 - Mike Baxter 32 - Elmer Dessens 33 - Andres Torres 34 - Luis Castillo 35 - Jordany Valdespin 36 - Jason Isringhausen 37 - Ronnie Cedeno 38 - Chris Carter 39 - Pedro Beato 40 - Willie Harris 41 - Ramon Ramirez 42 - Henry Blanco 43 - Nick Evans 44 - Jeremy Hefner 45 - Raul Valdes 46 - Frank Francisco 47 - Ronnie Paulino 48 - Josh Edgin 49 - Jenrry Mejia 50 - Jason Pridie 51 - Alex Cora 52 - Pat Misch 53 - Miguel Batista 54 - Omar Quintanilla 55 - Fernando Nieve 56 - Ryota Igarashi

[u:1la8ouvh]WBC Update[/u:1la8ouvh] Pool B play is in the books (it's been going on over the last couple of days, most of it while we were sleeping) with the Netherlands and Taipei advancing at the expense of South Korea & Australia Neth, Taipei, & SK all beat up on poor Australia (0-3) and then took turns beating each other and all finished 2-1. Korea, who lost in the final last time around to Japan, was eliminated on the basis of worst run differential.

BatMags wrote: ... I like the NFL playoffs. That's also a crap-shoot but there's not much that can be done about it. The game's too violent and physically demanding to have the teams play more than a few handful of games each season. I've gotten away from the NBA in a big way over the years thanks to the Knicks utter head-scratching putridness and destructive management. And though I don't like the expanded playoff format of the NBA, where more than half the teams qualify for the playoffs, the format nevertheless protects the integrity of the sport by making it highly unlikely for a team to capture the crown without being one of the league's elites. The best of seven format is a reliable way to determine which of two competing NBA teams is the better one. The NFL, in recent years anyway, is producing champions not only from the bottom of their playoff ladder but even from those teams that wouldn't even make the tourney (5th & 6th seeds) in MLB. As usual though, when this happens in the NFL it's considered exciting whereas the same thing in baseball tends to get written off as both flukey and as an indictment of the regular season. The NBA follows form more often than anywhere else (the NHL the least) although I think it's more because of the huge gulf between the elites of the league and the mediocre teams than anything to do with their format. The upside to that is that it gives them the best chance of having the actual best fighting it out at the end, but it also means that the first two rounds are must-miss tedium unless your team is involved and it certainly doesn't help that those two rounds take a month or so to complete.

batmagadanleadoff wrote: ... Ditto for the amateur draft and baseball's post-season unless the Mets are in it. Those last two are just big stinking crap-shoots. Are there post-season sports that you do watch? What does the non-crapshoot factor have to be for you to tune in? And does the idea that those sports where you (presumably) have a better idea/i] who is going to win at the outset make it better?

I think the 'cutoff' in the title was for how abruptly the movie ended.

Spring Training: What Do You Look For? I check to see the radar gun readings on my fastball.

Benjamin Grimm wrote: MRI indicates that Nieuwenhuis has a bone bruise in his knee. He's expected to be out for a week. Wasn't that the original diagnosis for Ike too?

You're just blind to the obvious correlation. Santana suffered a setback just by thinking about the WBC. THINKING! Hey, I heard about a guy who got hurt just reading about the WBC! And on that note, Rangers' one-time top prospect turned reliever turned starter Martin Perez: out two months with a broken forearm sustained during a standard ST game -- showing once again that NOT going to the WBC doesn't mean you just sit around and do needlepoint all day. This all brings to mind the old thread where Ms. Met wanted to do away with interleague play on account of her claim that it caused Al Leiter to be injured. Perez had been penciled in as Texas's 5th starter this season but this now could mean that Kyle Lohse, still unemployed as I type, might actually get a call. As far as Reyes & Dickey go -- when RA gets the win and Jose drives in the winning run during the game in September which eliminates the Yanx from playoff contention it'll all be worth it no matter what their season-long numbers are.

vtmet wrote: I'm really surprised that with Reyes injury history (particularly after playing in the 2009 WBC, and after the Mets moved him to 2nd) that the BJ's are allowing him to play in the WBC again...usually if Reyes stays in his routines, he's healthy; but that isn't usually the case when he breaks his usual routine.... There's no statistical connection with the WBC and injuries even though there are enough people who want to see one. The fact is injuries occur all the time* during March but it seems that only those which occur away from a team training camp get the cause and effect label. * Just this week in Met camp we saw Wheeler, Nieuwenhuis & Santana. Also Raffy Furcal is having elbow issues; Matt Garza is being shut down until at least May; Carl Crawford is on the shelf; Phil Hughes has back problems; and those are just the ones I know off the top of my head. I'm sure there are two or three in every camp.

I hadn't realized he had been unmotivated all this time.

And now you know the source for Swan-H's 'I'm walking here!' post in an IGT after the Cubs Anthony Rizzo drew a base on balls last year.

I didn't see/hear any of this but nice job piling on some runs towards the end and pulling out the tie after being down big earlier. I may be wrong on this but I believe they've tied every game played so far this spring; it's like their record is now 0-0-8 or something.

Kong76 wrote: Harvey gives up a kaboom to lead off guy (didn't catch his name) ... Seeing as how it's the Marlins, it's probably some 16 year old who they're paying $6.50/hour. Actually it was OFer Christian Yelich, their top offensive prospect these days and someone who maybe has previously crossed paths with Harvey somewhere in the minors.

As athlete-penned (or dictated) bios go, I've certainly read worse. Not that I mean that to be a glowing tribute or anything because that genre represents some pretty low-hanging fruit for the most part. This one, coming as it does five+ years after his last game and with the bit of perspective that gives, at least avoids the usual trap of sounding like an "as told to" type of book that is thrown together right on the heels of said athlete's big moment for the sole purpose of cashing in while the fervor is still running high. What this does come off as is someone who, because he remembers every doubt and slight (real or imagined) that's ever come his way, is genuinely concerned with his legacy as a ballplayer and is therefore determined to get his side of the story out into the public. In doing so he comes off like the comedian who gets roaring reviews at a packed house but then goes home obsessing about the one stone-faced guy he saw in the third row; as a bit of an entitled whiner and frankly a little paranoid at times. That method of seeing every slight as both a personal insult and challenge is most likely part of what made him the player he became; it's a trait that gets celebrated by the Michael Jordan worshippers of the world for the fuel to his fire (if he couldn't find detractors he was known to invent them) but it doesn't make it a particularly attractive one. On the plus side he doesn't paint himself only in a glowing light as the standard type of athlete auto-bio tends to do. He admits that those traits didn't always make him the best teammate or a press favorite. He seems to have some regrets that he didn't enjoy his career a little more while it was in progress but doesn't know if he could have succeeded any other way. On the various hot-button issues: - he makes a good case that the charges of him "coming out of nowhere" and therefore his success could only have been due to steroids are off base. He was always strong due to being a weightlifting & nutrition junkie from childhood, and could always hit on account of being obsessed at doing so from a young age. The reasons for the late draft pick (and a favor at that) were due more to being from a small HS in the northeast plus his overall lack of athleticism and a position. Not that any of that stopped him from seeing it all as a personal insult. - he admits to taking various supplements common to the gym-rat crowd including the now-banned Andro but flatly denies the always illegal stronger stuff. Looked into HGH when it was first becoming known but was steered off of it by Dodgers trainers. The "bacne" he says was a family trait that frequently lasted well beyond just the teenage years. Plausible? - yes ... Accurate -- ???, although I think Murray Chass at minimum needs something else to harp on. Overall he pretty much makes the same case I'd make on the whole steroids generation in general: that the players were as ill-informed about it as most GMs, owners, trainers, and journalists were; that it's both impossible and unfair to throw a blanket over the whole thing and pronounce everyone guilty or that you can somehow retroactively fix things by pretending you can pick and choose which records or players were clean or tainted. - had his better overall seasons in LA but felt very mis-treated by them and has much fonder memories of New York - touches only briefly into his father's supposed crime connections. He claims that the rumors that shot down Vince Piazza's attempt to buy the SF Giants to be totally the result of some crooked guy with whom dad had invested money which got him tainted by nothing more than association. And of course he sees it all as a slight that no one can see a successful Italian without also accusing him of being in organized crime. Vince Piazza comes off as a real piece of work btw.

Or, as it's known now, Bob Seger and the Silver Hair Band.

Rangers SS Elvis Andrus was forced to miss yesterday's ST game due to soreness from a recent tattoo.

Cashman sez that the Yanx have made "a considerable offer" to Robinson Cano. Suddenly that "policy" of not negotiating prior to a contract being up seems to have disappeared.

In a move that screams out; 'yeah, despite being one of the games highest paid players for nearly a decade, I managed to spend it even faster and therefore desperately need the dough', Manny Ramirez signs on to play in Taiwan. Just ?: ??: ?? being ?: ??: ??. And this is why BoC awards should still exist.

One of the advantages in breaking up and then later reforming 'The Eagles' --well, an advantage if your name was either Glenn Frey or Don Henley anyway-- was that Frey & Henley were able to re-set the parameters of the band to where they got the biggest bulk of the money generated by the band's second act, something that was in direct contrast to the dynamic in many new bands where the 'we're all in this together'/equal partners type of brotherhood tends to dominate. That chart shows 'Foreigner' as going through more drummers than Spinal Tap.

Some pretty good praise from prospect guru John Sickels at his site - and that piece provides an additional link to a brief interview and film clips done by 'Metsminorleagueblog.com' http://www.minorleagueball.com/2013/2/28/4038100/prospect-note-noah-syndergaard-rhp-new-york-mets

In a move that screams out; 'yeah, despite being one of the games highest paid players for nearly a decade, I managed to spend it even faster and therefore desperately need the dough', Manny Ramirez signs on to play in Taiwan. And speaking of ex-BoSox dummies, Johnny Damon could scarcely wait until the cast was on Curtis Granderson's arm before he was publicly begging for a contract from the Yanx. No such luck it appears.

If it's going to be a true soccer 'kit' for the Mets wouldn't it say AMWAY on it somewhere?

metirish wrote: ... the local rags are really trying to outdo each other in the cannibal cop headlines.....and the bar is set very low. I've totally ignored this story - but I did happen to see where both the Post & News went with a 'MEAT THE WIFE' headline on the same day.