Frayed Knot

Crew at FAN trying to figure out when the last time (if ever) that the Mets, Yanx, Knicks, Nets, Devils, Islanders & Rangers were all in action on the same day ... as they are tonight. Fuckin' Giant & Jet slackers.

From what I've heard of WIP, their high points make the low points of WFAN sound like Masterpiece Theatre.

A somewhat weather-delayed look at the first installment of how the teams are looking at various mileposts of the season. This first version shows where all teams stood as of their 10th games. Mets7 - 3 Braves7 - 3Marlins6 - 4Phillies2 - 8Nationals2 - 8==============Brewers6 - 4Reds6 - 4Cardinals5 - 5Astros4 - 6Pirates4 - 6Cubs4 - 6==============Dodgers7 - 3D'Backs7 - 3Padres6 - 4Rockies5 - 5Giants3 - 7 The AL chart is still waiting for the Mariners to get their 10th game in.

Ironic that Jay Bell was known - particularly in his later years - as the last of the position players who was regularly called on to Sac Bunt, but that he was only in position to score the WS winning run because he had screwed up a sac bunt (bunted into a force play).

Alou - 3.6 Glavine - 3.2 Castro - 0.9 Beltran - 0.9 Valentin - 0.6 Feliciano - 0.3 Smith - 0.2 Burgos - 0.2 Reyes - 0.1

Reyes made too many outs on the basepaths Tuesday night to get anything more than a token sip from me despite two hits, a real nice defensive play, and being part of another bushel of GiDPs turned. * Newly minted Bret Saberhagen post

Just what you need during weather like this ... a 3-1/2 hour game.

Kinda makes you wonder what the dude was thinking: Hey that fan there failed to catch the foul ball so, even though he wound up preventing the enemy OFer from getting an out on our guy, I think I'll heave this entire slice of pie at him! Even dumber when you consider that it's Fenway and so the thing probably cost him 6 bucks.

The word on Freddie Garcia is that his velocity has been plummeting in recent years and especially during ST this year. ]Antonio Alfonseca (R) Still solid and basically has the set-up man job locked in as his. You forgot to mention that he also appears at the moment to be at least 22 months pregnant.

With a nod toward the recent weather, MLB has named David Weathers, Tim Raines, J.T. Snow, Curt Flood, Rich Gale, and Gene Freeze as co-players of the week.

Y'know, rather than a day/night DH how about Memorial Day? The Mets & the Nationals are two of the few teams NOT schecduled for a game that day. The Mets are coming home from a Sunday day game in Florida; the Nats coming off a day game in St. Louis are also headed home. The Mets have both the previous Monday and the following Monday off so you don't run into that 'no more than 19 days in a row' rule. Washington has the next Monday off. Sounds like a no-brainer to me. Wonder why they didn't go that route. Maybe the players wanted the day off instead but players generally hate day-night DHs.

From Baseball America: No one would have blinked if Carlos Gomez struggled in his first month in Triple-A. After all, he’s a 21-year-old in a league filled with former major leaguers. But don’t worry about Gomez; he’s not having any trouble. Gomez went 3-for-3 with a triple on Monday. He has a hit in every game this season and is now hitting .419/.468/.651 with six stolen bases. Gomez’ hitting helped Philip Humber pick up the win on Monday. Humber struck out four and allowed one run in six innings. Dude has 18 hits w/6 2Bs & 2 3Bs

Edgy will use any excuse to get the word 'penultimate' into print.

Unfortunately it's not so easy now to keep things intra-division because of the odd sized divisions and so on. Back with the old two-division formats all games during the first 6 weeks of the season was all east-v-east and west-v-west. And my point from earlier was that keeping things within the division is the exact opposite of what most seem to think should be the "solution" to this weather problem. A SD-v-LA or Ariz game would be a waste to many since they want all those cities to be hosting bad weather teams rather than each other.

At least according to the same people who told me this morning that the BoSox were rained out.

sharpie wrote: The Patriot's Day game is being played. Top o' the first.I only listened to FAN for about 2 different 10-minute spans this morning, but both times I heard that the game had been called. As annoying as that station can be at times they're generally not a source of bad info ... except today apparently. ]Memo to MLB: stick as closely as possible to division play in April.Unfortunately, that memo is getting lost in the flood of memos imploring them to do essentially the opposite: ie. schedule as many warm weather site games as possible. The fault, of course, lies in the schedule that's been neccesitated by expansion and inter-league but no one wants to hear that. In all I'm not sure there's much MLB can do here. The northern teams don't want to start on the road every year and turn their 6 weeks in Fla/Arz into 8 weeks away from home. The warm weather sites don't want to start with extended homestands as they feel that an excess of April games means a lack of July ones when school's out and the weather is better. And then you've got the two-team cities that don't want both at home or on the road at the same time. Plus as it turns out, even if they somehow did arrange to keep week 1 games all in domes or the south, they're getting killed at least as bad in week 2 here. Sometimes you just gotta chalk it up to bad luck and deal with it.

The annual 'Patriots Day' game in Boston was first delayed - from its usual 10AM starting time to noon - and now canceled. This had to fuck up not only the AL sked (Angels now have FIVE games to make up in cities they're not sked to visit again) but also a lot of Bostonites drinking plans for this state holiday. They are, however, running the marathon despite heavy rains and strong EAST winds for a race run almost entirely west to east. Oooh that's gonna be a bitch. Some 112 lb Kenyan might be seen airborn over eastern Mass sometime today.

I don't have a problem with multi-year streaks. Seems odd to negate a streak just because it starts say in mid-August rather than in mid-May. If limited to a single season anything not started by around Aug 1 would automatically be excluded from even challenging DiMaggio's record. And I don't but the "increased pressure" argument. ** (ooh, ball boy gets smoked by hot bad bounce at Dodger/Padre game)** The supposed pressure on Wright (or anyone) wouldn't begin until nearing the mark anyway. This same argument was used with Tiger and golf's 'Grand Slam' a couple years back. He held the title to all four majors but did so in 2, 3, 4, and then next year's 1 order. Now if golf wants to define their GS as winning all four in one year that's up to them, but I certainly don't see 'The Tiger Slam' - as it was dubbed - as being any easier simply because of the starting point.

]Who the heck is Wendy Rosa? Sounds like the spawn of several Springsteen songs. The interesting assignment here is Fernando Martinez all the way up in AA already following just a partial (injury-shortened) season of Low-A plus a brief (and unsuccessful) year-end stint in High-A - all while being well ahead of his age group to begin with. This is a guy who doesn't turn 19 until October. Looks like Minaya is definitely sticking to his pledge of aggressive promotion within the minor league system for the higher rated prospects.

Scoot-o had one single in 20 ABs prior to today's walk-off. On the other hand he's had an impressive list of walk-off hits for Oakland considering his relatively short time there; I saw a run down of them just the other day. What was cool about today's hit is that the Oakland rally started with 2 out and none on: single - walk - HR ... which was the least they could do after doing almost the same thing they did in Saturday's game. In this case they got 2 in the 1st inning and were threatening for more before being shut-out and virtually no hit after that. Another error for Jeter (6th) Chase Wright?!?! will be the starter for the Yanx on Tuesday. * and with this post I become Randall K. Myers

Both Mussina (hamstring) & Pavano (forearm) to the (retroactive) 15 day DL - joining Wang & Karstens who are already there. Chris Britton (swag from the Jaret Wright deal) called up for now. Wang due to come back in the next week.

Giambi eventually won it with a 1-out HR in the 13th. By that point the Yanx were down to Brian Brunney, their 8th (and presumably last) pitcher. A's scored their 3 runs in the 1st inning and then were shut out after that. Farnsworth has been so bad lately - and especially in 2nd innings - that even with a pitcher crunch they only used him for that one inning. Doug Meintiewicz didn't start due to a deep slump, but was eventually double-switched in then went hitless in a few more ABs to extend his streak into 0-23. 4 Yanqui errors last night including two more for Jeter; totals in 10 games are now 13 & 5 for the team and him. Jeter's 2nd was a low throw that Meinky's sub - Josh Phelps - c/should have easily scooped but didn't come close to, which explains why the double-switch later. The Yanx are carrying 3 1st baseman at this point but only one they trust with a glove and he can't hit.

Chavez - 1.4 Beltran - 0.8 Delgado - 0.6 Valentin - 0.6 Wright - 0.5 Smith - 0.3 Burgos - 0.5 Schoenweis - 0.3

This game ranks highly on the dumbth scale so far: bad swings, bad situational play, bad pitches, bad decisions, bad umpiring. Exactly the kind of game that you can grab with a good last couple of innings and wind up feeling like you stole something and got away with it.

Pelfrey - 2.0 Wagner - 1.0 Schoenweis - 0.7 Heilman - 0.4 Feliciano - 0.4 Reyes - 1.4 Wright - 1.3 Franco - 1.3 Delgado - 1.5