Frayed Knot

So what's left to decide? * Diaz - Chavez - Redman One or maybe two of them (and probably not Redman) makes the team Bench = Castro, Franco, Valentin, Woodward -- plus one or two of the above depending on the number of relievers kept * The lefty relievers still hanging on are Darren Oliver & Pedro Feliciano Pen = Wagner, Sanchez, Julio, Heilman, Bradford -- plus maybe one of the lefties, and/or Iriki, Lima?, am I missing someone?

But that's part of the problem, that 'conventional wisdom' has decided that certain guys are absolutely guilty despite a lack of evidence, and that certain others are clean based on nothing more than some vauge rep.

Per E. Coleman on WFAN (and other sources): - Heilman will NOT make his scheduled start today vs Florida having been banished to the bullpen (at least for now) and that Brian Bannister makes the team as a starter - Keppinger sent down, which pretty much ends the speculation about who the starting 2nd sacker will be Lefty relievers Juan Perez, and Royce Ring also sent down - Matusi officially put on the DL although with backdating he can return as soon as the end of the first week

"Do you think Bagwell is a Hall of Famer?" Not a slam-dunk because he ended so poorly, but Yes. He did so many things well; great OBP (over .400 lifetime); great fielder, baserunner, etc, in addition to all the usual counting stat totals. May have been baseball's most complete 1st baseman throughout the '90s "Do you think future voters will consider whether players took steroids when they are being considered for the Hall, or will they chalk it up to "well, everyone was taking them in that era"? " Most will consider - though not automatically disqualify - whether a player was "using" but that gets into a dangerous area because it involves an awful lot of speculation. - We all "KNOW" Sosa was using ... but it's based on a whole lotta speculation and virtually zero evidence - If we're going to use the 'sudden jump' in power test then let's convict Davey Johnson and wipe out Maris's record also (he never hit as many as 40 either before or after his 61) and go back to calling Ruth the single-season champ - If Palmiero had passed last Spring's test he probably finishes out his career with the squeakiest, cleanest image - And how do we know that Bagwell was clean btw? Boston traded him because he showed little power in the minors ... then suddenly he had it and later develops physical problems that can't be fixed.

It's good that Zambrano (and Heilman & Bannister) are having good springs because Trachsel isn't. He's getting smacked around today by the Dodgers. 8 runs in a few innings including a 3R HR from opposing pitcher Brett Tomko

Metland is happy and gay! No, we allowed Piazza to sign elsewhere remember.

Ummm, I count 13 Marylins there (or 26 ... oh nevermind) Or is that supposed to be from 'Seven Year Itch'?

And speaking of 1st basemen who some of us were trolling around for last off-season, Carlos Pena was released by the Tiggers yesterday. Maybe it's just coincidence, but it seems that highly touted 1st base prospects have been awfully hard to read in the last few years. Pena & Choi are still young-ish but have both gone through about 4 orgs each already and neither has anything resembling a full-time job (and think about how many teams passed on Choi if he wound up w/the BoSox). Also Adrian Gonzalez: 1st overall pick 6 yrs ago - dealt at least twice since; Jason Stokes: various injuries and stalled progress; Troy Loney: Dodger farmhand who's been "next year" for about 3 seasons now. I guess that's the nature of that position - that if you can't hit [u:05d7f82f99]a lot[/u:05d7f82f99] you're just not that valuable (and one of the reasons I'm not sweating out the trade of Jacobs). Meanwhile, I wonder how the Royals like their M'kwicz signing now that all these cheap options are available on the waiver wire - not to mention their own Justin Huber who they just re-assigned to the minors.

"Between Matsui being out and Reyes being at the WBC, why couldn't they have gotten Lambin some more playing time? And why are we completely disfunctional when it comes to managing our second basemen? " I admit to knowing next to nothing about Chase Lambin but it doesn't seem to be only club mgmt; few others seem to think much of him either. A quick check of a few ratings of the Met system shows that BA doesn't rank him even among the top 10 Met prospects and John Sickels keeps him out of the top 20. And this is out of what now is a near bottom-of-the-barrel farm system. Maybe it's because he'll turn 27 in mid-summer and players fall off everyone's prospect-o-meter by that age. BP had better things to say based mostly on last year's sudden power spike (slugging jumped from ~.400 to ~.600 from '04 to '05). Maybe folks want to see him do it again before they take things seriously. Looks like the 2nd base situation is going to do some shaking out this season. Who knows where it'll wind up?

More BoSox moves (which apparently happened Saturday but didn't seem to make any of this morning's papers) in that they claimed Hee Seop Choi off waivers from the Dodgers. Also interesting is that he apparently has a minor league option left - although at 750K he'd be an expensive AAA player (but a cheap ML one). Sox now have to factor in Snow & Choi & Youkilis & Lowell into the 2 corner IF spots. Maybe this means Lowell hasn't looked good in Spring since they were thinking of a Youk/Snow platoon at 1st. Now both 1st basemen swing lefty and both potential 3rd sackers hit righty. A year ago at this time some of us were trying to figure out what we'd have to cough up to pry him away from LA. Now the Seo/Choi HS reunion tour is over before it started.

Kinda weird that they pulled Pedro after only 30-some pitches - especially with a 6-pitch 3rd as his last inning and that he's thrown upwards of 80 during simulated action (isn't 'simulated action' what got George Michael in trouble with the law?). Maybe that was planned in order to get Victor his work in and Petey threw some more on the side afterward. Such throwing isn't uncommon in cases like this although no one in the booth said anything (unless I missed it). 'SOkay anyway. Zamby looked real good: batters were flinching all day. Now if only ... Real bad O's defense. Some of that is prolly a 1-day thing but Millar is a real bad 1st baseman. Even some non-errors hurt Benson. Corey Patterson was a BA #1 overall prospect in part based on a rep as a ball-hawking CFer but loafed toward Delgado's blooper in LF and never came close to it. The fact that he's never learned to get on base in the majors hasn't helped his case either. Nice DP started by Andy-Hernandy (partly missed cuz they were talking to Mazzone). I just wish I was more sure that the guy could hit; I've seen 2 of those 'running slap-bunts' already this Spring (neither came close to working) and I've only caught a handful of innings so far.

"What handle were you gonna use? So next time, I know who I'm listening to" I've probably called all of 3 or 4 times in the 18 or so years they've been on the air so I don't think 'next time' is something you should hold your breath waiting for. There actually is a regular caller to that station I went to HS with (same first name/different town) who I eventually recognized through clues I picked up on via the sheer repetition of his appearances.

If you're going to subscribe to the notion that it's OK to give guys jobs based on March performance - which goes on all the time around here - then it would have to be legit to take them away as well. Plus, it's not like Seo pitched particularly well that season either while he was in the minors or later after he was put back into the rotation. Look, I'm not arguing against JWS or for the trade but can we stop pretending that he's got some uninterrupted record of stellar performance here. And, yes, frustrating your pitching coaches is going to have an affect on one's job status. And the point about the "missed" starts was an estimate of how many he might have pitched had they pulled the plug on Ishii earlier. Ishii, remember, was brought in due to injuries to Trax & Benson (another example of why rooting for injuries usually backfires) not specifically so as to bypass Seo.

I saw a replay of that bunt, and his actions were more like he was bunting for a hit than a pure sacrifice. Still don't love it, but 1st & 2nd/none out vs a tough pitcher (Carpenter) in the top of the 1st and it's less bad. Turns out that they took a 1-0 lead w/o getting the ball out of the infield partly on account of that: Reyes - IF hit; LoDuca - HBP, Beltran - bunt hit; Delgado - BB ... and then got no more as Wright K'd and Nady GiDP'd Richard Neer on WFAN brought the subject up this morning - praising the idea more than I thought it merited - which actually prompted me to do a rare thing and call to discuss it. Amazingly I got right through, was put on hold ... and then accidently hung up on myself fumbling for the speaker button. Turns out they had a bunch of guests afterward anyway so I either wouldn't have gotten on or would have spent 45 minuts on hold. Oh well.

If you're looking at all the options and dividing them by broad descriptions ... as in; "Not overpowering, good overall arsenal, knows how to pitch, consistent success in the minors." Nobody's saying that their track records have been the same to date; the timing and paths they took to get there have been completely different. Look, this doesn't have to be reduced to "mistreatment". Seo, by many accounts, was stubborn and tough to work with at times. He absolutely pitched his way out of a rotation spot he was virtually handed a few years back due to a lousy Spring (wouldn't it have been worse to give him one anyway simply because you "promised"?) and managed to frustrate both Peterson and his predecesor - although RP reportedly came to like him towards the end of last year. Did they stick w/Ishii too long last season? Yeah, but Seo also put that AAA time to good use and came back a better pitcher. At worst we're talking about a handful (maybe 5) of "missed" starts here. I think they just made a judgement that maybe we've seen the best of him and they were "selling high" while they had a fallback choice cut from similar cloth (those broad descriptions again) that could maybe do the same. In the meantime they plugged a bullpen hole. As usual, time will tell if they made the right call.

He had a lot more good/decent seasons here (hence his high ranking) than most fans will remember. That said, he was a very frustrating pitcher to watch and root for. Once he released the ball he had almost no baseball instincts whatsoever. Couldn't move, couldn't field, would throw to the wrong base, and barely seemed to know the rules (although suprisingly he wasn't a bad hitter). He's also rumored to be one of the dumber muthafuckas who ever walked the earth. Thinking that pro-wrestling was real is bad enough, but the story told in Pearlman's book about his struggle to buy a house is classic: he moped to Davey that he wanted to purchase a dream plot of land back in Hawaii that was going for $200,000 - but that he "only" made 250K at the time and didn't think he could live on $50K for the entire year. He had no inkling of the concept of down payments and mortgages.

YES really ws the guinea pig in that theirs was a huge fight over the concept of who - provider or distributer - got to decide whether the channel was destined to be part of the regular package or stuffed onto a pay tier. Once Cablevision lost that fight the rules for this addition were much more defined and all that remained to fight over was the price. It's why I was only somewhat worried over this but never really panicked.

I'm very much against a mid-season WBC for all the season interrupting reasons. I'm not all that worried about injuries cropping up. There were a total of 39 games played in this thing which is less than what's played in a regular MLB sked over 3 days. Throw in that only about 1/3 of the total rosters were MLB players and the injury possibility adds up to the same as about a day or two in reg season ball. Steinbrenner's whining aside, it's just not all that big a risk.

It already has ... Soriano took his place in LF during today's ST game. As mentioned before, continuing to refuse the assignment would have resulted in the suspension of his salary plus a forfeiting of his FA rights for at least a year. I'm sure his agent and/or the Player's Assoc took a page out of the 'Cool Hand Luke' playbook and told him; 'we've got to get your mind right'

Amazon finally shipped it to me the other day (ordered a month ago). I'm part way through it.

"You were born with a mandate to cover the Mets." No they weren't. Particularly not once the game is over. This station sees itself - and are trying to sell themselves - as a sports station that carries the Mets as opposed to just a Met's station. We'll see how this all shakes out in reality.