Edgy MD

d'Kong76 wrote: Well, that's kinda harsh. Well sure, but it's said with love. That said, the problem is that 1) the collecting hobby leads to a spirit of completionism, which leads 2) the producers to make more product to exploit that drive the collector has, which leads to 3) more and increasingly less interesting and distinctive product, which leads to 4) a diminishing spirit in the collector, which leads to 5) ultimately quitting in frustration, or becoming an absolute nut.

Parallels are colored variations, typically short-printed and/or numbered. In packs of this year's base Topps set, you can find red (at Target), blue (at Walmart), purple (at Toys R Us), yellow (in special "hanger packs"), green (in all the "retail" packs), "red hot," gold (numbered /2014), camo (numbered /99), black (/63, only available at baseball card shops), pink (/50), clear plastic stock (/10), and platinum (only 1 version made of each card). For example, some of the 2014 Topps Murph parallels: http://www.comc.com/Cards,so,vDetails,=2014+topps+mets+155 They can make you crazy, but can be fun too: https://twitter.com/cdorso/status/418041771088953344 Wow! This is obviously an insanely cynical move to get eight times as much change out of Stony Brook suckers like yourself.

I tend to think of a dozen DWIs in a row as something bad, topped off with the death of Josh Hancock. I know Hancock isn't Lou Brock or anything, but the lowliness of killing himself in an under-the-influence accident, crashing into the back of a stationary wrecker, is pretty dramatic.

Makes me want to create Mets money redeemable at CitiField and Mets Clubhouse-type retailers.

What are "parallel set cards"? Some sort of reprints?

Frayed Knot wrote: btw, how prescient did Smoltz sound talking, just before the two wild pitches, about Barrett getting tight and spiking his breaking pitches? I like Smoltz on the mike and on the occasional local games he does for the Braves he's the same only less restrained being off the network and therefore a bit goofier. The Braves games I saw suggested he didn't pay attention to any baseball he wasn't paid to look at, and only had references from his playing games. Didn't even seem to know his own team's roster that well.

Frayed Knot wrote: Edgy MD wrote: LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr wrote: I know we've been watching them all year, and I KNOW he actually exists, but it still totally feels like "Aaron Barrett" is a guy the Nats had CGIed just before the playoffs started. Yeah, that guy totally took me by surprise. I endured a lot of dis-spiriting Mets-Nats games this season and that guy didn't leave a mark on my psyche at all. And the bigger question, why Aaron Barrett while Tyler Clippard never even gets out of his chair? Yeah, the Nats and the Dodgers were so locked into roles they both went down with their best cards still to be played. Dallas Green in 1980 --- he had a hot hand in Tug McGraw and pitched him whenever he needed him. Say what you want about Dallas Green, but he knew the playoffs were an opportunity that may never come again.

It hits home, but they got one great year and a whole lot of junk out of Bartolo Colon. That's got to be on the list somewhere. Giving two years to Steve Finley at 40 years old, that was a head-scratcher.

LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr wrote: I know we've been watching them all year, and I KNOW he actually exists, but it still totally feels like "Aaron Barrett" is a guy the Nats had CGIed just before the playoffs started. Yeah, that guy totally took me by surprise. I endured a lot of dis-spiriting Mets-Nats games this season and that guy didn't leave a mark on my psyche at all.

Gimme the 10 worst Angels free agent signings.

Your Scottsdale Scorpion feature sexy-assed Mets pitchers Dario Avarez, Julian Hilario, Paul Sewald, and Rob Whalen; plus terrifying woodsmen L.J. Mazzilli, Matt Reynolds, and Brandon Nimmo; with a side helping of 2011 Met/potential future Mets batting coach Val Pascucci, and pitching coach/1980 Mets rotation anchor Ray Burris. Season starts mostly sweetly with a 7-4 win: Sewald: 1 1/3 scoreless. He gave up three hits but struck out three batters and stranded two inherited runners. Hilario: 2 innings, 1 hit, zero runs, 1 walk, 1 strikeout, WIN Alvarez: 1 inning, one run on a solo homer Nimmo: 2-5, 2B, 2 RS, Outfield Assist Reynolds, 0-3, BB, SB

Cards again.

I hear Keith and Fran, but the guy calling the homer isn't familiar, and doesn't sound like Cohen. It's not Coleman, is it?

Welcome abordick to Madoff's Mets.

Who's on play-by-play there?

A lot of chatter out there about Yasiel Puig being benched.

The back sleeve cover of E. Pluribus Funk (1971) by Grand Funk Railroad:

It's at about the one-minute mark here. [youtube:2nkau1pa]ClsAOhhUKz0[/youtube:2nkau1pa]

I found it mostly tedious when it wasn't goofily ridiculous. At the top, the movie represents the fall of man, showing a silhouette grabbling the forbidden fruit, and then a comically voracious SCRUNCH! takes place off the screen. It makes it hard to take what follows seriously, as much as it demands to be taken seriously. The visuals, like most epic films of the last decade, owe obvious debts to Lord of the Rings. Noah interacts with a race of giant creatures briefly referred to in Genesis, and they end up playing a large role, very much like the ents of LoTR. An inscrutable villain is also made of Tubal-Cain, a biblical figure who also warranted only a single biblical verse, apparently credited as the father of metal smithing. And based on this lone reference, the story seems to take place in some proto-Iron Age. Methuselah for his part, is a reclusive wizard. There ain't nuttin' in the Bible about no Level 10 magic users. They use cheap devices to deal with the obvious challenges of depicting the story. Noah's wife is depicted as some sort of magical herbalist, so they confront the question of how they spent all that time feeding the animals and mucking the stables by having her whip up an incense concoction and having the family walk dramatically and elf-lik around the stables and cages with censers until all the animals (but not the humans, somehow) fall asleep. This frees the family up to have internecine spats. Noah seemingly draws a lot of inspiration from The Mosquito Coast, it would seem, in that being a prophet of doom and the father of the future puts a lot of weight on one man's shoulders, and turns a body into a real asshole. The film tries to be about fatherhood, in that regard, in that being your family's protector forces you to do a lot of horrible things to keep the burden of sin from the rest of the brood. But doing those things turns you from your family's hero to your family's monster mighty quick. Obviously, the story is short enough that extra-Biblical stuff needs to fill in some of the blanks to flesh out the story, but most of these choices are to indulge the visual whims of the production --- the Watchers, the flood bursting from the ground in giant geysers. Or alternatively, to set up boilerplate conflicts --- much is made as the deluge approaches of the obvious plot hole that Ham and Japheth don't yet have wives. That's not extra-scriptural, that's counter-scriptural. And it's just an excuse to place brooding sons against crazy dad. The visual effects don't always fail --- the cartoonish serpent is goofy, but an extended ILM sequence depicting the seven days of creation is really good stuff. It would have made a cool-assed Peter Gabriel video, but in this film, it's just a vacation from the tediousness of the main narrative. Noah has already become a horror at this point, so he's telling you this story, invoking all these beautiful images depicting an evolutionary creation, and you want to say, "OK, here's his redemption," but you look at your watch and you know it's not to be. They try and get in some meaningful themes. Noah is raising his family as vegans as opposed to the sons of Cain, represented by most of humanity, tearing at the flesh of slaughtered beasts. This is actually scripturally based. Noah is also suggested to be a pastoral naturalist, standing in opposition to the industrialists drawing society into cities. OK, but i got the idea that the flaming moral ambiguity/moral disintegration of the asshole patriarch is what they really want to sell you. Maybe they wanted to make an Old Testament Breaking Bad.

Frayed Knot wrote: Edgy MD wrote: "We're going to walk this guy, Showalter reportedly told the conferencers at the mound. "The next guy's going to hit into a double play, and we're gonna go home." Congratulations to Buck and all the Orioles. One thing I hadn't realized is that this was the first time a Showalter team had won a post-season series. This was mentioned in the post-game, and he argued quite seriously that no, he had won a minor league post-season series with Oneonta or Fort Lauderdale or Albany or somebody. The interviewer was all, "Yeah, but.... the big leagues" and Buck was all, "They all count."

Fringey catchers who probably profiled best as backups, but were given semi-regular starting roles by bad teams, along with failed utility infielders, generally from Met teams who had other problems big enough that they didn't bother jettisoning failed utility infielders. The outlier, to me, is Donnels, who at least had middling power through the minors. You'd guess he'd've run into one or two or ten.

Ed said:The two different facades on the inset external illustrations. Are you referring to the OF wall & Scoreboard? If you are referring to something else lemme know Ed. I am using the old classic scoreboard and OF wall. The one above uses a mix of the classic and final -a midway version. I do want to find a way to work in the more recent SB/OF look. I think an external would be the only way to go. I'm going to need more blank space around the stadium. [fimg=400]https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-Q0pphRGSQX4/VDGXkuKNfYI/AAAAAAAAU-Y/wH0IwpVA22k/s1042/sn4611mackpolo.jpg[/fimg] ^ ^ These inset illustrations in the lower left and lower right corners. They are inside baselines for Polo Grounds, but they likely would be different for Shea, because the perspective would be different. But I would use those two spots for illustrations of the two Shea exteriors --- the tile-coated Payson exterior and the neon-ballplayer-adorned Doubleday exterior. In fact, I hereby move that these two skins be forever referred to as the Payson Exterior and the Doubleday Exterior. If this works out well, can we do a shirt?

What about Matsuzaka? And since he's not going to another team, perhaps we needed to have a "Memories of Abreu" thread, or should we just wait until he officially takes another job?

Tejada.

Interestingly, they describe how Buckner "boots" the ball. But he of course booted nothing. As the illustration suggests, he just missed it.