Edgy MD

Spotted on the Lower East Side: And here is the portside view of the same spotted all the way up in... well, it looks like the Lower East Side as well.

Re-Sign Hausman NOW!!! What?

Our local "arthouse" cinema is showing This Is Spinal Tap this weekend, to coincide with a release date of 11/11/11. It's such a publicist's dream that it's too bad they didn't use it as an excuse to give the film a general re-release. Turns out, Nigel Tufnel Day is, like, a thing.

i think that's abundantly clear.

The Apple wasn't particularly funny, but it gets points for going the way it did before reading Kiernan's article. With no NBA, the Reyes Sweepstakes is going to get a lot of mid-week backpage ink, news or no.

Yeah, it looks like most, if not all, of the stories have Harper DNA. Kiernan definitely wins the Dumb of the Day Award.

Reports have the Marlins in for three years. ~$60 million. Healthy, but I imagine he'll keep browsing.

I prefer "millstone contract." Interesting in that, in a acquiring a big star moving toward free agency, teams aim to land a guy and lock him up in one fell swoop. But if the Mets traded for Santana, enjoyed that one year with him and let him go, they would have made off like bandits. Omar wins as a talent evaluator and loses as a businessman.

I figured absorbing the advisor's advice is what changed. I think: (1) They had a deal. (2) It was seemingly sweet for them --- with the cash influx to get them good with their creditors and fund a competitive operational salary budget for a few years --- with the caveat that they lose the team if they don't meet their obligations. (3) They arrogantly believed that the influx of money would be so steadying to the organization, and that they'd be so responsible, and the future was so bright, that there was no reasonable scenario where they would fail to meet their obligations. (4) The advisor put his staff to work poring over the agreement. (5) The staff told the advisor, and then the advisor told the Wilpons, "No way --- you're totally going to lose this team. You may have been the smartest guy on some other block. But this Einhorn guy is the smartest guy in every block he's ever lived on. See this clause? Now see this codicil? Got that? Now that doesn't seem too intimidating, right? But look at these revenue projections. THAT'S the optimistic set of projections, Mr. Wilpon. That's if everything goes right between now and 2016. Housing market returns by 2013. Your main stars don't get hurt. The president strikes a debt deal with Congress. The Avengers wins a half a dozen Oscars. Stevie Wonder wins a 'Where's Waldo?' contest. When was the last time everything went right? What I'm saying is that if you sign this deal you are signing away the Mets." (6) The 'Pons went back to the table, saying, we just, you know, want to take a look at this clause and this codicil. (7) Einhorn, being the smartest guy on the block, saw that their interest were cutting too much into his own, and realized that if he really wanted to own this team, he had a better chance giving the Wilpons a chance to collapse, and then sweeping in later. (8) They agreed to disagree. They're differences were irreconcilable. They both, in the end, want control of the team. The advisors probably recommended this bond-selling alternative as the less-risky way to get some cash. But bills come due. Oh, they do.

I think the hotshot advisor did what he was paid to do, telling them was Einhorn's deal had them in a better-than-likely position of losing the team. So they balked. I think they probably don't go Chapter 11. They just... shrink. I mean... MLB's not calling their loans, and they're settling affairs so they have cash on hand to stay current with their other debt obligations whether the team is generating or not. Bud probably has more guys than Alderson embedded in the organization to ensure his creditor's are fiscally prudent, even if that means stinking up the joint. David Howard was half-right in saying the team was getting lean like other organizations in this era. What he didn't include was that it was like other organizations that got stupid when things were good.

I'm sure Vic did silently.

I'm tempted to give this victory to attgig, whose prediction amounted more or less to "more of the same," but he had a much more accurate vision of the amount of usage Acosta would get, and that reflected well on him across the board. In the absence of numerical predictions, I drew inference from folks textual predictions, where reasonable. In retrospect, I feel a twinge of pride over my impassioned defense of Acosta's (and CitiField's) homer stinginess. PreditionWLW-L%ERAGGSGFCGSHOSVIPHRERHRBBIBBSOHBPBKWPBFERA+WHIPH/9HR/9BB/9SO/9SO/BBWARActual41.8003.4544015004475021186150462002041081.3839.61.12.98.83.070.6LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr---�4.20�60-----�65--�30�14�25-�74----�89--2.0�3.5�10.3�2.940.4Edgy DC---�3.90�60-----�65--�28�8�25-�74----�96--1.1�3.5�10.3�2.940.6attgig�3�2�.600�2.95�47�0�14�0�0�1�45.0�34�15�15�5�20�1�48�0�0�3�178�134�1.210�7.7�0.9�4.1�.9.5�2.33�0.7

Screamers. Waddayagonnado?

Andy McCullough says that the Mets had a scout at the Cespedes workout. Hopefully, they didn't fire him afterwards.

Merged.

Thank you.

Way to go, SI.

Willie-as-a-Met Disparagement Alert You�ve gotta feel sorry for Jesse Jackson; his time is so far gone, people don�t even remember when his time was. He reminds me a little of Willie Mays playing for the Mets in 1973�the best all-round baseball player who ever graced a baseball diamond, looking like a minor league-er, an all-time great who hung around one season too long.

I'm prepared to buy anything MacNamara wants to tell me about Roger Clemens, including his hatred of America and contempt for rappers and the representatives and employees of Death Row Records.

Most older and more expensive than Thole.

Sure. Same can be said of most of the other better guys/better bargains. I'm pretty cool with Thole returning.

Forget whether you want to or not, bringing back the current lineup may be our only option. But I do want it. I think wheeling and dealing isn't really about being creative. At least, not necessarily. It tends to be about acknowledging that, at some level, you've lost faith in your own creative process. Impulsiveness over planning. And yeah, creativity comes in impulses too, but not the kind of planned, developed, systemic creativity that I think an organization needs to achieve a level Hank Hill might call hawesome. Impulses need to be folded into the process, not overwhelming and exploding the process, which is what big off-season splashes do.

Wow. Severing that tradition may have been one of the first marks of the Doublepon Administration.

Through 1979, the Mets regularly (annually?) made a trip to West Point for an exhibition against the US Military Academy. In 1979, Abe Zapruder (or a student of the Zapruder film-making school) was there. It's all edited into a mess, but there's some steamy Jerry Cram action, and what looks like a Kranepool homer. [youtube:27zxhzkn]IWGeYizQlak[/youtube:27zxhzkn]