Edgy MD

If you're coordinatin', I'm participatin'.

Opening the season, your Peoria Javelinas going up against the rival Salt River Rafters: Colin McHugh, who had a nice season for Bingo, starts and is raked for three runs on five hits in two innings. He walks one and fans zero. But he's not the only Bingo baby on the Javelinas. Erik Turgeon came in to pitch the fourth with the Javs up 5-3, having bailed McHugh out. He did his best to blow that, though, coughing a run up in his inning. Not wanting to let Bingo go unredeemed, Robert Carson came on and gave up a run, but he went one and a third. That's... better. Fearing the system would be completely embarrassed, in came Anthony Whitenton, the fourth Mets pitcher on the day and the third in a row, but this time from the Savannah Sand Gnats. Unlike his more advanced teammates, he left without a tally, loading the bases on a hit and two walks but escaping with a 1 1/3-inning hold. That's all messy. Perhaps we got some hitting done, no? Well, in a 12-9 slugfest, Savannah secondbaseman Wilfredo Tovar managed to go 0-4, and... that's it. Havens, Marte, and Lagares all had splinter-picking duty and reportedly performed admirably. Maybe tomorrow.

I thought it sounded optimistic.

Tmo Perez, most recently of the Toledo Mud Hens, gets a 50-game suspension after testing positive for Ritalinic Acid and Methylphenidate. High five, Timo!

G-FaFiF wrote: The Mets, in their own way, seem to be introducing the We Haven't Won Jack In Five Years package/ Which philosophically beats the hell out of the We Understand You're Pissed That Jos�'s Gone Package.

Yeah. McCarver went national and it only meant that the Mets lost him every other Sunday. But gained him back when they were the national broadcast, which was pretty often. Then everything went... terribly wrong.

Oops. Just mentioned him.

The Tejada one screams 1975. I had to plug my ears.

I'll disagree. Pagan's offensive dropoff was disappointing pretty close to within a typical range of variance from last year, but his defensive dropoff was disastrous for the team and could hardly have been expected.

How about that exact tie for fifth? (Too bad neither guy actually had a particularly successful season.)

Plus he'll need a new agent, now that Lon Babby is the president of the Phoenix Suns.

Chris Young signed a one-year contract and is a free agent.

Have we mentioned Itzhak Perlman?

metirish wrote: So ,John Sterling may or may not have coined the term "Downtown", let's stop wasting bandwidth on this nonsense. Sorry, you have next subject.

This guy has Celtics announcer Johnny Most using the term in the sixties.

MFS62 wrote: Of course, the NBA did not have the three point shot until the leagues merged. So there would have been no need for Marv to use it. And he and I are both saying that it was used for long jump shots before there was a three-point line in the ABA or anywhere else. Downtown Freddie Brown was so called for his ability to hit long jump shots as far back as high school --- in the late sixties with no three-point line.

My feeling is that when discussion about a sports broacaster is which coinages he gets credit for, we're in dangerous territory, as his job no longer becomes about delivering the game, but delivering his schtick. And the fact that a guy has a signature call or phrasing becomes somehow something to celebrate whether it's clever or not. And nowhere is this confusion more prevalent than in the bubble immediately surrounding John Sterling, who clearly stays up nights trying to come up with coinages. "Hmmm. Russell Martin. 'A dry Martini!' That doesn't make any sense --- he's from Canada, not Italy. 'A northern light!' That's too obscure --- THINK, JOHN, THINK! Russell with the muscle!! That's good, but not good enough! What time is it...?"

I'm going to respond with deep doubt that Sterling coined "downtown" as a term for a three-point shot. On the one hand, it's not particularly clever and must have been used seven seconds after somebody painted a three-point stripe --- or even earlier, simply to refer to a long jump shot. On the other hand, it's just the kind of un-clever phrasing that Sterling would think is clever, and rush to secure trademark claims on.

First off, if Braun had gone for 3 for 4 to climb over Reyes in the batting race... are we really to believe Braun would have stayed in the game for a fifth at-bat to needlessly risk yielding the batting crown back to Reyes? (If you think so, you might want to file for tax-exempt status for your Church of Braun.) Braun is neither here nor there, Snarky. I root for Reyes to meet the standard I and other Mets fans hold our team to. Braun, Jeter, or Bill Madlock are players for other teams and therefore highly suspicious to begin with. As anyone who knows baseball history could point out -- David Schoenfield, for one, pointed this out in a piece for ESPN.com -- there is a long-standing precedent of players sitting out at-bats or entire games to preserve batting titles, including Terry Pendleton in 1991, when he won the NL batting race, the NL MVP, and led the Atlanta Braves to the World Series. It's what I expect of Pendleton. It wasn't I look for from Reyes. Still, that didn't stop plenty of people whose job is to know sports from spouting off on Reyes's character. ESPN's Steve Levy, for one, tweeted after an eventful evening that decided postseason berths: "On a night in which we saw everything that is right and great about baseball,we got the oppositte [sic] from jose reyes. Don't want him on my team." Yeah, outside criticism was over the top. I think criticism from within Met fan circles is what matters. And most of it has been fair with a reasonable amount of perspective. I certainly don't want to be thrown in with Levy. Or Jim Rome. Reyes "backed into" the batting title? No, Rome is wrong. Reyes won the title on his ass. As part of the whole controversy, haters have focused also on how Reyes got his last hit in 2011. The bunt is a non-issue (I wish he'd bunt for hits more) and shouldn't be part of the story. But perhaps the most foolish criticism of Reyes came not from professional "experts" but from the segment of fans at CitiField who booed when he came off the field on Wednesday. Few are more anti-boo than me. But this isn't elevating a physical failure to a moral one as most home-player booing is. This was experessing disappointment for the star on the marquee exiting in the first inning of his last game when they came to cheer him on one last time. This was about a broken understanding. This was about disagreeing with a choice. And it was relatively modest. But teams always play their subs and prospects at the end of the year, and if you buy a ticket to game 162, you don't expect to see the "A" team unless they're involved in a contest that decides postseason berths. Yeah, it gets frequently argued that the last game is about looking at prospects. Look at the facts. He was pulled for Justin Turner --- ultimately one of the team's leaders in plate appearances --- not Reese Havens or Jordany Valdespin. Stop it. It was understood publicly that this was to be Reyes' last game. The manager publicly expressed disappointment that Reyes wanted to come out. So this isn't about his manager placing a higher priority on looking at fresh blood. Fans usually don't like players telling them what they need to understand, but in this case Reyes is right. This wasn't just his batting title but the team's and the fans'. The Mets had their third losing season in a row and the team has never had a pitcher throw a no-hitter, but fans no longer have to hear a Met has never won a batting title. No, they have to hear something else. The fans can set their own standards about what they want to hear. Unfortunately, there's a chance they also might no longer be able to cheer for Reyes in a Mets uniform. I hope the Mets front office finds a way to re-sign him. If not, he would leave a void that would take years to fill. And due to a deliberated choice, that void began about six innings before anybody was ready for it.

John Cougar Lunchbucket wrote: Hagin's just a dreadful pbp announcer whose main problem, as Paul says elegantly on that site, is a brain writing checks that his mouth can't cash. It's as though his words lead him down an alley with no escape other than an abrupt, awkward reversal. It's at times impossible to listen to. I think this is exactly right. But I think by and large, folks have a very different problem with him. The ship has run into bad luck and he's like the guy in Master and Commander who's always the officer on watch when it happens. When things go bad and folks start looking around for a dog to kick, he seems like less a member of the family. You've said this before, but it's only really gotten to me the second half of this year. Pitcher gets to a ball but can't make the play at first. He'll go at great length to describe how the pitcher can't get the ball out of his glove. He'll describe his anxiety that forced him to rush, he'll use a metaphor, he'll describe the guy's disappointment in himself after the play. "And here comes the catcher out to the mound to calm him down," he'll say, while I'm still wondering, "THE RUNNER ON THIRD... DID HE SCORE?! That's the issue. Good team or bad, it's an issue. Wayne isn't without skills, and he'll be working a long time --- long after I've forgotten his name --- but his p-b-p is maddening first hand, night after night.

There's no meaning in any baseball game except that which you invest in it.

"I would have played the whole game. I'm like, 'Hey, I fought this hard to be in this position and I'm going to see it through to the end.' My personality, I'm going to ride it out. I worked this hard to be this good and put up these numbers, I would like to see it all the way to the end." "I don't think it's lack of confidence with Jose Reyes, but that is the way he wanted to do it. For what reason, I don't know. It could have been outside influences. His agent may have told him, 'If you get up there, if you get a hit your first AB, you come out.' " "He did everything he needed to do, and when you see that coming from another player, you see them putting the team first. 'It's not about me. I've got to push the issue for the team. I put myself in position that puts us in position.' In previous years you just didn't get quite that feeling from [Reyes] being in the other dugout. This year you really did. It was like, 'This man is doing everything he can.' " "It (being a free agent the same offseason as Reyes) )makes for great comparisons. [Reyes] had a great year, but with free agency, you take a year and a career all into consideration. Then on top of that, you take the things you don't see on the field -- the intangibles in the clubhouse, leading the team. Is this guy a winning player? How does he impact the team by himself when he's in the lineup and out of the lineup? They are all great things to compare." "Baseball is not only about numbers. You get paid a lot with numbers, but you get people to fall in love with you and want you around and give you a little bit more money when you can do all the other things along with putting up good numbers." --- Jiminy Rollins Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/sports/mets/rollins_rant_Ap9KSTC38AW005vQrS6xAI#ixzz1ZaQwE0vF

No, there'll be someone else, but until they re-sign Reyes or bring in that somebody else, he looks number two on the shortstop depth chart for guys currently in the organization. He's already on the 40, too.

One level of honor we still have a right to expect, I think, it's that a man a manager puts in the lineup plays until his manager says otherwise, and that a man who is the announced attraction of the day plays some semblance of the game. Folks came to give him love, and like Jackson Browne in "Hold Out," he traded love for glory.

I think that's more or less a fair assessment. Problem is that it mostly takes Howie Rose out of the color business. But it's not like being a pbp guy ever kept Tim McCarver from offering reflections.