Vic Sage

what, they stopped sucking big hairy moose cock? or is the walrus's phallus being pleasured in addition to the Cervidae's BHMC?

I won't miss Bobby O's typical jock-tough guy douchebaggery and agenda-driven analysis. Oh, Nelly!

it's absurd to list a guy whose never played in the majors and is unlikely to start the season with the team to be the key to the Mets 2015 campaign, particularly at a position of our greatest depth. Syndergaard could drop dead tomorrow and our team's chances in 2015 would not change one iota. While i can understand the argument for Harvey, deGrom showed last year he can be an ace even if Harvey doesn't come back strong. Wheeler has that potential as well. Again, depth of pitching makes any particular pitcher less critical to the team's success next year. On offense, however, we are thin and in dire need. While it would be nice if Flores develops, its not something we can count on or on which the team's success will be based. Ditto d'Arnaud. But if our #3 hitter and team captain only produces a .270/8 HR/60 rbi line again, we won't score that 1 run that even Matt Harvey needs to win. If Wright doesn't bounce back, we're cooked. If he does, we'll have just enough offense for our pitching to give us a shot. I don't know how you get any more "key" than that.

Far From The Team I Loved How can I hope to bear the grief I feel Which I do, when I do, That's why I won't drive on down to CitiField Where lives the team I love. Once I was happily content to be Going there, cheering them, There among the fans who sat right next to me, Where lived the team we loved. Who could see that Madoff would come And would change the shape of my dreams? Helpless now I yell at Fred, Watching as our team lies dead. Oh, what a melancholy choice this is, staying home or paying him, Closing my heart to the team that lives there, out on Citi field. There where my heart once settled long ago I can't go, I can't go, Who could imagine I'd be straying so Far from the team I love Yes, now with my team, I'm done.

Edgy MD wrote: A lot of starters sliding happily over to the bench like it's the 1970s all over again. But Laggy sliding over for Caleb Stewart? I laugh! I scoff! There is a parallel reality in the multiverse where this has already happened.

Sandler, like Jim Carrey, has a few films in which he steps outside his comic persona to, you know, act. He's not bad here. And Don Cheadle can make almost anything watchable. This is a case in point.

I downloaded a few movies onto my Kindle for a long plane trip. One of them was Terry Gilliam's last, THE ZERO THEOREM, which made the trip so much longer. It got me thinking about the peaks and valleys of Gilliam's career, which is unusually steep in both the ascent and the descent thereafter. He is, like Ridley Scott, an extravagant visualist with only a passing relationship to coherence. An animator before he became a Python, sustained narrative is not really in his wheelhouse. But Gilliam is a Quixotic poet of the imagination, often balking at studio control, known at least as well for his many projects that were scrapped or mangled as he is for his successes. Gilliam is wildly inconsistent, but when he's good... Anyway, here's a Terry Gilliam film festival. Anybody who could sit through all of it unscathed gets... well, whatever one can imagine. 1) Shit & Armor: * MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL (1974) - His first feature, Gilliam co-directed it with fellow Python Terry Jones, and co-wrote and performed it with the troupe. It is the essence of Python and a cultural touchstone for a generation. My son and his teen pals even quote it still. * JABBERWOCKY (1977) - Gilliam forces some Grail-type knights through Carroll's looking glass in this Arthurian-era fantasy of heroes and monsters. It looks like it was shot through a feces-smeared lens, but begins his life-long tribute to the power of imagination. Actually interesting only in conjunction with GRAIL. 2) Python's scribe: * MONTY PYTHON'S LIFE OF BRIAN (1979) - Gilliam penned Python's most coherent feature, directed by Terry Jones, a blackly funny attack on political and religious doctrinism. * MONTY PYTHON'S MEANING OF LIFE (1983) - Gilliam wrote and co-directed (with Jones again) this anthology of sketches, with some hits and misses, like the original TV series. 3) Through the eyes of a child: * TIME BANDITS (1981) - A British lad leaves his stultifying suburban family and follows a gang of dwarves through holes in time and space, landing in different historical eras before meeting god and the devil. BANDITS is funny, ascerbic and fantastical, with some great performances (Sean Connery, David Warner, Ralph Richardson, Ian Holm), but its episodic nature works against its narrative (as Gilliam's films usually do). Still, I've watched it many times and it continues to hold up. Acting as a co-producer, too, it's one of Gilliam's most accessible, successful movies (co-authored with Michael Palin). George Harrison was another of the producers and he wrote the final credits song. Some critics see BANDITS as the beginning of Gilliam's "trilogy of imagination", followed by BRAZIL and BARON MUNCHAUSEN, as we see characters escape into their imaginations... first a boy, then a middle-aged man, then an elderly man. But that could describe any Gilliam film, so i don't buy it. * TIDELAND (2005) - Gilliam's story follows an abused young girl escaping into solitary imaginings while enduring a horrible life on a Texas farm. This barely released feature garnered strong reaction (mostly negative). 4) The Dystopian trilogy: * BRAZIL (1985) - Gilliam's blackly funny rif on Orwell's 1984 is among the best works of his career. Presented in a style he called "retro-futurism", he created a future that looks like the past... or rather a future that might have been naively imagined in the past, like Menzies' THINGS TO COME and Lang's METROPOLIS. Jonathan Pryce is simultaneously heartbreaking and hilarious as the doomed everyman destroyed by soul-killing bureaucracy, with DeNiro great in a cameo as a revolutionary air-conditioning engineer. But this film marked a new low in Gilliam's relationship with a film studio taking over his film. Like BLADERUNNER a few years earlier, the studio wanted the film cut shorter and with a happy ending, which he resisted mightily. Gilliam's version was released successfully in Europe and, when he screened it privately for film schools and critics, it ended up winning the LA film critics award for best picture. The studio relented and allowed him another cut, making it somewhat shorter but still with its dark ending. The film has gone on to be ranked among the greatest SF films of all time and, as a progenitor of the "steampunk" scifi aesthetic, one of the most stylistically influential. * 12 MONKEYS (1995) - Bruce Willis is a haunted hero in this SF time travel tragedy, written by David Peoples (BLADERUNNER, UNFORGIVEN) as an adaptation of the French short film, Chris Marker's LA JETEE. Gilliam was brought in to helm it and created one of the biggest commercial and critical successes of his career. He's working with his typically dark dystopian themes and devices like retro-futurism, nonlinear storytellng, a haunted (and possibly insane) hero, and a hopeless finale. Brad Pitt was nominated for his supporting performances as a whacked out revolutionary. One of Gilliam's more grown-up and serious (some would say humorless and grim) films, but still very watchable. * ZERO THEOREM (2013) - Oscar winner Christoph Waltz stars in this final chapter of Gilliam's Orwellian SF trilogy. Waltz is an emotionally damaged computer programmer given the job by "management" (Matt Damon) of solving the "Zero Theorem", a mathematical proof that life is meaningless. Meanwhile he waits, like Godot, for a phone call to come and tell him what the meaning of his life is. His monomaniacal obsession with his wait for the call ends up rendering his life otherwise meaningless, thus proving the theorem. It sounds better than it is. It's got a kind of goofy, amusing energy and tone early on, but just devolves into Gilliam's typically meandering self-involvement until it is finally unwatchable. 5) German Whimsy: * THE ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN (1988) - Gilliam's sumptuous (if inert) rendering of the tall tales of a German nobleman during the Ottoman War, is a story within a story, once again about the power of imagination. The film went over budget and the production was known to be a nightmare. The studio dumped it upon its release, despite Oscar nominations for its visuals and design and mostly positive reviews (a bomb here, it was subsequently successful in Europe). Like most of Gilliam's films, it is episodic in structure and meanders without any narrative energy. The film's whimsy is leaden, but Robin Williams gave a great supporting performance as the King of the Moon, which is worth seeing if just for that, and the film is a treat for the senses. * THE BROTHERS GRIMM (2005) - Gilliam's adventure fantasy features Matt Damon and Heath Ledger as the noted German brothers, whose lives are depicted as a fictionalized fairy tale. More leaden whimsy, more going overbudget, more fights with a studio, another bomb in the US that did well in Europe, but unlike some of his other similar misadventures, this movie just sucks. 6) Fantasy & Reality: * FISHER KING (1991) - Gilliam's best movie... a moving, funny depiction of the tenuous hold we have on reality. The great script by Richard LaGravanese providing a strong narrative to ground Gilliam's flights of fancy, and the performances by Robin Williams and Jeff Bridges provide a stronger anchor than is typically found in a Gilliam film (great supporting performances, too, by Amanda Plummer, Mercedes Ruhl [who won an Oscar], and the late great Michael Jeter). Like Gilliam's first film, this is a Grail quest, but this one is not about jokes and gags, but instead about the damage done to the human heart and its ability still to heal. * FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS (1998) - And there he goes, over the deep end. Once again straining at a barely there grip on reality, Gilliam filmed the unfilmable Hunter S. Thompson novel, a fictionalized autobiographical descent into a drug-induced hell of his own devising. Depp's Thompson imitation is spot on, including Hunter's incomprehensibility, but there is a reason the book (one of my all time faves) was deemed "unfilmable", and it should have remained so. Tedious, meandering, plotless, hallucinatory... a titanic disappointment. But this one wasn't entirely Gilliam's fault. The project had been in development for years before Gilliam was brought in. It wasn't really his project, but he imbued it with all his worst attributes (which i suppose is the same point that Las Vegas serves in the book... America at its worst). 7) Production Catastrophes: * LOST IN LA MANCHA (2002) - This documentary tracks the implosion of Gilliam's film project, THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE, which he started to film in 2000 and then had to shut down. Financial problems, script problems, weather problems and illness of his leading actor all conspired to destroy the mad director's attempt to tell the story of the mad knight. Evocative of similar docs about Coppola making APOCALYPSE NOW and Werner Herzog's FITCARRALDO, both eerily similar in their depictions of mad directors telling stories of mad men despite overwhelming obstacles. Unlike them, however, Gilliam didn't get the movie made and is, in fact, STILL trying to get it done. It's now scheduled to shoot this year with John Hurt as Quixote and Jerry O'Connell as Sancho. But i'll believe it when i see it. Still, its in his very effort that he embodies his protagonist, a Gilliamesque figure who insisted on the power of his delusions to change the world. *IMAGINARIUM OF DR. PARNASSUS (2009) - This time, the death of his leading man didn't derail the production. Gilliam replaced Heath Ledger with not one but a trio of actors (Johnny Depp, Jude Law, Colin Farrell), who became Ledger's character in turn, adding another layer of insanity and incomprehensibilty to this typically Gilliamesque story of the power of imagination. Great performances by Christopher Plummer as the titular doctor, pre-Spider-Man Andrew Garfield as the young hero, and Tom Waits as the devil. For some reason, i love this movie. i can't for the life of me tell you why, which is how i feel about much of Gilliam's oeuvre. A uniquely visual satirist and a clumsy storyteller, Gilliam is at least an artist in a dialogue with his time, making his failures as interesting as his successes. Worth a discussion at least... and not many filmmakers today are.

2019 LINEUP Nimmo* [Rf] D.Smith* [1b] Herrera [2b] Coforto* [Lf] Plawecki [C] Uhrena+ [3b] C. Stewart [Cf] Rosario [sS] [u:jg17ulqz]Bench:[/u:jg17ulqz] Wright [CI/ph] Duda* [1b/ph] D'Arnaud [C] Lagares [Of] Cecchini [MI] [u:jg17ulqz]SP:[/u:jg17ulqz] Syndergaard Harvey DeGrom Matz* Molina [u:jg17ulqz]BP:[/u:jg17ulqz] Famiglia Leathersich* Morris Edgin* Mazzoni Fulmer Montero

TheOldMole wrote: I root for the Mets, not the Mets' balance sheet. I don't care how much they pay people. The Mets have let go infielders with a lot less promise than Wilmer Flores (Marco Scutaro, anyone?) and seen them flourish. I don't automatically assume that Flores can't flourish. Hey, his name is Flores, isn't it? That said, if they can upgrade the position, I for one am not going to judging the deal by how many dollars it costs the Wilpons. ideally i'd agree with you, Mole. But the Pons have demonstrated an unacceptably limited willingness to spend to improve the team, so any monies they tie up in a bad deal is money they don't have for other (potentially better) deals. Its a zero-sum game, so if they overpay to improve at SS, that affects their ability to do other stuff that could help more.

If the Mets PR deptartment is ignoring the twitterverse, it's one of the few things Mets management has done with which i totally agree. I think i just heard Captain Rogers bang his head again. Louder, Steve. You've got to hit it harder so it makes a loud echoing pop. You want to be heard in the balcony, you've got to project.

My rankings compared to the final rankings: 30) DeGrom +1 29) Duda -1 28) Murphy = 27) Lagares = 26) Niese +1 25) D'Arnaud +2 24)Wheeler -2 23)Granderson -1 22)Wright +2 21)Famiglia = 20)Colon -2 19)Torres +2 18)Gee = 17)Tejada-+1 16)Mejia-3 15)Niuehenheis+1 14)Flores-1 13)Edgin+1 12)EYoung+1 11)Recker+2 10)denDekker+3 9)Carlyle+1 8)Eveland+4 7)Campbell-3 6)Black-7 5)Herrera+2 4)C.Young-2 3)Abreu+2 2)Matsuzaka-3 1)Montero +1 My rankings included the same 30 players, with all of them ranked within 2 slots of their final positions, except for the following outliers: over-ranked 8)Eveland+4 [4] 10)denDekker+3 [7] under-ranked 6)Black-7 [13] 16)Mejia-3 [19] 7)Campbell-3 [10] 2)Matsuzaka-3 [5] Eveland and Black were my biggest outliers. Apparently i overvalued Eveland's quality innings and undervalued Black's trip to the minors and Mejia's loss of the closer roll. Perhaps i just undervalue RPs generally. And i flipped the utility guys, Cambell and denDekker, perhaps because Cambpell's late season ineffectiveness weighed more in my recollections.

it's never a bad idea to get a great player if you think he still has more future greatness in him.

its on the top of my netflix queue.

Here are the top 10 golden globe nominees (winners marked with *): ***Birdman - (7) ***Boyhood - (5) **The Theory of Everything - (4) *Selma - (4) *The Grand Budapest Hotel - (4) *Big Eyes - (3) The Imitation Game - (5) Gone Girl - (4) Into the Woods - (3) Foxcatcher - (3) honorable mentions: *Whiplash *Still Alice *How to Train Your Dragon 2 Annie - (2) St. Vincent - (2) Other nominees (1 nom each): Big Hero 6 The Book of Life The Boxtrolls The Lego Movie Nightcrawler Inherent Vice Cake Wild The Hundred-Foot Journey Maps to the Stars A Most Violent Year Pride The Judge Noah The Hunger Games: Mockingjay � Part 1 Interstellar 2015 golden globes results: Best Drama Winner: Boyhood Foxcatcher The Imitation Game Selma The Theory of Everything Best Comedy or musical Winner: The Grand Budapest Hotel Birdman Into the Woods Pride St. Vincent Animated feature film Winner: How to Train Your Dragon 2 Big Hero 6 The Book of Life The Boxtrolls The Lego Movie Director Winner: Richard Linklater, Boyhood Wes Anderson, The Grand Budapest Hotel Ava DuVernay, Selma David Fincher, Gone Girl Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Birdman Screenplay Winner: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Nicolas Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, Armando Bo, Birdman Wes Anderson, The Grand Budapest Hotel Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl Richard Linklater, Boyhood Graham Moore, The Imitation Game Actor, drama Winner: Eddie Redmayne, The Theory of Everything Steve Carell, Foxcatcher Benedict Cumberbatch, The Imitation Game Jake Gyllenhaal, Nightcrawler David Oyelowo, Selma Best Actor, comedy or musical Winner: Michael Keaton, Birdman Ralph Fiennes, The Grand Budapest Hotel Bill Murray, St. Vincent Joaquin Phoenix, Inherent Vice Christoph Waltz, Big Eyes Actress, drama Winner: Julianne Moore, Still Alice Jennifer Aniston, Cake Felicity Jones, The Theory of Everything Rosamund Pike, Gone Girl Reese Witherspoon, Wild Best Actress, comedy or musical Winner: Amy Adams, Big Eyes Emily Blunt, Into the Woods Helen Mirren, The Hundred-Foot Journey Julianne Moore, Maps to the Stars Quvenzhane Wallis, Annie Supporting actress Winner: Patricia Arquette, Boyhood Jessica Chastain, A Most Violent Year Keira Knightley, The Imitation Game Emma Stone, Birdman Meryl Streep, Into the Woods Supporting actor Winner: J.K. Simmons, Whiplash Robert Duvall, The Judge Ethan Hawke, Boyhood Edward Norton, Birdman Mark Ruffalo, Foxcatcher Original song Winner: John Legend, Common, Glory (Selma) Lana Del Rey, Big Eyes (from Big Eyes) Patti Smith, Lenny Kaye, Mercy Is (Noah) Greg Kurstin, Sia Furler, Will Gluck, Opportunity (Annie) Lorde, Yellow Flicker Beat (The Hunger Games: Mockingjay � Part 1) Original score Winner: Johann Johannsson, The Theory of Everything Alexandre Desplat, The Imitation Game Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, Gone Girl Antonio Sanchez, Birdman Hans Zimmer, Interstellar Foreign film Winner: Leviathan Force Majeure Turist Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem Gett Ida Tangerines Mandariinid

BOC right there, CF.

The New York Times mentioned Piazza and steroids in the same story, and that was by far my favorite. On at least two occasions, maybe three, during Piazza�s years with the New York Mets (1998-2005), as a baseball writer and columnist for The New York Times, I wanted to write about Piazza and the possibility that he had used steroids. However, I was told I could not because Piazza hadn�t tested positive for steroids use and hadn�t been named anywhere as a suspected user. An article in the Times Wednesday cited Piazza�s 427 career home runs and .308 batting average and said, �Those are standout numbers. But in an era in which the voting is shadowed by baseball�s entanglement with steroids, Piazza has suffered from the perception, among some writers, that he might have been a user, although no evidence has emerged that he was.� The article was written by Jay Schreiber, who was the editor who said I couldn�t write about Piazza and steroids. Chass's proposed article didn't meet minimal journalistic standards. Where were his facts? His 2 sources? He had nothing but "whispers" and suspicion. So his editor rightly rejected it (Chass should have gone to work at the Post; they have no standards.) Now the Times covers the story -- not about Piazza using steroids, but about the suspicions of writers (like Chass) and how that has effected Piazza's vote -- and Chass misuses this distinction to make some kind of vague point about... what? Hypocrisy? Unfortunate change of view? It's unclear except to the extent that Chass can't see the difference between what the Times said to him and what it's doing now. And that's why he is a shitty journalist and his ability to form rational, reasoned conclusions is far more suspect than Piazza's bacne.

and sons of millionaires wake up on third base and think they've hit a triple. Then they run daddy's franchise into the ground.

i think we're over-complicating this issue. Some (enough) writers have already demonstrated (and specifically articulated) their objection to voting for anybody with PED taint, even if its only based on here-say, rumor and innuendo. Whether enough of them get over it (with regard to Piazza and Bagwell at least) remains to be seen, but with regards to those players who either admitted it, or failed a test, or both, i don't think they'll ever vote them in and will instead leave it to the veteran's committee to sort it out. I think that was the basis for cutting the eligibility period from 15 years to 10 years, so guys like McGwire, Bonds and Clemens will fall off the ballot sooner rather than later. Even if a writer wants to use the "character" clause to keep out the roiders, they should still use the same journalistic standards for determining who fits that definition that they would be obligated to use if they were to file a story accusing such players. It can't be just based on rumor or a "feeling", any more than it could if they were going to publish such an assertion and then be liable for defamation.

other views on how shafted Smoltz is by biased use of WAR and JAWS: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-a-tures/biased-war-and-jaws-stats_b_6417496.html?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000592

LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr wrote: Vic Sage wrote: Gee for Zobrist makes sense to me; if it's not enough for TB, then pass. Gee's a 29-year-old who's missed significant parts of the season in 2 of the last 3 years, and has never put up a traditionally good-- like, above-league-average-- season. Zobrist, while 34, is a guy who plays credible defense at 4-5 positions, including both middle infield slots, AND OPS-es .750 or so in down years. And, oh yeah, he's severely underpriced. Pardon my French, but zat offer is skull-fucking ridiculous, mon ami. You see if they'd take Gee-plus-Plawecki or Niese-plus-Rosario-plus-Puello; you think long and hard when they come back with Plawecki-and-Montero, and you hope it settles somewhere in between. the Mets don't need an excellent utility guy for 1 year; they need a SS for the next decade. If you're ok with Zobrist's D at SS, then lets just go with Flores and see how he develops there. He's got at least as much range as Zobrist at SS and is more than a decade younger, significantly cheaper, and his minor league power shows upside, whereas Zobrist's power is declining. I like Zobrist as a super utility guy for a contending team, not as a starting SS for a young, building team.

Gee for Zobrist makes sense to me; if it's not enough for TB, then pass.

were i to reconsider Smoltz/Mussina, it'd only be to drop Smoltz off my ballot, not to add Moose. To me, they are both on the J.Morris/Pettite/Schilling/K.Brown/Hershiser tier of borderline HOFers, without a clear mandate for any of them (i.e.,more Drysdale than Koufax), so it becomes a somewhat idiosyncratic task in choosing among them. For me, the difference is Smoltz' excellence as both a starter and closer. Winning a CY as a starter and then the Rolaids as a top closer is unique accomplishment. And then to be able to make the transition back to an effective starter at the end of his career? unprecedented accomplishment.

i wouldn't trade a young, good-hitting catching prospect for an aging utility guy on a 1-year deal, even a very good utility guy. Zobrist would be an upgrade over Murphy at 2b, but since his range is no greater than Flores', i'd like to see what Flores greater upside can produce (as long as we're not going to get a good, established SS). If we traded for Zobrist, and then traded Murphy for Castro (for example), i'd be fine with that.

the reason that remains a hypothetical is that there is nobody who is clearly "11th best". Its a subjective analysis, at least in part, and a reasoned and reasonable argument could be made for Sheffield in the top 10. He's got at least as good a case as Schilling, Mussina, EMart, Trammell, F.McGriff and Lee Smith, none of whom is in danger of falling off the ballot, and any of whom might one day be elected. Even roiders like McGwire and Sosa have stayed on the ballot for a number of years (not to mention obvious 1st ballot guys like Bonds and Clemens). If these percentages continue, Sheff would be the first 500hr guy to fall off the ballot after 1 election (i'm guessing, but it seems likely to be true... maybe Palmiero, too?). Why is Sheff a special case? I guess he's a victim of a toxic blend of roids, assholeness and borderline stats, as well as a ballot stacked up because of past writer bans on roiders (both real and imagined).

i can understand Sheffield not getting in because of his name in the Mitchell Report (and his statements about race, as well as the commonly held view that he didn't have much heart and integrity, and was just an asshole generally), but to fall off the ballot after 1 year? A guy with 500+ career HRs, whose average line over a 20+ year career was .290ba/100r/100rbi/30hr/20sb with a .900 OPS/140 OPS+, a guy who had 9 AS appearances, 5 SS awards (at 2 different positions), 6 times in the top 10 in MVP voting, and a WS championship, should not just fall off the ballot after 1 year unless he actually killed somebody. Or at least got convicted of a felony. The other steroids guys are still on the ballot, and being an asshole shouldn't be a good enough distinction from the rest to bump him so unceremoniously (particularly when the rest include such spectacularly assholish types as Bonds and Clemens.)