Vic Sage

Grote was bad in `66, too. And what it says about him that the Mets stuck with him after TWO terrible years is that he could catch like a muthafucka. Yes, he had a "career year" in `68 (by which i mean he hit .280 instead of .250), but he still offered virtually no run production for the team, with no power or speed, and no R or RBI. Whether that was in fact average production for a catcher in his day i don't know. And maybe it's a soupcon above "offensively inept", but it ended up being his high-water mark for his career, and he was rarely even adequate offensively thereafter. So i don't think you can group him with Hundley or even Stearns in terms of Met catchers who turned around slow starting careers to eventually became useful offensive players.

"It's not about credit, it's about doing the right thing... so give us some credit for that, damn it!" OK, Bobby, even if its true (and it might well be), complaining about this now makes you look really bad.

kudos to the kids for following their dreams... but, man, did they suck or what? and the unofficial seat upgrade thing... i never could get the hang of it. I'm always either refused entry or kicked out soon after. I think they can smell my fear. And even when i'm not kicked out, i'm constantly looking around, wondering if the ushers are coming for me or if the guy whose seat i'm in has shown up yet, and not really focusing on the game. Its a distracting way to watch a game; i'd just as soon sit in crappy seats that i know i have a ticket for than put up with that sort of emotional insecurity. And last night, when i so obscenely overpaid for my behind-home tix, i think i would've been more than a little pissed off if folks who paid $10 for upper deck seats sat down next to me. Not that i begrudge them the right to try, and not that i deny my own feelings about it could generously be categorized as petty and small, but that's how i'd feel. I guess i should just take it up with my therapist.

Edgy MD wrote: Grote, Stearns and Hundley were all offensively inept in their earliest auditions. Exactly what I'm saying. The problem is that at least two of those guys didn't exactly turn it around quickly. And Gibbons came up at 21 and never found his groove at all. Look, I love Grote as much as the next guy (more than some, perhaps), but I'd like to know exactly when in his career he ceased being offensively inept. He was a .250 hitter with no power, speed, or walks. And that was in a good year. His one offensive talent was to hit into DPs. He hit mostly at the bottom of an offensively challenged lineup. If he weren't one of the best fielding and throwing catchers in the history of the game, he wouldn't have kept a starting job. But he was, so he did. And good for him. But lets not hope he's the measuring stick for d'Anaud's upside as a hitter. A shudder just ran through my body as i typed those words.

just got home from the game; wow, what a total snooze. never felt like we were in it, even after the DenDekker hit got us to 4-3. TC over managed us right out of it, too -- why take Francisco out, with 1 out in a close game? He brings in Byrdak to pitch to some guy named Brown? WTF? Francisco doesn't have some huge platoon differential, i don't think. He was throwing all right. If he brings in a LOOGY there, you KNOW Davey is going to counter with Scott "all i can do in this game is hit lefties" Hairston. And kaBOOM. gee who didn't see THAT coming? I had good seats at least. And the lack of any other human beings within spitting distance was both pleasant and disappointing. No line at Shake Shack! No traffic, no trouble parking. I tell ya, it reminds me of all those enjoyable outings in the late 70s; we sucked but it sure was easy to get tix, to get in and out, to get concessions, to get to the bathroom. All you had to do was put up with them trading away Seaver and watch Willie Montanez play 1b.

I assume just buying the At-Bat app and streaming it over the air on a college radio station for $15 is in violation. ya THINK?

Delta Club Silver, Section 18 -- they cost me $110/each (plus a host of fees), but now the Mets' "dynamic pricing" system is selling those seat for $79/each. Ouch.

Sage family will be in good seats tonite. Anybody else in the park?

Well, I think it's nice that Willets came back and we patched things up. Red-head loving, liberal Metfans have to stick together. But i still agree with Edgy, and stand by every word i wrote, and am proud I convinced LWFS of my position, too. In fact, I think I was eloquent as fuck. If not my finest CPF moment, it was among my favorites. Clusterfuck? I disagree. A lengthy debate about the nature of honor (or "honor", as some would have it) is a thread worth keeping and remembering.

It's not so much that i object to the roster expansion as much as question its timing. There are teams in pennant races, and some of them are playing teams that are out of it and so are giving their minor leaguers a good long look, to see what they have for next year. But they're playing teams still very concerned about THIS year. And its one thing for that bad team to run out a few extra backups each day, and quite another for them to use an extra 15 minor leaguers, with literally none of the regulars even having to see the field most of September. Its the kind of unpredictable wild-card that skews results toward the arbitrary and not necessarily deserving. I probably wouldn't mind so much if the expansion happened in April, where teams are coming out of spring training and would still like to give a longer look at some of their younger players or veteran FAs to see if they could be useful THIS season (not in some utopian future year), and allow them to use a 40-man roster to shake out gradually over the course of the month. Then, May 1, you finalize your final 25 and go from there to the end of the season. In either case, i don't think it's that big a deal, and i do enjoy seeing kids like Hamilton come up and impact a pennant race. I'm just not sure how much Pitt and St.L like it though. RUN, FORREST, RUNNN!

I'm sure it was a great adventure, and possibly a good movie, but his theory is still believed to be incorrect by most of the contemporary anthropological community. So he didn't really prove anything other than that he was able to make the journey and survive.

i guess that's right, but it's still an irritating thing for him to say publicly. He could have just said, "we are not prepared to discuss our off-season plans for staff and players", and leave it at that.

yeah, the ending exposed Reyes for what he is; i have no nostalgia about him. I'll take him if the price is right, but that's purely a baseball decision. And it's easy to say, since it is so unlikely to happen.

i wonder, too, and i wonder why it should factor in at all. This season is lost, so the manager should be developing players for next year. If he thinks his job hinges on how many games he wins in the shor-term (and how many tix are sold), he' would play it differently, and not necessarily in a way that serves the long-term interest of the franchise.

craw - a pouch in many birds and some lower animals that resembles a stomach for storage and preliminary maceration of food Idioms: stick in one's craw, to cause considerable or abiding resentment; rankle. [1350�1400; Middle English crawe, related to crop*] [related to Middle High German krage, Middle Dutch cr?ghe, neck, Icelandic kragi ,collar] * Crop: A pouch-like enlargement of a bird's gullet in which food is partially digested or stored for regurgitation to nestlings, and a similar enlargement in the digestive tract of annelids and insects.

Q: Terry Collins? A: We�ve seen everything but the finish. The finish is not going to difficult to access but will require a different kind of assessment. so he's been your manager for nearly 3 years, and you still don't have enough of an assessment of his performance to decide whether to extend his contract or let him walk? But you lose your best hitter, best pitcher and top closer to season-ending injuries, and you trade away the next best hitter along with the starting catcher for prospects, and you add late season call-ups comprised of kids and marginal MLers, and THESE are the conditions under which you're going to evaluate your manager's performance? If that's not a setup for scapegoating, i don't know what it is.

next year: star-crossed disabled veteran

agreed. which is why the deal probably won't and shouldn't happen.

i think even if his range diminishes over the next few years, he is still sure-handed and strong-armed enough, with enough SS experience and savvy, to keep manning the position through the remaining 4 guaranteed years on the contract. Particularly in light of the offense he brings to carry that diminished defense. We would still be an overall + at the position, relative to the league. Unless he continues to get injured, in which case it doesn't really matter where they position him, cuz he won't be there. If he was a free agent tom'w, would you sign a 30-year old .290/100r/50sb/15hr hitting SS coming off an injured season to a 4-year deal, and if so, at what price in the current market? Assuming diminishing defensive range, fewer SBs but more HRs, would such a FA be worth it, with no other options on the major or minor-league levels? And then add in the fan value of bringing him back -- what is that worth? how many more chochkees sold and tickets, hot dogs, parking spaces and cable-tv viewers and radio listeners? They can make some projections on stuff like that these days, so that goes into the calculation, too. So then you add the market price for his projected level of production at SS, the organizational need, the position's scarcity within and without organization, and home-town marketing (and some other factors i probably overlooked) to determine his "value". Equaling what? None of us has any idea, but throwing out random salaries and players in trade is entertaining enough, i suppose. So i'll thow out one. $10m@4yrs in salary (or the average of what he's gotten over the first few years of the deal), with Murphy and Montero in trade. Murphy is competent but not an impact player, and Flores can play 2b (and they need to find a position for him, if they believe in him), and while giving up Montero is a risk, we have plenty of other pitching prospects, and we'd have to give them at least 1 level A prospect or major leaguer for them to eat this much salary (they'd probably want another too -- Ike, Duda or Tejada come to mind). I still don't think they'd do it, since it requires eating over 50% of his remaining contract, but i think that's his worth, all things considered.

But i thought we HAD stopped, pretty much. Yet he keeps going, like a bizarro energizer bunny, sucking the life out of everything he touches. sharpie wrote: Jeez, Vic. I've pretty much loathed everything he's done in this century including the ones that some people liked (those two London movies, VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA). Truly hated that stupid Rome movie. I'm gonna go so far as to say that I liked it better than anything since, I dunno, SWEET AND LOWDOWN. Part of it is that I like to watch both Cate Blanchett and Sally Hawkins and although it was set in San Francisco it seemed less like a travelogue than his recent films. Plus he wasn't acting in it which is a huge plus. Not a great movie, but not the pile of dogshit that Vic implies. He has this habit of churning out movies every once in a while about wealthy, over-educated, pretentious new yorkers who are absolutely loathsome, and when he makes a comedy out of it, or a light romance in which the characters are redeemed by love (to some extent), he can sort of get away with it. Sort of. But when he makes it a tragedy, unrelieved by any humor at all (or even song and dance numbers, in the case of EVERYONE SAYS I LOVE YOU), with a story of an awful person causing awful things to happen to herself and everyone around her, why the fuck should any human being on the planet care about that? Yes, i love Cate Blanchett too, and she is acting up a storm ("ACTING! THANK YOU!), but to what purpose? To drive me out of the theater? well, it worked.

Just stop, Mr. Allen. Just stop. vote carefully; it's in reverse.

good. screw him and the daddy he sprung from. Yankee turncoat motherfucker.

yeah, good for him and all, but a 24-year old playing in the FSL seems like a man against boys, and a .259 BA describes a guy who isn't going to make quite enough contact to put up those power numbers at higher levels. But we'll see, i guess, and good luck to him.

put it in the books...

i know most folks like a nice tight game that puts you on the edge of your seat until the final out. I hate that. This is my ideal game... we score a bunch of runs early, and spend the rest of the game pulling further and further away, until it becomes a blowout. no muss, no fuss, no tension. I'm too old for tension. my doctor says it's bad for me.