Vic Sage

Edgy MD wrote: Well, there's Wuilmer Becerra. And Wilmer Flores if he lands there. Possibly den Dekker if he develops the stick to stick. Yes, they are all viable prospects. But Nimmo was a 1st round pick; if he fails to develop, it'll be more damaging for the Mets than if a 5th rounder like Den Dekker doesn't make it, or 2 young kids signed out of Venezuela. And Flores hasn't played an inning in the OF yet, as far as i know. He may end up there, but until he does, he's not an OF prospect. And the likelihood of den Dekker suddenly learning the difference between a ball and a strike at age 25 seems unlikely to me, though his glove and power may yet make him a useful major League bench player. Becerra is 18 so it's way too early to know what his ceiling is, but if he doesn't make it, then it's "oh, well, he was just a throw-in in the Dickey trade anyway". But, as i said, I think that Nimmo is the only OF prospect with the potential to make a major impact, and at the cost of a 1st rounder, they need him to. I'm certainly rooting for that.

Mets desperately need for this kid to turn out to be something. They have literally no other OF prospects that could have an impact at the major league level.

Buck 3 Murphy 2 Valdespin 1 Rice 0.25 Hawkins 0.25 Lyon 0.25

Byrd 1.75 Murphy 1.75 Tejada 1.75 Nieuwenhuis 1.50 Burke 1.00 Atchison 0.75 Recker 0.50 Hawkins 0.50 Rice 0.50

Harvey 4.50 Buck 2.00 Duda 0.75 Tejada 0.75 Murphy 0.75 Wright 0.75 Byrd 0.25 Edgin 0.25

John Cougar Lunchbucket wrote: Violent hijinx await a young couple in the English countryside. Vic Sage calls this his favorite Dustin Hoffman film, but I wouldn't. Not that it sucks, it's just... wow. That's your review? "not that it sucks, it's just...wow"? ok. Look, it's a brutal film about our brutal nature. It's not easy sledding; i never suggested it was. ----------------------------------------------------------- SYNOPSIS (SPOILERS): A cowardly academic (David), with a nubile English wife (Amy) flees America to escape the anti-war fervor by moving to his wife's hometown in the English countryside. He seeks to avoid conflict and lives inside his head (he's a mathematician), but the locals, including his wife's ex-boyfriend (Charlie), who he's hired to repair their cottage (he can't repair things himself) smell his weakness and continue to torment him. They also take Amy's habit of staring at them, topless, from her window as they work as an indication she has no respect for David either. And she doesn't. He's not a "real man". So when Charlie rapes her in her home, she responds to him sexually, still desiring him, particularly in contrast to her milquetoast husband who is more interested in his blackboard than her sexual appetites. But when Charlie's buddy joins in uninvited, she is brutalized and there is no undercurrent of pleasure anymore. While she never tells David about it, she is haunted by memories... not of the brutality of the second rape, but of her guilt in enjoying the first. The couple accidentally runs over the over-sized town idiot (Henry) as they head home from a community event, and take him to their home to help him. But it seems the fellow had accidentally killed a sexually precocious teen at the party, and now the men in town (including Charlie) are drunk and out for blood. They arrive at the cottage, demanding Henry be given over to their vigilante justice, but David has been pushed too far. He will not turn Henry over, and if they try to enter his home he will kill them. The town sheriff arrives to try and calm things down but the men kill him. There is no going back now. David has calmly created booby traps and gathered weapons to defend his home. And he does, in a ballet of blood that ends with him slamming a bear trap down on Charlie's head. He leaves Amy in that abattoir and drives Henry back to town, through the thick fog. "I don't know my way home, " Henry says. "That's all right, neither do I," responds David. -------------------------------------------------------------- You can run from a war but you will find one anyway, Peckinpah says, because Man is a brutal creature that cannot escape from himself. And even as David changes from the intellectual to the physical, from pacifist to killer, from coward to man, he also loses himself in the process. He loses his notion of himself, he loses his wife, he even loses the concept of "home", which is the very definition of lost. He has more in common with an idiot now than he does with his prior self. There is nothing easy here. It's a dark tale, with a disturbing point of view, shot in greys and muted colors, with slow deliberate pacing exploding in bursts of grotesque violence and brutality. It is an oppressive psychological thriller without relief from its tension. It was highly controversial in its day, particularly the "misogyny" of Amy seeming to enjoy the first rape, and the "none shall pass" protection of his castle indulged in by David struck Pauline Kael as "fascistic". But Amy's reaction to the first rape needs to be understood in contrast to the 2nd one (so Peckinpah is clearly not saying that this woman (or any woman) likes to be raped... he's saying Amy had an unsatisfying marriage and still desired her ex-boyfriend on some level. So when Charlie forces himself on her, she was conflicted about it, and later guilty about the pleasure she took in it. As for the fascistic nature of the work, Peckinpah isn't celebrating or glamorizing violence, or the territorialism (nationalism) justifying it, he's simply saying its essential to our nature and we cannot run from it and pretend we are above such uncivilized notions. There are lines that even the most humane of us will not allow others to cross. And the price for that violence is our place in the world. So its not like the self-awareness comes cheap, or is easy to obtain, or ends happily. Is it Hoffman's best performance? Well, it seems to me the one with the highest degree of difficulty. It is an unsympathetic role, yet is the lead that carries the piece. He's flawed but, unlike many of his other roles, the character lacks the awareness of his flaws that would allow him to dismiss them with a bemused smirk and smart-ass remark. There is no accent, or physical disfigurement, or bigness of character to hide behind. He has to be as plausible ignoring a hot woman's sexuality as slamming a bear trap on a guy's head. He is walking the high wire without a net in this movie and i think he makes it across with distinction. Your mileage may vary.

you missed nothing

m.e.t.b.o.t. wrote: Harvey 3.93 Duda 3.42 Buck 1.58 Wright 0.57 Byrd 0.42 Parnell 0.07 Edgin 0.02 hey, Bot, you forgot Ike Davis' HR.

John Cougar Lunchbucket wrote: batmagadanleadoff wrote: I didn't even get it. I had to google "Steve Irwin". And I still don't get it. I mean I don't get the supposed joke. I get the bad taste part, but only after googling Irwin. I don't think reading about Irwin is quite the same as having seen him. He was kind of funny himself, that's part of the joke, also the shock of bad taste, funny. Getting a guy dressed up in a ray outfit to hold the sign as part of a scheme is funny too, since it perverts the whole purpose of the mascot from friendly ambassador to brand-rep-gone-mad. The picture of Irwin is funny. Making a complex joke of a list, with one item crossed out, on a placard is funny. I give it three thumbs up. yeah, this.

m.e.t.b.o.t. is a very tough grader of pitchers. however, this is largely due to the equal weight m.e.t.b.o.t. gives to the performance of pitchers while batting. m.e.t.b.o.t. believes that there are two potential solutions to this problem. one is that pitchers should become more proficient with the bat so at to then increase their contribution to the probability of winning the games in which they appear. the other alternative would be to prevent pitchers from batting. m.e.t.b.o.t. is careful to note that the latter solution is incompatible with the spirit of the game of baseball, at least to the extent that m.e.t.b.o.t. has been able to observe. if a shortstop who plays excellent defense but cannot hit himself out of a dried pressed wood mulch grocery container is still required to wield a bat, then so too should pitchers regardless of their current general level of offensive proficiency. ...or you could simply give a pitcher's offense less value in your computations, right? Given that (1) a pitcher good enough to be a hitter is often made one at some point early in his career, (2) the others do not have the time to improve their already lesser offensive skills as they are too busy trying to perfect the skill that they are on the team for (ie., pitching), and (3) half of baseball thinks pitcher's offense is so superfluous to the game that they changed the rules just to replace them at the plate with actual hitters. But somehow you, in your robotic wisdom, choose to give their hitting "prowess" equal weight to their pitching, in your formulation. Yes, a weak-hitting short stop still has to hit. But first of all, that's part of what he's expected to do as a player, and is expected to be proficient enough at it to be a major leaguer (except for Rey Ordonez). And defense, while important in the aggregate, is primarily impacted by pitching, not by fielding. And the extent fielding has an impact, it is a job shared by all 9 players. So a shortstop generally cannot impact the defense enough to make up for his bad hitting. There is, of course, a certain amount of era-context in determining this. Mark Belanger and Buddy Harrelson were very good SSs in a small-ball era; whether a team could afford to carry them in the steroids era, where SSs were hitting 30 HRs a year (except for ours, of course), is at least an open question. But when games are determined by small margins because of run scarcity, a SS that can prevent a run is more valuable than one that can prevent a run when runs are more plentiful (and therefore worth less). On the whole, every fielder has to carry their glove with their bat. A pitcher does not, and shouldn't be penalized for not doing so, in my view. You could simply give those handful of pitchers who are actually good hitters, too, a bonus for their extra value. Don't blow a fuse now; i'm just sayin'.

Gee 3.50 Buck 2.75 Turner 2.25 Rice 0.50 Edgin 0.50 Lyon 0.50

Harvey 4.25 Duda 2.00 Buck 1.75 Davis 1.00 Wright 0.50 Byrd 0.50

i have no resentment toward players who are still being paid by the Mets after their Mets career ended. None. I don't know why others do, but i think Bonilla gets a disproportionate amount of crap because of it. But this isn't about Bonilla or Bay. The fact that we're paying more to 2 OFers (ANY 2 OFers) that we had to buy out just to get rid of them than we are to any of our current OFers is worth noting if only for its symbolism. It is, as Mr. Rogers noted above (and as Edgy condescendingly dismissed as just "wrong"), distinctly different from paying a lot of money to guys on the DL, as the Yanks are (for example). Having guys on the DL is a mostly a matter of bad luck, and such players at least have the potential of coming back and contributing at some point. But guys with big contracts that were released because they suck so bad that we were willing to pay them NOT to play for us, is all about management. Bad management, making bad decisions. And those decisions are exacerbated by replacing those players with minimum wage prospects, suspects and castoffs, because we lack the resources to compete in the market for quality players. So we can all pretend the Bay/Bonilla thing is just a meaningless internet meme making the rounds just to make Willets' head explode, and most teams are constantly doing some version of this all the time, or we can recognize it as a symptom of the mistakes of the past regimes and hope it serves as a cautionary tale for the current one, and not a blue print for the future.

Benjamin Grimm wrote: I agree! Path to step balloons! "____ to step up." But what is the ___? "Path"? no. "Road"? no. The sentence probably needs a "Way" at the beginning, but i don't see how you get "way" from a bike path with some cyclists, some trees and a fence.

The Second Spitter wrote: metsguyinmichigan wrote: I liked "Fever Pitch." The scene where he tortures himself by showing a loop of the Mookie/Buckner moment is classic! Fever Pitch is desecration of sacred and holy text. I'm sure it is; most movies either poorly represent the books they are based on or absolutely betray them. And if you're a fan of a book, it can be galling. But ultimately that is entirely irrelevant as to whether its a good movie or not. THE NATURAL, as was mentioned, totally betrays its source material to give the hero a happy ending. But given the tone, style and nature of the movie, it was appropriate and the movie stands on its own. I love the book, and I love the movie for very different reasons.

Annie Savoy, Nuke LaLouche, Crash Davis... do these strike as you names right out of kitchen-sink naturalism?

Yeah, I'm not there. I like Costner (I even like WATERWORLD and THE POSTMAN), and I LOVE Sarandon... just in general (I was 15 when she sang TOUCH ME, TOUCH ME, TOUCH ME, TOUCH ME... I WANNA FEEL DIRTY!... right to me, sitting in the back of the 8th St playhouse. You never get over something like that). So a love story between these 2 actors has got me half-way there, from the get go. Then, throw in some realistic and comic baseball action juxtaposed against intentionally heightened (i.e., unrealistic), poetic dialogue (since the story is narrated and told from the perspective of a poetry teacher and Romantic who sees stadia as cathedrals and baseball as a metaphor), and you have a unique concoction that audiences (and critics) have responded to in the way they have. Crash: "William Blake?" Annie: "William Blake!"

i see Tejada hit a double; what kind of shot was it? to where? was there a play at 3rd?

all worthy additions to the list.

We're paying more for the outfielders NOT on our team than we are for the outfielders that ARE on our team! We have a brilliantly run franchise! Woo hoo! But when i mention this fact, I'm subjected to your sarcasm because you have read it somewhere else "on sports and social media" and were annoyed by it? Wow.

Edgy MD wrote: Naked Gun almost qualifies, as the climax is during a baseball game --- a key defining element of "sports movie" to me is whether the climax takes place on the playing field --- but I'd say no, as the protagonist wasn't a player. I think it's even more fundamental than that. A "baseball movies" has to be about BASEBALL, regardless of who its protagonist is or whether it has a climactic game. That's why BREWSTER'S MILLIONS doesn't count, either. The protagonist tries to get rich by spending alot of money in a month in order to inherit alot MORE money under the terms of a will. Here, the protagonist happens to be a ballplayer, but he could have been anything, and its not about baseball per se

Know what else is a good baseball movie, guys? He's Just Not That into You. You should catch it together. the best baseball movie ever, by most polls and rankings, is also a romantic comedy. BULL DURHAM is just a much better one, with a lot of great baseball action. But love story aside, FEVER PITCH captures the obsessive nature of fandom, as well as the way it exemplifies a familial legacy and creates a community for fans. BULL DURHAM does so, too, but not many other films do. MAJOR LEAGUE 2 - noted. instead of which one on my list? FOR THE LOVE OF THE GAME - ditto? but: NAKED GUN - it has a baseball scene in it, but its not a baseball movie. BASEKETBALL - its about another sport, not baseball. MR. 3000 - is already on the list.

1. Bull Durham 2. Field of dreams 3. The Natural 4. The Bad News Bears (1976) 5. Moneyball 6. Bang the Drum Slowly 7. The Rookie 8. The Sandlot 9. Major league 10. Eight Men Out 11. Fever Pitch 12. A League of their Own 13. Pride of the Yankees 14. Bingo Long & his Traveling All-stars 15. Fear Strikes Out 16. Angels in the Outfield (57) 17. Damn Yankees 18. Little Big League 19. Mr. Baseball 20. Mr. 3000 so here's my top 20 -- add or subtract as you will.

Edgy MD wrote: If there's anything I'm less inclined to be charitable toward than Billy Crystal, director, it's Billy Crystal, director and Yankee fan. But *61 got it done, and I'd put it ahead of Fever Pitch and A League of Their Own, unless we're not counting movies that didn't get a theatrical release. (Ranking should be settled by votes, I think.) that was my criteria (see, "theatrical releases only") but you can include whatever you want, including docs, to put forth your own top list. Obviously, if your counting cable movies, then i'd include not only 61* but also LONG GONE. If you want to set this up as poll, we should come up with 20 movies (and we need to decide if we're including docs and tv movies), then people can vote for their top 3 and we'll see where we end up. So i've put forth 13. If you want to eliminate any of them, and/or add some of your own, go ahead.

Fever Pitch seemed pretty disposable. Top Portrayals of Babe Ruth: Babe Ruth: The Pride of the YankeesJoe Don Baker: The Natural (billed as "The Whammer")Wiliam Bendix: The Babe Ruth StoryJohn Goodman: The BabeArt LaFleur: The Sandlot Not only is FEVER PITCH a charming romantic comedy, it's the only baseball movie that i can recall which speaks exclusively from the fan's point of view. They have yet to make a good BABE RUTH movie. I had hopes for THE BABE, but it swung and missed.