duan

Decent smack by Duda there. Y'know I'm kinda seeing him as maybe being a good year of Xavier Nady, he could be really decent with the stick.

Edgy DC wrote: Well, Duan, that's because you're a world-class badass. Yeah, I know head wounds look far worse than they are. But sharply struck liners come at you a lot faster than an opponent's head on the football pitch. And the eye is the eye. The bad hop at third is a scary prospect and has ended more than one career. Bobby Valentine got his nose squished by one, and came out of it with a new-found appreciation for artificial turf. no, it's cause i'm a centre-half and we don't intend to look pretty .

ah c'mon, i've popped my eye like that plenty of times with a clash of heads on the football pitch and patched it back together myself with sterile strips. Ref's won't allow you play on any more (hard to stop the eye from leaking and you can't put a big bandage around it to protect it without blinding yourself) , but if it's higher up i've played on with a head wrapped up no bother. If it were regular season game and he didn't come back I'd be surprised .

I have no problem with the Mets suggesting they can't operate at a $70 million dollar a season deficit. However I have a huge problem with the fact that the nature of that deficit is masked by SNY's ability to make profits on the usage of the Mets games at what may be a below market price deal. Until someone tells me how much the Mets are getting paid for their games and does a objective analysis of where that might lie vs the probable return in a competitive market I don't buy the 70 million. A good comp of the market value might be the Angels - who're getting $3 billion over 20 years. "The Angels have agreed to a new deal with Fox Sports worth at least $3 billion and expected to cover 20 years, two parties familiar with the deal said Thursday. The parties declined to be identified because the deal has yet to be officially announced." http://articles.latimes.com/2011/dec/08/sports/la-sp-angels-fox-tv-20111209 For revenue sharing purposes it behoves the Mets to 'lessen' the value of their deal with SNY too. "The trouble, MLB executives and club officials say, is trying to determine the actual value of the equity rights owned by teams. The Yankees say their TV rights are worth about $85 million to $90 million a year from YES, while the Red Sox insist their TV rights from NESN are worth less. The less money declared by the two giants, the less that goes into the revenue-sharing pool, which was about $400million last year, Selig said." http://www.usatoday.com/SPORTS/usaedition/2012-02-10-MLB-TV-cover-0210_CV_U.htm The only value I can get re the SNY contract is the below - meaning that to my mind anyway, the Mets are selling their TV rights at a minimum of $30-40 million discount in return for the equity that Wilpon & Katz get in SNY - therefore the real year to year loss is more like 30-40 million. Indeed the current cuts of $52 million in payroll would equate to them turning a profit, subject to all other revenues remaining the same. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/04/sports/baseball/bankrupt-dodgers-will-benefit-from-robust-tv-marketplace.html "So much has changed in the sports marketplace since 2001. The price of sports rights, nationally and locally, has soared. Teams like the Yankees, the Mets, the Cubs, the White Sox and the Giants own parts of the networks that televise their games. YES is paying the Yankees about $80 million a year. SNY sends the Mets $60 million to $70 million annually, about what NESN pays the Red Sox. In 2013, the Astros will start receiving an average $80 million a year from a new channel they and the N.B.A.�s Rockets will own with Comcast."

sometimes I find it helps if (like on this thread) there's a lot of jumping around. I know I do it too.

Plunk them both - y'know there's nobody in our lineup you'd worry about getting hit back. Ike Davis will get injured again anyway .

would it be wrong to plunk him?

TransMonk wrote: Hey, bro! seriously, the first time I saw the pic I assumed edgy had made a mistake. He's the spitting image Tell me that's not the guy that might creep on to the roster as the 5th OF.

batmagadanleadoff wrote: Wait a minute... FOUR to SNY? Sandomir also reported that SNY, the Mets-partnered cable network, would be purchasing four shares, for a total of $80 million. SNY, which is 65-percent owned by Wilpon and his partners, has plenty of motivation to try to bail them out as owners of the Mets. Their minority partner at SNY, Comcast/Time Warner, knows that SNY becomes far less valuable if decoupled from the Mets in terms of ownership. The network earns its profits almost entirely through showing Mets games, and pays a far lower rate for those rights than a new owner would likely demand. http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/null/2012/02/5333055/mets-owners-keep-peddling-story-about-new-investors-whos-buying This bit - the SNY bit is why the whole "The Mets are losing loads of money" thing can't be taken at face value. If they're selling the rights to them too cheap it's cross subsidisation and the gap between those figures (the price they're selling them for and the price they 'should' get) should be taken off the mets "losses"

It's actually par for the course in these yokes I suppose, but it is totally horrible way of constructing something. Makes you feel kinda quesy really.

I don't get being so down on Thole, a .700 ish ops isn't that bad at catcher - especially when it's weighted equally obp/slg and not a barajas esque 250/450 and when he's only 24. Defense wise I don't get to see enough to have a conviction but BP's metrics have him down as being ok. Sure, a lefty masher (how is Ramon Castro these days) would be a nice caddy, but I don't think that's our biggest problem.

he could try this "five bottles of beer and sex with his girlfriend at least four times . . . it was her birthday, the lady deserved a treat,"

Edgy DC wrote: Regarding marathon, above: I guess so. I certainly thought the Mets were wrong in not making a higher offer than they did to Edgardo Alfonzo. I hoped he succeeded. But when he didn't, even though I felt modestly badly for him, I found it wasn't that hard to tip my hat to Steve Phillips. I can even now personally entertain scenarios where he wouldn't have floundered had he not left the Mets. I can attribute all his downward career trajectory to heartbreak and homesickness for the Mets and New York. It might even be true. But it's certainly far-fetched enough that I'm not going to hang my hat on it. So again, I tipped my hat to Steve Phillips. Even as I stick to my guns that you go higher to retain home-grown stars and honor the connection that the fanbase has with them. Steve F. Phillips. I know, right? I said "Posada Money" for Alfonso (meaning that time round 5 years @ about 60 million. ) I too have learnt that sometimes the guy actually does know what he's doing.

I don't know that I buy the whole "keep him August & September to keep some bums on seats" thing, the larger money is made @ Season ticket sales time and with broadcast deals. Surely they'd much rather have got this out of the way then, acquired some bonafide talent, rather then worry about the +/- 10% on individual tickets sales for 30 games. I mean how much could it actually be? 5,000 by 30 by $20 ? that's only $3 million, Reyes' salary for the 2 months would have been a chunk of that.

I've tried to get round to thinking about this for a couple of days. to be honest, the Mets under the Wilpons are a bit like Ireland. There's the Tsunami of Madoff (for that read the mishandled banking meltdown) which if everything else was going well you could handle but then there's also the reckless growth of spending in the payroll, the stadium and planes for the owners (for that read our current budget defecit) There's no easy place to go with this except to accept some painful medicine for a couple of years and hope that the medicine is actually correct and that the clean bill of health happens earlier rather then later. Of course there's a risk, correcting the payroll imbalance too quickly could lead to a depressionary spriral where due to the poverty of the output and the absence of confidence the income which comes with it declines at an accelerated pace. So what you try and do is get rid of the things that you simply can't afford any more, and make smaller chops everywhere else. Last year the Mets spent $41 million on players who did not play at all, they have also had one of the worst injury records in the majors for last 3/4 years. So I have no doubt that Reyes' relative inability to stay healthy over an extended period of time has been the key factor in Alderson valuing him a *that much less*. Normally the advantage of being a big market team is that you can absorb one or two bad injuries/signings, but until the mets get through this period they can't. Me, I think it won't be a great signing, but they'll get one MVP season, two MVP but hamstrung, one healthy but only ok, one injury riddled and one .320 obp 390 slg with 10 steals fiasco. Don't get me wrong, he'll be a lot better then Jason Bay, but therein lies the secret of where we are now.

can I be against both of them?

fair fucks to him, he looks great.

that's going to be amusing. Ozzie Guillen is a dick, but kinda fun to observe from relatively close.

metirish wrote: duan wrote: . They play the Irish national anthem as the last song in rural irish 'discos' and it's a gruesome affair. . The local pub would do that, the band playing would finish up with it.....out local rural disco finished up with either "Whole of the Moon" or Sinatra's New York New York.Yeah it was gruesome alright. I've seen some grim sights in the likes of Ballinrobe when the lights come on at 3am for Amhr�n na bhFiann. Nobody looks good in bright lights at 3 am.

how embarrassing is this crowd.

I think it's fairly bad on all sorts of levels. To me national anthems are great when it's two countries playing each other, but anything else is just silly. I think that just the same about Mayo vs Kerry in Croker as I do about the Mets vs the Padres. It just seems so parochial and narrow. They play the Irish national anthem as the last song in rural irish 'discos' and it's a gruesome affair. As for the God Bless America stuff, at this point in time there's plenty of times when there's more guys from parts of the world other then the USA on the pitch playing the game - is one trying to rub their noses in the fact that they aren't from there or make it seem like the USA is definitively better then where they're from? but I'm a grumpy geopolitically sceptical witness and probably not the target market.

is it sad that I'm still thinking if we can go on a 9-1 run and the braves go 2-8 we'll be in the mix again?

Well surely I get credit for north Dakota?

North Dakota and Oregon.

by the way, because it coincided with one of my longer stints in NY I got the Trivia question right. I think I saw one of the 50 as well of either Mosato Yoshii/Hideo Nomo in the flesh.