roger_that

Here is what Joe Posnanski wrote today about the bat shard incident of a quarter-century ago: August 10, 2025 | Wait — the Bat is STILL the Ball? Roger Clemens and Joe Torre are sticking with history’s worst alibi 25 years later. On October 22, 2000, Roger Clemens threw a broken baseball bat as hard as he could at Mike Piazza during a World Series game. Even now, 25 years later, those words seem surreal. But it’s true, it happened, in front of the entire baseball world … and nothing happened to Clemens. He wasn’t tossed from the game (he pitched eight shutout innings). He wasn’t even warned. He was later fined $50,000, which he probably found sitting in an old pair of jeans and that was the end of it. Well, actually, not the end because, famously, Clemens had a justification for his actions. An amazing justification. A justification that has echoed through the years. He thought the bat was the ball. Even now, this is so galactically stupid that it’s hard to know where to begin. I mean, let’s grant that in the heat of the moment, Clemens, a grown man who had been playing baseball all his life, might have mistaken a jagged baseball bat for the ball. Let’s just give him that one. Why did he then throw the “ball” at Piazza? How does saying it’s the ball in any way change the basic issue, which is that Roger Clemens threw an object at Mike Piazza as hard as he could? I wouldn’t be writing about any of this today except for this. Clemens is apparently STILL saying it. And his manager, Joe Torre, is joining in. Saturday, Clemens pitched in the Yankees’ old-timers’ day. And when he walked in to talk to the press, Torre leaped in to clear the air before there was even a question. “There’s still a question with the broken bat, with Piazza and the whole thing in Game 2,” Torre said. “I think if Mike knew that the ball was foul, he wouldn’t have been starting to run to first base. The ball went over the first base dugout, was foul right away. He didn’t know where it was, so he started running.” WHAT THE HECK IS JOE TORRE BLATHERING ABOUT? “I didn’t know he was running, and Mike said that same thing too,” Clemens said. “He didn’t know where the baseball was. So my first instinct when I shattered that bat in about four pieces, I thought it was a baseball coming at me.” DID THIS MAKE SENSE IN CLEMENS’S HEAD BEFORE HE SAID IT OUT LOUD? IS THERE ANYTHING TRUE LEFT IN THE WORLD? Just so we can keep our sanity, here’s what happened: Roger Clemens threw a hot fastball. Piazza dribbled it into foul ground and shattered his bat. The ball rolled into the first base dugout, and the fat part of the bat hopped up on Clemens. Piazza did lose sight of the ball for an instant and did start running toward first. But, almost immediately, he saw the ball roll into the first base dugout, and he slowed to a crawl — a good thing because if he had kept running, Clemens very well might have hit him with the bat or ball or whatever it is that Clemens thought he had. Oh, by the way: Clemens was looking RIGHT AT PIAZZA when he threw the bat. Right at him. He knew exactly what he was doing. Stop gaslighting us. It’s been 25 years. Let it go, fellas. You threw a bat at Mike Piazza during the World Series and got away with it. Move on with your lives.

How close is the "d" key to the "n" key on your keyboard? It's not a typo. It's a mistake. And you're welcome.

You're confused about whether you're confused.

I think you've confused Ron Hodges with Rod Kanehl.

We'll never know

I'm far from sure as well, but it was definitely a possibility.

Interesting to go back to the initial post in this long thread. If the Mets would have signed him to a five-year deal on the day of Post #1, then they'd be looking at having him signed up through 2027, which would be their ideal contract at this point in time.

Me, too. But he might like money more than he likes us.

Well, technically you've got hundreds of available 1bmen. Problem is, all of them suck. You've got players in AAA who can be forced into playing 1B, all the way down to rookie league players, plus the available free agents who've been cut by other organizations. None of them are desirable solutions. But if you've got a player (and the Mets have at least two--Mauricio and Acuna) who've shown signs of being solid defensive MLB SSs and given glimmers of offensive ability, and a guy under contract through 2031 (when he'll be in his late 30s) who can unquestionably hit with any 1bman and almost certainly field like a Gold Glove first baseman, you might consider trying that solution out, instead of throwing money that will probably be wasted at Alonso. I think he will get the contract he wants from some other team, and that team will most likely have to eat the last few unproductive years of that six or seven year deal. I'd rather the Mets spent those millions on younger Free Agents.

Totally with you on pinch-running Taylor for Marte, but that's just one decision in a game their offense was woeful in, not a real explanation for their offensive problems. Generally, I think Mendoza's done a decent job as manager, and as I say, you're bound to disagree with any manager sometimes. If McNeil had popped a double in the gap and Marte had scored easily, we'd all have forgotten about that choice by now. We might even be happy that Marte was still batting in a tied game. If they were simply an unlucky team so far (grant me that premise for a moment) some folks would still be casting about for a more satisfying explanation, wouldn't they? It's a tough thing to do, accepting "Bad luck" as an explanation, but it's got to be the truth sometimes. Maybe this is just one of those times.

=Gwreck post_id=200752 time=1754755099 user_id=56] =roger_that post_id=200746 time=1754749286 user_id=128]and the bottom of the order is excellent, at least potentially and often in practice.

=Centerfield post_id=200745 time=1754748731 user_id=65] The offense has been bad over the long haul. It's not some bad stretch. I posted in the other thread. They've been bad all year, all of 2023 and the first two months of 2024. This is not a “rough patch”. The good stretch in 2024 is the outlier.

Losers of 9 of the last 10 games , unacceptable, Gelbs keeps banging on( and has for a good while ) about how this offense is too good for this , so annoying It is irritating to listen to, over and over, but what if he's right? There's some explanation for the chasm between the team's offensive ability and their performance on the field, but what if that explanation is "bad luck"? That's usually the best explanation of poor hitting with RISP, and it eventually comes to an end, most of the time. The team starts driving in key runs again, and the bitching about shitty RISP hitting lowers in volume and in frequency, until the next streak of really bad luck. More popular explanations include bad managing (and there are so many managerial decisions that you can always find a few every game that rub you wrong), weak character by a player you happen to dislike for a variety of reasons (most of them irrational), a bad attitude on a lot of the players' parts (which is another form of "bad managing"), and other explanations that amount to grousing and complaining about results. Every team has some gap between its potential and its performance, most of them small, some positive and some negative. But every once in a while, you get a huge gap and sometimes that huge gap is negative. (When the huge gap is positive, we call it a "miracle team" and we eat it up.) Fans get unhappy when a negative gap happens to their team, but a streak of bad luck is unavoidable over the long haul. And we're in it right now.

Not if you've got three shortstops and no first baseman you don't.

Someone should make "Generic Music Biopic." Dude alienates family by choosing music as his career, hooks up with a series of untalented bandmates, perseveres, drugs, sexual relationships, more drugs, better bandmates, more drugs, breakthrough hit, alcohol, romantic interest, followup hit, family accepts him, marriage and child, classic hit, more drugs and alcohol, divorce, new sexual relationships, band breaks up, solo album, depression, rehab, more drugs, suicide attempt, more rehab, period of isolation, second marriage, second solo album, second divorce, band re-forms, series of major hits, series of romantic attachments, more hits, biopic gets made, the end.

Peterson wasn't a prospect? Or he didn't work out?

And we'd probably have let it slide if we weren't Mets fans. I mean, you could tell me that Hector Lopez or Bruce Bochy hit 27 HRs his rookie year, and I might have let that pass, but Benny? I've just had a very similar exchange with Google's Gemini about an error it made on a book I'm currently writing. It told me a character said something that I know he didn't say, and when I pointed that out, it told me "Sorry" but said that speech belonged to a different character who didn't even exist. After much back and forth, finally the AI program said it wouldn't continue to give me feedback because it was wasting so much of my time. Also, in the "third time through the order" thread I noted that I asked AI to tell me pitch-count stats that I know are kept somewhere and it told me it couldn't supply them, just general statements about pitchcounts, even when I asked specific questions. It couldn't tell me, for example, how many pitches David Peterson had thrown in each inning 1-9, and I know that data is out there somewhere. It is, however, GREAT at apologizing.

Agbayani? I must been asleep the season he hit 27.

Very few players reach their career highs in their first year. Some do, I suppose, but the vast majority--maybe 90%? more?--surpass their rookie records consistently later on. You want to assume that Vientos will never hit more than 27 HRs again? Or Alvarez 25? Or even Baty at whatever number of HRs he's going to hit this year? I'm going to assume the opposite, and the odds will back me up. Just take the batters who've ever hit 27 HRs or more in their rookie seasons and average out their lifetime HR totals and you'll be up around 400, I'd suppose. Or catchers who broke in with 25 or more. It's a short list but very impressive.

The stats I presented (24 HR, 76 RBI in 678 ABs this season, 31 HRs and 87 RBI in 566 ABs last season) resemble full-season stats for one full-time regular. (Alonso and Lindor finished last season about halfway between those two figures, 608 and 618 ABs respectively). So I think it's a fair and easily understood way to look at how productive the three young infielders have been. To read the pissing and the moaning here about how these three horrible incompetents have been killing the Mets, you would never believe that these are in fact their full-season stats. I'll bet if you told one of the pissers and moaners that the Mets could swap the three of them to get one player with those stats in his mid-20s who could play 2B, SS, and 3B and will almost certainly improve in the near future, he'd be ecstatic. "Do it, do it, do it!" he would exclaim. "But where are you finding a team dumb enough to lose those three clowns in exchange for such a star?"

It solves a lot of potential problems if the Mets have a very hard time getting Alonso to agree on a contract, which they probably will. Let's say Pete is looking for a six-year deal at top dollar, and the Mets are looking for a three-year deal, max, at somewhat less than record-shattering top dollar, and they just can't come to terms. Both sides are thinking the other side blinks first, but meantime some other team offers Pete all he's looking to get and more. So he leaves. Now the Mets have no first baseman. But they do have a logjam of MLB-ready and affordable middle infielders, plus a shortstop who hits like a first baseman and is losing range at SS. Makes all the sense in the world to me, especially if replacing Pete at 1B will cost a fortune and still yield an inferior first baseman. And if the Mets do end up with Lindor at 1b next year, all I ask is a simple plaque acknowledging where you first came upon this idea.

And he'll make a great defensive first baseman instead of deteriorating into a mediocre shortstop by the end of his contract. Remember, you read it here first. The Mets have two young MLB-ready players at ss and possibly a gigantic hole at 1B.

Yeah!!!! And depending on how it works out, you get to decide if Stearns dealt the correct redundancy!! Why not deal off all three? I'll tell you why. Because at least one of them is going to become a star and you might get very little in return for dealing off another Jeff Kent, who also sucked. So you'd rather keep all three even as they bring down the Mets now just in case one at some point down the line becomes a star? That logic is flawless and you are truly a genius. Well, thank you. Very kind of you to say that. "at some point down the line" could start tonight. All of these young guys have great AAA credentials, pretty fair MLB stats so far, and none of them are killing us this year or last year. As I said elsewhere, you combine their numbers and collectively it looks like the power stats of one very good full-time young middle infielder-3Bman.

Some men see things the way they are and ask "Why?" I see things the way they aren't and ask "Why not?"

How about they move Lindor over to 1B for the rest of his career? He seems to have taken a step back defensively, and he can still hit as well as a 1Bman should. And then they can play Mauricio (or Acuna?) at short, and use the money they would have spent on a long-term contract for Alonso on the best young free agent around.