Olympian Effort in Baseball?

Oh baby! Baseball’s really revving up now as baseball articles intrude on the Olympics and basketball coverage inundating the sports pages. But, this happens just as I was starting to get into Bode Miller and Lindsay Vonn, and, if I must say so, Julia Mancuso. And the ice dancing, something I ordinarily wouldn’t watch, drew me in last night as the coverage led off with a piece on White and Davis, one of the two American entries skating in the top 5.

What struck me were the sacrifices these two had put in for so many years of their lives. It makes you realize that these Olympians are athletes, highly trained athletes in every sense of the word. And then to see them put up some ridiculously high number to vie for gold was very gratifying. Their attitudes were great too, happy that they did their jobs pretty splendidly and only hoping for the best. They wound up with silver, of course, and I had to grudgingly admit that that Canadian couple looked pretty damned good too. (How’s that for analysis)?

It made me wonder too. Do baseball players try that hard to achieve excellence? More particularly, do Mets players try that hard? More particularly even than that, does Oliver Perez even toss the ball around in the off-season?

I pick on Perez as I had just finished reading that Sandy Koufax was impressed with him and that Jerry Manuel was impressed that he could duplicate the same delivery twice in a row. I can understand Koufax being impressed with his arm. Koufax was notoriously wild early in his career. His success came relatively late. I can recall watching some of his early games, wondering what all the fuss was about him. He couldn’t come near the plate some games.

Let’s hope Ollie’s career takes a similar path. That’d be nice. It’s encouraging too that Manuel had some good things to say about him. At this point, I don’t think Manuel would go out of his way to say good things about someone who has arguably been the Mets greatest failure.

But really, how hard is that guy capable of working? And how long will he be able to keep it up? I guess 2010 will tell us. We’ll see if he can become the #2 starter the Mets have needed. Not that a good or even great performance from Perez would have made any difference last year.

But, all in all, there have been a lot of good indicators coming out of Mets camp. You hear that Pelfrey dropped 25 pounds, not that that’s necessarily a good thing. I can recall Sid Fernandez, one of my all-time favorite Mets pitchers, dropping weight and being dreadful. But Pelfrey’s dropping some pounds is a good sign of effort.

Carlos Beltran, too, seems over his funk, or at least that has become his story. I personally don’t think Beltran is the type of person to worry too much about anything. And while he was obviously perturbed with the Mets and their medical staff, it sounds as if it was for good reason. He knows it, the Mets probably know it, and the whole incident just smells of bad public relations and bad communications within the Mets hierarchy. Again.

Ah well, let’s face it. Everything can’t be rosy. Sometimes it’s tough to be a Mets fan. For example, I had been looking forward to watching Omir Santos break out and have a good year. Next thing I know, he’s out and Rod Barajas is in. Why? I have no idea. And Santos won’t even be the second catcher. That job will go to another guy, Thole, nobody’s ever heard of. Why? I have no idea. Maybe it’s excessive perspiration or he needs a breath mint once in a while. He sure seemed to hit in the clutch. How bad can his pitch selection be?

And speaking of pitch selection, there’s the story out of Yankee camp that Burnett and Posada have worked out their differences, or, alternately, that there was never a problem to begin with. That Girardi gave Burnett Molina to catch all his games was just some kind of miraculous coincidence. Posada isn’t as stupid as he looks….or something.

Ah geez, there’s that Yankee hate coming out of me again. I just can’t help myself sometimes, like Newman (from Seinfeld) railing against the postal system. At least he had Kramer to rein him in and bring him back to reality. I have to rely only on Yankee beat writers and the few pearls of what is supposed to be wisdom from Brian Cashman.

Okay, he finally got them a World Series. After outspending the entire free world for baseball players for around ten years or so, he finally got one. Let’s anoint him baseball’s version of Bill Walsh. Oops, there I go again.

But really, the difference between the Mets and Yanks is astounding when it comes to PR. The Mets say nothing, the Yanks spin stories. For example, Joba is officially off his pitch count, but, oh by the way, he may be going to the pen.
I’m still amazed the Yanks let Johnny Damon go. He was the perfect Yankee in that nobody was ever more full of baloney. He’s thrilled to be a Tiger, he always wanted to play for Detroit, he’s happy with his one-year contract for 8 mill. Heeeere’s Johnny….

Let’s see now, is there a point to these ramblings? I’ll tie it all up with this….if the Mets put as much effort into communications as they expect their players to put into baseball, things would be better. And if the Yankees put as much effort into baseball as they put into baloney, they’d probably have some more Series rings to their credit.

Oh, and they really should have made more of an effort for Damon/Matsui. I can’t wait for crunchtime in Yankee games when it’s all on the line for, um, Granderson? Nick Johnson? Heh-heh.

Two New Guys and an Old Guy

Two new guys and an old guy, that was pretty much the story Sunday in the NFL.

We got to see rook Matt Stafford lead a hungry team to a looooong-awaited victory over the hapless Skins, so embarrassing to the media, if not the team itself, that many sports shows seem to be calling for the ouster of their seemingly unbeleaguered head coach.

And our own Mark Sanchez, who faked the Titans out of their jocks and threw a little looper TD pass to his tight end, then he put his head down on a scramble and forced his way over the goal line. Then he stunk the joint out for a quarter or so as the Titans came back. No problem, Sanchez just didn’t let them take the game away, coming back to thread the needle to Cotchery on a slant.

And, then, we saw ancient Brett Favre thread the needle with two seconds left to a little-used wide receiver at the back of the end zone to beat a deserving young 49er team. We saw it once, we saw it twice, we saw it again and again, and I know I’ll be seeing some more of it before another Sunday blessedly appears.

Taking that last game first, I was rooting for the young 49ers. I’m just coming off a trip to their fair city, I’ve picked them to win their Division crown (so to speak, I never saw the crown but I’m sure it’s a heavily-bejeweled one, at least as valuable as those boxing championship belts), and I have to admit I’m rooting for Mike Singletary.

The Niners played those Vikings really tough for the entire sixty minutes, yes, including even those last two seconds. Adrian Peterson ran hard but didn’t really kill them, their offense was good enough to put some points on the board against a tough Viking defense, and every Niner seemed to be taking care of business, just as you’d expect from a Mike Singletary representative.

But they played the game a little too conservatively at the end, going three and out in those critical two minutes, leaving time for a grizzled old gunslinger to take a good team down the field. They relied on their defense, which had done the job over and over again all day long. But, when you do that, you leave the door open.

Favre snuck in the door. He completed passes to just about everybody, Rice and Harvin, Shiancoe and even Berrian to take them all the way down to the 32 yard line with just about 12 seconds left.

Then the big bad wolf blew the 49ers house in. The play was designed so that he could step up and then slide to his right, and he could fire a line drive that would be harder to defend. He stepped up and slid around and then threw long enough to eat up ten seconds on the clock as Greg Lewis snared that liner with just two seconds on the clock.

“You have nothing to be looking at the floor for!” Singletary shouted after the game. “You didn’t steal anything! You didn’t do anything wrong! OK? We’re going to get better! We’re going to get there! We will see them again in the playoffs, all right? You hold your head up!”

That Mike felt that was necessary is good enough for me. It had to be said. That team just played a great game. Another young quarterback, Shaun Hill, had thrown 2 TD passes to tight end, Vernon Davis. The special teams blocked a field goal attempt and returned it for a touchdown. The special teams did give up a TD on a kickoff though, and that big play alone could be blamed for the loss.

I really don’t like Favre. Giving credit where it’s due though, that was one great drive and one great play. Maybe nobody else in football does it just that way, not either Manning, not Brady, not Rivers, not Roethlisberger. His arm is back this year, and that’s really my biggest problem with him. He was perfectly happy to play last year for the Jets with a torn biceps. After all, he had to save his precious “never missed a game” record.

And really, all these woops retirements, and all the Green Bay-Vikings melodrama, in addition to ruining last season for the Jets. None of any of that sits too well with me. And the sweetest thing that happened last year for me was the Pennington and Dolphins thrashing of the Favre-led Jets to win a playoff spot.

But he was himself on Sunday. His arm is back. He’s still got the same head though and the Vikings will have to take the bad with the good. It might be enough to take them to the playoffs, especially the way Green Bay has been playing. And Chicago might have something to say about the finish as well. I’ll be rooting for anybody but the Vikings.

That the young Sanchez has been able to propel his Jets to the top of the heap in the AFC East, and beat the Pats in the process, is almost doubly sweet because he’s the guy replacing Favre.

Yeah, it’s been nice seeing a young whippersnapper run around and throw bullets and say all the right things too, unlike his ridiculous teammate Scott, But a swashbuckler isn’t exactly what the Jets may need. And that TD run, as much as I liked it, qualifies him as one.

But those USC quarterbacks ain’t too shabby, Carson Palmer and Matt Leinart and now Sanchez. You could see them hangin’ with D’Artagnan at the local pub. And Francesa says he’s “cavalier” with the ball.

Finally, you have to like a youngster who can light up an entire city, if just for a day, and that’s what Matt Stafford pulled off in Detroit. That Washington team he beat really isn’t as bad as it looked. Look for Detroit to win a few.