No hitting at all. Except for Ike, I guess. I’m watching the Mets play the Padres again in the first game of two they’re playing today and it doesn’t look good, once again. These Padres pitchers are really solid, I know, and the Pods do lead their division, but still. They can’t hit either. Snooze.
It’s raining here in beautiful Short Hills but not so much in Flushing Meadows apparently. Ike is at the plate as this is written, facing Gregorson, just one of those nice relievers the Pods send out day after day to befuddle the opposition. And Ike goes down swinging.
But it is what it is. The Mets are fun to watch. They get contributions from a lot of different guys. But they’ll lose their share of games, especially when Wright and Reyes and Jason Bay don’t do too much, which, today at least, is pretty much the story.
Luke Gregorson just struck out the side, Ike, Wright and Frenchie, but at least Wright struck out on a pitch that was about a foot outside. And some people think instant replay shouldn’t be allowed for balls and strikes. Not only shouldn’t there be instant replay but there shouldn’t be any need for an ump calling balls and strikes at all!
Just use the box, the one we see on our TV screens all the time. When the pitch is in the box, it’s a strike. How hard is that? Get rid of those obnoxious umpires who just want to go home anyway. There’s absolutely no need for them. Have a couple of fellows work the bases, including home, and that would be that.
They say pitching is dominating the hitters today. And it’s true. Just have those umps keep calling strikes for balls way out of the zone; just have those lazy umps call strikes on every check swing. If you want the game to come to some semblance of balance again, just get rid of that umpire calling balls and strikes.
I mean, I know it’s traditional and all, but what good are they? There would still be plenty of umpiring jobs available, in every league that couldn’t afford the technology, which basically means every league other than MLB.
There are lots of complaints too about the length of the games. I know there is some time wasted on players arguing with the umpire on called strikes, followed by the irate manager getting thrown out for questioning the ump’s eyesight (and heritage sometimes no doubt). No umpire, no argument. How can you argue with a box?
So let’s recap. Hitting would get better all over the league, games would be shorter, and everybody’d be a lot happier, except for the pitchers, of course, but they’d get over it as every pitcher would suffer equally, and ERA’s would go up one for everybody.
If the technology allowed computerizing the calls on the basepaths, I’d favor that too. That missed call at first base that erased Gallaraga’s perfect game really rankled. I don’t particularly care that the ump cried about it later on, to be perfectly honest. He had to show some contrition. It was right out there for everyone to see. It wasn’t even questionable. It was a horrible call, and one that he stuck vehemently to, before he saw the replay. And everyone saw the replay.
If I’m being harsh on umpires, I’m sorry, but no group deserves it as much as do the major league umpires. They’re arrogant, lazy, usually out of shape and very often too concerned about their impact upon the game, which is significant, I must say, unfortunately. I wouldn’t mind so much if they weren’t so horrible as a group. But they can’t seem to see what everyone else does.
Especially for balls and strikes, MLB should just use the box. It works on line calls in tennis wonderfully. I don’t see why it wouldn’t work for baseball. Anyone who has seen their favorite hitter strike out on a pitch they couldn’t have possibly reached with a fishing pole would have to agree.
Think about it. How ridiculous is it to have everyone just be happy if the umpire is consistent with his strike zone? That means, it’s fine as long as a ball 6 inches outside is called a strike all the time. The same goes for those balls at the ankles or at the shoulder. Why should we continue to put up with it? Just get rid of the whole bunch of them.
The Mets just lost. Cohen tells me the last 22 Mets in a row were retired. Geez, that’s pretty bad hitting. Johan Santana was the victim again. You have to feel for a pitcher who never gets run support. I don’t know what mysterious factor is involved, maybe just the fates or baseball gods, whatever, but some pitchers just have no luck at all.
Baseball would still be exciting without that fat guy behind the plate. There’d be a little less melodrama, of course, but I’m sure the Lou Piniellas of the world would still get thrown out from time to time. There’d be more home runs, higher batting averages, more runs scored and very likely affect negatively only those pitchers who exist solely on locating their pitches, which, to me, is just a euphemism for pitchers who consistently get strike calls on non-strikes, thus driving the batters to distraction.
Pitchers with legitimate stuff would rise to the top of the rankings. The Jamie Moyer 47-year-olds would be phased out. When a pitcher lost his fastball, he’d be in trouble more often than not. Baseball would become a young man’s game again, which is as it should be, except in the American League, of course, which would still carry its forty or so designated hitters.
If a pitch is in the box, you get a white light. If it’s outside the box, you get a red light. There’d be no need for challenges. What’re we waiting for?
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Monday, June 7, 2010
Fredi Finishes the Fish!
What a deal! It helps if your opponent’s manager is a grandstanding fool and Florida’s Fredi Gonzalez filled that role admirably yesterday. He conceded the winning run to our Metsies in the bottom of the 8th by not playing his infield in with the winning run on third base. Florida then got the double play but the winning run came trotting in. Thanks very much, Fredi!
Now I know his thinking was that he had the heart of his batting order coming up in the 9th and the Mets Ike Davis was likely to hit the ball hard, but c’mon Fredi, that heart of your batting order would be facing one of the top closers in the National League in the person of K-Rod.
And that 8th inning masterpiece of thinking was actually the second totally inane move Fredi made on the day. Fredi took out his best pitcher, Ricky Nolasco, in the 6th inning and replaced him with virtual nobody Tim Wood, who promptly gave up the hit the Mets needed to score two of those runners.
Nolasco was understandably beside himself. He had given up nothing but cheap singles and a bunt. If anybody on that field was capable of getting the Fish out of that inning, it was that guy standing on the mound, Ricky Nolasco.
But Fredi hadn’t seen enough of Wood in the 6th. So he sent Wood out in the 7th as well. Fredi still hadn’t seen enough of Wood after he walked Davis and gave Barajas a double. So Jeff Francoeur was only too happy to bang one over the fence for a 3-run homer.
Although Wood was only charged with the 3 runs he allowed in the 7th, to me he was responsible for the damage done in the 6th too. Of course it wasn’t all his fault. Fredi bears the responsibility for all of them.
This is the same Fredi Gonzalez who made such a big deal out of Hanley Ramirez’s failure to run hard after a Texas Leaguer popup he missed and then accidentally kicked, this after hurting himself in the previous inning. I know I watched the whole sequence of events and, given the circumstances, Hanley Ramirez deserved a break there. Only a grandstanding manager would have elected to take him out of the game.
Ordinarily, I would never excuse a player who didn’t hustle. But Ramirez had just finished hurting himself, then not only couldn’t catch up with the Texas Leaguer but kicked it as well. You could have made the argument that the whole muffed play was as a result of Ramirez hurting his foot in the inning before.
The brilliant Gonzalez then made Ramirez apologize to the team, thus furthering his embarrassment and deepening his bitterness over the whole affair. Mr. Ramirez doesn’t seem to play hard anymore and I don’t blame him. He’s close to free agency and it’s about 99-1 in my mind that he’ll re-sign with the Marlins. And, for those of you who may not be aware, Hanley Ramirez is one of the five best players in the game today.
Fredi seems to quite enjoy embarrassing his best players. What a management ploy! It’s a good thing Fredi is insulated by the relatively quiet media in the Florida market. If Jerry Manuel or even Girardi had done what Fredi did yesterday, there’d be all kinds of hell to pay.
Gonzalez is a grandstanding manager, much as Joe West was a grandstanding umpire before his official chastisement from the league. If I were a Marlins fan, I’d be screaming for his firing. Instead, he gets kudos for pulling a player who didn’t hustle, no matter the killer circumstances.
Now, maybe the Mets would have won in extra innings anyway, especially the way they’re playing. But Fredi Gonzalez gave them the game. It almost takes all the fun out of the win. Any other manager in the game would have won that game for the Marlins, first by leaving his best pitcher in the game, and second, by playing his infield in.
I congratulate the fine Mets broadcast team, Ron Darling and Gary Cohen, for pointing out the absurdity of both errors. They continue to call them the way they see them.
In my last column, I had pointed out that the “core” Mets were not performing well and provided some revealing statistics to accentuate my point. I was of course referring to Jason Bay, David Wright and Jose Reyes. After Sunday afternoon though, you have to wonder whether this Mets team really has anything you could call a core.
And that could be a good thing. I’d much prefer an even, strong performance from the whole team, which is closer to what we are actually seeing from this Mets team. It’s very often other combinations of players doing it for the Mets these days, either Barajas and Francoeur, or Pagan and Ike Davis, or even Castillo or Cora.
It helps them too, not having a fool for a manager. Although I’ve slammed Manuel for seeing things “far off” while not accepting the obvious, I surely appreciated his presence Sunday afternoon. His call for a “hit and run” with Bay at the plate and Pagan on first base was a master stroke.
Bay sometimes totally mis-manages his at-bats, but when forced to swing at a ball, there’s no better risk to at least make contact with the ball than Jason Bay. Bay did make contact, of course, and stroked a six-hopper through the left side of the infield, moving Pagan, who was running with the pitch, all the way over to third base.
Pagan scored the winning run, of course, on Davis’s double play after Fredi’s decision to play his infielders deep and let the winning run score without a challenge, with just one inning to play and facing arguably the best reliever in the game today.
K-Rod finished the Marlins, of course, but Fredi had actually lost it for them a little earlier.
Now I know his thinking was that he had the heart of his batting order coming up in the 9th and the Mets Ike Davis was likely to hit the ball hard, but c’mon Fredi, that heart of your batting order would be facing one of the top closers in the National League in the person of K-Rod.
And that 8th inning masterpiece of thinking was actually the second totally inane move Fredi made on the day. Fredi took out his best pitcher, Ricky Nolasco, in the 6th inning and replaced him with virtual nobody Tim Wood, who promptly gave up the hit the Mets needed to score two of those runners.
Nolasco was understandably beside himself. He had given up nothing but cheap singles and a bunt. If anybody on that field was capable of getting the Fish out of that inning, it was that guy standing on the mound, Ricky Nolasco.
But Fredi hadn’t seen enough of Wood in the 6th. So he sent Wood out in the 7th as well. Fredi still hadn’t seen enough of Wood after he walked Davis and gave Barajas a double. So Jeff Francoeur was only too happy to bang one over the fence for a 3-run homer.
Although Wood was only charged with the 3 runs he allowed in the 7th, to me he was responsible for the damage done in the 6th too. Of course it wasn’t all his fault. Fredi bears the responsibility for all of them.
This is the same Fredi Gonzalez who made such a big deal out of Hanley Ramirez’s failure to run hard after a Texas Leaguer popup he missed and then accidentally kicked, this after hurting himself in the previous inning. I know I watched the whole sequence of events and, given the circumstances, Hanley Ramirez deserved a break there. Only a grandstanding manager would have elected to take him out of the game.
Ordinarily, I would never excuse a player who didn’t hustle. But Ramirez had just finished hurting himself, then not only couldn’t catch up with the Texas Leaguer but kicked it as well. You could have made the argument that the whole muffed play was as a result of Ramirez hurting his foot in the inning before.
The brilliant Gonzalez then made Ramirez apologize to the team, thus furthering his embarrassment and deepening his bitterness over the whole affair. Mr. Ramirez doesn’t seem to play hard anymore and I don’t blame him. He’s close to free agency and it’s about 99-1 in my mind that he’ll re-sign with the Marlins. And, for those of you who may not be aware, Hanley Ramirez is one of the five best players in the game today.
Fredi seems to quite enjoy embarrassing his best players. What a management ploy! It’s a good thing Fredi is insulated by the relatively quiet media in the Florida market. If Jerry Manuel or even Girardi had done what Fredi did yesterday, there’d be all kinds of hell to pay.
Gonzalez is a grandstanding manager, much as Joe West was a grandstanding umpire before his official chastisement from the league. If I were a Marlins fan, I’d be screaming for his firing. Instead, he gets kudos for pulling a player who didn’t hustle, no matter the killer circumstances.
Now, maybe the Mets would have won in extra innings anyway, especially the way they’re playing. But Fredi Gonzalez gave them the game. It almost takes all the fun out of the win. Any other manager in the game would have won that game for the Marlins, first by leaving his best pitcher in the game, and second, by playing his infield in.
I congratulate the fine Mets broadcast team, Ron Darling and Gary Cohen, for pointing out the absurdity of both errors. They continue to call them the way they see them.
In my last column, I had pointed out that the “core” Mets were not performing well and provided some revealing statistics to accentuate my point. I was of course referring to Jason Bay, David Wright and Jose Reyes. After Sunday afternoon though, you have to wonder whether this Mets team really has anything you could call a core.
And that could be a good thing. I’d much prefer an even, strong performance from the whole team, which is closer to what we are actually seeing from this Mets team. It’s very often other combinations of players doing it for the Mets these days, either Barajas and Francoeur, or Pagan and Ike Davis, or even Castillo or Cora.
It helps them too, not having a fool for a manager. Although I’ve slammed Manuel for seeing things “far off” while not accepting the obvious, I surely appreciated his presence Sunday afternoon. His call for a “hit and run” with Bay at the plate and Pagan on first base was a master stroke.
Bay sometimes totally mis-manages his at-bats, but when forced to swing at a ball, there’s no better risk to at least make contact with the ball than Jason Bay. Bay did make contact, of course, and stroked a six-hopper through the left side of the infield, moving Pagan, who was running with the pitch, all the way over to third base.
Pagan scored the winning run, of course, on Davis’s double play after Fredi’s decision to play his infielders deep and let the winning run score without a challenge, with just one inning to play and facing arguably the best reliever in the game today.
K-Rod finished the Marlins, of course, but Fredi had actually lost it for them a little earlier.
Friday, June 4, 2010
It's the Core, Stupid!
A day of rest, that’s just what the Mets needed, and that goes for their fans too. I know I surely needed one. That last loss to the Padres was excruciating. One strike away from the win they were, and just little David Eckstine at the plate. Oh well.
I won’t be picking on anybody today, not even Ollie Perez. I’ll try to stay away from Gary Matthews too. The fact is that they’re just a .500 team, one among many it seems in a league that’s showing a lot of parity this year. Once you accept that simple truism, the team is a really interesting one to watch, even when Keith (Hernandez, the 3rd guy in the booth) takes still another day off.
I mean….what other team has every player on it being almost psychotically streaky . Name me one everyday player who shows any consistency. Bay? Certainly not. Reyes? Oh please. Wright? I don’t think so. When Barajas, the catcher, leads the team in rbi’s, that’s pathetic, I’m sorry, even if the total number is pretty high.
Yeah, I guess Castillo and Ike Davis have been consistent, but even as good as they’ve been, their total potential impact just isn’t that great (although Ike has won a few games for them, come to think of it).
Right now, for example, Reyes is hot. Francoeur is hot too but those two are five spots apart in the batting order. Even Reyes doesn’t steal home that often. He may have stolen 2nd and 3rd and induced a balk to get home once or twice, but it’s a 162-game season. They just, as a team, don’t score that many runs(17th), especially when Santana’s on the mound.
A typical batting sequence might have Reyes getting on, Castillo moving him over, Bay striking out and Wright popping up. They just don’t put things together that often. And they don’t get big hits. But when the pitching is good, as very often it has been, the whole team plays a lot better, not at the plate certainly but in every other aspect.
Their core players are just not getting it done, or, I should say, haven’t got it done so far this year.
Bay, for example, is hitting a respectable .295 right now and leads the team in runs scored but his OPS is just .829 while his average career OPS is .892. He’s the type of hitter that hits a lot of long balls that get caught. When they’re not caught, it’ll be a double. He just hasn’t been able to get that ball over the wall this year. I hate to say he’s got “warning track power” but that’s been his story this year.
David Wright is hitting .267. He’s got a marginally better OPS than Bay, and 9 home runs, which is probably better than many fans expected, but he just hasn’t produced as often as you’d expect. If he were better in big spots, the low batting average wouldn’t make as much of a difference, but alas, he’s been the guy who strikes out, the guy who pops up, the guy who makes that final out.
Reyes’s numbers are very revealing. He’s batting a paltry .248. And, even with 30 runs scored, that’s just not enough from a player such as Reyes has been. It surprised me to discover that Reyes’s career average OPS is .764, pretty impressive for a shortstop, but his current OPS is a ridiculously poor .638. That’s 150 points off his average.
That’s the real story of the Mets season thus far. That’s not what you’ll read in the news stories though. You’ll hear about Perez refusing to get sent down and Francoeur fixing his swing, even though he’s always fixing his swing. You’ll see stories about Pelfrey, who has been a great revelation this year, or Takahashi, who has generally been good wherever they’ve put him in the rotation. You’ll see stories about the need for another starter, arguably the biggest Mets story of the year.
But it’s all baloney. The Mets are currently 12th in ERA in both leagues, just two spots down from the Yankees, who can boast of possessing Sabathia and Burnett and Pettitte and Hughes. And that nice ERA number has been achieved despite the woes of John Maine and Oliver Perez, both who have been predictably horrible.
The pitching staff deserves kudos for their resiliency, at the very least. A big reason for that is the fact that the Japanese duo of Takahashi and Igarashi have been great, although Igarashi obviously returned to active duty too soon after his injury. Recently R.A. Dickey, the knuckleballer from the minors, has been great. Niese, before he got hurt, had been a pleasant surprise.
The Mets now have a rotation of Santana, Pelfrey, Niese, Takahashi and Dickey. That’s not too shabby. On the relief side there are K-Rod and Feliciano, and Igarashi, who should return to form soon. Then take your pick of Nieve or Mejia or even Dessens. Valdez has been a disappointment, but, in the grand scheme , it’s been a small thing.
Another huge distraction has been Carlos Beltran’s continued absence from the lineup. But Angel Pagan has done a great job in centerfield. He’s also been pretty damned good at the plate, presently sporting a .784 OPS. I consider him a mini-5-tool-guy. The guy does everything pretty darned well.
So I don’t pay too much attention to the stories. The real problem has been the core, or what’s left of it, after the loss of Beltran and Delgado. I’ll ignore the melodrama surrounding the return of Niese and who’ll get dropped from the roster as a result. It just isn’t that significant. Gee, maybe they’ll drop Matthews, who’s deserved a much worse fate than he has thus far experienced.
Reyes has to keep his recent hot streak going. Bay has to start hitting the ball with authority. Wright has to hit the ball more often.
It’s the core, stupid!
I won’t be picking on anybody today, not even Ollie Perez. I’ll try to stay away from Gary Matthews too. The fact is that they’re just a .500 team, one among many it seems in a league that’s showing a lot of parity this year. Once you accept that simple truism, the team is a really interesting one to watch, even when Keith (Hernandez, the 3rd guy in the booth) takes still another day off.
I mean….what other team has every player on it being almost psychotically streaky . Name me one everyday player who shows any consistency. Bay? Certainly not. Reyes? Oh please. Wright? I don’t think so. When Barajas, the catcher, leads the team in rbi’s, that’s pathetic, I’m sorry, even if the total number is pretty high.
Yeah, I guess Castillo and Ike Davis have been consistent, but even as good as they’ve been, their total potential impact just isn’t that great (although Ike has won a few games for them, come to think of it).
Right now, for example, Reyes is hot. Francoeur is hot too but those two are five spots apart in the batting order. Even Reyes doesn’t steal home that often. He may have stolen 2nd and 3rd and induced a balk to get home once or twice, but it’s a 162-game season. They just, as a team, don’t score that many runs(17th), especially when Santana’s on the mound.
A typical batting sequence might have Reyes getting on, Castillo moving him over, Bay striking out and Wright popping up. They just don’t put things together that often. And they don’t get big hits. But when the pitching is good, as very often it has been, the whole team plays a lot better, not at the plate certainly but in every other aspect.
Their core players are just not getting it done, or, I should say, haven’t got it done so far this year.
Bay, for example, is hitting a respectable .295 right now and leads the team in runs scored but his OPS is just .829 while his average career OPS is .892. He’s the type of hitter that hits a lot of long balls that get caught. When they’re not caught, it’ll be a double. He just hasn’t been able to get that ball over the wall this year. I hate to say he’s got “warning track power” but that’s been his story this year.
David Wright is hitting .267. He’s got a marginally better OPS than Bay, and 9 home runs, which is probably better than many fans expected, but he just hasn’t produced as often as you’d expect. If he were better in big spots, the low batting average wouldn’t make as much of a difference, but alas, he’s been the guy who strikes out, the guy who pops up, the guy who makes that final out.
Reyes’s numbers are very revealing. He’s batting a paltry .248. And, even with 30 runs scored, that’s just not enough from a player such as Reyes has been. It surprised me to discover that Reyes’s career average OPS is .764, pretty impressive for a shortstop, but his current OPS is a ridiculously poor .638. That’s 150 points off his average.
That’s the real story of the Mets season thus far. That’s not what you’ll read in the news stories though. You’ll hear about Perez refusing to get sent down and Francoeur fixing his swing, even though he’s always fixing his swing. You’ll see stories about Pelfrey, who has been a great revelation this year, or Takahashi, who has generally been good wherever they’ve put him in the rotation. You’ll see stories about the need for another starter, arguably the biggest Mets story of the year.
But it’s all baloney. The Mets are currently 12th in ERA in both leagues, just two spots down from the Yankees, who can boast of possessing Sabathia and Burnett and Pettitte and Hughes. And that nice ERA number has been achieved despite the woes of John Maine and Oliver Perez, both who have been predictably horrible.
The pitching staff deserves kudos for their resiliency, at the very least. A big reason for that is the fact that the Japanese duo of Takahashi and Igarashi have been great, although Igarashi obviously returned to active duty too soon after his injury. Recently R.A. Dickey, the knuckleballer from the minors, has been great. Niese, before he got hurt, had been a pleasant surprise.
The Mets now have a rotation of Santana, Pelfrey, Niese, Takahashi and Dickey. That’s not too shabby. On the relief side there are K-Rod and Feliciano, and Igarashi, who should return to form soon. Then take your pick of Nieve or Mejia or even Dessens. Valdez has been a disappointment, but, in the grand scheme , it’s been a small thing.
Another huge distraction has been Carlos Beltran’s continued absence from the lineup. But Angel Pagan has done a great job in centerfield. He’s also been pretty damned good at the plate, presently sporting a .784 OPS. I consider him a mini-5-tool-guy. The guy does everything pretty darned well.
So I don’t pay too much attention to the stories. The real problem has been the core, or what’s left of it, after the loss of Beltran and Delgado. I’ll ignore the melodrama surrounding the return of Niese and who’ll get dropped from the roster as a result. It just isn’t that significant. Gee, maybe they’ll drop Matthews, who’s deserved a much worse fate than he has thus far experienced.
Reyes has to keep his recent hot streak going. Bay has to start hitting the ball with authority. Wright has to hit the ball more often.
It’s the core, stupid!
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