Appreciation At The Rapture

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The 2011 season has given us many fond memories already and it’s not even Memorial Day. Since roughly 4% of certifiably batshit humans prepared for the end of the world last weekend, the rest of us should take a moment to realistically appreciate what we have: a Mets season and team that we can root for.

Fight

Let’s face it; this team began spring training with distractions and massive issues on and off the field. The truth about the Madoff/Wilpon connection had just come out…questions swirled over the legitimacy of the team’s chances after an awful year and no additions made in the off-season…Reyes and Beltran were entering contract years…Johan was rendered all but out for the season. This was a mediocre team that had every reason to flush themselves out of contention by May. But despite it all, the Mets sit at .500 after 44 games  - even with David Wright, Ike Davis, Angel Pagan, Jason Bay and Chris Young missing significant time with injuries.

The New York/Buffalo Mets

As much as we all miss Oliver Perez, Luis Castillo and Jose Valentin, it’s nice to see some players on the field that look like they actually want to be on the field. The fact that they are coming in the form of Mets’ farmhands and are actually contributing at the major league level just makes it even sweeter.

The homegrown arms have been vital this season. Pedro Beato has been lights-out. Dillon Gee and Jonathon Niese have been solid all season, Bobby Parnell was throwing bb’s before he got hurt and even Mike “LaLoosh” Pelfrey is showing signs that he might be coming around.

Guys like Justin Turner, Ruben Tejada, Josh Thole, Daniel Murphy, Nick Evans and Fernando Martinez have all contributed and have done admirable jobs with their roles they were forced into.

Izzy Dead?

It’s tough to expect Jason Isringhausen to continue performing at this high level given his age and injury history, but even if it ends tomorrow, we can say he had his moment of the season in game 1 against the Yankees in the Bronx. Clinging to a 2-1 lead in the bottom of the 8^th inning, Izzy retired Mark Teixeira, Alex Rodriguez and Robinson Cano in order.

Izzy now has pitched 15 innings during his second stint with the Mets with an ERA of 1.80, a 0.87 WHIP and 13 strikeouts through the first 44 games… and dammit, that’s not bad.

Omar Who?

The fans were sick from watching overpaid and underperforming players. This current team competes and plays every game hard – two compliments that were never even considered for the sleepwalking Minaya teams of the last 4 years.  Kudos to GM Sandy Alderson for cleaning house and removing the Omar-stank quickly and quietly.

Big Years

Jose Reyes, Carlos Beltran, Ike Davis and Francisco Rodriguez have put together fantastic starts to their seasons and have played huge roles in getting the Mets to .500.

Selig Claiming the Dodgers

You know what this means. No one has paid more attention to Selig’s jacking of Frank McCourt’s Dodgers than Fred Wilpon. The sooner MLB forces Wilpon to sell the team, the sooner a new owner can be found to hopefully provide the common sense, intelligence and integrity that is nowhere to be found under the Wilpons re.

Keith Hernandez

What? We’re talking bright spots of the Mets’ season and he’s one of them. Known for his brutal honesty and ability to fit his size 13D-wide foot in his mouth, Mex has done his ditzy-celebrity-but-on-point-baseball-mind persona perfectly this year. He’s even scaled back on his sometimes lengthy and self-indulgent monologues and recollections about his own playing days, which can be summed up in seven words: Rusty, Lou Brock, Michelob, and Rib-Eye Steaks.

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Sure, it’s only been 44 games - but the season has been strangely respectable and unusually promising… maybe it really is the end of the world.

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No Habla Espanol

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There’s something happening here… what it is ain’t exactly clear. There’s never been any official statement from the organization, but the Mets- under the new management of Terry Collins and Sandy Alderson- have purged the team of Latinos almost completely. And that’s a fantastic thing.

Let’s get something straight here- I have nothing against Latinos. I love the people, I envy them their warm climate and ability to enjoy baseball year-round, and two of my three favorite Mets- Johan Santana and Angel “Butter” Pagan- are Latin. And in case you’re wondering, the other is a Jew.

It’s not Latino players that are the problem- it’s the way in which they were brought here. Former General Manager and racist huckster Omar Minaya was so insecure he decided to exploit his Latino heritage by signing Latin free agents in order to create an ethnically homogenized, culturally-polarized baseball club, a group of players divided in the clubhouse and disjointed on the ball field. And the result was that we stopped playing as a team.

It’s a well-publicized fact that when Omar first approached Carlos Delgado he used as his selling point not the heritage and tradition of the Mets organization, but the prospect of Carlos “joining his Latin brothers in playing on my team.” How do we know this? Delgado- disgusted- broke the story to the media. If a white man- assembling an all-white team- had ever been exposed for using race as a bargaining tactic he would be fired immediately and probably shot moments later. This was one of many mysterious free passes that Omar received from the media… hey, they couldn’t blow the whistle on league-wide steroid use, so you really can’t expect them to stand up to Omar Minaya and foil “Operation: Salsa.”

Delgado would eventually sign with the Mets, after re-thinking Omar’s offer, and why wouldn’t he? He was getting a ton of money to come to Queens and die. That’s what Castillo did. That’s what Beltran was doing before he came alive in ’11. This wasn’t a team- it was a Latin sports hero retirement home, a museum… a zoo. At one point in 2009 we had three different men named Fernando on the active roster. The clubhouse was a nightmare- a virtual wall was built between the Spanish-speaking players and the English-speaking players. Certainly Latinos were accused of “forgetting English” for post-game press conferences- especially losses- and of simply disappearing from the media entirely when they didn’t feel like speaking. Omar not only created this communication breakdown- he fostered it by refusing to draw the line and demand accountability or results from ANY of his players. In fact, Omar took the unprecedented tact of playing his team against ownership, against fans, and against itself. Raise your hand if you think this is going to end badly.

Sandy Alderson and Terry Collins are consciously bringing balance back into the Mets clubhouse- one carefully-chosen roster move at a time. It’s not healthy for a club to be too Latin. And it’s also not healthy for a club to be too white, or too black, or too Italian, or too Irish. Diversity is the name of the game, just like in everyday life. Omar is a memory, and his racist ways are gone at last. ¡Es maravilloso!

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Wright Vs. Right

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David Wright apparently sustained a stress fracture to his lower back on April 19^th in a game against Houston.

This of course raises two questions. 1) Houston still has a major league franchise? And 2) Why did this information take 25 days to ascertain?

“They had wanted me to get an MRI for some time now, and I kind of – I won’t say put it off – but I felt like it was getting better,” Wright inexplicably said over the weekend.

Lower back stress fractures typically get worse with activity and go away with rest. It’s highly unlikely that Wright was in fact feeling better as he continued to play everyday and his declining numbers certainly justify the suspicion: he had just 11 hits in 62 at-bats (.177) since April 25.

Wright didn’t tell the team that he was dealing with this pain and therefore the Mets’ medical staff –one of the league’s worst when it actually knows of an injury – could not do anything to treat it.

Was Wright supposed to know the proper treatment for a fracture? Did he even know he had a fracture? Highly doubtful. And why would he know if he never got it checked out?

Never mind Wright’s stupidity for refusing a simple MRI (a procedure that costs a modern day athlete a mere hour of their day), more importantly if the team was pushing for him to have an MRI ‘for some time now’ then they knew something was potentially wrong. So why aren’t the Mets ordering Dinky - the soon-to-be lone face of the franchise left on the team – to have an MRI? Is Mr. Met really going to say no? If he did say no, it would be the first time he said no to anything they requested.

It’s tough to know Wright’s motives for keeping quiet. Could he possibly be so insecure that he thinks his job was in jeopardy if he were to miss a few games or land on the DL? The face of the franchise needs to know that he can be honest about injuries without suffering the fate of Wally Pipp.

More likely of an explanation is the idea that David Wright is another in a long line of modern day athletes who confuses toughness with leadership. The type of star that thinks ‘playing every day’ and ‘gritting it out’ alone will make them enough of a leader. Being in the lineup everyday is certainly a positive and a good example for teammates - but it is only a small piece of the ‘leader’ puzzle. One of the largest pieces of that puzzle, especially in New York, is – to put it bluntly - having a set of stones.

Some might call the types of players who lack these stones ‘a different type of leader’ or a ‘lead-by-example’ type leader, but let’s call a spade a spade: these players make the choice not to step up into this role. Met fans saw it for years from Mike Piazza. He was tough as nails, played his hardest and put up phenomenal numbers. But when push came to shove, he was an absentee presence in the clubhouse.

Those that have followed Wright’s career know how little the third-baseman likes to say anything controversial. Serving under his fourth manager in Queens, nary a word has been said by David about any of the four gentlemen he has played for – either complimentary or derogatorily. He doesn’t write provocative tweets. He doesn’t sit out games when his spot in the batting order changes. He doesn’t critique management (and honestly, what player in the majors has had more right/opportunity to do so other than Wright, the biggest star with the most power on the bumbling Mets of the Wilponzi era?) In short, he doesn’t do anything that could even potentially be perceived as negative.

Sure, playing every day and not stirring the pot shows good character and can be a breath of fresh air. But what athletes like Wright often do is mistake character and attendance for leadership while failing to use their crystal clean charisma for good. No one is suggesting you’re not a good guy Davey, but it’s your eighth year in the league and you haven’t even accidentally flexed your locker room muscle for the good of the franchise. Every Met fan out there would accept you not playing all 162 games and resting once in a while in exchange for 145 games played and you possessing the gumption to occasionally grab some teammates by the throat and demand they play the right way.

And while it’s unfair to blame Wright for any of the epic disasters that marred the Omar Years, maybe if he spoke up a little more and wielded some of the clout that he has spent countless hours earning through public appearances and overall ‘good-guy-ness’ - the old regime would have been ushered out of town a little sooner and as a result, placed the Mets a few seasons ahead in the rebuilding process they find themselves immersed in today.

But Wright seems to be okay with his place on the Superstar Path of Least Resistance. The type of cookie-cutter star ballplayer model that was perfected by Alex Rodriguez, controlling every element of their image, never giving their naysayers a free reason to question their drive or knock them. The resulting figure makes for a player who certainly does the right thing and respects the game, but one who fans have a very hard time fully embracing or connecting with, leaving them with positive but hollow feeling towards their superstar.

Perhaps this is undeserved pressure and responsibility to place on Wright and other athletes. Maybe fans should just be thankful they’re not shooting themselves in the thigh in a nightclub with an unregistered gun or sexting dick-pics to unsuspecting cheerleaders. To be fair, David Wright is far from the biggest problem in sports today.

But as we saw with A-Rod, who got busted for steroids, eventually had his wife leave him after cheating on her with Madonna and is now banging every washed up blonde in Hollywood, these players are still human. Hopefully for Wright’s sake, not reporting his back injury earlier is the worst thing he does in his career. Met fans can only hope that, like A-Rod, Dinky can help in some way to deliver a championship. 

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Bump In The Night

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It was bound to happen… It had been over three days since the last Mets humiliation, so you knew we were due. In Tuesday night’s game in Colorado a simple pop-up baffled the collective brains of the Mets infield, resulting in David “Dinky” Wright colliding with Ike Davis.

After rolling his ankle on the play Ike was placed on the fifteen-day Disabled List.

If you check out the replay you’ll notice human paperweight Mike Pelfrey helpfully standing on the mound and making no effort to either catch the ball hit directly over his head or to call off one of the fielders on their collision course. Mike is special.

Catcher Ronny “Placebo” Paulino does even less, but gets excused because he stayed off-camera.

Who was at the plate, you ask? Who hit the fated pop-up that took our first baseman and best hitter out of commission? None other than Met-Killer Troy Tulowitzki, whose season got off to an explosive start as he creamed the Mets at home in April. His numbers against us for the 2o11 season so far? .522 average, .593 on-base percentage with 5 home runs. And it’s May 10^th.

Not to be outdone by the reckless stupidity at the corners, team nincompoop Daniel Murphy makes a glaring error on the very next play by forgetting to look at the ball off the bat and falling on his ass while Todd Helton’s catchable line drive goes screaming past him for a base hit. If you don’t know why Daniel Murphy is such a fuckup please check out this link.

Am I bitter? You bet. Am I angry? Of course. I’m a Met fan watching Met baseball, and I deserve the pain. Why couldn’t it have been vacant pretty-boy Wright who landed on the DL? What was Ike’s sin- playing like an old-school, no-nonsense veteran in only his second season? Refusing to wear Dinky’s nighttime eye-black?? Consistently striking the ball with his bat? The beard? Now we’re blaming David’s offensive impotence and .234 average on nagging “back discomfort” while Ike’s .302 average and 7 home runs sit in the clubhouse icing down an ankle.

The final score indicated that the Mets won, but if you’ve been watching the games this year you know that the score rarely tells the full story of the game, and this blustery night at Coors Field was no exception.

Even when we win we lose.

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Fred Man Walking

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Maybe we should have known that something shady was going on with the Mets finances a long time ago.

Maybe it shouldn’t have taken us until 2oo8, and the arrest of Bernie Madoff, and the revelation that Mets owner Fred Wilpon was his biggest investor and bestest buddy for us to see that Fred & Co. were on the winning end of the world’s greatest financial fraud.

We probably should have seen some red flags back in the early 90’s, when the Mets began deferring the payments of contract buy-outs until 2011. Instead of it paying 6 million dollars to part ways with players for good, the Mets countered by paying 20+ million dollars- twenty years later.

First of all, who does that? Has any other MLB team structured a buy-out like that before? The answer is no. And if you think Fred and Jeff and Saul Katz didn’t know that Bernie Madoff was dirtier than a Texaco Men’s Room you’re fooling yourself, my friend.

Only time will tell, but as of this writing it doesn’t look good for the Wilpons. Their Sterling-Mets investment firm was heavily invested with Madoff. Bernie had roughly 1,500 accounts and 461 of them- nearly one-third- were Sterling-Mets: all Wilpon money. The billion dollar lawsuit that Fred is currently facing asserts that he “knew or should have known” that Bernie was breaking all kinds of laws and running a fraudulent investment scheme. You don’t invest hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars without knowing what you’re doing.

Even if you wanted to give Fred the benefit of the doubt you’re faced with the reality that his other investment firm Sterling-Stamos was forced to pay back 13 million dollars as a result of being found guilty of a previous Ponzi scheme back in 2oo2. Fred was specifically targeted because his firm withdrew its investment money just before the scheme collapsed, and his settlement and pay-out is all but a confession that he knew what was going on, and that he had inside information about the scam. There’s more evidence damning him, and we’ll talk about it later, but for now every good Mets fan should start facing the reality that the owners of our team may be the most sinister and greedy in the history of the sport.

So was Freddy Wilpon a financial visionary with his bizarre ballooning buy-outs? Was he blazing a trail with deferred salaries at more than 300% their original value?

No. He just knew that he’d be making an exorbitant amount of money in a few years with the help of his magical broker Bernie. It looks bad, and it’s only going to get worse. When the lawsuit on behalf of the Madoff trustees comes to trial it will reveal the depth of the Wilpons’ guilt: losing the case means Fred was guilty, settling out of court means Fred was guilty, only winning the case would prove he was innocent of fraud and deception.

And if the Mets under Wilpon have taught us anything, it's that winning is rarely in the cards.

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One Run And Done

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After Tuesday night’s 7-6 loss in extra innings, the Mets stand at 2-7 in one-run games. Glass half-full? That’s 7 of their 17 losses that could have very easily gone either way. Glass half-empty? Bad teams find ways to lose close games.

Whatever the water level of the Mets’ proverbial glass, this record speaks mostly to their lack of lefty depth in their bullpen and their sub-.200 batting average as a team after the seventh inning.

Now the hitting will either turn around or it won’t; there’s no drill or technique that can improve clutch hitting. The law of averages suggests that the Met bats won’t be this impotent in late innings all year long.

The real culprit is the bullpen. The Mets have one left-handed reliever. And his name is Tim Byrdak. He’s got an ERA of 5.62 and is certainly not a lefty specialist. In Tuesday night’s game, it was the right-handed Taylor Buchholz who began the tenth inning against the lefty Aubrey Huff who subsequently homered. But more depth in the pen – specifically a southpaw or two - will lead to more flexibility for the team. In the meantime Terry Collins is going to have to manage better late in games or he's gonna need a glass full of something stronger than water. 

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