Baseball!

A 63.00 ERA sounds rusty to me.

Two diet cokes in five hours.

Put him in the Hall of Fame and then stop talking about him.

Not many hits, but Teixeira really enjoying being out there.

Jason Giambi forgives Barry Bonds, good to know.

Joey Votto says it out loud:

"It would have been challenging playing during that era, and certainly without using drugs it would have been challenging. Whereas now, if you use drugs you're kind of the black sheep, it seems like. Who knows how many guys are using something?"

Bill Madden is enabling Terry Collins.

Approximately one year ago, Collins was dishing some spiel about Johan Santana pitching 200 innings and every starting pitcher on the Mets pitching 200 innings.

With the understanding that nothing is impossible, Collins once again crosses the fine line between optimism and delusion. It's difficult to tell if Madden is speaking for himself or relaying Collins's over-the-top prognoses, but this article is basically predicting everyone on the Mets to be an MVP candidate:

"But while Collins’ attempts to keep his head while all of those above him in the Mets command are seemingly losing theirs by suggesting anything less than 90 wins from this Mets team this season will be viewed as a major disappointment, the manager at least has an idea of what he’s going to need to get from each of his players to achieve that goal. Injuries are not part of the equation, and while Collins’ expectations may have seemed, on the surface, a bit of a stretch in some cases, it’s not as if these players haven’t demonstrated an ability to attain them."


A bit of a stretch ...


"The time is now for Travis d’Arnaud, who must assert himself as the No. 1 receiver by staying healthy and catching a minimum of 125-130 games and hitting at least 15 homers, which he did twice in the minors."


In the minors?

I hit more than 15 HRs in a season lots of times. In fact, while playing Atari RealSports Baseball, I have hit 15 HRs in one game. Does that qualify as a demonstrated ability to attain this goal?

1) 15 HRs is not a lot.

2) HRs are not the only stat in baseball. He can be an effective offensive player if he has a lot of singles, doubles, and walks.

3) He hit one HR last season in 99 at-bats. Fifteen doesn't just sound optimistic, it sounds completely irrelevant. If his batting average is floundering below .240 at the all star break, Collins and Madden are just going to talk about how well he handles the pitching staff.


"No matter whom it winds up being — Duda or Davis — Collins agreed he needs to get a minimum of 20 homers and 80 RBI out of this power position."

20/80 combined from your first basemen? It's an improvement from last year. Still pretty bad.


"No matter where Chris Young plays in the outfield, Collins is looking for him to match or surpass his career bests of 32 homers and 91 RBI. No one expects Curtis Granderson to approach his 40-plus homer production of 2011-12 now that he’s playing at Citi Field, but anything less than 25 bombs and 90-plus RBI, especially if he also has 170-plus strikeouts, will be a huge negative for the Mets. In the case of Eric Young Jr., if he wants to keep his place in the outfield, he needs get on base more — think a .340-.350 on base percentage, as opposed to his career .325 number by using his speed to get more bunt hits. If he does that, Collins sees him scoring 125 runs and stealing 50-60 bases out of the leadoff spot. That, especially, is a major ingredient for a 90-win season."

Wow.

If Eric Young Jr. steals 60 bases and scores 125 runs, I'll give him the NL MVP and the Mets could win 100 games. Since we're being delusional, why not go all the way?

He is a 28-year-old with 173 career runs, but he's going to score 125 this year.

The Mets got Mike Trout on the cheap. Who knew?


"But considering the Mets’ uncertain bullpen, it is almost imperative for Collins to get 175-plus innings out of four of his starters. When it came to closer Bobby Parnell and his offseason neck surgery, Collins held up his crossed fingers and said: 'I’m going to assume Bobby will be fine, because I have to, and assuming that he is, I’m looking at 40-50 saves there, with 65-70 appearances from my set-up guys.' "

Fifty saves for Bobby Parnell?

In one season?

In the 2014 season, Bobby Parnell is going to save 50 games?

Bobby Parnell, out of nowhere, is going to lead the majors in saves and shatter the Mets' single-season record for saves?

The problem is, with Eric Young Jr. scoring 125 runs and everybody driving in 90+, you'll win all your games by too many runs. Parnell won't get enough save opportunities.


You know what? I'll go the other way. I'll predict less than 25 saves and losing the closer job due to injury or poor performance. How's that for an optimistic prediction?

Huh?

I think Joel Sherman is exploring dadaism:

"The Mets told Jhonny Peralta they had a Ruben Tejada problem, but only offered him two years to solve it or one fewer than the superior team in New York, the Yankees, were proposing and two fewer than arguably the best-run team in the whole sport, the Cardinals."

Who said what to whom about who?

To Bill Madden, everyone on the Mets is good.

Is that decimal point in the right place?

I thought he was gonna be good.

Justice

Productive player, lazy player.

"You should want the guy on the field helping his team win instead of making an unnecessary show out of sprinting for the sake of public perception. And Cano, through his supposedly unacceptable explanations, seems to realize that. It’s not lazy, it’s smart."

Of course I don't want a player to get hurt. I fail to see how running 90 feet is a dangerous act. If it is, then every motion on the baseball field is dangerous and the only way to avoid injury is to avoid playing altogether.

As for the statistical GP analysis of Cano vs. Jeter, plenty of players (Pete Rose comes to mind) hustled and also played long careers.


But let's say, for argument's sake, that Cano has avoided injury by jogging to first base. Let's pretend that Cano's lack of hustle is the intelligent result of his own cost-benefit analysis. He wants to stay healthy, and that's why he jogs on infield grounders. He's not lazy, he's "smart." (I almost choked on those words, simply because of the mere implication that Cano thoughtfully analyzed this in the first place.)

How do you explain jogging on doubles ... getting thrown out at second base on line drives off the wall?

How do you explain his unwillingness to catch throws from the catcher on attempted steals?

Or his unwillingness to dive after ground balls?

How do you explain his lack of stolen bases? Cano's 162-game average is 4 stolen bases with 3 caught stealing. Thurman Munson had more stolen bases per year. Thurman Munson had three nicknames according to baseball-reference.com: Tugboat, Squatty Body, and the Walrus.

How do you explain getting caught twice in one season on the Jeff Nelson fake-to-third, throw-to-first pickoff move? Twice! In one season! That has to be a record. Was that a smart play because the possibility of running 270 more feet was too much for his hamstrings to take?

Is he a $24 million-per-year DH who will never get an infield hit or take an extra base?

Because if running the bases and playing the field is too dangerous for a professional baseball player, I'm not too sure what's left. Walking (which he doesn't do too often) and hitting homeruns.


Look, on balance, Cano's positives far outweigh his negatives.

But please don't call me crazy for pointing out the obvious all these years; please don't turn laziness into an asset; and please, please, please, most of all, PLEASE don't insult my intelligence by proclaiming Cano's lack of hustle is a well-thought-out strategy.

I don't doubt that Cano spends a lot of time in the batting cage. Like I said before, that activity can only be described as "work" to a professional baseball community who has forgotten what "work" is.

Calamity!

"The Yankees are set up for the same calamity this year that befell them a season ago. They have areas of real fragility and little in the way of strong second-tier options."

If the Yankees' 87-win, third-place finish is a calamity, I wonder what noun Joel Sherman uses to describe Toronto's 2013 season .... or Houston's 2013 season.


"In 2013, as they used a franchise-record 56 players, that meant fire-drill acquisitions of underwhelming players such as Ben Francisco, Lyle Overbay and Vernon Wells, and too many at-bats ultimately for lightweights such as David Adams, Reid Brignac and Luis Cruz."

Overbay was 2nd on the team in RBIs and one of the best investments in the league. The Yankees got 14 HRs and 59 RBIs for $1.25 million. Not that Overbay was overwhelming, he was just wasn't that underwhelming.


"Well, 'The Day After Tomorrow 2' is in pre-production. The Yankees began the offseason with voluminous holes and budgetary constraints on how much could be laid out for 2014. They went big for Carlos Beltran, Jacoby Ellsbury, Brian McCann and Masahiro Tanaka. The result is the Yankees have a terrific top 15 players on their roster."

Awesome.

Let's hope they stay healthy and the Yankees win the World Series.

In the meantime, I'll rent "The Day After Tomorrow" so I can keep up with your pointless pop culture references.

After he leaves, critics are public with their criticisms.

Somebody has never heard of Eduardo Nunez and his 10 career homeruns.

You answered your own question.

He fought because he had nothing to lose, other than lawyer's fees. His career is over either way, right?:

"There’s no way he’ll ever play for the Yankees again. The team’s hierarchy would just as soon buy out the remainder of Rodriguez’s contract than allow him back in the clubhouse. Rodriguez’s teammates are long past the fatigue factor with his controversies. Don’t think for a minute they wanted him to show up in Tampa this month."


I think they'll buy him out.


"So where does A-Rod land in 2015? Finishing out his days with another team is a long shot at best. No owner would risk Selig’s wrath by signing the most hated man in the game’s modern history. Selig used his own scorched-earth policy to finish off Rodriguez, making it clear what happens to his enemies."


Well, Selig won't be commissioner anymore, but it's a lovely thought. The ex-commissioner doling out justice, deciding who gets to play major league baseball. Selig should return all his career earnings and live out the rest of his days on a park bench.

As for a MLB team's willingness to sign ARod, they probably question ARod's ability to produce.


"That’s Selig’s enduring legacy, proving he’d go to any lengths to wipe out PEDs. Rodriguez’s camp never got over the shock of discovering that Selig was even tougher and more ruthless than the slugger himself. And that sent a chilling message, not only to A-Rod, but anyone else considering using performance enhancers."

This is a misinterpretation of reality.


"But that’s not to say Selig’s victory was complete. It is not. The truth is, Rodriguez would’ve never been caught had it not been for a disgruntled employee at Biogenesis. Had Anthony Bosch not been hard up for cash and paid his workers in a timely fashion, incriminating documents — the ones that cemented A-Rod’s guilt as a drug user — never would have ended up at the Miami New Times.

Rodriguez claimed — rightfully — that he never failed a drug test between 2009 and 2012, when he was involved with Bosch. It’s a fact that sends its own warning to the commissioner’s office. The sport administered thousands of random drug tests in 2013 and was unable to unearth a single positive result."

The owners and commissioner sure cashed in.

While Selig uses a $100 bill to light a retirement cigar, he has a quick retort to Klapsch's claim: "You don't think MLB's drug use has unearthed any positive results? Have you seen my bank account lately?"

Truth Prevails

Which is terrific, because the obfuscation of the Truth is always bad:

"This is what you were told, for months, about the guy who used to play third base for the Yankees:

You were told that it was a witch hunt. You were told, by a marching-and-chowder society in the media whose membership somehow kept declining as the facts of the case came out, that commissioner Bud Selig needed to testify in an arbitration case, or the world would stop spinning on its axis."

It still was a witch hunt and Bud Selig is still a fraudulent turd.

I don't know what marching-and-chowder society even means.

I don't feel ignorant, either, because the author of this stupid phrase has a decades-long history of saying stupid things.


"You were told that anybody who kept pointing out that the guy never told his version of things under oath had some kind of agenda. So it was Major League Baseball who was out to get Alex Rodriguez, or the New York Daily News, or the New York Yankees, or their team doctors, or Columbia-Presbyterian."

Personal animus towards one man, as demonstrated by several of the parties listed above, led to a 211-game suspension instead of the 50-game or 100-game that all the other cheaters were given.

The Daily News had no influence; the doctors were most likely competent and unfairly accused; the Yankees and MLB? No doubt they were out go get ARod.


"Rodriguez wanted you to believe that after all those players in the Biogenesis case got suspended in one day last summer, 13 players, the most sweeping set of sanctions in nearly 100 years in baseball, that Selig needed to make an example out of Rodriguez, professional victim."

This is accurate. ARod overplayed his lying hand. I don't think many people believed ARod after the others accepted their penalties.

The thing is, when you start with the idea that "truth prevails," and then you fail to suspend David Ortiz or Chris Davis ... then I am justified in telling you to get off your high horse. You look quite ridiculous up there. You're a wee man and your feet can't even reach the spurs.


"And somehow he kept getting people to go along with him, to act as if Al Rodriguez was the most falsely accused man since Al Dreyfus."

Nobody knows who Al Dreyfus is. I had to look it up on Wikipedia. Just because they both have first names that begin with "Al" hardly makes this an apt metaphor.

Must I explain the purpose of metaphors?

The purpose of metaphors is to simplify a complex subject. If your readers are having difficulty understanding Alex Rodriguez's victim strategy, perhaps you can point them towards a separate well-known victim and your readership would quickly understand.

You referenced a French story from 1894.

Again, perhaps I'm ignorant of something that everyone else knows about, but I doubt it.


"You were supposed to believe that the real issue was the methods MLB had used to enforce its drug policy, not the methods Rodriguez had used to get baseball drugs from Anthony Bosch and use them."

Both things are issues.


"Baseball’s investigators were the bad guys, not the player who seemed to have redeemed himself after his drug admissions of the spring of 2009, who helped the Yankees — mightily — win a World Series and then went looking to Bosch for a different kind of help, almost as if he went straight to Biogenesis from the Canyon of Heroes."

Both are bad guys.

Either/or is a child's way of perceiving the world.


"You were supposed to believe that A-Rod only went to Bosch for diet and nutritional advice. Or that Bosch couldn’t be trusted because he was some lousy grafter drug dealer, and never ask — if that was true — what Rodriguez was doing with him in the first place."

Yeah, that Francesa interview was nuts. I think it should win a Pulitzer Prize ... Francesa got ARod to lie to his face on record. Most compelling radio sports interview I've heard since Lupica had a parade of nameless ESPN hacks on his afternoon show ... the radio show which constantly interviews ESPN personalities in its unending pure search for the Truth ... the radio show which plays Coldplay for its theme music, as if listening to Lupica's screechy voice wasn't torturous enough.


"At long last, all those who kept saying he had been overcharged and overprosecuted saw why the arbitrator, Fredric Horowitz, ruled the way he did. No longer was it about irrelevancies, or the circus the whole thing became. It was about that."

Well, technically speaking, Horowitz ruled that ARod was overprosecuted ... he got his sentence reduced, after all.


"The circus leaves town now six months after it really began last August. Alex Rodriguez finally faces facts, even if he never told his version of them under oath. He could never make the evidence go away. He goes."

It will be interesting to see which Yankee player becomes Lupica's new target. Maybe throw us a changeup and go after the Mets who take steroids.

Because, you know ... your readers celarly value the Truth above all else.


"All winter long, we heard that Hal Steinbrenner had to channel his dad, absolutely do that, 100%, and spend as much money as the media kept telling him to spend on the 2014 Yankees."

It's still winter, you yutz.


"But you know how Hal could really channel the old man?

By making somebody or anybody accountable one of these days for the state of the Yankee farm system."

Well, sure. The Yankee farm system is definitely in trouble, but we pretty much know the reasons why and the difficulties of getting good draft picks when you win the division 20 years in a row.


Funny how Lupica sort of defends George Steinbrenner after decades of ripping George Steinbrenner.

So now that George is dead, just replace the name "George" with the name "Hal" and use the same template.

I like criticizing the Yankees' front office, and the readers seem to like it, so I'll just do that some more.

Nice work, hack.

Joe Tacopina v. Daily News

I don't know what to expect from this lawsuit, but I can guarantee that the Daily News sports reporters will treat Mr. Tacopina with fairness and journalistic impartiality.

You're so vain ...

You probably think this article is about you:

"Now Rodriguez supposedly 'disappears' from baseball for a year. But don't be surprised if he somehow finds a way to stay in the news. He always does. He'll probably resurface somewhere, throwing off more fake sunbeams about how restorative this 'timeout' will be, when the truth is seeing his career and legacy come to this has to be killing him deep down inside."

If you are going to write an article about him, please don't complain about his unending news coverage.