I don't agree at all.

Again, what else are you going to write about?

The Yankees will benefit from the delay and so will the Mets.

Guess why?

You get one guess.

That's right.

Because they currently have players on the DL and this gives those players time to get healthy!


Well, guess what?

It also gives Verlander, Ohtani, and Sale time to get healthy.


The Yankees' biggest strength is their depth.

While lamenting their injuries last season, you can't ignore the fact that they won 103 games.

I'd put the under/over at 100 games played.

"Officially, Major League Baseball has not yet abandoned the hope of playing a 162-game schedule. Unofficially, that possibility all but evaporated when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended no gatherings of 50 or more people for the next eight weeks. That recommendation carries through May 10 (and could be extended based on the trajectory of the coronavirus spread)."

There is also a possibility the whole season will be cancelled.

I'd say it's a small possibility.

I also thought it was a small possibility that the Prime Rate would fall to 0.00 and my 401(k) would take a 35% "correction."


Now, I've got nothing against Tom Verducci ... and what is he supposed to write about when no baseball is being played?

His genius observations are that a shorter season would have an impact on the outcomes of the season ... in all the obvious ways you thought of right away.

When you put it that way ...

"You can argue, as President Roosevelt did during World War II, that an anxious nation is heartened by the continued normalcy of its games. But these games don’t even count. No one is heartened by the continued normalcy of watching a series of Double A relievers try to master their curveball."

Bad news for Aaron Judge, the Yankees, Yankee fans, and the Yankee trainers.

Good news for ... Pete Alonso?


No, I'm not reading another Lupica article about Alex Rodriguez.

I'm sure Lupica is right to some extent.

I don't understand ARod's resurgent popularity and ARod has no credibility when it comes to cheating. On the rare occasion I listen to what he's talking about, I  find him somewhat inarticulate and unimaginative in his baseball analyses.

Why are we still talking about Alex Rodriguez?

ARod retired from baseball in 2016.


As news of Judge's stress fracture makes the rounds, here's an awesome take:

"If Aaron Judge can’t stay on the field this season, after missing a total of 110 games the past two, then Pete Alonso has a chance to be the baseball star of the summer."

Good on Pete Alonso!

I suppose Lupica means New York Only baseball star of the summer?

Which, of course, Alonso could be even if Judge is healthy?

So Pete Alonso is good is your point?

Can there be more than one New York baseball star of the summer in 2020?

Is Healthy Judge just going to steal the spotlight from Alonso, ruining Alonso's bid for baseball star of the summer?

Or can they both co-exist, along with several other stars of the summer?

I never understood this rule and I don't like it.

Throw in Tebow and it's a deal.

Maybe the problem is you.

Designated Hitter is not murky.

Aubrey Huff's free speech rights are intact.

If they weren't, you wouldn't be hearing from him.

I actually tend to agree with Huff on this one. It sounds like an over-reaction by the Giants to satirical tweets.

Outside of SF, was anyone in the country clamoring for the 10-year anniversary of the 2010 Giants WS title?

Invite him to the reunion. He’ll stand in the corner and eat some pigs-in-a-blanket while wearing a JCPenney suit. This doesn’t need to be on the national radar.

But in terms of Freedom of Speech, the Giants can exclude you from their reunion simply because they don’t like you. It sounds as if that’s what they did and they were forthright about this.

In terms of the First Amendment itself, the Giants are not a Government agent … Huff has been embarrassed perhaps (it’s questionable), but he hasn’t been fined or jailed or intimidated by the State. 

In fact, the State probably loves him.

You Know Who will probably give Huff a medal.

Big names piling on the Astros.

This seems to indicate a fracture amongst the players which is quite different than the reaction to the PED scandal.

I'm also quite surprised.

The odds are stacked.

"Entering his fourth season with the Mets, the 32-year-old left fielder is coming off a 2019 season at Triple-A Syracuse in which he struggled, slashing .164/.299/.338 with four home runs and 19 runs batted in over 77 games.

So the odds are more than stacked up against Tebow, the former college football star at the University of Florida (2006-09) and three-year NFL quarterback (2010-12) who signed a minor-league contract with the Mets in September 2016. But he's back once again for his latest Spring Training with the Mets in Port St. Lucie, Florida, where Tebow embraces another opportunity."

What about his arm?

It's not you, it's me. I read his stuff, so I'm to blame.

Lupica with a predictable about face:

"And yet with all that drama, because there always seems to be drama around the Mets, in the best of times, they are still getting ready to play the season.

And guess what?

They have a chance to be good. Maybe really good."

This is Lupica seven whole days ago.

Keeping Score

"As one scout this week told me, 'They'll win 90-95 games easy if Diaz figures it out again. And they should have a championship bullpen.'

Hard to argue."

My first observation is that 90 wins is a good season. Third place in your division.

95 wins is a playoff spot.

In the 2020 NL East, 95 wins seems like a stretch.



This kind of prediction also assumes that nothing else changes between 2019 and 2020. Like, we start with a baseline of 86 wins. Then Diaz is better, Betances helps, and that's 90 - 95 wins.

It may work out exactly like that.

No one knows.

But since we keep score on everything, I will predict it doesn't work out that way.


"Because if Diaz again becomes a reliable closer, the Mets should be monsters in the late innings, with newcomer Dellin Betances likely sliding in as the primary set-up man and Seth Lugo then available as an Andrew Miller-like wild card, helping to lock down games with multiple-inning outings wherever needed."

You just changed the parameters of the discussion.

It's not just Diaz who's going to single-handedly get you an extra 4-to-9 wins by being the most dominant relief pitcher in baseball history.

He's going to triple-handedly join an already-dominant bullpen.

Yeah, I'll buy that. If everyone on the Mets is good, then they will surely win a lot of games.



"'Potentially, and I say potentially with great caution,' said another scout, 'they've got a better pen than just about everyone -- even the Yankees. But obviously there's a lot of uncertainty, starting with Diaz.'"

An unnamed scout said it, so I guess it doesn't mean much.

How can a professional athlete not realize he is 25 pounds overweight?

Get ready for endless stories about Spring Training Optimism.

Last year at this time, Troy Tulowitzki was going to hit 25 HRs and provide clubhouse leadership.

So weird how the Astros cheating scandal has brought Pete Rose into the spotlight again ...

... not so much because of the President's tweet, just listening to angry people on sports radio.


Gambling is worse than steroids or sign stealing.

Gambling is an existential threat to baseball. Sign stealing is not, and, as the 1990s proved beyond any doubt, steroid use surely is not.


No surprise that Trump's tweet is inaccurate ... Trump has no idea which teams Rose bet on ... and, obviously, this is not the point.

The point is that MLB does not need a manager who owes a bookie $250k and is looking for a way out.

Also, whatever you think of Giamatti's original punishment, Rose is his own worst enemy. Rose lied over and over and has never shown contrition to this day.


I kind of think Rose belongs in the HOF, unceremoniously, just so the world would shut up about him and move on. I don't think the HOF is for angels.

On the other hand, MLB is allowed to make its own rules. MLB is allowed to decide that gambling is the worst crime of all.

Somehow, this jerkoff overrated crook and statutory rapist has become a sympathetic, gritty, throwback hero to old, white men.

Maybe it helped more than I initially thought.

The pronounced decrease in "chase rates" would seem to indicate that the batters were cheating often and it helped a lot.

Maybe he's angry at the Mets for ignoring Buck Showalter?

I don't really believe in the Battle for New York anyway, but I can't recall Lupica disregarding the Mets. Maybe he'll change his tune by Opening Day?

Ahead of his time.

Imagine this guy with a juiced ball and acceptance of high strikeout rates?

He'd be ... he'd be ... Greg Bird.

"It's worth remembering ..."

Mike Lupica wants to talk about ARod some more:

"You can start here with sign stealing in baseball, and this week’s historical fallout because of it: The ones who got sanctioned got what they deserved. They were no better than all the drug cheats in the sport who thought they’d never get caught until they did. Those were the players who knew what they were doing was wrong and against the rules and kept doing it, going for the needle or however they got their happy juice. Know why? Because cheating worked for them."

I mean, sure.

One notable difference, of course, is that zero players were punished this time around.

I personally think the punishments were surprisingly harsh, but, whatever. I took it as a pre-emptive strike by the Commissioner who will be unable to push back against a tide of technological advancements.

"All of them can come back from this, by the way. You know why? Because Alex Rodriguez came back from twice being outed as a drug cheat; for lying about it after getting caught in Biogenesis; for being more than willing to take down anybody including the Yankees team doctor to save himself, and acting like then-Commissioner Bud Selig was the one engaged in a witch hunt against him, and hoax. And that’s the short list with Rodriguez.

Some people have short memories about the headbangers Rodriguez hired to save him. But not everybody does, starting with baseball executives who went as far as having their homes electronically swept when Rodriguez was in the barrel with Selig and Manfred, his top lieutenant at the time.

You know where Rodriguez is now, five years after serving his one-year Biogeneis suspension: He 's the mayor of baseball, with regular jobs on both ESPN and Fox. If he can come back, so can Luhnow, so can Hinch, so can Cora, so can Carlos Beltran, who never got to manage a game with the Mets because what he did with the Astros finally caught up with him.

The late George Steinbrenner was suspended twice from baseball, by two different commissioners -- still a world record for an owner that might never be broken. He got it for illegal campaign contributions to the Richard Nixon campaign, and got it again for paying a gambler named Howie Spira $50,000 to dig up dirt on Dave Winfield, one of Steinbrenner’s star players. You know what happened after that. Steinbrenner came back: The Yankees won four World Series in five years and nearly made it five in six years, and when Steinbrenner died, he was regarded as the patron saint of the modern New York Yankees."

I'm not disputing any of this ... I mean, I didn't read the whole thing, but I get the gist.

The gist being Mike Lupica really hates the Yankees in general and ARod in particular.


"Yankee fans are always going to believe they got robbed in the 2017 American League Championship Series. Fair enough. But if it was cameras and garbage cans and sign stealing that beat them in that series, somebody please explain to me how the Astros knowing the Yankees’ signs kept the Yankees to three runs in the four games of that series played in Minute Maid Park."

Well, that is probably because the Cheating Astros had good pitchers?

Maybe the Cheating Astros were a better team than the Yankees?

Their title is not being vacated. I personally don't think the sign stealing makes that much of a difference. But the Astros also have lost the benefit of the doubt.


(One minor point that seems to be overlooked quite often is that the Yankees would have had to beat the Dodgers to actually win a Championship, but again, this is all Imaginary Baseball League.)

If you don't need to cheat to win ... well, you can finish the thought, you cheating cheaters.


Sir Lupica is a True and Just Guardian of the Game when the dishonest person is wearing Pinstripes.

When a dishonest person is on a team that beat the Yankees, this his focus  shifts to the Yankees.


"Everybody gets the we-wuz-robbed mentality from the fans, and now from CC Sabathia. I get it, you get it, people in outer space get it. But before anybody around here gets too righteous about all of this, it’s worth remembering that when the Yankees won their last World Series, in 2009, their best hitter was Rodriguez. Who didn’t just have priors with performance-enhancing drugs, whether he ever tested positive or not, he had futures in the pipeline, with all his great and good friends at Biogenesis."

See?

I agree that lots of loudmouths are about to get thrown off of high horses.

But what do the 2017 Astros have to do with the 2009 Yankees?


As for the impact of ARod on the 2019 World Series, Hideki Matsui hit .615 in the 2009 World Series and won the MVP.

ARod hit .250.

But ARod was their "best hitter" ... and that tidbit is "worth remembering."

"Could baseball have hit the Astros harder? Sure. But take a step back and look at where we are right now in baseball, because of the sanctions just handed down: Three teams, Astros and Red Sox and Mets, are looking for managers a month from spring training. Nothing like this has ever happened in the history of the sport. The Astros are also looking for a new general manager, less than three months after leading the World Series three games to two.

Again: Do you think that anybody is going to go to an iPad or laptop to cheat the game ever again? Send up a flare if somebody does, and risks their baseball life in the process."

Second part first: Yes.

I'll send up 1,000 flares right now.

At this moment, the Astros are pondering ways to get away with stealing signs for the 2020 season. All 30 teams, actually. They're trying to figure out the line they're not allowed to cross and how to do everything right up to that line and then they'll occasionally cross it.


First part second: "The Astros are also looking for a new GM after leading the World Series 3 games to 2."

Yeah, but ... oh, never freaking mind.

It's the same reason Milli Vanilli never got another record contract.