Mets vs. Dodgers Game 5 Is Not "deGrom vs. Greinke" Because Pitchers Don't Face Pitchers, Duh

Mets vs. Dodgers.

New York vs. Los Angeles.

The Big Apple vs. Hollywood.

Good vs. Evil.

deGrom vs. Greinke.

Wait. Stop. One thing NLDS Game 5 isn't is Jacob deGrom vs. Zack Greinke. That is not how baseball works. Baseball is quite literally never pitcher-vs.-pitcher because that would be two people throwing baseballs at each other, which may be amusing, but hasn't happened since Frank Drebin got caught in a rundown with the second-base ump:

The Dumbass Award for Lazy Writing goes to ... Joe Ward!

... for his article entitled "Moving Home Plate Could Help Mets."

(This is a quick response to the article Chuck posted below, which was gonna be a comment, then became a commmmmmmment, then grew legs and walked on over to the New Post nursery, and Poof! Here it is, a brand new post! They grow up so fast…)

It's an interesting idea, this whole Mets-can’t-hit-home-runs-so-let’s-shrink-Citi-Field thing, but the author leaves out some glaring, rather obvious information.

For example, he says:

"The Mets have the fewest home runs at home of any team in the majors this season, with 47, and also have the fewest home runs over all, with 93."

Using calculus, I deduced that the Mets have therefore hit 46 home runs when not playing at Citi Field. Which, if I understand word meanings correctly, is fewer than they hit at Citi Field. Which doesn’t seem to support the idea that Citi Field is the problem.

Aside from home runs, let’s take a look at the Mets’ overall home/away power numbers this year:

Doubles
Home: 135
Away: 151

Triples
Home: 29
Away: 17

Slugging percentage:
Home: .402
Away: .381

Now while those numbers (including homers) are all god-awful sucky bad, it’s actually quite clear that the Mets – if anything – have more power at Citi Field than away from it, though admittedly it’s very close.

Also, regarding David Wright, he writes:

"...the Mets, and particularly, David Wright, have struggled to hit home runs at home." [Ed. Note: Awful usage of commas there, too.]

David Wright 2009 home runs:

Home: 5
Away: 5
Which: the same

(And regarding the Mets as a team struggling to hit home runs at home, please see above where the Mets hit more home runs at home than not at home.)

Look, the Mets fucking suck. They can’t hit for shit, that’s obvious. But you really can’t say Citi Field is the problem when they actually hit better there than not there. The problem is that they can’t hit anywhere.

Finally, the article's headline, "Moving Home Plate Could Help Mets" is also just...ugh. How is moving the plate 10 feet closer supposed to help the Mets? Wouldn’t it help their opponents equally and, therefore, actually help nobody? (And yes, I realize Joe Ward probably didn't write the headline. Nevertheless, it's a good summation of his article, so I still win.)

Rather than Citi Field, here is an off-the-top-of-my-head list of things genuinely wrong with the Mets that should be fixed/traded/released/fired/sacrificed to the Mayan God of Round Trippers (Pujolsia) in an unholy ritual involving testicle removal and mouth-shitting:

1. All of the players
2. All of the coaching staff
3. All of the front office
4. The cast and creative team of “Entourage” (the Mayan thing)

Roy Halladay not coming to the Mets (updated)

Is there a Doc in the house?

According to Jon Heyman, the Mets rejected an offer from the Blue Jays for Roy Halladay, where the Mets would have given up Fernando Martinez, Jon Niese, Bobby Parnell, and Ruben Tejada.

Hm. How should we judge this one? Let's go through the facts:

• Roy Halladay is one of, if not the best, pitchers in baseball.
  
• He wants out of Toronto and to pitch for a team that can get to the postseason, where he's never been.
• The Mets are in dire straits, with a gigantic payroll, no offense, no bench, one (excellent) starting pitcher, no other reliable starters, and a good-but-shaky bullpen
• The extent of the Mets' injuries and the possibility of any stars returning soon are up in the air, but it certainly can't be described as "hopeful" or "likely" or "suck my dick, Omar." Okay, the last one, maybe.
• Fernando Martinez, Jon Niese, and Bobby Parnell have all shown promise, but certainly don't qualify as no-doubt keepers; and Ruben Tejada is some minor-league shortstop named Ruben Tejada (who may very well be good, but still).

Of course, there's the whole Don't Mortgage Your Future for an Aging Pitcher camp, which is fair and relevant. Halladay is 32 years old, getting on in years. So there's that, but also this: A) getting out of the A.L. East and B) switching to the National League would both certainly help him. The Mets would be guaranteed his services for the rest of this year and 2010. And next year, ideally, Reyes and Beltran will be back, Delgado gone for sure, and Maine, Pelfrey and (sigh) Perez will have an additional year on their resumes. A starting rotation (on paper) of Johan, Halladay, Maine, Pelf, and Ollie is top-heavy in a good way, with the back end hopefully not bad enough to destroy the team's hopes, and maybe good enough to dominate.

So how valuable are Fernando Martinez et al? Well, we just don't know, do we? But we do know, thanks to the brilliant Dave Cameron at Fangraphs, how valuable a season-and-a-half of Roy Halladay is:

"The market value for wins took a tumble on the low end last year, but at the high end, teams were still willing to pay around $5 million per win for premium free agents. Based on that, we’d say that Halladay’s fair market value is something like $30 to $35 million per season. However, those $5 million per win contracts were all long term deals, which carry extra risk to the organization and therefore pull down the annual average value that teams are willing to pay. With only a 15 month commitment, the long term risk with Halladay is substantially lower, and teams should (and will) pay a premium for that risk avoidance.

So, for a Cy Young contender only under contract through 2010, $5.5 million per win is probably a more accurate number to use. That puts Halladay’s market value between $33 and $38 million per year.

If we settle on $35 million as a middle ground, which puts him around a +6.5 win pitcher, we then [see] Halladay’s value through the end of his current contract is about $52 million - a full year of 2010 plus a half year of 2009. But, you can’t forget about the fact that he’s very likely to be a Type A free agent at the end of 2010, and the acquiring team would be able to recoup two quality draft choices if they didn’t re-sign him as a free agent [which] is around $8 million or so.

$52 million for Halladay’s performance + $8 million for the draft picks = $60 million in total value. He will be paid $22 million over that time frame, so 60-22 = $38 million.

To acquire the Jays ace, teams should be expected to surrender something like $40 million in value.

What does $40 million in value look like? Something like three terrific prospects who are not that far from the majors. No one’s giving up players from the Matt Wieters/David Price mold, but it’s going to take several players from that second prospect tier, the top 25-50 type guys.

Phillies fans - that’s Dominic Brown, Kyle Drabek, and Carlos Carrasco.

Mets fans? Fernando Martinez, Wilmer Flores, and Jenrry Mejia.

You get the idea. If the Blue Jays trade Roy Halladay, they’re going to ask for the moon. And they should. He’s worth it."

So yeah, it looks like the Mets would have to give up one of those three top prospects, replacing the other two with Niese (so?) and Tejada (meh) plus Parnell (whom I like, but am not attached to) in order to acquire this amazing pitcher.

My feeling is that they should do this trade, but the X factor, I guess, is the Wilpons and exactly how much money Bernie Madoff stole from them. Taking on Halladay's contract and losing those cheap players is a huge financial trade-off, no doubt, and we can't discount that element. But one more bit to toss in would be this -- if the Mets get him, then that means the Phillies don't get him.

The way I see it: Halladay's worth it, at least in terms of that thing that baseball teams should want more than anything to do: win.

UPDATE: Well, maybe Minaya didn't reject it after all.

Dear The Mets,

This letter goes out to Omar Minaya, Jerry Manuel, and anyone else who has a say. Brian Schneider sucks more than a thing that sucks a lot. Ramon Castro has proven that he's a good hitter and a pretty good catcher. It seems apparent that Omir Santos is a pretty good hitter and I don't know anything about his catching but, really, how bad could he be? Let's keep Brian Schneider on the DL indefinitely so we can keep that suckfest off the field.

Brian Schneider couldn't get a hit if his life depended on it and they let him hit the ball off a tee and the ball was a softball and they let him use an aluminum bat and all the infielders were sitting down and all the outfielders left the field and everyone was blindfolded except for him and also everyone is handcuffed and isn't allowed to use their gloves and once they field the ball they have to kick it over to first base like a soccer ball.

Can we please give up on Brian Schneider? Both of these other gies are decent hitters. I'm tired of the Mets lineup being a complete black hole in the 7, 8, and 9 spots.

And while we're at it, can we keep Ryan Church in the lineup please? Enough with this Sheffield crap. And can you gies give some kind of seminar on clutch hitting?

Baseball on my mind

This has nothing to do with anything.
(No. 5 on Google Image Search for "Dogs Fucking.")

Usually when I bring up a baseball writer, it's because I think he's full of shit. I've done it here before, but I want to take a moment to point out two very well written and thoughtful articles I read today.

The first is by a guy named Ken Davidoff, who writes for Newsday. I'm especially happy about this, because Newsday's baseball coverage normally shits the bed, led by head shithead Wallace Matthews. (For proper documentation of his idiocy, please look here.) Anyway, I'm now a big fan of Ken's, because he finally did something I haven't seen any other New York writer do: explain to yankee fans why wanting to get rid of Alex Rodriguez is a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad idea.

As you may have heard, A-Rod/A-Roid/A-Hole will miss the first few weeks (at least) of the upcoming season. And if you're a dumbass and listen to people like Mike Francesa or read any of the nonsense most NY Post/Daily News writers are saying, you'd think that losing maybe the best player of the last 10 years is somehow a good thing for the yankees. After all, A-Rod's an asshole, a cheater, a poor public speaker, probably a Nazi, and any other such drivel. (BRING BACK BROSIUS!)

However, reasonable people -- and it has now been proven that at least one New York sports writer falls into that category -- know better. Take it away, Ken:

All right, world, you have your chance now. For the next six to nine weeks, you'll get to see what life is like without Alex Rodriguez. You'll view the mighty, regal Yankees, rid of their "albatross." You'll look at Mr. Perfect, Derek Jeter, liberated from the cumbersome task of playing alongside one of the greatest players in baseball history. Based on what people have been saying out there, I'm betting the Yankees go 35-1 while A-Rod rehabilitates from arthroscopic surgery.

Beautiful. I'm tearing up already.

Somehow, the belief is now pervading that the Yankees will be better off without A-Rod: That he costs as much in anguish and headaches as he pays in home runs and walks.

I don't get it. It doesn't make sense on any level, and the only evidence used to back it up - that the Yankees haven't reached a World Series since they acquired A-Rod - could also be deployed to prove that A-Rod's a heck of a player, but he ain't no Clay Bellinger.

Mwah! I love it. If I were Jewish and my wife just had a kid, I would ask Ken Davidoff to snip the tip. Anyway, Ken goes on to describe how, yes, it's real easy to hate A-Rod for a lot of things (steroids, lack of media savviness, general douchiness), but man-oh-man can the jerk play baseball. And then he gets to my favorite part, something about which I've written before, A-Rod's postseason "foibles."

Has he underachieved in the postseason since he joined the Yankees? Sure, although not as much as you might think. If you could surgically remove his October numbers from 2004 through 2007, then install them into the 1996-2001 Yankees, Joe Torre would probably own five or six World Series rings, rather than four.

I'm not sure how accurate that is, but the fact that the yankees haven't won a World Series since 2000 has nothing to do with A-Rod. The very fact that the yankees (and many of their fans and especially New York sportswriters) consider a non-World Series-winning year a "failure" is beyond retarded.

Ken proceeds to the steroid issue for a bit (and very thoughtfully, too) before finishing with a goddamn flourish, as far as any thinking baseball fan goes. After describing how if the yanks get off to a good start without A-Rod, that just proves the idiots' point. But...

If the Yankees do struggle, however, if the new guys can't live up to the expectations and the old guys can't reach back for better days, then perhaps the haters will finally have their question answered. They'll finally realize the old "Be careful what you wish for" axiom. Nah. They'll probably just hate A-Rod all the more for getting injured.

God bless this man. Just try to explain this very insightful-yet-borderline-obvious commentary to your average yankee fan at the bar, and within moments I'll bet these names come up: Paul O'Neill, Tino Martinez, Chuck Knoblauch, and the sainted-best-ever-third-baseman-of-all-time-'cause-he-was-so-damn-gritty Scott Brosius.

Okay, no more on that.

Right now, the Mets don't have a fifth starting pitcher. In the offseason, Omar Minaya signed Tim Redding, Freddy Garcia, and Livan Hernandez, in an apparent attempt to disprove the rule that if you have no toilet, you can find a good toilet by acquiring three random toilets full of shit and somehow combine them and come out with a brand-new, shit-free, good toilet.

Oddly enough, after those signings the Mets' fifth-pitcher conundrum is still shitty. So a lot of Mets fans (myself included) have started to think again about the previously unthinkable: re-signing Pedro Martinez, who was himself quite a poop-stained toilet of a pitcher last year.

So now, what to do? Give Pedro a chance or not? As much as my heart tells me that Pedro can rediscover his awesomeness, my head tells me that the dude is washed up. I think yankee fans might recognize this quandary in the Bernie Williams saga a few years back, and more recently the Red Sox had to decide whether to re-sign Jason Varitek. A beloved player, but whose better days are clearly long gone, yet there is a need for someone to fill that position...

I don't think I can say it any better than Jason at Faith and Fear in Flushing. It's a tremendously written piece, and I think any Met fan can see what he's saying. But it certainly extends to any sports fan in this situation. (Just read the thing, that's why there's a link. What, did you think I was going to excerpt a bunch of of it and comment on it? Don't be ridiculous.)

And on a final note, the U.S. dropped its first game in the World Baseball Classic tonight. They lost to Venezuela, a team they demolished a few nights ago 15-6. But the only really interesting part, to me, was when Frankie "K-Rod" Rodriguez, the new closer for the Mets -- now pitching for Venezuela -- came in in the bottom of the 9th with a 5-3 lead. His first hitter? Jimmy Rollins. And what happened? He walked him. The leadoff man. With a 2-run lead.

Sigh.

I hope this is not a sign of things to come.

And on a completely different and ignorant note, I am an average white person. Can someone please explain to me the name "Rodriguez"?

A-Rod: Dominican Republic (though he played for the U.S. last time)
K-Rod: Venezuela (even though his nickname RHYMES with the first guy)
I-Rod, aka Pudge Rodriguez: Puerto Rico

Which: ???

If anyone here speaks Spanish, please explain. Three guys, same last name, three different countries? Sounds fishy, to say the least. And I know this guy at work whose last name is Rodriguez and he says he's Mexican. Should I believe him too?

Everyone named Smith or Jones is from America, that's just history. Like everyone named Corleone or Gotti is from Italy, anyone named Mohammed is an Ay-Rab, and a woman can't get pregnant if she's on top -- it's just gravity.