perpetual memory loss

Joe Posnanski is one of the best sports writers around. His book Soul of Baseball recounts the time he spent following Buck O’Neil around the country. Buck wasn’t the best of the old Negro League players, but he was quite good. However, he became baseball royalty for what he did after his playing days were over. He was the first African-American coach in the MLB, a fantastic scout (who is credited with signing Hall of Famers Lou Brock and Ernie Banks among others), and he worked tirelessly to keep the history of the Negro Leagues around and relevant, which culminated in the building of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum.

Perhaps the saddest/best part of the book is what Buck missed out on in life. Buck never got the chance to play in the MLB because Jackie came later and he never got to manage in the MLB even though he was a good manager in the Negro Leagues. Throughout the book you see that he never let this affect his life. Instead of being a bitter curmudgeon (like I probably would have been) he was forgiving, thankful, and full of hope. This book is a short read but well worth it for sports fans, or just people who like a great story about a great person. Pick up a copy and do yourself a favor and read it.

Also if you like sports you should be reading Joe Posnanski’s blog. With the amount of absolute garbage out there in the sports writing world Posnanski’s blog is like a breath of fresh air.

Yeesh! I’m still recovering from the craziness that was last night’s slate of baseball games. But since there are better recaps than mine, I will just stick to one main point and a few little ancillary pointettes. Since 2007 I have had to live with the ignominy of being a Mets fan. The Mets if you remember (I sure do!) is the franchise of the historic late season collapse of 2007 which subjected the franchise and the fan base amazing amounts of ridicule. However, thanks to the Braves and the Red Sox even bigger and even more pathetic collapse, which culminated yesterday, Mets fans and the franchise are off the hook. I would like to thank everyone who made this possible especially the entire Red Sox and Braves organizations. Thank you for having a worse collapse than my poor, poor Mets. The lackluster baseball I have seen both those teams play this last month has made my memories of ’07 Mets seem like the ’27 Yankees. It’s even sweeter since the Red Sox spent around 5 gazillion dollars last offseason and still managed to blow a 9 game lead. Also special thanks to Jonathan Papelbon. Thanks for blowing the game. If anyone deserves the shame that you feel right now it’s you. Papsmear you are truly one of the biggest douches in baseball.

Most of all, however, I’d also like to thank Evan Longoria (my man crush beeteedubs) for the walk-off homer that completed the Red Sox failure.

Man crush

Oh yah and the icing on the cake is that Reyes won the batting title yesterday for the first time in franchise history. Fuck the haters, most players do what Reyes did so stop comparing everyone to fucking Derek Jeter and Teddy Ballgame.

PS to all my friends who are Sox fans: Sorry you are just going to have to suck it up and deal with all the shit talking. I’ve heard and taken a bunch of shit from all of you over the Mets. Now it’s your turn.

PPS to Frank McCourt: Thanks for being an even shittier owner than the Wilpon’s.

The Mets are a mess but at least they are providing comedians with plenty of good material.

This clip is even funnier and more appropriate after yesterdays Opening Day debacle. It’s going to be a long season Mets fans.

Season tickets are arriving Thursday night. There will be drunken celebration.

I have to say 2011 so far has been much better than 2010. I started out this new year with a brand new job–which I will be writing about soon–and today I took the next step into making 2011 the best year yet. As of today I am the proud owner of Nationals season tickets (yes the plural is correct as I own not one but two seats).

Many of you may be saying “pssshhh who cares it’s the fucking Nationals.”

To which I would reply, “It’s baseball season tickets!!! Are you fucking kidding me you can’t go wrong!! Plus owning season tickets is totally on my bucket list!!!”

I think any way you slice it season tickets are great. You may disagree but I won’t be able to hear you over the roar of fans screaming and cheering for whoever is playing the Nats.  But still it’ll totally be worth it. Two weeks until pitchers and catchers report and then after that six weeks until opening day.

Take a look at the view from Section 108 Row HH Seat 23.

We were also given a tour of the stadium and we were allowed to go down on the field and into the dugout, which was something else I had on my bucket list.  Check and check.

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by Shep Sheperton

Port St. Loosey-Goosey, Fl.–Today was the last day of Spring Training for the World Champion Gotham Rats.  Tomorrow they will begin the move north and start preparing for their Opening Day series against the Good Griefs.  The atmosphere here this spring was drastically different from last year when they were considered the league under-dogs by many of the best baseball minds.  That won’t happen twice, however, as most analysts have jumped on the bandwagon and are predicting that the Rats will be strong contenders for the title this year.

Starting third basemen Evan Longoria noticed the change also, “You know, last year we just wanted to be competitive and show people that we can play ball, but this year we have a bit of a chip on our shoulders.  We know we can play and we plan on defending out title.”  His sentiments were mirrored by the trio of sluggers Howard, Teixeira, and Fielder.

“Ryan Howard likes the way this team looks.  Ryan Howard thinks that there are some real good players on this team, we will have good chemistry,” boasted Ryan Howard. When asked about his propensity to strikeout he replied, “Shit son, when Ryan Howard hits 45 homers and drives in 130 RBI’s every year, it doesn’t matter how many strikeouts Ryan Howard has.  Ryan Howard is a force to be reckoned with, like a tornado or something.”

“I’m just here to contribute to the team in anyway that I can,” droned Teixeira in one of his cliched statements.

Newcomer Prince Fielder was in good spirits today and remarked, “I think I’ll do much better this year.  New York has plenty of vegetarian restaurants so it won’t be so hard for me to find a tofu burger.  It was damn near impossible for me to find that shit in Milwaukee.  Every time I asked for one some joker would give me a Bacon Ultimate Cheeseburger.  Man that shit was whack!”  Prince then meandered off to the outfield apparently looking for some food.

Meanwhile the Manager, Pablo Rodriguez, summed up his team stating, “Well all I can say is that this is a top notch organization from the top to the bottom.  Our ownership puts us in a position to compete every year, and we picked up some good youngsters in the draft.  Once we bring up David Price, and add him to the already formidable Shields, Lester, and Liriano, well our pitching is going to be tits.  Offensively we are even better than last year with the additions of Dunn, Prince, and Tulo.  Honestly, we have a strong team that is well-balanced offensively and defensively.  We have some good vets and some promising youngsters, and I expect great things from all of them.”

One of the most upbeat players in camp was Ubaldo Jimenez who stated “Main, bodee bop fastball boodoop doop err good main, badop pop, yah you know, pa toop whoop.”  No one ever knows what Ulbaldo is saying but you can’t argue with his upside so most players have just learned to encourage him with lots of nodding and high-fives.

The Rats are chomping at the bit to get this season started and Opening Day seems more like a year away rather than just one week.  Regardless, this team does look formidable and unlike last year they have confidence in themselves.  That should help them get over the hump and back into the playoffs.  Rats fans are in for a treat this year as this team should hit the ground running firing on all cylinders from the get go.  When asked about expectations for the year Carl Crawford bluntly boasted, “To win it all again!”

Team Moves

The Rats sent P David Price down to Triple-A McKracken where he will sit around and play Xbox 360 for a month while the Rats try to squeeze another year of eligibility out of him.

Also Marco Scutaro will potentially be sent back to the Dominican Republic for a box of Puerto Rican rum, but negotiations are stuck because the Dominicans don’t think he is worth 5 bottles of Don Q.

Shep Sheperton is the beat reporter for the Gotham Rats, and when not begging for a quote can be found crying in the women’s bathroom because the whole entire organization hates him.

Riiiight.

Yesterday after I got back from school I decided to take a break from studying for the night and play some video games.  I downloaded the new MLB 2K9 demo and hoped that it would be a vast improvement over the previous incarnations.  My hopes were shattered as the 2K series continued its tradition of suckery.  For some reason the powers that be decided that competition amongst sports games was a bad idea and so they embarked upon all these exclusivity contracts.  Unfortunately for baseball fans 2K received the exclusivity on Xbox and the MVP series ceased to exist, and because of that I haven’t played a good baseball video game since MVP ’05.

My main gripe with the 2K series is that there are way too many layers.  Back in the day video game baseball used to be fun when all I had to do was worry about pressing a couple buttons in conjunction with the D-pad.  Now things have just gotten ridiculous; let me count the ways.  Swing stick = lame.  You know I don’t want to sit there and decide if I want a 40 degree downswing, or 55 degree swing, or a 30 degree upswing.  I just want to swing the fucking bat.  I don’t need to ‘mimic’ a real swing.  I just want to hit the ball.  Pitch stick is likewise lame.  I don’t want to ‘mimic’ a slider, curve, circle change, or whatever.  If I wanted to mimic the real motion of a slider I would go outside and throw sliders on my sidewalk, and if I was any good at it I wouldn’t have to play the goddamn video game to begin with.  So what else is annoying?  Running the bases with any degree of skill is pretty much impossible and usually I end up getting two players tagged out at one base–a la J.D. Drew and Jeff Kent in the ’06 NLDS–because I didn’t have the manual dexterity to hit the required 12 button combination to advance the lead runner but not the other runners.  How did they fuck this up when I never had any problems with this on my old Nintendo?  It’s because 2K is terrible and they make everything as complicated as possible.  Speaking of the Nintendo at least they had a good excuse for crappy looking four pixel characters, but in this day and age how does 2K keep churning out shitty models.  Why does Prince Fielder look like he weighs 180 lbs.?  Why does Ryan Howard look like Jimmy Rollins?  Seriously are you guys even trying anymore?

I’m assuming that next year they will go beyond baseball simulation, and do something a bit like this:

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As I’m sure some of you may have heard this weekend is, yet another, corporate holiday shoved down our throats in an attempt to hijack some of our hard-earned dollars.  I am, of course, talking about Valentine’s Day.  So while there will be tons of people buying candy hearts, chocolates, flowers, cards, and all the other Valentine’s Day accouterments another important event will be relegated to the back burner.  That event is the official beginning of baseball season.  Pitchers and catchers are to report to Spring Training on Saturday, February 14.  So instead of buying your gal pal some chocolates, or any of those other contrived gifts, go buy her a baseball mitt.  Then you can go outside and play some catch, because as we all know, after the crack! of the bat, there is no better sound than the whizz and pop of playing catch on a nice spring day.

The beginning of the real baseball season also means that fantasy baseball is about to begin.  I have been struggling to find something to waste my time on these last few months to no avail.  The biggest time vampire in the entire world is fantasy baseball and I, for one, will be glad to have it back in my life sucking precious minutes out of my day that would probably be better spent on school work or something constructive like that.  So to all of you in my league “Look Out!” because I haven’t been resting on my laurels all winter and my team will be ready to defend our title this year.  Forget Valentine’s Day I’m all about the “Beginning of Baseball Season Day.”  Now there’s a holiday I can get behind.

Oh, my heart was my Pavlovian response any time the words Mets and bullpen came together.  It was usually followed by moanings and groanings, that was followed with yelling and cussing (and the occasional thrown beer), which was then followed by “I fucking knew that would happen.”  To make matters worse afterwards my phone would start doing the merengue with text messages as shit talkers wanted to rub salt in my wounds.  Suffice to say it has been a brutal couple of years for the Mets bullpen, and last year was particularly terrible–29 blown saves.

How bad was it consider these facts from ESPN’s Jayson Stark:

The Mets were 13th in the league in ERA from the seventh inning on and 13th in bullpen ERA overall.

They blew 29 saves — second most in the National League, behind St. Louis.

They gave up 61 home runs from the seventh inning on, tied with the Giants for the most in the league.

And the real kicker is how the season could have played out if they would have had some help at all:

If all games had ended after six innings this season, the Mets would have finished the year 11 games ahead of the Phillies (aka, the team that won the World Series).

If all games had ended after seven innings, the Mets would have finished six games ahead of the Phillies.

And if all games had even been just eight innings long instead of nine, the Mets would have finished five games ahead of the Phillies.

Wow that is just dreadful, now imagine how my heart felt by the end of the season.  I was on the verge of a heart attack.  This week, however, the hot stove finally got hot and the Mets have (hope, hope, fingers crossed) cured themselves of the late inning troubles.  Yesterday, the Mets finished the majority of their bullpen reorganization.  After picking up K-Rod earlier in the week–even though I didn’t want him for 5 years $75 million I’ll take him at the discounted 3 years $37 million–and yesterday the Mets pulled off a 12 player 3 team deal to bring J.J. Putz to the Mets as K-Rod’s set-up man.  So for one year at least the Mets will have an outstanding 1-2 punch in the 8th & 9th innings, and what’s even better is Aaron Heilman and Billy Wagner (btw Billy I still hate you) are gone for good.  Wooooo! Hooray and Good Riddance to both of you.  The work is not done yet and here is what I would like to see done before Spring Training.

1. Take Luis Castillo and chain a very large and very heavy rock to him.  Then throw him off of the Brooklyn Bridge.  Next sign Orlando Hudson giving the Mets an awesome 1-2 at the top of the order and one of the best middle infields in baseball.

2. Sign/trade two more pitchers and let Jon Neise get some more seasoning in Triple-A.  However neither of these new pitchers should be named Oliver Perez or Ben Sheets (who is a perpetual broke-dick).

3.  If possible find a good right-handed bat to play in left-field.

4. Someone anyone hook me up with tickets to Citi-Field Shea Stadium because prices will be kind of outrageous.

It’s amazing baseball season has only been over for a couple months and already I can’t wait for the new season.  Damn you hot stove.