I think Zambrano watches game tapes of Ravi's starts.

Stupid Dodgers, signing Erickson- he's 1-4 with a 7.22 ERA.

gotta like the attention to detail with the managers in that cartoon.

meanwhile, peep randy johnson's deep intensity and passion for playing for the yanks against the mets.
"Why should I make that game any more important?"

once again, his sentiments speak for the yankees as a whole, who treat this thing as a big yawn.

How do the Braves keep winning?

The thing about the US is that, besides Sheets, Prior, and Mulder, everyone is 30 or older. DR's starting lineup is ridiculous. Pujols, Vlad, Manny, and Papi in 1 lineup?!?!?! G'damn.

Excerpt from an interview with Michael Lewis:

"The news just can't be intelligent about baseball because news by definition is small samples. Because it's daily, right? The most typical opinion in sports is the opinion about something that just happened. If you listen to them, they are always rationalizing the most recent events. If someone hits a home run, it becomes a reflection of that person's whole career. And they make these vast generalizations about the home run. If someone walks in the game winning run, it's a reflection of that player's character. So it's always taking some event that just happened and trying to make it signify more than it does. There's an inherent idiocy in baseball commentary. It's particularly idiotic in baseball commentary because you do have this pool of data that's available from which you can actually make some pretty intelligent statements which is just being ignored in that moment because you want to explain that moment."

I agree completely with Lewis, but there's clearly no solution in sight because the daily papers need something to talk about, so they need to build up the importance of what happens every day. Otherwise, there's no reason to buy the paper. Plus, it's human nature to want to attribute greater meaning to every single event.

And all this is why I found it so hard to keep doing Baseball and Booze each week of the season, because there's not much that can be intelligently said about what happened during a single week of baseball. The preseason was always more fun to talk about because you could talk much more broadly about what had been done during the offseason and what we could expect at the macro level for the season.

Completely unrelated, Baseball America has projected rosters for the World Baseball Classic. This is gonna be awesome. The US has the strongest team. DR is close. The US has a lot more depth, but I don't think it'll matter much in this format. Each team is probably only going to need 3 starting pitchers. The US and DR lineups are pretty even, but DR's pitching is a little lacking after Pedro. Venezuela, on the other hand, has Johan and Zambrano, plus KRod out of the 'pen. But, their lineup is weak. PR and Japan are the only other teams that have a chance as far as I can tell. Then again, based on everything said above, any reasonably good team can win a one game semi-final or final, so overanalyzing the rosters is probably foolish.

Crap, I thought I wrote that it was from espn.com, sorry.

Numb3rs-

http://nytimes.com/2005/05/13/sports/13numbers.html

Wall Street Journal ALSO has an article (front page!) on why pitchers don't choose single digit numbers in today's issue, but alas, noone has a username/password for it.

Also, Brad, and everyone else, please source whatever articles you cutnpaste. Just a pet peeve of mine, but a viable one I think.

Another former Met!

NEW YORK -- Chicago White Sox utilityman Jorge Toca was among 11 players given 15-game suspensions Thursday for violating baseball's minor league steroids policy.

	Toca

Toca, 30, is hitting .273 with eight homers and 19 RBI with Triple-A Charlotte. He appeared in 25 games with the New York Mets over the 1999-2001 seasons, hitting .259 with no homers and 32 RBI in 175 at-bats while playing first base and left field.

Toca split 2004 with Cancun in the Mexican League, Montreal's Triple-A team at Edmonton and Detroit's Triple-A team at Toledo. He signed a minor league contract with the White Sox on Jan. 4 and spent part of spring training in Chicago's major league camp.

either way, reports of the yankees' demise were greatly exaggerated.

everyone hoped on this kill the yanks bandwagon, but obviously the worst perpetrator was the ny post. on sunday, joel grr-man had a 3-page (!) story on the reasons for the end of the dynasty. but while roc-a-fella may be fading the yanks aren't.

they head west to beat up on the mariners and a's again, which will give them the perfect head of steam to come to shea and ravage the mets.

the glass is always empty.

oh, and the post has already christened tom glavine as "tom horrific" his mike vick name is Dante Arizona.

Whoa there ryan...let not let the statistics blind us [you]. While Giambi might have that OPS, let's look at his actual numbers. His OBP is still a solid .386, but at the same time, he's slugging .325 -- same as Tony Womack. Combined with the fact that he has displayed an Aram-like ability to not make contact with any outside pitches this season and that the ancient Tino Martinez is valued as a better defensive player than him (Giambi's made 3 errors in 4 games) AND that he's been declining for 2.5 seasons now, it's safe to say that Giambi is not an elite player anymore, and in my opinion he's not even a passable player anymore. In fact, is you beleive the numbernazis at baseballprospectus, he's just barely above average w/a WARP-1 at .3.

For a $13.5 million player to be hitting less than his weight, well, that's just unacceptable. Who knows what's going on in his psyche, but the press has always made Giambi seem like a emotional person, so maybe this gigantic sucktitude is a result of psychological issues. Whether, and where, these issues (psychological and physical) can be best resolved is still up for debate. I say, if he agrees, the Yanks send him down until Tino cools off (i.e. returns to being old and bad), and hope that he can get his confidence back up in the minors, and see what he can provide if/when he returns.

And I thought of a new nickname of Tom Glavine. Remember how Tom Seaver was "TomTerrific" (before he became "Tom Crazy old man" in the broadcast booth), I'd like to christen Tommy G. as "Tom Terrible."

I got home last night, and the first thing I heard when I put on Baseball Tonight was "the big story out of New York" about Giambi meeting with Torre and Cashman to figure out what's wrong. Everyone's saying he has to go to the minors.
Giambi's clearly off to a poor start, but just to put it in perspective, here's the OPS's for some Yankees:

Giambi .711
Posada .709
Matsui .688
Womack .655
Bernie .603

Giambi's hitting better than half the lineup.
Some other pretty good hitters with a lower OPS than Giambi:
Durazo .708
M.Young .692
Loretta .686
Beltre .629
V.Mart .620
Lowell .587
Chavez .555

And looking back to last year, here are some OPS #s through May 10 of 2004:
Jeter .519
Huff .554
Ichiro .695

Boy, those guys sure were done.

i recently read that the mets could have a glut of starting pitching by the all-star break, with pedro, glavine, benson, zambrano, ishii, heilman and trash-el.

wow, what a collection of crap!

who needs kazmir? who needs the quik-e-mart?

Mike & the Mad Dog both think that trading Cameron for Tanyon Sturtze is a perfectly reasonable idea. Sturtze's ERA:
2002 5.18
2003 5.94
2004 5.47
2005 4.97

Tom Glavine needs 164 innings for his option ($8m + $2.5m in incentives) to kick in.

For absolutely no reason, I present some random Dave Mlicki facts:
-He made over $20 million during his career!
-If things had gone differently, he might have been a pretty good reliever. In 1996, his only season out of the 'pen, he had an 83/33 K:BB ratio in 90 innings, with a 3.30 ERA. His most similar player after that year is Tim Worrell.
-His 2 most similar players are Sidney Ponson and Pete Schourek.
-Mlicki has a career postseason ERA of 0.00 in 5 innings, but is 0-1.
-In June '98, he and Greg McMichael were traded to the Dodgers for Nomo. McMichael was traded back to the Mets a month later.
-McMichael was originally acquired by the Mets in a trade for Paul Byrd, who came to the Mets in the same deal (Burnitz to the Tribe) that brought Mlicki.
-McMichael's most similar player through the age of 29 is Dooley Womack, whose real name is Horace Guy Womack.

Jason Phillips: .313/21 rbi
Ramon Castro: .192/2 rbi
Kaz Ishii: ????

I'd like a do-over on that trade.

Well, it comes down to Yanks management deciding that they wanted Unit and Bernie rather than Beltran and Vazquez. I don't see how that makes any sense. 2 guys on last legs, who could maybe go 2 more years at most; or 2 guys who are still in their late-20s and could anchor a team for a good 5 years? Someone want to explain that to me?

Reyes couldn't even bat in the 8th last night without laughing. Apparently Dougie Mient was on the steps trying to get everyone to be quiet, and gave him a big hug after he grounded out. Awww.

I love RCN cable. But I hate Glavine. Think he'll accept a demotion like Trachsel did back then?

I also hate how the NY papers are so pro-Yanks. Even when they lose, they make the back page ahead of the Mets. Dicks.

The Mets are giving every ticketholder from last night a free ticket to one of four games.
Apparently, when the count went to 3-2 on Reyes last night, the fans were chanting "walk, walk, walk". Troo.

Here's an article in which Tom House says he was using steroids in the '70s.
"House estimated that six or seven pitchers on every staff were 'fiddling' with steroids or growth hormone."

Big news of the day seems to be the Yankee moves. Cano in, Bernie out. Womack and Matsui moving.
It seems like a panic move to me.
Cano (or "Canoe" as Mad Dog is calling him) has been tearing it up in AAA, but his career isn't that impressive overall. PECOTA projects him to hit about as poorly as Bernie's been hitting so far. And he's apparently a terrible defensive player.
And as poorly as Bernie's hitting, Womack is hitting just as poorly. Considering their track records, why not bench Womack if you're so desperate to get Cano in the lineup. Womack will probably end up being the worst hitting LF in the majors. Really, the Yankees need to get a CF, which they should've realized over the offseason. But, do they really have anything to trade at this point? Cameron would be a perfect fit, but there's nothing I'd want from the Yanks in return.

And Unit's going to miss a start, which is nice. Wang and Henn in the rotation? It seems like the Yankees chose the wrong year to stop carrying 7 starters.

Anyway, it's nice to see the Yankees in panic mode. They'll probably trade for a CF, get Clemens back in August, and make the playoffs again. But, maybe this is finally the year where things go wrong.

mushnick will be all over the 2 hour, 15 minute rain delay at shea tonite. why not call the game and do a double-header any of the next 3 days the phils are in town? instead they play before an empty house in miserable conditions and piss off the fans that came throo in the rain at 7 and left after an hour.

i'm just mad because the game was supposed to be on espn and i waited around watching the reds and cards but when the mets game finally started espn never switched back or put it on espn 2, even tho espn 2 was showing absoutely nothing.