Category: mets

Cardinals-Eagles.   Really?

If Cardinals-Eagles were the 4pm game in week 9 you’d go walk the dog.

After the Eagles tied the Bengals, Eagles fans wanted to do to McNabb what Mets fans wanted to do to Carlos Delgado on May 1st.

The Cardinals are well, the Cardinals.   It will probably take them half the week to sell out the game under threat of blackout.

Meanwhile in the AFC we have the Chargers, Steelers and Ravens.   You tell me what excites you there.  Which of those three thrillers do you want to stare at on Super Bowl Sunday.

If the NFL winds up with Ravens-Cardinals then FOX should schedule a bonus American Idol and ABC should schedule something from Hannah Montana.  They’ll have a good chance of knocking NBC to third place that night.   Maybe fourth in NYC if YES televises a Manny Ramirez press conference.

There’s going to be ten billion articles about how this years Eagles are like last years Giants.  Blah blah enough already.  Tom Coughlin had an interesting game plan which for the most part included running the ball right at the largest collection of Eagles players that the back could find.

Congratulations Philadelphia.  You’ve got the upper hand on New York yet again.   I’ll root for you because I like watching TV.  You’ve ruined the playoffs for everyone in America.  Giants-Anything is more interesting for everyone than Eagles-Anything….but it’s better than Cardinals-Anything, so go Eagles.  Is it spring training yet?  Did the NHL lockout ever end – maybe there’s something interesting there.    Sigh.

Yeah I know the headline sounds naughty.

The Orioles are jacking up ticket prices this spring.

Want to see the Bosox play the Orioles?   The O’s won’t sell you a ticket.   They will sell you a package of 15 games, or if you don’t go for that they’ll sell you a package of 4 in the bad seats (although it’s spring, how bad could they be).   No singles for the Red Sox game.

Tickets to see the Red Sox or Mets will cost you an extra $2.

Don’t worry the Mets raised the prices on the Red Sox game at Port St. Lucie as well.  $25 tickets become $35 and so on.

I understand supply and demand so I get it.   I hope the next time the Mets decide to lose 100 games that they understand it works the other way too.   At Shea in the 90’s they preferred having an emoty upper deck rather than sell $1 seats, and in the 70’s I remember attending games when the uppers were closed off.

www.metspolice.com

Stadium Page has more sad pics of Shea.   She’s dead Jim.

www.metspolice.com

I’m not a Giants fan.  I’m not an Eagles fan.   I have no stake in this game.  

I am a sports fan and an NFL fan and I live in the NYC area.   Last year I rooted for the Giants because they are local and my team was out (49ers) and I don’t care about the Patriots either.   I never claimed to be Captain Giants or one of these front-runners that appear every January, just a local guy who rooted against the team from further away.   I was very happy for my Giant fan friends when the Giants won.

Then the Giants announced the PSLs.   I looked at my friend whose family has had tickets for 50 seasons.  The friend whose family somehow never gets offered Super Bowl tickets (zero for four games, do the math on that – surely someone is jumping ahead of him on line).   He got a bill for $20,000.

It offends me.

So what to do?  I’m going to watch this game.   Mets Police Junior likes the Giants.   Do I root against them?  Does that change anything?  The PSL’s will still happen.  There’s thousands of people waiting in line to give the Giants money for nothing.   Rooting for the Eagles does nothing for me.   Rooting against the Giants means   I’m likely to wind up with the boring Panthers in the Super Bowl.

I like to watch sports on TV, and thus I want the best possible Super Bowl .  I think I need to root for the Giants and the Steelers to maximize my own enjoyments of sporting events.   Damn.

www.metspolice.com

The Mets signed Tim Redding.   You’re probably not impressed.   No he’s not C.C Sabathia and he’s not Derek Lowe.   He’s Pedro and he’s dirt cheap.  To be a successful Met he doesn’t need to win, he needs to eat innings.

I got killed yesterday talking about the Mets frugality , so I guess this signing is what people want, a nice cheap pitcher not one of those high priced free agents that the Yankees overpay for.   That’s what comments like these are telling me:

What are you talking about? We have the 3rd highest payroll in baseball! You don’t have to throw money around frivilously just to prove yourself to be a big market team. I am, for one, glad we are NOT like the Yankees! Look at this offseason and all the signings they made. They could have had them all for much much less. They basically competed against themselves. No one was even bidding remotely close to them!

and

What you want is the Mets to be like the Yankees. Spend spend spend. When will you and other Mets fans realize that the Wilpons, who spent over $137 million on team salary last year, do NOT want to go over the luxury tax. You want Manny, you want Lowe, you want K-Rod, you want Tex, you want this guy and that guy. ALL that signage means the Mets will a) be compared to the Yankees as just a team who spends and b) go over the luxury tax and be forced to pay the fine. Just because we spend a ton of money doesnt mean we wont collapse again. This is a good team that has to find a way to finish at the end of the year. Plain and simple. 

That post got a lot of attention and I’ll break that down tomorrow…but today I want to focus on Redding.  $2.25 million is nothing.  Redding doesn’t need to win.   He doesn’t even have to pitch .500.   He can go 10-16 and do the Mets a favor.  All Tim Redding needs to do is eat innings.

Last year I had a big problem with Pedro Martinez (people go bananas when I call him “Four Inning Pedro”) but one of the problems with the 2008 Mets was that every time Pedro pitched you had to use the entire bullpen to get through 9 innings.   Pedro started 20 games and pitched 109 innings….with some short starts in there let’s call it about 5 1/3 innings per start maybe even 5 2/3 if you throw out the really short ones.   Redding pitched 182 innings in 33 starts.   That also is 5 2/3.   He’s going to need to go a little deeper.   The front end of the rotation will bank the wins, he just needs to not waste the entire bullpen every fifth day.  It’s the old adage that no matter what you are going to lose 60 – so lose them on Redding day but don’t let it spill over.

A guy like Derek Lowe may not win 20 games, but he’ll get you over 6 1/3 per start.  (211 IP in 34 starts).   Comparatively a guy like Santana, and we saw how good he was, averaged nearly 7. (234 in 34).

Redding replaces Oliver Perez who averaged 5.7 per start.   The Mets save some money and aren’t those crazy wild spending idiot Yankees….but we’ll get back into that tomorrow.

www.metspolice.com