The Mets Police

I blogged about it all year and caught lots of grief from my name-calling, but it looks like Pedro-bashing is catching on.   People are starting to realize that Pedro did nothing after June 6, 2006 – something I first mentioned in this post and about 100 other times since….but enough about me, I’m just a fat dopey blogger.  How about the take of a respected journalist:

Here’s an excerpt from Bob Klapisch on Espn.com

Mets didn’t get their money’s worth with Pedro

Fern Cuza might be talking a good game for his client, but the Mets aren’t about to forget how quickly their investment in Pedro dried up, especially this past September. He went 0-3 while the Mets were being caught and passed by the Phillies, ending the season with a 5-6 record, the first sub.-500 campaign in a full season of his career, and a 5.61 ERA.

Plucking away Martinez was an enormous public-relations coup, but today the Mets’ hierarchy admits Pedro fell short of their expectations. “We thought we’d get three [good] years from him,” one senior official said. “Turns out we got 2½.”

Even that’s a generous assessment, considering Martinez spent long stretches on the disabled list in each of his past three seasons with the Mets. Pedro was terrific in 2005, winning 15 games, striking out 208 and posting a league-leading 0.95 WHIP. His dominance rolled over into early 2006, when he was 5-1 through May, allowing just 39 hits in 71 innings. But then came the first of two stints on the DL that season, and the old Pedro never returned.

The entire piece is a good read.

Meanwhile there are always Pedro Apologists like this guy. (below)

So the Hall of Fame ballot was announced yesterday and there are four players on the list that spent some time in a Mets uniform, 2 who were “real Mets”(Jesse Orosco & David Cone), and 2 who were rented players (Ricky Henderson & Mo Vaughn).
Now of course each team likes to promote their own players, be they deserving or not. So it came as no surprise yesterday when I saw an article on the Mets website doing just that. Except the title mentioned “A Trio of Mets” on the ballot, and who’s picture is included – Mo Vaughn!
Mo had some good years – in Boston
He even had 2 ok years – in Anaheim
But the man played only 166 games with the Mets.
I love that the Mets seemingly want to embrace history – but come on, embrace your own history, not someone else’s.

I was checking out some pics on Zell’s and noticed the below.

I guess that’s the bleachers we’re looking at.   Notice the blue seats.  I don’t see any breaks.  Is the person in the middle going to have to ask 25 people to move when he wants to get a hot dog?   Seems really uncomfortable in there to me.

I doubt many of you read The Guardian but I thought this was kind of cool perspective. (Excerpts below).   Personally I feel the whole Piazza as hero thing has been way overblown (the dude hit a home run, big deal) – but I respect the writer below who just wants his sport to pick up the pieces and get back to normal.

That 2001 Mets team was another of Bobby V’s poorly prepared teams.  His Mets had a habit of digging huge holes in April.  This team was 10 games under on June 1st so it didn’t matter how “heroic” Piazza was or how many games they won after 9/11…sometimes the math catches up to you.


Miracle Mets show Mumbai why cricket matters more than ever 

It’s a shame that cricket’s response to the Mumbai attacks will be nothing like as eloquent as baseball’s was to 9/11

Six days after 9/11 the Americans started to play Major League Baseball again. The League Commissioner, Bud Selig, explained the decision by saying: “I’ll be grateful if we played a small role with other social institutions in bringing this country back.” That very day the New York Mets played their first game since the attack, away at Pittsburgh. The team took to the field wearing Fire Defence of New York caps. Their home park, Shea Stadium, had been turned into a recovery centre for relief workers. The night before the Pittsburgh game, the Mets manager Bobby Valentine had stayed up till 3am directing the loading of relief supplies by volunteers.

The Mets won that match, 4-1. Four days later, on September 21, Valentine would return to Shea to oversee his side’s first home game back at the stadium. The Mets had decided they would play that game without pay, donating their combined wages for the night, $450,000, to the New York Police and Fire Widows and Children Benefit fund.

The Mets won that night as well. They won, in fact, each of their first six games after 9/11, thrilling their fans and delighting the city as they did so. Back pages were again filled with headlines about the ‘Miracle Mets’. Their hitter Mike Piazza commented: “we expect to win every game right now … because we’re playing completely relaxed, even during what should be the most tense of circumstances.”

Sport, which is normally taken disproportionately seriously, was just a gloriously trivial distraction from the grief of the city. Mumbai will not be given that opportunity. The attacks may have represented a 9/11 moment for the city but, much as we may want it to be, cricket’s response will be nothing like as eloquent as baseball’s. The ripples have spread too far across the sport. The decisions that have to be made by those governing cricket are harder still than the ones that Selig faced. The matter of England’s imminent return is only the first of many issues cricket will have to tackle.

For instance it looks increasingly unlikely that the Indian government will permit the team’s January tour of Pakistan to take place, despite the many pleas for a show of solidarity from across the border. Pakistan have not played a home Test match since October 2007. Since then the only teams to tour the country have been Bangladesh and Zimbabwe, though India and Sri Lanka did briefly visit for the Asia Cup. The Pakistan Cricket Board is understandably desperate for India’s January tour to go ahead. With Indian investigators attributing the attacks to Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Kashmiri extremist group based in Pakistan, the tour seems improbable.