On the 10/01/06 edition of Baseball Tonight:
Steve Phillips, regarding possible (probable) AL Rookie of the Year, P Justin Verlander:
"He's a rookie because the age and numbers say he is, but the way he pitches he's not a rookie."Huh. I thought Verlander was a rookie...cuz this was his first year.
...in the baseball season and it's 11pm on Saturday night and I finally feel like talking about it.
-I never got around to congratulating the Mets on their first division championship since 1988, but I'm not really feeling that congratulatory vibe just yet. I'm excited for the playoffs to start, but I'm not as confident in this Met team as I was just a couple of months ago. The Mets are playing .500 baseball in September (11-11 thru today), David Wright just today hit his first home run at Shea since before the All-Star break, the starting pitching is messy and inconsistent. Thank God (or, if you prefer, Bill "The Spaceman" Lee - I know I would) for a killer bullpen, second only to San Diego's. I have a feeling they are going to be working a lot throughout this playoff season.
-Looks like the Dodgers are, perhaps, prepped and ready to have a fork stuck in their collective asses. The Dodgers, Padres and Phillies, all three teams competing for the last two playoff spots, all finish the season on the road after this Sunday's games and the Dodgers, far and away, have the worst road record of the three. Too much inconsistency for a team that was very much underrated thru much of the season.
-Early prognostication?
NL:
Mets
Cardinals
Padres
Phillies
AL:
Yankees
Twins (winning the AL Central)
Athletics
Tigers (taking the Wild Card)
Mets v. A's in the World Series.
No picks for who wins just yet, but I'm sure you can guess who I'm rooting for. But I think the A's are gonna surprise a lot of people in the playoffs. Yankees fans are more deluded than I thought they were if they really believe that Bobby Abreu is the puzzle-piece they've been lacking for the past five years. The Twins will be back next year, hopefully with a healthy Francisco Liriano. They were ridiculously good this year when they had Santana and Liriano anchoring their rotation. And since the Tigers will draw either New York or Oakland in the first round (they are 7-9 vs. NY/OAK), they will get Jim Leyland the AL Manager of the Year Award, but unfortunately no World Series ring to go along with it.
...more to come...
Lenny Clarke and Denis Leary stopped by the NESN booth a week or so ago to do the play-by-play for a couple of innings during a Red Sox game. They somehow got on the subject of 1B Kevin Youkilis' ethnic origin. Youkilis ended up having a hell of an inning. And, in the process, comedy magic was born...
...the New York Mets were the best team in baseball. As of today, the Mets have the best record in the majors. To celebrate this fact, I found this Mets video from 1986 on YouTube today and just had to post it. The "80's"-ness of it all, combined with the inherent cheesiness of sports-team-videos, makes it a little tough to take. Joe Piscopo being in it only makes it worse.
08/31/06 - Mets record: 82-49, with 31 games remaining.
I found this today on crooksandliars.com:
The National Priorities Project has a real eye-opening website that calculates the cost of the War in Iraq and them compares it to what we could do with that money.
As a resident of California, here’s what they say we could be doing:
Taxpayers in California will pay $40.3 billion for the cost of war in Iraq. For the same amount of money, the following could have been provided:
* 16,733,296 People with Health Care or
* 627,551 Elementary School Teachers or
* 4,767,634 Head Start Places for Children or
* 25,168,314 Children with Health Care or
* 235,246 Affordable Housing Units or
* 4,390 New Elementary Schools or
* 7,685,109 Scholarships for University Students or
* 616,017 Music and Arts Teachers or
* 741,482 Public Safety Officers or
* 117,140,845 Homes with Renewable Electricity or
* 601,790 Port Container Inspectors
Check out your state's trade-offs.
Jon Kruk, on Baseball Tonight, um, tonight, referring to the Mets' first three-game sweep of My "Favorite" Team in Atlanta since 1979, and Met centerfielder Carlos Beltran, in particular:" . . .The Braves were on a roll. They were hot, and here comes everyone in the media, around baseball, saying, 'Here come the Braves, don't count 'em out.' Well, Carlos Beltran made it a- he took a personal disliking to the fact that the Braves were coming on their heels (???) and he decided to do something about it."
Eww. Reason #37 for me to continue to hate the Braves.
Here are some numbers my friend and I were kicking around after we found out the news today that the Braves acquired Cleveland closer Bob Wickman:
Current Met Record: 57-38 (67 games to go)
Say the Mets go .500: 34-33 (ok, 1 game over)
Final Record Then Is: 91-71
The Braves also have 67 games to go.
Their record at the moment is 45-50.
In the last 67, the Braves would have to go 47-20, making their final record 92-70, to catch the Mets in this scenario.
Now I don't think that adding Bob Wickman to their roster makes that a lock to happen. But the trade today makes clear that, after the week the Braves just had, they certainly believe they're in it. I don't know about the rest of you, but I haven't bought my World Series tickets yet, if you know what I mean. I'm a lifelong Met fan, and they are kicking ass and I'm having a blast watching them, but I won't count the Braves out until they are 12 games back in September.
Now I'm fairly confident that, barring a colossal meltdown, the Mets are gonna do better than .500 the rest of the way. And even if the Mets do go .500, I know that the Braves going 47-20 is a pretty tall order, but even 85-90 wins, in this year's soft NL, may just get you the Wild Card. And I'm pretty positive that, at this point in the season, the Braves could care less about making it 15 years in a row.
