The Mets suffered several injuries in the raid

Ruben and the Phillies finally went and did something that I thought they had forgotten they could do, they used the waiver wire. What with Ross Gload, Juan Castro, and Drew Carpenter polluting the roster (among others), a roster move of this sort has been long overdue. I’m thrilled it happened.

I’m not so thrilled with the bounty though. Nelson Figueroa is a 35 year old, mediocre pitcher. Better options have been seemingly available like Chad Gaudin. Figueroa is likely to take the equally mediocre Drew Carpenter’s spot on the team, providing garbage innings and an arm to throw at opposing teams should more of the ‘quality’ starters get hurt. His presence on the team is likely to be brief. As Blanton, Romero, and Lidge return to the team, three of Figueroa, Bastardo, Kendrick, and Herndon have to go elsewhere. All three alternatives are better than Figgy.

In the short run, this is a fine move, it gives the Phils more depth at SP while Blanton is out. It’s a nifty little use of the 25th spot on the roster. Now Ruben has to keep his eyes open for something tastier.

I'm not gay, I'm not Dominican

For those of you who aren’t daily readers of Deadspin, I highly suggest that you start making daily visits.  Their best postings, in my opinion, are simply posting e-mails of other Deadspin faithful.

I’m not sure if what came to my mind after reading this story is considered a violation, but the first thought that came to my head was “I wonder how many dicks Jose Reyes has sucked”.

I want to let you know about what many Dominican baseball players do when they first come to the US. In the Dominican culture, it is acceptable to have sex with another man. There’s a bunch of stuff I’m not clear on about it, but from what I’ve heard the “pitcher” is not gay because he just needs a release, and the “catcher” isn’t gay because he is just helping out a buddy. But in some cases, the “catcher” is gay if he enjoys it. I don’t know, something like that.

Anyway, pro teams in the US have to spend a lot of time with some players to break them of the “habit” once they come stateside. Case in point: I did an internship about 8 years ago with a minor league team in Florida that was also a Spring Training facility.

This facility had a dorm. Team staff would literally have to go through the dorm each night and make sure that players were sleeping in separate beds (many times they were caught cuddling, but I never heard of them being caught in the act). There was also the case of a catcher (position on the field) who was a bigger guy and would literally just walk up behind smaller players in the shower and start going to town. It was to the point that this organization brought their HOF catcher to town to try to talk some sense into him. Apparently, he finally stopped and I think he made it as far as Double-A (I think).

I just wanted to enlighten you on something that a lot of people outside of baseball don’t know. I still work in the game, but I’m at a higher level now so we don’t have those issues here.

Holy freakin’ shitballs.  Whether this is true or not, I still thought it was hysterical, considering that our favorite team has a fetish for players from island countries.  Enjoy the speculation

Original link: http://deadspin.com/5500263/in-which-we-learn-that-all-dominican-baseball-players-are-gay-also-hot-chicks-in-cars

Fuck the Mets! OH YEAHHHHH!

Seth is a real American hero. Not only is he an EMT keeping my ass safe in York, PA but also one hardcore sum’bitch when it comes to our Phils. Cut the dude and I’m pretty sure he’ll bleed in red pinstripes.

Out drinking Saturday night in Hershey, some Mets fan had the audacity to enter the same bar as our hero. Being the righteous Philadelphia sports fan he is, Seth was honor bound to go bust some balls. Decked in his finest throwback tee, Seth cut down the lowly Met fan with the same precision he uses to suture stab wounds on crack dealers in York.

After laying the verbal smackdown on the orange-wearing interloper, Seth brags of his accomplishment on Twitter:

I saw a Mets fan at the bar. I promply walked to him and said “fuck you sir”. Mission accomplished!!!!

When I issued the challenge “Video or it didn’t happen,” Seth came through and delivered big with this gem. Keep in mind, he already told the dude to fuck off, this is him going back WITH A CAMERA for more. Video after the jump…

Amazing. Follow Seth and myself on Twitter.

One fun thing about being a member of a sports forum is trolling the Mets boards and seeing what these unlovable losers are crying about on any given day. Since they have little else to talk about, except having 14 catchers, they decided to have a discussion about the concessions at Shiti Field.

Now Phillies fans, for the most part, try to stay out of the Mets forum for the simple fact that they have some mods who have a trigger happy ban hammer and enjoy stroking their internet peen. But on this fine day a member of the Phillies forum, who simply goes by “I Like The Phils”, decided to chime in on the subject with this gem:

Whatever you eat, don’t choke.

This of course netted him a two month ban. You will be missed ILTP. This ones for you.

Honk Honk

Their offseason will be known more for their non-moves to fix their holes, than their actual transactions.  No Joel Pinero, no Jon Garland, no Ben Sheets, no John Lackey.  Yes, they signed Jason Bay, but unless he can pitch every fifth day, his impact is going to be fairly neutral.  The pitching staff that had a combined 7.3 WAR (only above the Padres, Nationals, and Brewers) will again rely on a post-surgery Johan Santana, John Maine, Mike Pelfrey, Oliver Perez, and a fill-in youngster.  So here we go, after the jump…

Additions (’09 WAR):

• C Chris Coste (-.2)
• C Henry Blanco (1.1)
• P Kelvim Escobar (.1)
• LF Jason Bay (3.5)
• P Ryota Igarashi
• CF Gary Matthews Jr. (-0.8)
• 1B Mike Jacobs (-.6)
• C Rod Barajas (.6)
• P Kiko Calero (1.4)

Subtractions (’09 WAR)

• 1B Carlos Delgado (.8 / 3.0 in ’08)
• SS Ramon Martinez (-.6)
• P J.J. Putz (.1)
• OF Gary Sheffield (.3)
• P Tim Redding (.1)
• OF Corey Sullivan (.2)
• OF Jeremy Reed (-.3)
• P Brian Stokes (0)

Totals: (5.1) – (.6ish) = +4.5 wins

All in all, it was actually a decent offseason for Los Mets.  And trust me, I use the word “decent” lightly.  Decent, as in… not a complete clusterfuck.  The impact of most of their signings outside of Bay is completely negligible (and even his is iffy).  A few thoughts popped into my mind while staring at this screen for the past few hours, trying to wrap this up in a way that’s only fitting for the Metropolitans.

First:  What’s with the catcher fetish? They added three catchers, and only one of them is actually better than the incumbent Omir Santos.  One can only assume Omar’s having a little too much fun behind closed doors.

Smelly Fingers

Second: Is this team pitching optional? I’m all for improving the bullpen, but you’re relying on a Japanese import, Kiko Calero, and some random “prospects” to keep your pen together at the back end, with FRod to close.  And the starters are just a mess.  Too many question marks to not go out and get another starter… but they decided to stick with Oliver Perez (who is laughing all the way to the bank), John Maine (who has regressed the past two seasons), and Mike Pelfrey (and his fantastical 1.62 BB/K in ’09).  Johan’s going to be Johan, obviously, but what are the odds the other schmucks are going to show up this year?  It’s like the island of misfit toys out on the mound in Queens.

Third:  How hysterical is it going to be watching Jason Bay out in LF? Brad Hawpe’s going to have a run for his money for the “Worst Fielder Alive” award.  You could put a cardboard cutout in left field that would end up with a better UZR than Bay.

Fourth:  What can you expect from Reyes, Wright, and Bay? I’ll start with Reyes, because he’s the tricky one.  While he’s been a 5+ WAR player the previous three years, he also has to stay on the field in 2010 to make any sort of impact.  I’d expect a slightly down year from Reyes as he works out the kinks from his recent medical struggles.

Thankfully for the Mets, DWright shouldn’t be as balls awful as he was in 2009.  Everything went downhill.  His power vanished (10 HR, .140 ISO), his fielding hit rock bottom, and his bat was missing more balls than ever in the strike zone (80.4 contact%, 26.2% K rate).  Certainly wasn’t expected, and shouldn’t completely reoccur this year.  While CitiField will still have that shrinking effect to his power numbers, like steroids on Canseco’s testicles, it will still be a fairly ho-hum year.  As his contact% goes back to normal, his inflated BABIP (.390 in ’09!) and K rate should go down as well… but down expect the power numbers to magically reappear.

As for Bay… this could be a disaster.  He’s a terrible fielder (-11.5/-18.4/-13 UZR the past three years), and is going to the Bermuda Triangle of ballparks.  While he’ll still be solid at the plate, I’d expect a decline in power to the 25-28 HR range, and the rest depends on the protection that David Wright and Carlos Beltran (eventually) can provide.

Fifth and final: So where do they stand in the NL East? I have to stick them in fourth.  While they’re going to be improved from last season, I just don’t seen them getting past the Bravos and Fishies.  They didn’t improve their defense in their ginormous park (hell, they probably just downgraded with Jason Bay), they didn’t improve their starting pitching, and they added a power hitter

Douche of the Day: Jose Reyes

I really didn’t have to cover up the two girls’ faces but I just needed to show the contrast to the girl all the way to the right. Wow. Quite the lookers you’ve got there. Douche.

Some of you may have already read my introduction the last time Long Drive briefly opened its doors to the public.  For those of you that didn’t, rejoice! for this version is about 53% more readable.  I’m The A Team, check out my theme song and trailer.

I’ve been brought aboard mostly for my familiarity with advanced statistics and scathing indictments of the Mets.  Being a first hand witness of Omar Minaya’s bungling of a second in-division foe has been a truly rewarding experience made all the richer by the play-by-play of The Contest.  But in all seriousness, my job isn’t to be resident Mets basher.  I think Chris can handle that just fine.

I’m here to talk stats, analyze trades, ruminate on the virtues of our various prospects, second guess management, and keep up with the latest hype.  I’m really mostly here to do that first thing.  When doing analysis at Long Drive, we’re going to be using a suite of stats that the casual fan will be unfamiliar with.  I will be trying my damnedest to explain why context adjusted statistics are more useful than the standard crap on the back of a baseball card without putting you to sleep.  Along this line of thought, I will be starting a roughly weekly “primer” series on helpful stats.  I put primer in quotes because these articles will be intentionally light on math and therefore not very primer-ish.  I do this for three reasons.  First, being a liberal arts grad, my own math chops aren’t really up to snuff when it comes to doing my own analysis.  I can import an excel document into Stata and run an ordinary least squares regression on it, and that’s about the extent of my ability.  I’m not even sure why someone would do that for baseball…  Second, I’m aware of my audience.  Chris’ claim to fame is calling people douchebags.  I can’t compete with that by discussing the various subtleties of different compilations of Wins Above Replacement.  Third and perhaps most important, all this shit has been done already by people with major sabermetric chops.  Why do a poor job re-writing someone else’s work when I can link to it, pop in a quote or two, and relate it back to something relevant to us Phillies fans.

(you should click that read more button!)

My first two articles in this series are already planned and I have high hopes that they will be well received.  One will be titled something like “Why Roy Halladay Shits on Johan Santana’s Face aka How to Use FIP/xFIP/tERA to Make Mets Fans Cry”.  Nothing like using recent trash talk to teach stats right?  The other will be about Philadelphia’s favorite son with the title, “Chase Utley, You Are the Man.”  I’m aware that dozens of entries at other blogs already have that title, but seriously, that phrase brings more goosebumps than the 2007 Phillies “Goosebumps” ad campaign (or the entire R.L. Stine series for that matter).

I wasn't fooled...

All this talk of stats may have some of you reflexively cringing.  You may be wondering, “but what about clutch? what about the intangibles?”  Fear not!  Despite the well publicized (and highly exaggerated) discord between the statheads and scouts, no saberist worth his salt will tell you that any of their beautiful numbers is perfect or that scouting isn’t as much or more important than statistics.  For both real decision makers and us internet baseball junkies/trolls, context neutral statistics serve several meaningful purposes.  Here are just some of those:

• They give decision makers a tool to quantify an approximate dollar value for a player
• They serve as a useful semi-objective means to double-check the subjective work of scouts
• When scouts and stats agree, decision makers can be very confident in the assessment
• When they disagree, decision makers can focus their resources to figure out why, stats could pick up on something the scouts failed to see and vice versa
• Stats can help identify inefficiencies in the game, see A’s and OBP circa 2003 or defense and Rays (2008), Mariners (2009), Rangers (2009), Red Sox/rest of the decent GM’s (2010)
• Stats allow fans to evaluate players with minimal actual scouting
• Stats help us to identify which fantasy performers are likely to breakout/collapse, see my trade of Emilio Bonifacio for Mark Buehrle and Nate McLouth last year after week 1
• Stats let us write articles that definitively say that Roy Halladay is better than Johan Santana
• Stats help us make Mets fans cry
• Stats hate Jeff Francouer

nice catch clown...

Let me repeat my exclamation to Fear not!  My articles will not be totally stats reliant.  In the absence of scouting reports (and personal scouting) I will rely heavily on statistics, but I will also seek out that scouting data and use it whenever possible.  I like scouting data more than stats data.  Unfortunately, it’s rather costly to get personal scouting data on everyone I’m going to talk about in this blog.  I watch a lot of baseball, but I’m only one man and I have a job, girlfriend, and video game addiction to maintain on top of the time spent writing, watching, and reading baseball.  It’s not like I’m a family man, blood spatter expert, and serial killer of serial killers like Dexter, but my plate’s not empty either.  I will also occasionally call people douchebags.

If anyone is up for some homework, I highly recommend fangraphs.com as a starting point to self-learning advanced stats.  If you ever have any questions, please post away in the comments or you can email me at pitchin432ATyahooDOTcom.  Until next time, I’ll leave you with the latest shenanigans from Jim Bowden.  Be sure to see the last 10 seconds.  http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/article/jim_bowdens_sabermetrics_primer/