Tag Archives: mets

Baseball

The Trump Plan for the Mets

trump.jpgAm I interested in buying the Mets? A good businessman never shows all his cards. So I’m going to say yes, I am definitely interested.

The Mets need a proven winner like me to take them to the next level. I know what it takes to build from the ground up, because I have built an empire renowned and respected the world over, and all I started with was an insane amount of inherited wealth. My face alone guarantees tens of millions in additional revenue from people who are dumb enough to buy anything with the word TRUMP on it.

Can I revive the Mets? Look what I did for Atlantic City. I turned that dump into a dump where you can lose your money! Better yet, look what I did for the USFL. Enough said.

First thing’s first: the Wilpons gotta go. They’ve proven they can’t run a business. Do you know they haven’t gone bankrupt even once? I’ve done it three times already! To me, that shows lack of initiative.

Next, we sign a big time free agent to get some fannies back in the seats. Who’s the most recognizable athlete in the world? That’s right, Tiger Woods. I am prepared to offer him a $500 million/year contract. I know he doesn’t play baseball, but people will show up to see if he can, or at least to shout really horrible things at him.

If The Apprentice has proven anything, it’s that people love to watch celebrities fight while trying to run fake businesses. So I’d kick Sandy Alderson and The Nerd Herd to the curb, and bring in my own front office: Star Jones, Danny Bonaduce, Janice Dickinson, Spencer Pratt, and one of the kids from Glee or something. We’d film them screaming at each other about trades or making pizzas or whatever, sell the footage to NBC, and make a series about it. And possibly a line of towels, too. We’re still working it out.

The team gets revenue and publicity, the people get something entertaining to watch. It’s a no-lose situation. At the box office, anyway. The team itself would probably lose a lot on the field, but that’s the price of fame, folks.

Then, I get Bloomberg to build us a brand new stadium on top of one of my luxurious condos on the West Side. CitiField is ancient history–its practically three years old! My proposed Trump Grounds at Trump Stadium will be the world’s first sports arena situated 750 feet above the ground. I’m told heavy winds might be a factor and the players will probably have to wear oxygen masks. But do you want comfortable playing conditions or glitz and glamor? Can’t have both, people.

And in any case, we’ll make up for the lack of breathable air with some Trump Ultra-Luxury Boxes. You can’t even walk past them for less than 50 grand. They’ll have all the features of my iconic Trump buildings, with gold lined everything, and one of those fountains with a naked chick in it, cuz that’s classy. This aesthetic will appeal to Russian oil billionaires and hip-hop artists living off of hit singles from 1997.

After that? I dunno, I’ll probably get bored, sell the team off for scrap, and buy a new helicopter or something.

Baseball, Pointless Nostalgia

My Best Laid Plans

redfoley.jpgAs a kid, I didn’t go to too many baseball games. My family lived a little too far away from the city and had just enough money to not starve, so games involved too large an investment of time and capital. We’d make it out to Shea maybe once a year, inevitably sitting in some of the stadium’s worst seats, way up at the highest reaches of the upper deck. The players looked like pinstriped ants, but I didn’t care. The experience was still special and amazing. I didn’t dream of going any more often, because that seemed so impossible to me

Whenever we went, I’d somehow scrape together enough cash to buy a program and score the game. No one taught me how to do it. I’d learned from Red Foley’s Best Baseball Book Ever, which my grampa gave me one birthday. Once upon a time, Red was the official scorer for the Mets and Yankees. I found the book really interesting, even if Red was unable to get MLB licensing, and all the stickers had bootleg team “logos”.

The last game I went to for a very long time came the day after opening day, 1993. My mom, two brothers, and grampa snuck in chicken cutlet sandwiches and sodas to avoid crushing concession prices. It would be a horrible year for the Mets–The Worst Team Money Could Buy–but we didn’t know that yet. It was also the second game ever played by the Colorado Rockies. They were shut out the day before, so I got to see the first ever Rockie run, home run, and RBI when Dante Bichette went deep against Bret Saberhagen in the seventh. I still was young and dumb enough to consider this Witnessing History. The Mets won anyway, 6-1.

Shea gave away Opening Day Weekend pins with little Mets and Rockies hats on them. I considered it a precious thing and put it with all my other precious things, in the top drawer of my dresser. It stayed there, untouched, forever. Years later, when my grandparents were both gone and I was cleaning out grampa’s dresser, I found the same pin, nestled against watches and retirement gifts.

Continue reading My Best Laid Plans →

Baseball

The Baseball Gods Bow to Math

I have done a complete 180 on my feelings about the Mets since the end of the season. 2010 couldn’t have gone worse, but even more frustrating was the fact that it seemed like there was no hope in sight. As necessary as the departures of Omar Minaya and Jerry Manuel became, those moves in and of themselves did not inspire me with confidence, because it seemed the real issue with the team was its tone-deaf, thoroughly unprogressive ownership.

Then they hired Sandy Alderson as their general manager, and my outlook changed from that second onward.

sandy.png* Apologies to whoever crafted my favorite Photoshopping of the 2008 presidential campaign.

Sandy Alderson is the architect of how modern front offices operate. There are
very few teams whose operations are not influenced in some way by what
he did with Oakland in the 1980s. Would Bill James-ian thought and top-down management made its way into the game anyway? Perhaps, but Alderson did it first, and it wasunbelievably revolutionary when he did it. To me, him running the Mets is like getting Frank Lloyd Wright to design my house, or Steve Albini to produce my album. (Full disclosure: I have neither a house nor an album.)

My biggest beef with the Mets in recent years has been how out of touch they were with the way competitive teams are constructed in the 21st century. I was frustrated by their complete rejection of anything remotely sabermetric. I was baffled by their seeming inability to attract top baseball minds to the richest media market in the country. While the Boston Red Sox–a team with comparable financial resources–assembled a juggernaut front office full of some of the best talent evaluators and number crunchers in the game, the Mets had their VP of player personnel challenging minor leaguers to shirtless brawls.

Overnight, all of these gripes were addressed, and then some. The fact that Alderson’s first hires were J.P. Ricciardi and Paul DePodesta, two Billy Beane acolytes prominently featured in Moneyball, is astounding. This not only creates a surplus of brain power in their organization, but also makes the Mets an attractive destination for an up-and-coming executive or talent evaluator, which they definitely were not this time last year. The Mets have already taken a quantum evolutionary leap. One second they were making crude stone tools, the next they were mapping the human genome.

Does the addition of Sandy Alderson mean the Mets will compete in 2011? I haven’t the slightest idea. The answer to that question depends in large part on Johan Santana, whose recovery from shoulder surgery remains a huge question mark. If he misses significant time, or is a shell of his former self, it’s going to be very hard for the Mets to win. I do think Alderson has the ability to improve this team right now. Whether they’ll improve enough to be a playoff team next season remains to be seen.

But even before he’s made a single personnel move (aside from picking up Jose Reyes’ option), I can say I feel more optimistic about this team than I have in a very, very long time. Because in the grand scheme of things, how the Mets do next year is not as important as how they set themselves up for the future, and they’ve already put themselves on the right track to do this.

The selection of Alderson as GM means the team will have a coherent philosophy and direction for the first time in a very long time, perhaps since the days of Frank Cashen. In both Oakland and San Diego, Alderson implemented organization-wide standards and goals, and there’s no reason to think he won’t do the same in New York. This is not as ground-breaking an idea as it once was, but the Mets have not attempted it in a long time, if ever.  After years of being lost on the backroads of baseball, Alderson’s hiring shows the Mets have finally decided to pull over and ask for directions.

The Mets couldn’t have indicated more clearly that they’ve made a break from The Old Way of doing things. Omar Minaya’s approach to building a team was a lot like Ed Wood (as played by Johnny Depp)’s approach to filmmaking: “It’s not about the little details, it’s about the big picture!”

Acquiring big time free agents like Pedro Martinez and Carlos Beltran? No problem. Surrounding those big time free agents with a supporting cast? Not so much. Even his backup/bench signings were “name” guys like Alex Cora and Jeff Francoeur, and he overpaid by several factors for the privilege, getting replacement level (or worse) production for sums that could have brought in several better players.

His administration would not–or could not–multitask. One problem area would be identified and targeted for each offseason, at the expense of everything else. Like 2009, when the Mets reacted to the bullpen woes of the previous year by signing Frankie Rodriguez and trading for J.J. Putz–and doing virtually nothing else, resulting in another lost season (though an injury epidemic of biblical proportions helped).

I have no such fears with Alderson. I have such faith in his abilities, in fact, that I’m totally indifferent to the managerial search. Before he was hired, I worried the Mets would take somebody for ticket-selling purpose, like Wally Backman. Now I feel that if Backman does wind up with the job, it’s because he was deemed the best man for the job.

My biggest concerns with Alderson are external: How will his regime be treated by the headline-hungry, chaos-loving sports press and an impatient fanbase that doesn’t necessarily know (or care) about his résumé? If the Mets are mediocre in 2011 (a distinct possibility), will fans and scribes alike scream MONEYBALL DOESN’T WORK! And will the Wilpons, who seem at times overly sensitive to criticism, get antsy if such an outcry occurs?

We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it. I have no expectations the Mets will sign a big-time free agent this winter, and yet I am filled with hope for their future. Weird, huh?