Tag Archives: mets

Baseball, Media Morons

Pick Out Somebody You Wanna Punch

Are you familiar with MLB’s blackout rules? You probably aren’t, unless you specialize in sports law or are a masochist. They’re quite arcane, outdated, and draconian.

Case in point: Fox has exclusive national rights for baseball on Saturdays from 4pm to 7pm. That means if your team schedules a game during this window, but isn’t being broadcast by Fox, it can’t be shown on TV. As you might imagine, most teams don’t schedule games during this time unless they’re being shown on Fox.

That’s why there’s more and more Saturday start times of 7:10 (or later). When I first got a Mets ticket plan several years ago, I opted for a Saturday plan because I liked the idea of spending a lazy Saturday afternoon at the ballpark. But in a short amount of time, these lazy afternoons turned into torpid evenings and getting home at 1 in the morning.

Technically, a team can schedule a game whenever they want. They could play at 3am if they felt like it. The Marlins decided to test this freedom in the first series of the season. They scheduled a 6:10pm start for this Saturday’s game against the Mets. As a result, the beginning of this game can not be shown on TV anywhere in this country. Not in New York, not in Miami, not in Nome or Omaha or Cucamonga. It doesn’t matter where you live. You will not see the start of this game.

So I’m trying to decide who I hate more right now. Is it MLB, for not restructuring their antiquated blackout rules for the new digital age? These blackout rules date back to baseball’s radio days, where certain teams were assigned arbitrary “territories” (and there were only 16 teams, and none west of the Mississippi).

And for some ridiculous reason, they blackout your local team(s) on MLB.tv (based on your billing address), even though anyone watching a game online is doing so because they’re someplace where the local feed (or TV in general) is unavailable. Thus, they cut themselves off from the lucrative traveling businessman/cubicle slave goofing off market.

But these rules, dumb as they are, aren’t to blame for Saturday’s blackout. So maybe I hate Fox, for insisting on this ridiculous exclusivity. As if your local team is “competition” for whatever game they decide to send Joe Buck to. Everything Rupert Murdoch touches, he poisons and destroys.

Then again, The Fox Rule has been effect for several years now. It’s not like Bud Selig was carrying it around in his back pocket, waiting to unleash it at the most inconvenient time. So I think I’ll reserve most of my hatred for the idiot Marlins, an organization that clearly hates baseball.

Apparently the Marlins also hate music. Do you know why they pushed the start time of Saturday’s game up by one hour? To accommodate a postgame concert by rapper Flo Rida.

Not familiar with Flo Rida? If not, then clearly it’s been a while since you were harrassed by some douche driving a car with a purple neon license plate. Surely you’ve bought the soundtrack to the cinematic masterpiece Step Up 2, or grooved to his monster hit “Right Round” at your local club that’s totally a front for the Russian mob.

Do you know how many baseball teams sponsor pre- or postgame concerts? I’m gonna say all of them, from the smallest market teams all the way up to the Yankees, BoSox, etc. I know the Mets have a well-attended Merengue Night every year.

And I don’t think a single team has moved a game start time in deference to these events. Except for the bush league Marlins, a team with so few fans that they don’t care whether their games are on TV or not.

Keep in mind, they’re not doing this to appease a musical legend, or even an old band/artist playing classics. They’re doing it for a fourth-rate crunk “artist” who is 18 months away from the State Fair Circuit. I would call him a flash in the pan, but a flash in the pan will seem like a small eternity compared to Flo Rida’s career trajectory. This guy will be forgotten in a heartbeat the second he has a flop single.

Don’t believe me? Anyone hear from the Ying Yang Twins lately? Yeah, that’s what I thought.

This is something a minor league team would do, sandwiched in between Dunk the Mayor Night and Ladies Named Sheila Pay Half Price Day.

If this was 1983, I could see the Marlins bending over backwards for a postgame concert by Michael Sembello.

“Listen: We’re not starting this game at 7. We’re starting it at 6 and that’s final! If Michael Sembello wants to go on no later than 10, he’s going on no later 10. Do you realize who we’re dealing with here? This is the man who wrote ‘Maniac’! You don’t fuck with that kind of star power! And you make sure his dressing room has 16 gross of marshmallow Peeps, just like he asked for. I go in that room and there’s one less Peep than that, so help me God, heads will roll!”

Hey, Marlins, wanna know why your organization is a sports punchline? Start with crap like this.

1999 Project

1999 Project: Games 2 and 3

Click here for an intro/manifesto on The 1999 Project.

rickey2.jpgApril 6, 1999: Mets 12, Marlins 3

The Mets recovered from an embarrassing Opening Day loss to clobber the Marlins in the second game of the season. Every starter had a hit, including pitcher Rick Reed, who also contributed an RBI sac fly and threw no-hit ball for four innings. Mike Piazza slugged his first homer of the year, and new acquisition Rickey Henderson wreaked havoc on the basepaths. The always humble Henderson told reporters:

I’d probably be the king of stealing runs and creating runs if they
kept those stats…Making them throw the ball away, I’d probably be
the king of that, too.

Ex-World Series MVP/future Met Livan Hernandez was torched for seven runs. After the game, Hernandez said, “[The Mets] have the strongest bats in the National League.” The Times article linked above doesn’t mention if Livan performed some tensile strength experiments on the Mets’ bats to confirm this.

The never smug and never presumptive GM Steve Phillips suggested a headline for the beat writers: “Money well spent.”

99_rickey_marlins.pngApril 7, 1999: Mets 6, Marlins 0

Henderson was in full force again in the series finale, with two solo homers, two doubles, four runs scored, and 12 total bases, one shy of a club record (that record would fall later this year). How did Rickey recover from a dreadful spring training?

Any time the bell rings, we’re ready to play…It rang. I heard it solid.

Rickey also said he couldn’t remember having so many extra base hits in one game, “But I can’t remember half the things I do in this game.”

Bobby Jones recovered from his own terrible spring to toss seven shutout innings. Armando Benitez retired both batters he faced in his Mets debut.

1999 Project

1999 Project: Opening Day

Click here for an intro/manifesto on The 1999 Project.

99_dunwoody.jpgApril 5, 1999: Marlins 6, Mets 2

The 1999 Mets were eager to leave the previous year’s collapse behind. They signed Mike Piazza to a huge, seven-year deal, and so they’d have a full season of one of the most feared sluggers in baseball. They acquired Rickey Henderson to provide spark at the top of their lineup. They also made a three-way trade to get Roger Cedeno and Armando Benitez, bolstering both their outfield depth and their bullpen.

One of their biggest off-season acquisitions was All Star third baseman Robin Ventura, known for his bat and his glove (so much so that Edgardo Alfonzo moved over to second base to accommodate him). But both failed Ventura in his Mets debut, and contributed to a 6-2 loss.

[Ventura] got a late jump on Luis Castillo’s leadoff Baltimore chop that led to a single and he was unable to glove Derrek Lee’s hard smash to third with one out and runners on first and third, turning a potential inning-ending double play into a run-scoring single and opening the way for the Marlins’ three-run rally.

”If I can get a glove on it, I should get it,” Ventura said. ”I thought I did and then I didn’t.”

Todd Dunwoody [seen to your right, because no, I don’t remember him either] lined a run-scoring single to center, Mike Piazza committed a passed ball to allow the runners to move to second and third. Preston Wilson, who was part of the trade that brought Piazza to New York last May, delivered a sacrifice fly to center.

Just like that, the Mets were down, 3-0.

But there were many contributors in the defeat, if you can call them that. The Mets left 14 men on base in total. They were able to scratch out hits against Alex Fernandez, making his first start in 18 months after rotator cuff surgery, but couldn’t plate any runners other than a weak sac fly and late homer by John Olerud.

Al Leiter’s overall ineffectiveness was no help either: five runs (four earned), nine hits, and 124 pitches in only five innings of work. This was cause for concern, after a sub-par spring training and a bruised right hip he suffered in an exhibition game. Although Leiter himself thought he got unlucky on a few dinky grounders that managed to find holes or bounce off of gloves.

The loss underscored the Mets’ troubles beating bad teams, which cost them dearly the previous year. In 1998, they went 7-5 against the post-fire-sale Marlins, who won an NL-low 54 games. They fared even worse against the 65-win Expos. The New York Times believed that Opening Day was a bad omen for the team:

Unlike the Marlins, the Mets are built to win now. Their starting
lineup averages 31 years of age, their starting rotation 34; their
closer is 38. [GM Steve] Phillips had talked before the game about his only expectation being that his players perform to their average capabilities.

If that happens, the general manager was asked, is this a playoff team? ”It should be,” Phillips said, well aware that the Mets have not qualified for the post-season since 1988. ”It better be.”

But today, the Mets looked a lot more like the team that had trouble beating the Marlins and the Expos last season.