I am telling you in my encounters with him and his family – I found him to be a great guy.

I am a believer that he has a sickness – there’s a difference to me between that and being a punk on the field or off the field.

Last year when that fan died trying to get the ball Hammer threw to him – you know how easily that could have broken Hamilton? I mean do you have any idea the magnitude of that moment? Here you have a born again christian who is admittedly weak to drugs as an escape from reality and he literally just watched a man die in front of his eye to try and get a baseball he threw to him.

That would send most non addicts into a depression.

I get that people will always look at his problems and judge him. That is your right. But I don’t feel it is my right.

I’ll take him and his desire to want to be clean and battling through the day to day struggles while having an attitude that is admirable over any player who shows up and doesn’t give a darn or pushes every clubhouse button he can.

I just think there is more to the man than his problems and using them against him is a simple way to judge somebody you do not know.

If he had these issues and fought with his manager or teammates etc. I’d be with you.

You have no clue what you are talking about. Drug addicts dont take drugs because of availability, they take drugs because of the way it makes them feel.

If an addict couldnt get his hands on his drug of choice he/she finds a substitute…..ex. sniffing spray paint, glue etc.

It is all about the high, the feeling the drugs give you…It is utterly retarded to say pressure is an excuse….Pressure causes STRESS!!! Some people over eat when stressed, some drink, some smoke cigarettes(nicotine) some do DRUGS!!!

Being a Great guy and having honorable intentions are 2 totally different things. His actions continue to show otherwise and we aren’t judged by our intent, we are judged by the actions we take.

If he wants others to view him as an honorable man maybe he should start to ACT on those INTENTIONS. Rather than continue to act upon the un-honorable decisions he has chosen countless times in his life.

Again I repeat……

YOUR ACTIONS ARE WHAT YOU ARE JUDGED ON!!!! NOT INTENT!!!

Actually I was employed full time with the minor league organization that he made his return to pro baseball with. I was also employed by them when he was drafted out of high school and played there. I can tell you with 100% certainty that kid and the guy who came back to baseball are 2 totally different people.

It has nothing to do with getting an autograph or seeing him at a charity event. I’ve been around him in a clubhouse, outside of the stadium and talked with him in situations where he didn’t “have to be on.”

I sat through an entire game with his wife and kids in Batavia, NY right behind home plate. This isn’t some star struck moment where I paid $ to get an autograph.

He has a problem, nobody will ever deny that. Ever. He’ll always have those demons – but I assure you he has honorable intentions of staying clean and doing the right thing.

And again, NYC is not the only place in the world for that stuff.

GREAT PERSON???

Really, Just because you met him once att a autograph signing or charity event you know what kind of person he is? Lets be for real, fans killed Cabrera for his stunt of trying to fool everyone with dishonesty…and everyone questioned his character and rightfully so. Josh Hamilton has done far worst so shouldnt his character come into question? YES!! IT SHOULD

How should/do we judge people? By their “Actions”…. A great guy doesnt leave his wife whom has just given birth to their child by going out and blowing their money on Crack and banging strippers instead of supporting his family. The guy then relapsed again 2009 caught with strippers and drunk asking where he can score some coke then again in 2012 in you guessed it a bar banging some skanky chick in the bathroom…..

Yeah Jessep GREAT GUY!!!! And Valdespin gets a bad rap and this guy is a GREAT GUY!!! in your eyes Jessep…lol…

Isn’t Ike Davis a bit too young to start thinking baseball is just a job? When Keith talked about the dog days of August he wasn’t referring to teams still not acting like professionals – just how hard it was trying to remain doing so. And young kids are still hungry but I mean, even Baxter thrown out at second on a base hit?

A good friend of mine is also an ardent Sandy supporter and recently wroteto me “It’s frustrating as all hell, but these are typical growing pains. What
WASN’T typical was the 46-40 start. You look at these same guys and wonder
where THAT came from. Be happy we had that instead of a 110-loss season.”

But I had to remind him that was not what he was saying around the All-Star break. He said this team was different than the 2011 edition which according to him was just “hanging around”. Because of that, he loves the move to have gotten Wheeler. He was, however, keen on this club (like we all were) in early July despite the season long slumps by Duda and Davis and too much reliance on our starting pitching and Captain Kirk. Like some other Sandy supporters, he was also explaining why the Met bullpen was not the awful one it was being made out to be – bad, yes, but not awful compared to others. He also felt this team was in a much better position thanks ito two wildcard slots and the league being mediocre.

Now he writes me and says these are growing pains and the the team was cutting it’s teeth.

A team that can hold it’s own for the first half two years in a row is not one that is a state of re-building. It has already proved itself to be competitive. That’s why I think the team is so demoralized and the actions of the front office are a major contributing factor. They were playing their butts off and needed help and no action was done by the front office. When the Mets started slumping after the all-star break, how many games were lost not because we did not have the ability to come back in late innings for we did – we fought back. Our efforts were wasted because almost night after night the shoddy bullpen that Sandy acquired over the winter blew it for them. It was this way throughout the first half too and it’s to their credit that they managed to be seven games over .500 at one point and a shame in realizing they could have been much higher had it not been for the bullpen – Sandy’s bullpen.

And Sandy made no effort to at least try and resolve it. Remember, it was the bullpen that blew at least four games for the Mets during that stretch against Atlanta and Washington. And yet Sandy still wanted to wait to evaluate the team? The bullpen was killing an otherwise good team and he still needed time to decide whether or not to make moves?

Ownership is broke and has no money to spend to helping to get decent players to support the current group when they were in the race. Even Sandy said one cannot expect to get a fifty percent player and be anything other than .500 (which we aren’t).

Yet those are the ones he kept on acquiring.

And when talking about power hitters that are out there he again referred to cost and them being productive but not five star players. He then alluded to our young pitching prospects in the minors but if he demanded a top five prospect in return for a bench player like Hairston, how does he expect to get any better a productive player in return when he is talking in terms of mid level pitching prospects as trade bait instead? Nothing for nothing gets nothing.

Remember Tug McGraw mentioning that as a Phillie his fellow teammates felt depressed having to come to New York to play? That was because ownership turned a great franchise into a morgue with it’s moves and non-moves based solely on the oh mighty dollar that even opposing players wanted no part of it. Seaver saw this coming long before the bad blood spilled over.

Yes, an ownership and it’s front office can definitely play a major role in a team’s downfall. It is happening before our very eyes. And it’s easy to use the term “rebuilding” to excuse what they have done to wreck a still very competitive team the past two years. Yes, they had a core of good players and they needed moves to help make them stronger. And if our kids on the farm are not yet ready why not look at the free agent market now – and by that, I don’t mean Mo Vaughan or Roberto Alomar and the like.

Other teams got players to help them before the deadline. Sandy says we now have some good mid-level pitching prospects that he would use as trade bait. He had those six weeks ago too. Mid level prospects and cash goes along way as we’ve seen with fire sales.

The Wilpons are trying to hold onto ownership at all costs and are dragging the team down with it. They are not broke due to no revenue coming in since we are the biggest market in the country and SNY plus merchandising reaps in hundreds of millions each year. Outside issues caused them to downsize the Mets to the budget of a Kansas City or Pittsburgh. In addition, the Mets had enough good players that they did not have to start from scratch. Ownership would have hired a different general manager and would have been conducting business much differently had their personal finances been different. If they hired a good general manager, one that was a baseball man instead of dollars and cents man, they could have been improving the present without short changing the future – as Atlanta, St. Louis do – and surprising others. Look at the Chicago White Sox. They were picked to be toward the bottom by many and yet they are now in first place. The Pale Hose are a perfect example of how a team can have some off seasons but bounce back by moves to help instead of re-building. Last year their record was about like ours was as well. So they made moves to improve instead of to rebuild.

http://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/CHW/

Teams don’t have to compromise the future to stay relatively competitive over a long period of time. Teams can build from within and from without and not need to go into a five year rebuilding plan. That is, if they use the resources they have available to them and don’t need them to pay off rising debts. There would be no fifty-percent players like those Sandy went and got, that’s for sure.

I wouldn’t go so far as to call him a hero…

Francesca is really just a flag who senses the wind and blows hard in the direction of it! LOL

The team did not quit on Terry, Terry and the team bought into the front office’s evaluation of it!
The FO quit so what was the point in trying to prove otherwise to them? Terry is sying the right things but he would have blown up at them by now if he himself had not also pretty much given up on this year.

Most know they aren’t going to be here next year and nothing they do will change that.
The fact we traded for no one is proof to them that we intend to fill in with the Minor Leaguers whenever they are ready and that means even the few who deserve an extention for thier performance this year are not likely to get one.

The two who have the most to gain are Young and Hairston, both are not lkely to be resigned by us considering what they have done so far and will get in FA.So hey are the only ones who hav a real reason to perform at all.

All of the money will go to replacing that BP we blew our entire FA load on this year with the exception of Francisco who still has a year left on his contract.

Terry said yesterday that Murphy is totally out of gas which means you will see less and less of him once roster’s expand.

Basically the remainder of this season is nothing more than an open audition for the pitching staff.
Why else would you go to a 6 man rotation other than to see more pitchers in the time you have left to judge who is a keeper fo next year?

Saw some debates on air last night claiming ‘the Yankees are in trouble’. If they continue their downward spiral and lose their hold on top of the AL east, their won’t be any Met fans calling into his show….it’ll be all Yankee fans screaming ‘this can’t be happening’. LOL.