Mets Merized Online

This morning when I opened up my email I was both shocked and surprised to see an email from the Mets saying they were offering six pack ticket programs this year, and we could order them right away. For years I was seven pack holder at Shea Stadium. Last season, when Citifield opened the Mets did away with the seven packs, in favor of a 15 game pack. Sorry, from both a financial and domestic ( no way my wife would let me go to 15 games), the 15 pack didn’t work for me.

I think the return of the six pack can be traced to a few things. Firstly, its obvious a lot of Met fans are disgusted with the way this organization is going. Quite frankly I don’t recall seeing this type of anger directed at both the G.M. and ownership since the 1970s. The disgusted fans are sending a message to the Mets the only way they can: by not renewing their ticket packages.

The second reason I think the Mets are offering six packs, is due to the current economy. The area is still in a recession. People are thinking two or three times about what to do with their discretionary income (if they are lucky enough to have any). Its simple math, 15 ticktes are a heck of a lot more expensive than six tickets.

I think this is one of the smarter move the Mets have made. Fans may not want to spend a lot of money watching a team that may finish no higher than 4th place. The less expensive plan also allows fans who may not otherwise be able to see Met games live, get to Citifield at least six times.

Like the rest of you, I found the news of Carlos Beltran’s surgery earlier this week disturbing. I found the Mets reaction to be disgusting. So being both disturb and disgusted, I took a step back and tried to find something positive we could focus on.

First, pitchers and catcher aren’t due to report to Port St. Lucie for another month. This will give manager Jerry Manuel and his coaching staff some time to prepare the Mets for life without Carlos Beltran.

The Mets, with or without Beltran, are a talented team. Last year was a disaster, no doubt, but it is highly doubtful that we’ll see a rash of injuries like that again. Look back to 1987. After 1986, the Mets were considered to be sure fire winners in 1987, until their entire pitching staff spent time on the DL. The Mets didn’t make the post season in 1987, they did however make the post season in 1988. It could work that way this year.

This year will be Jerry’s first full squad, full spring training. What I mean is that there will not be any WBC to interrupt things. Jerry and his coaches need to emphasize playing fundamental baseball, and by all accounts, this is what they have been preaching this off season in comments they’ve made. Only time will tell.

Despite the injuries, their lack of fundamentals was too blatant and a very disturbing trend. Whether it was Daniel Murphy dropping a fly ball against the Marlins (costing Johan a win), or Castillo dropping the third out against the Yankees, the Mets need to execute.

Citi Field is a big ball park. No one will ever mistake it for a “band box”. The Mets need to play to their big ball park and adapt to its vast dimensions and use it as strength and not a weakness. 

Stop worrying so much about the lack of homeruns and start learning how to play “little ball”.

Take the extra base, hustle, hit and run, bunt. Play to the ball park… Make the other team handle the ball and force those errors.

Finally, after reviewing the 2010 schedule, it won’t be a cakewalk during the early part of the season without Beltran. They begin the season with Opening Day at CitiField on April 5th with three against the Marlins and a weekend series against the Nationals. That’s the easy part, because then it’s on the road to Colorado and St. Louis to play two of last years post season teams. The Mets return for a long ten game home stand featuring the Cubs – who have made some good moves, the Braves – who are always a tough opponent, and the Dodgers – who return as the defending NL West champs. The month ends with the start of a three games series in Philadelphia to play the NL Champion Phillies.

The short of it is that we play all four NL teams that made the post season in 2009, and each of our division rivals. The Mets cannot afford to get off to a slow start. The Mets have to work hard this spring. The good news is that Jerry has time to get a plan in place.

As most of you all know, pending a healthy physical, Jason Bay will soon be introduced to the masses in a press conference within the next few days. While I’m as excited as most of you about his addition to the team, one thing still puzzles me about the events that led to his agreement with the Mets. How did WFAN’s Mike Francesa get the scoop, and manage to keep it such a secret?

Like most of you, I search the web daily looking for breaking Met news. When I visited the Mets.com message board, there were several threads saying Francesa would have a “major Mets announcement” on Tuesday’s show. After reading a few threads I decided to check out my usual sources; the Daily News, NY Post, Newsday, MLB.com, CNN/SI, ESPN.com, The Seven Train To Shea and Mets Merized Online. But none of these fine websites had anything to report… yet.

As soon as Francesa broke the news at 2:07 PM, it wasn’t long before the Jason Bay signing went viral in the Mets blogosphere.

What strikes me as strange in this whole deal was how did Mike Francesa pull this off?

None of the beat writers had any advanced knowledge and even the normally reliable baseball insider, Jon Heyman, was seemingly left out of the loop. So who fed such a major scoop to Francesa, was it the Mets?

It would seem so, but why would the Mets bypass their own SNY cable network and give it to WFAN’s Francesa, someone who is known to be a huge Yankees supporter and a Mets hater who constantly takes shots at the Mets?

If they had their reasons to break this on WFAN, why not do it via two well known Mets supporters (and frequent guests on SNY) Joe and Evan?

Are the Mets grooming Francesa to take over for the revered, but aging public relations VP, Jay Horwitz?

Obviously not, but still it’s all very curious.

Maybe the Mets felt that by tossing the big man this scoop, he’d go easy on them in the upcoming season?

I wouldn’t bet on that.

I just finished reading Michael Shapiro’s very good baseball book, Bottom of the Ninth. This book focuses on the efforts of Branch Rickey, William Shea, and other would be baseball owners, and their efforts to get major league baseball (the owners) to allow major league expansion. A secondary, and probably unneeded storyline focuses on Yankee manager Casey Stengel’s final years with the Yankees. The book covers the time span from when the Dodgers and Giants moved west, until the owners agreed to expansion (1957-1961).

I learned quite a bit from this book, such as the huge role both Branch Rickey and William Shea had in running the Continental League. We all know that Mr. Shea played a big role in National League baseball returning to New York, but Shea really was a force in the Continental League as a whole. Also, the plan was to name the ball park in Flushing after Branch Rickey, but Rickey declined the honor, so it was passed onto Mr. Shea.

As much as we think owners are greedy and manipulative, the owners of 50 years ago were much worse. Shapiro’s book details some of the tricks used by both the National League and the American League to stop expansion.

Another interesting point is that in as early as 1958-1959, Walter O’Malley and Horace Stoneham wanted to charge their fans to watch baseball games on TV (pay per view). O’Malley in particular was against televising Dodger’s games, and in fact in the early years of the Dodgers being in Los Angeles only allowed 11 Dodgers games (those games against the Giants), to be televised.

If there is one critique I have of this book, it covers so much ground, that Mr. Shapiro cannot really get deep into the details.

I am a huge fan of baseball history, and I found this book very interesting. During this hot stove season, I hope to write some articles about the history of this great game. I also know from reading the comments of our readers on MMO that there are a lot of original Met fans out there. I think it would be really cool for those fans who were there in 1962, and before to share their thoughts about what New York was like when it was just an American league town, and also those feelings of happiness and relief they had when the Mets were born.

The St. Louis Cardinals have announced that Mark McGwire will be their hitting coach next season, replacing Hal McRae.

Mark McGwire is back in baseball, reunited with Tony La Russa as the St. Louis Cardinals’ hitting coach. McGwire was not at the news conference at Busch Stadium, but La Russa and general manager John Mozeliak said there will be no effort to shield McGwire from questions about steroids. The team anticipated a telephone news conference with McGwire.

“By no means is he trying to hide, and by no means are we trying to hide him,” Mozeliak said.

He didn’t even show up for his own press conference…

It seems like odd timing for McGwire to finally return from oblivion.

The last time we heard from McGwire was during the 2005 congressional hearings regarding PEDS in baseball. At that time McGwire said he wasn’t there to talk about the past. Pretty shady testimony if you ask me.

The Cardinals have always been one of baseball’s more classy organizations, so why would they bring back McGwire now?

If McGwire did not use PEDS, why didn’t he admit it at the congressional hearings in 2005?

Instead he danced around the question and faded into darkness for four years without so much as a peep.

In the late 1970’s Charles Finley owned the Oakland A’s. Finley knew he had no chance of re-signing a bunch of his stars, so he traded them away for cash. Bowie Kuhn, who was the baseball commissioner at the time, voided the trades. He claimed that the trades “were not in the best interest of baseball”.

That’s exactly what commissioner Bud Selig needs to do now.

He needs to tell the Cardinals that hiring McGwire as a coach, is not in the best interest of a game that is still suffering from the the stigma and aftereffects of the steroid scandal which isn’t even completely dead yet.

I keep reading how the suits running MLB want the post season to be seen by the largest amount of fans possible. Also about how they want the kids to be able to enjoy the post season. I guess that’s why they decided to air the Phillies-Rockies game at 10:00pm last Sunday night. I’m sure there were very few school age kids watching that game last week, even if Monday was a holiday.

Then there’s the curious decision to start the playoffs so close to the weekend, with the Dodgers-Phillies not playing on Saturday, but starting at 8:00pm Sunday night. Once again the Philadelphia school kids are being deprived of watching their team play on a Sunday night.

For the ALCS, the Yankees and Angels are off on Sunday. But strangely their game on Monday is scheduled to start at 4pm local time. What about the L.A. school kids who may want to watch the Angels? First pitch is scheduled to be thrown at about 1pm Hollywood time. Maybe FOX doesn’t want the Yankees-Angels to interfere with “House” and “Lie to Me”. The move just doesn’t make sense to me at all.

If MLB is serious about getting larger ratings for the post season, they need to be more flexible when scheduling games, and they need to have the NLCS and ALCS played on both Saturday and Sunday.

The Mets announced Monday that long time coach Sandy Alomar Sr. will no longer be Jerry Manuel’s bench coach, and will be offered another position within the organization.

To me, this is a strange move, and you got to wonder what the motive is behind it. Why would a team fire its bench coach, yet allow the manager to stay on?

Usually the situation is reversed, the manager is let go, and the bench becomes manager. It happened with the Mets last year, when Willie Randolph was fired and Jerry Manuel took over for him. It happened in Colorado earlier this season when Clint Hurdle was fired and Jim Tracy took over. So what’s up here, why was Sandy Alomar Sr. fired or reassigned and Jerry Manuel retained?

Could it be that the manager and his bench coach had a “strained” working relationship?

Remember Jerry inherited Sandy Sr. when he took over for Willie. Could it be that Sandy Sr. was one of Omar’s guys, and ownership is taking another swipe at the GM?

Could it be that Sandy Sr. was a divisive force in the Met clubhouse?

Whatever the reason, this firing strikes me as a strange move, I bet there is more to this that we still don’t know.

I was watching the Met game this past Saturday when Gary Cohen mentioned that it was legendary Met broadcaster Bob Murphy’s birthday. “Murph” would have been 85 years old.

Earlier this season I wrote an entry about Ralph Kiner, and how much he meant to Met fans, and I never did a follow up post about Bob Murphy. Simply put, to me and I’m sure many, many Met fans, Murph is the voice of summer.

How many cook outs, or days at the beach has Murph been with us? How many night’s was Bob Murphy’s voice on a transistor radio under our pillow – the last voice we heard for the day? Murph was so taken for granted that we never thought there would come a day when we wouldn’t hear him.

Gary Cohen made a great point Saturday, when he said,

“Bob & Ralph never lost their enthusiasm for the game, even though the Mets were out of so many games.”

No truer words were ever spoken.

As an adult, just hearing Murph at the start of a game brought a smile to my face. He’d always tell you about the weather conditions “the skies are overcast today at Shea”. The other thing about Murph, is when he was broadcasting a game you never knew if the Mets were winning by 12 runs or losing by 12 runs.

Early this year Joe D. wrote an post about Murph making a call, and I think each one of us of a certain age, tries to do a Bob Murphy impersonation. He was just that good!

Keith mentioned during the game Saturday that Murph would get upset when players impersonated him. Murph, shouldn’t have gotten upset, it was their way (and ours) of paying tribute to a good guy.

For my “happy recap”, how many guys remember Bob Murphy hosting Bowling for Dollars on channel 9 in the 1970’s?

Murph we miss you, Happy Birthday!!!

By now most of us have heard the bad news that Mets owner Fred Wilpon has assured Met fans that embattled GM Omar Minaya will absolutely be back next season. Omar’s return also makes it a pretty good bet that joke of a manager Jerry Manuel will be back too.

If you’re the Wilpon family, its pretty much a no brainer to bring Omar back. Omar has made the Wilpons tons of money, all while helping to perpetuate one of the biggest frauds Met fans have ever seen. Tough words? Maybe. Lets face it, brand new CitiField is going to be sold out this season, and probably next season. Why would Omar bother spending Fred & Jeff’s hard earned money improving the team if the place is going to be sold out anyway?

Let’s be clear here, anyone thinking Fred Wilpon wants a world championship caliber team is pretty clueless. Fred could care less about winning World Championships. Have we ever heard Fred say he wants to win championships? We’ve heard Fred say he wants the Mets to “play meaningful September baseball”, whatever that is. Fred is an unabashed Brooklyn Dodgers fan. In all their time in our fair city, the Brooklyn Dodgers won exactly one World Championship.The Wilpon family doesn’t give a rat’s behind about the fans or winning world championships. In there world cash is king, winning is secondary.

I also believe that Omar, and Mets management deliberately misled Met fans about the injuries on this team. In over 30 years of watching baseball I have never seen so many apparently minor injuries become season ending injuries. The Big Three were supposed to be back by the All Star Break, what Omar didn’t say was the All Star break of 2010.

So Omar Minaya, author of three straight embarrassing and disappointing seasons gets to come back. Even though he drastically over estimated the starting pitching. Even though he mishandled the firing of his buddy Bernazard, and embarrassed the organization in the process. Even though he has failed to make a blockbuster in season trade since he’s been here. Even though the farm system is barren, the Buffalo team a complete joke.

I hope Fred & Jeffy were on hand Saturday night to see the 1969 Mets get honored. I hope they noticed the welcome Mrs. DeRoulet received from the fans, because the next time they are introduced at CitiField, that’s the greeting they’ll get. Fred & Jeff Wilpon, true losers.