By Mike Stainkamp LI natives stay loyal to roots preparing for Spring Training Baseball players have always been considered the “Boys of Summer.” But what happens when the final out of the World Series is recorded and the offseason begins? For two Mets prospects and Long Island natives, Camden Maron and Steven Matz, the offseason means coming back to Long Island and making the most out of their offseason training program with some of the best [...]

In Part One of my story, we left off with a discouraged Collin McHugh coming off a mediocre junior year at Berry College in Georgia. McHugh found himself at home watching the 2008 MLB Draft, more out of habit than because of any expectation that he would be selected.  But then the phone rang… It was the New York Mets. By Elliot Chester McHugh was floored. Beasley had known it was coming. “I knew Collin [...]

By Elliot Chester I. Collin McHugh’s third pitch as a major league baseball player was not a bad one, a four-seam 91-mile-per-hour fastball that tailed away from Charlie Blackmon, a slap-hitting nobody who had just two hits all season entering the late August game. But Blackmon, recently installed as the Colorado Rockies’ starting right fielder due to a rash of injuries, stayed with the pitch and sliced the ball past the jutting field-level seats of [...]

In 2003, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, a book written by Michael Lewis, sparked the interest of not only baseball fans, but also management and statistical scholars across the country. [1] Recently in 2011, this book was introduced as a sports drama movie starring Brad Pitt. Basically the storyline of the book encompasses how the main character Billy Beane, General Manager of the Oakland Athletics, implemented a measurement and feedback system based [...]

While the New York Mets have been relatively quiet this winter, past and present media have stepped up to fill-in-the-blanks. Before Opening Day at least five new Mets-related books have been, or will be, released. The two most anticipated releases will happen over the next month. Former Mets catcher Mike Piazza will release his autobiography, Long Shot, on February 12. The book was co-written by writer Lonnie Wheeler, a Cincinnati sports columnist, who also wrote [...]

A couple of weeks ago, the great Mets historian and author Matt Silverman, was nice enough to give me a sneak preview into his newest publication, Swinging ’73: Baseball’s Wildest Season. The verdict is in, and Matt has done it again – delivering another Amazin’ Book that should be a part of every Met fan’s library. This isn’t your regular everyday telling of the “Ya Gotta Believe” season, and in fact it was not what [...]

Yesterday on Sirius XM’s MLB Network Radio, the ever-frugal Mets GM Sandy Alderson had this to say regarding the current outfield market and the 2013 Mets outfield: “We continue to look, but I think, realistically at this point, there’s not a lot left on the shelf,” said GM Sandy Alderson. “So at some point we have to realize that, well, perhaps the outfield is not the strength of our team. But at least going into [...]

I once heard an interview where a player gave his estimation of how many players were on some sort of performance enhancing drug when he played in the early 2000s. He said it was ninety percent of the players—in other words, nine out of ten guys. Let that marinate for a second. I don’t remember who the player was, but I certainly believe that stat to be fairly accurate. It always made me wonder why [...]

The stars were out at the New York Hilton Saturday night at the 90th annual Baseball Writers’ Association of America (BBWAA) Dinner. This year’s award winners received their hardware, and of course, R.A. Dickey was the main event. Dickey took home the 2012 NL Cy Young Award and was honored with the BBWAA’s “Joe DiMaggio Toast of the Town” award for forging a special bond with the New York fans. Before Dickey took to the [...]

The smell of fresh cut grass on a summer day is still one of my favorite smells in the world. That smell has the ability to draw memories that are buried deep in my subconscious mind, like a super powered magnet draws a needle from a haystack. Anyone who’s played this great game of baseball knows exactly what I mean. People will tell you similar stories about any memories they have. Certain sights and sounds [...]

I totally loved digging into the first half of this reaction post by Bill Price of the Daily News, after learning that the Mets balked at Scott Hairston’s two year contract demand. Just who the heck does Scott Hairston think he is? According to reports, he has the nerve of asking the Mets for a 2-year, $8 million contract? If my math is right, that’s $4 million a year. Who does he think he is, Albert Pujols [...]