YOU’VE got to give the Mets points for consistency. No runs, but lots of points. Their team-wide, season-long disinclination toward running to first base continues to both blow the mind and minimize their opportunities to win even their biggest games.
In the art world, the Mets would be described as members of the Minimalist School, artists who smear a single blue line on a canvas, schlep it to an art gallery, entitle the work, “Single Blue Line On Canvas,” then await the arrival of some avant-garde sucker to write a check.
But what the hey. Est non disputandum de gustibus. There’s no accounting for taste.
In the sports world, the Mets’ minimalist approach to baseball isn’t a matter of taste, it’s a matter of fact. And it’s recognized for what it is: Terrible fundamental baseball, dogging it, the School of Fido.
Tuesday, Game 1 of the NLCS, top of the third, none out, Roger Cedeno on third. The Braves are up 1-0. Rey Ordonez hits a swinging roller a few feet up the third-base line.
Catcher Eddie Perez cautiously stalks the ball, noting that Ordonez is not running. With Ordonez an idle bystander, figuring that the ball would roll, spin or kick foul, Perez could’ve tagged Ordonez out. Instead, he threw to first, nipping Ordonez by about 70 feet.
Surprisingly, Bob Costas and Joe Morgan, calling the game for NBC, focused more on the path taken by the ball than the one not taken by Ordonez. The play didn’t make a sound in the next day’s papers, either. Perhaps the sight of players not running to first is no longer so unusual that it warrants comment.
Still, had Ordonez run to first, as baseball players are encouraged to do shortly after they’ve kicked the slats out of their cradles, Perez would’ve been left with three options, all of which lined up in greater favor of the Mets than Ordonez being tagged out near home plate.
1) With Ordonez running, Perez might’ve chosen to see if the ball would roll foul. If it had, Ordonez would’ve still been at bat.
2) With Ordonez running, Perez, had he chosen not to touch the ball and had it stayed fair, the Mets minimally would’ve had first and third with none out.
3) With Ordonez running and the ball fair, Perez would’ve had to hustle his throw to first in order to retire Ordonez. He’d have had to risk making a pressurized throw in a pressurized game.
Instead, because the Mets continue to eschew the virtues and advantages of running from home to first, the Braves were gifted an out, no money down.
In the end, Cedeno would not score. The inning would end with the Mets still behind a run and some of us wondering how it’s even remotely possible that a team, one series away from playing in the World Series, still doesn’t run to first base.
* DURING Game 1 of the NLCS, Bob Costas was handed a promo to read about NBC’s inaugural “Gravity Games,” a promo that told us that the Games’ next installment will appear, “Sunday, at a special time – 2 p.m.” Remarkable. The Gravity Games don’t yet have a regular time, but they already have a “special” time.
“Watch how fast [right fielder] Brian Jordan gets to this ball,” NBC’s Joe Morgan said during Game 1 of the NLCS, moments before a replay of Jordan running appeared – in slow motion.
The first question asked among local baseball fans yesterday morning about Game 1 of Red Sox-Yanks wasn’t really about the game, but a qualifier: “Did you stay up to see the end?” Just as people in London had a better shot at being awake than people in New York for the end of Games 1 and 2 of the Mets-Diamondbacks series, people in Los Angeles had a better shot at seeing Bernie Williams’ home run end Game 1 of the ALCS than people in New York and Boston.
Funny, how when a team in any sport doesn’t sellout a playoff game, the media question the devotion of that town’s fans. They rarely mention the price of tickets or the time the games begin and end.
Fox’s Keith Olbermann, in pregame of Wednesday’s ALCS, noted that “El Duque,” Orlando Hernandez, fled here from Cuba for freedom from oppression and the right to lie about his age.
Fox will forego commercials – and commercial revenue – after the top of the first inning in tomorrow’s Yanks-Red Sox to air Roger Clemens’ procession from the visitors’ bullpen in Fenway. Who knows, this scene could eventually find itself in a future installment of When Animals Attack, Part XII. Has anyone mentioned that the four remaining MLB playoff teams are rooted in either New York or Boston? After the ’52 season, the Braves left Boston for Milwaukee. . . Postseason lookalikes: Dennis Mann of Marine Park submits Met reliver Dennis Cook and “Butch” from the Little Rascals.
One reason today’s baseball can’t be taken all that seriously as historical matter is because offensive records, established over 100 years, are regularly being supplanted by numbers established in just the last few years. Or will history simply record that beginning in 1995, all hitters experienced a dramatic rise in their ability to hit home runs and drive in runs?
Today’s the 30th anniversary of MSG Network. It began Oct 15, 1969, North Stars at Rangers, Bob Wolff with the call, a telecast only available to 18,000 subscribers in lower Manhattan. Shoot, in the hands of Cablevision, MSG now shuts out nearly 100 times that many subscribers from Ranger games on any given night.
Interesting, that TV – local and national – has anointed Keyshawn Johnson team spokesperson for the Jets. Outside of those moments when he’s in the game, the only team he appears to speak for is Team adidas. Heck, even when he heads for the sideline, infuriated that no one threw him “the damn ball,” he can’t shove that adidas cap on his head fast enough.
While no one seems to have any problems with rules designed to protect punters and place kickers, given their vulnerability in the performance of their duties, people take issue with rules and proposed rules designed to protect QBs. Yet, QBs, when passing, are even more vulnerable than kickers. Kickers risk broken legs, QBs risk brain damage.