More World Series Math

In a previous post, I (teasingly) criticized my brother-in-law about taking his kids to Game 3 of the World Series.  At a $1000 per ticket, and 0 chance of seeing them win even if they won, I argued for the statistically most probable 7th game, if he couldn't see all of them.  Turns out I was wrong - he managed to pick the one game the Mets won, and he is a die-hard Mets fan so I am sure he enjoyed it.  Kudos to him for picking right.

Eleven Takeaways From The World Series

With a hearty congratulation to the Kansas City Royals, a "that was a hell of a season" to the New York Mets, and a "oh crap, 108 days until pitchers and catchers report" for the rest of us:

1. It doesn't matter how good your pitching staff is, it really, really helps if your fielders remember how to catch the ball.

Mets - Royals Storylines

Behold the Patron Saint Of This World Series!

With a Royals - Mets World Series staring us in the face, the time has come to ponder which ridiculous narratives the media is going to try to pin on this thing. Sure, the Cubs would have made it easy for those guys - billy goats, curses, etc. - but Royals-Mets? Where do you go from there? Well, it may be one of the following:

Love/Hate Guide To the Championship Series

With the MLB playoffs down to 4 teams, it's time to take a long, hard look at who's left to figure out who's worth rooting for - and who's worth rooting against:

2013 MLB Predictions - NL East Edition

And now in first place, the Miami Marlins!

There are blogs and publications that spend thousands upon thousands of words writing up minutely granular predictions of the upcoming season. They use advanced statistical packages like ZIPS and PECOTA, they spend countless hours scouting A-ball LOOGY types who might make a six-inning contribution in mid-August on the back end of a day-night doubleheader, and they generally pour their hearts, souls and minds into their previews.

We are not one of those blogs.

DickeyBird

So the deed is done. The cash-strapped Mets, unwilling or unable to pay a below-market extension for their Cy Young Award-winning ace, shipped him off to Toronto for a haul of prospects and one overpriced, lumpen catcher. (I had John Buck on my roto team last year. I'm still bitter. Can you tell?)
But more than that, they made sure, before they shipped him out of town, to try to make him look like an ass. Suddenly, media sources reported, R.A. Dickey wasn't liked in the clubhouse. He was too interested in the media. He broke clubhouse code by mentioning a teammate did something dumb in his book. He - gasp - answered questions about his contract situation honestly when asked about it by the media at a team event. He was too interested in his sudden celebrity.
Oddly enough, none of these issues when he was picking up a broke-ass train wreck of a team and putting it on his back. Or when he was being celebrated for the brutal honesty in his autobiography about issues of abuse. Or when he was climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro for charity, cheerfully tweeting all the while. Or when he was giving interviews before his contract situation became A Thing. Or....
You get the idea. For whatever reason the Mets refused to meet Dickey's (in context) reasonable contract demands, and then tried to make him look like the bad guy so their fans wouldn't riot when they shipped him out of down. Because, really, devaluing your trade chip always works, and so does suddenly slagging the guy you've spent years building up.
Look, none of us actually know R.A. Dickey. Maybe we got caught up in the fun of a guy who named his bats after the magic swords in The Hobbit, and didn't realize he called his three outfielders Bifur, Bofur and Bombur. Maybe he did enjoy the fabulous book tour scene (note: Book tours, not actually fabulous) more than the Mets felt was proper. Maybe all he should have said at the Mets' holiday party when cornered by the reporters the team had invited was "Look! Santa!", and then run.
But for three years, Dickey has been unfailingly polite, gracious, humble and engaging. That these stories would come out juuuust when he and the Mets were at a contract impasse is more than just suspicious. It makes the Mets look like schmucks.
If you weren't going to pay the man, that's one thing, and that's fine. But to try to sully his name in what can only be described as spin more hamhanded than the right side of the Mets' infield defense, that's crossing a line. It's going to make players less interested in coming to play for the Mets when there are comparable dollars available elsewhere. It's going to make fans suspicious of anything coming out of the front office because, hey, wait, they said this guy was great and then they said he was a jerk. And it's going to make the rest of us even less likely to give the Mets the benefit of the doubt because, well, screw those guys.
And in the meantime, R.A. Dickey can pack his Cy Young award and head to Toronto, with a team behind him that's interested in winning and not largely composed of emergency AAA callups. I'm guessing that whatever names the Mets call him on the way out of town are going to get drowned out by cheers.

Dear Terry Collins:

I understand that you want to be a football coach. Football coaches have all the power, after all. To misquote Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels, there is nothing so much like God on earth as a football coach on the practice field. They get to make men many times larger than themselves run until they puke. They get to pontificate to a rapt media about their tactical brilliance. They get to call "voluntary" workouts and then cut the guys who actually understand the dictionary meaning of the word "voluntary".
You, on the other hand, had a shortstop show up on time for spring training. He did nothing wrong. He did nothing to get upset about. He simply did his job, and you, you chose to make An Issue out of it because, well, there's nothing else worth talking about in Mets camp, is there?
Look, Terry, I understand. You have a team with the deep potential to be terrible. Your best player left. Your second best player is undergoing the sort of power outage that usually goes with a flying saucer hovering over your car. Your best pitcher doesn't throw hard enough to break glass and nobody can pronounce your catcher's last name. And above it all lurks the high probability that you're going to have to hold bake sales in the concourses of Citi Field to make payroll this year, because your owners are in deeper financial dookie than the Greek government.
But really, Terry, taking it out on the kid in the media? Dragging it out long past the natural lifespan of the story? Isn't there anything, anything else at all you could be talking about? Or maybe you could just get down to getting a baseball team ready for spring, and not wish you were a football coach. At least, not quite so loudly.