Tagged: Ryan Church
Six Weeks?
You didn’t have to see Jay Bruce’s right wrist bend unnaturally to believe he had broken it – but it helped.
The questions become what the Reds do in his absence, and how long that absence will be. The Reds face one immediate problem: the only five outfielders on their 40-man roster are already on the major league roster. Thus the thought of promoting a Chris Heisey or Drew Stubbs or any other outfielder, requires somebody being pulled off the 40-man roster. Or you could move a 40-man roster player to the 60-Day Disabled List.
Unfortunately the leading candidate for that would be Bruce himself, and 60 days on the DL would make Cincinnati GM Walt Jocketty’s immediate ETA for a Bruce return – as soon as six weeks – officially wildly over-optimistic. While nobody in the CitiField press box had access to Bruce’s x-rays, there wasn’t a person in there who thought the Jocketty estimate was reasonable.
While the roster move, and the length of Bruce’s absence, remain in doubt, the players Dusty Baker will use in his absence probably do not. Chris Dickerson was taking over Laynce Nix’s lefthanded platoon with Jonny Gomes in left as it was, and he is a passable rightfielder. It’s likely Nix gets back into the time-share with Gomes, and Dickerson takes over full-time in right. Exotic moves, like moving Joey Votto to the outfield, replacing him again with Ramon Hernandez at first, with the underappreciated Ryan Hanigan moving back behind the plate, seemed unlikely to the Reds’ people I talked to.
Regardless, it’s a terrible night for Bruce, who is one of the more admirable young prospects for superstardom in the game, and whose 2009 now has to make you wonder if there isn’t something to what they used to call “The Sophomore Jinx.”
ON MR. FRANCOEUR:
The two hits were not exactly titanic blasts – one was the dying quail on which Bruce injured himself, and the other a grounder that Jerry Hairston nearly made a fine play on – but Jeff Francoeur and the Mets will take it.
The positive – and this is mirrored in Atlanta with the acquisition of Ryan Church – is that even with players in funks, with reputations, with management angry at them – at this stage in the season the team getting rid of them usually charge a slight premium. You deal Church or Francoeur for a comparable player and, maybe, a prospect. Here it was a straight-up change-of-scene exchange, with the pre-set advantage to the Mets because of the age difference and the higher ceiling Francoeur still offers.
In the stands, it was obvious that after a summer of Argenis Reyes, Wilson Valdez, Fernando Martinez, et al, Mets fans were happy just to see them add a new player who, in the past, has appeared on his own baseball card.
The first “Francoeur” jersey was, apparently, sold to Joel Francisco, who wore it proudly just in front of the press box tonight.
Some Mets Afraid Of Ghosts
I hate ghosts. They’re spooky. And I don’t respond well to spooky behavior.
— Amy Poehler as “Maxine Walken,” Saturday Night Live, 2008
It is beyond tempting to give names to any of the three players involved, but as the New York Mets prepared for their road trip beginning in Milwaukee, those guys – and maybe more – are worried about ghosts.
The Mets are staying at the venerable Pfister Hotel and once again the 106-year old landmark has been cited as a place in which rooms might be booked by Supernatural Expedia. The local legend is that it’s one of the hotel’s founders, well-dressed and amiably, if somewhat transparently, still greeting guests from a perch on the 9th floor.
Cardinals’ infielder Brendan Ryan told a local television reporter that he sensed something from another world in his room at the Pfister: “It was more like a moving light that kind of passed through the room. It was very strange. The room got a little bit chillier. Strange things. Strange things.”
This is from a guy who has had to participate in the Bat-The-Pitcher-8th deal, so he knows his strange.
One non-believing Met has been egging on two of his teammates. One is a rookie who seems a little vulnerable to suggestion (and should really wonder if he isn’t being set-up for a Tim Hudson/Moe Drabowsky level of sophisticated practical joke while at the Pfister). The other is veteran whom the provocateur claims is seriously contemplating staying at another hotel and seems to have convinced himself he’d rather take his chances at Jack Nicholson’s place from The Shining.
Before you observe that the Mets should be more worried about trying to find the ghost of their offense, just in terms of the Pfister, there should be more practical concerns. The hotel was the scene of the most infamous fights in modern baseball history, which has twice been described to me with the phrase “Wild West Saloon Brawl.” The perpetrators were the 1974 Yankees, arriving in Milwaukee on September 30 for the end of the season with a slim chance to reclaim the lead in the A.L. East. Instead, backup catcher Rick Dempsey and backup utilityman Bill Sudakis, already jabbing on the plane, both tried to get through the Pfister’s revolving front door.
The breaking of the logjam at the door seemed to propel the two men into each other. The next thing that amazed on-lookers knew, furniture and players were flying around the lobby (the New York Times elegantly called it “brief but violent”). At least one vintage lamp was used like a javelin, and one version of the story has a chair being launched, either by Dempsey or Sudakis. Dempsey later told me that he knew if Sudakis, or somebody, didn’t stop him, he was going to kill Sudakis with his bare hands.
Unfortunately, the late Bobby Murcer decided he had to break it up with his bare hands. Murcer, a month away from being traded to the Giants for Bobby Bonds, also broke his pinky in the process and had to be scratched from the do-or-die game the next night. His replacement in rightfield, Lou Piniella, backed away from a tweener fly ball in the 7th, costing the Yankees the lead, in a game they would lose in extra innings – and in the process, be eliminated.
There should be at least a plaque in the Pfister about that. And if there really is a ghost, it should be of the 1974 Yankees’ post-season hopes.
YES, YOU WALK JETER TO PITCH TO MARIANO RIVERA, BUT:
As various announcers kept insisting with jaws agape that with runners at first and second, two out, Derek Jeter up, Mariano Rivera on deck, Yankees 3, Mets 2, top nine, that the Mets were insane to have Francisco Rodriguez pitch – even cautiously – to Jeter, two thoughts occurred to me:
1) What exactly would you do to K-Rod in the event Rivera got his bat on the ball and blooped a single somewhere, or worked out a bases-loaded walk (as he did)?, and…
2) Did anybody remember Joe Torre’s assessment of his outfield a few years back? That based on pure athleticism, his second most-gifted centerfielder would be Derek Jeter, and his first most-gifted centerfielder would be… Mariano Rivera?
EXTRAORDINARY IMAGE OF THE WEEK:
Jerry Manuel, whose obvious humanity earns him the respect and affection of virtually all who are privileged to know him, still can produce an occasional howler of a blooper.
On both Friday and Saturday, he insisted to the media that he was comfortable playing Ryan Church in center “because he’s played it in JFK.” We all assumed he meant RFK in Washington, because center at JFK Airport is around 18,000 square yards and has planes in it.
That New Ballpark Smell
In the summer after my eighth birthday, my parents brought me to Yankee Stadium for the first time and gingerly explained that the building in which we sat had been built way back in 1923. “That was before either of you were born!,” I exclaimed with remarkably adult grammatical structure.
Weeks later, a Hastings-On-Hudson village program of some sort sent a busload of us kids to the upper deck at Shea Stadium. I looked around in the greenish lighting, at the cracked cement, and the rusty bolts, and the overhead fixtures that looked like our back porch light at home, and the building that vibrated in the wake of the jets overhead, and told the adult that if Yankee Stadium had been built in 1923 as my parents said, Shea Stadium must’ve been built in 1886.
Shea was three years old at the time.
It is in that context in which the Mets’ new home must be judged. The first 100 most important facts about CitiField are identical: it ain’t Shea. While the now-leveled stadium was a genuinely praiseworthy attempt to mix civic expenditure with private business, and use modern technology to build a facility suited to both football and baseball, it was a dump from day one.
Thus, yes, apart from the marvelous “Ebbets Field Wrapper” that reduced to tears a friend of mine who once had season tickets to the original, and apart from the Rotunda that Bud Selig said he came to this game to see (and he saw the original), it is Coors Field plus Jacobs Field plus Citizens Bank with a few echoes of the Polo Grounds and Tiger Stadium in the overhanging rightfield porch. But it ain’t Shea.
Also, that Rotunda looks very retro at night — especially with Rickey and Robinson on the wall there.
Also, if CitiField averages even half the oddities of this opening night, it will be a place of weirdness not unlike Ebbets Field was.
In ascending order of fulfilling The McCarver Rule (“At every game you will see something, or at least a combination of things, you have never seen before”), here are the top unique or unlikely events from the park’s opening:
8. The Mets’ first game in their field featured a hold by Duaner Sanchez (released by the Mets last month), and a save by Heath Bell (traded by the Mets in 2006).
7. Somebody decided that the best way to christen a ballpark replacing a stadium notorious for 45 deafening seasons in the flight paths of LaGuardia was to have a military jet flyover complete with near-sonic boom.
6. The home team’s starting pitcher fell off the mound with two out in the second, laughed it off, and proceeded to give up four straight hits, including the opposing starting pitcher’s first in the big leagues.
5. That other pitcher to christen the ballpark, Walter Silva, was not listed in the Padres’ Media Guide and his biography had to be disseminated to the media via a photocopied sheet.
4. In an almost literal case of opening night jitters, the game was decided when the eminently reliable Ryan Church dropped Luis Rodriguez’s fly for a three-base error, and then Rodriguez scored on a flinch of a balk by Pedro Feliciano.
3. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg got a foul ball off the bat of Fernando Tatis in the 9th Inning, even though he was sitting behind the home plate screen.
2. Six innings earlier, a stray cat desperately trying to exit the field leaped onto the low fence directly in front of New York Governor David Paterson.
1. The first batter in the first inning in the first game in CitiField, Jody Gerut, homered – the first time in baseball history a new stadium has been so christened.
Baseball Nerd 