It Happened

Feel like I should talk about this since for the final two innings I was literally shaking and I never got up from my chair because if I moved from where I had been sitting for the previous hour and a half I would ruin everything and feel like an asshole.

I screamed when the final out was recorded, because for the first time in Mets history a pitcher wearing a Mets uniform threw a no-hitter. All but one team - the San Diego Padres, est. 1969 - has thrown at least one. It was a black cloud that always followed the New York Mets. It was a statistical oddity that underscored that the Mets are an inferior franchise that fuck up every chance they get.

On their 8,020th attempt, the Mets threw a no-hitter.

I feel embarrassed even admitting to my visceral reaction, but I think it’d be a hell of a lot weirder if I didn’t react that way. I thought for a long time about it, and I can confidently estimate that I’ve watched at least 1,700 of the previous 8,019 Met games. So 1,700 times, something never happened. And then tonight, something that never happened happened. Sometimes when something that never ever happens happens, it’s really bad, like when a second baseman drops an easy pop up to lose a game against your geographic arch nemesis where seemingly everyone you know is watching. That sucked. That physically hurt. Same with your favorite player looking at a third strike to end a season where you were the best team in the league and you let yourself believe that it was The year. That also hurt. Tonight was great. It’s still great as I’ve been flipping for the last three hours across the cableverse between SNY, ESPN and MLB Network finding more and more opinions (they range from Johan Santana was “great” to Johan Santana was “awesome”) and camera angles and interviews (“This was great!”) and reading tweets from Mets fans typing and texting out their disbelief and joy. Hearing in the postgame press conference that manager Terry Collins told Santana he was his hero, and Collins took ten seconds to try to not get choked up to say something like, “Yeah whatever. Sports.”? So embarrassingly corny and perfect. Ridiculous and stupid and loaded with dumb machismo “sports is war” garbage and fucking great. Also, WFAN Mets broadcast producer Chris Majkowski (@metsWFAN), who is there for every single game, who has tweeted every time a Met pitcher gave up the first hit of a game “Not today boss” for something like four years got to finally tweet this

I actually read the tweet before the final pitch of the game appeared on television, confirming once and for all that “live” is a seven second delay. It didn’t completely ruin the moment because I automatically assumed it could be a terrible prank and it proved that I literally had to see it to believe it.

There has been many ink spilled trying to perfectly articulate how baseball is a metaphor for life that basically tries to say that because there are 162 games played in a calendar year that following a baseball team is like following your life where millionaires play out your daily battles between good and evil. Sometimes Luis Castillo will inexplicably drop a pop up/someone close to you dies out of nowhere. Sometimes Johan Santana throws a no-hitter against the team that ended The year/you meet your future wife at the Oscars after you accept your Best Original Screenplay award. Something like that.

Of course it’s dumb.Life is life, not life is life and also baseball. But following a baseball team like the Mets does feel a lot like being religious: You blindly have faith that one day it’s all going to pay off and you’re going to get to go to Heaven when you die and ask John Lennon why he was such an asshole because you know he’d appreciate your honesty/your team is going to win a World Series, but there’s very little evidence that it’s going to happen. During the journey to the destination you can draw strength from your Faith and do important and amazing things, and sometimes the Mets will have exciting and successful seasons and that’ll be fine and dandy, but in the end it’s all about a cloud with your name on it and for the 25 men that play for your team to win a championship.

But what the fuck am I supposed to do? Over the years as I developed adult friendships and other interests (Television! Writing! Writing about television! Writing for television! Comedy! Ladiez! Not necessarily in this order!) my relying on the Mets to inform me on what mood I should be in dissipated, but I still end up watching a part of or all of 90-100 games a year. I still play baseball on Saturdays when the weather is right, even though I’m not particularly good. I hate that I’m not good at something I love. I’m reminded of it almost every Saturday, but I keep coming back for more. Baseball will always be a part of me, for better or worse, and when the Mets finally got a no-hitter tonight after I’ve seen them somehow not manage to do it 1,700 times before I was very happy. I gladly took phone calls of congratulation as if I had thrown the thing myself, after the eighth inning I texted friends who I figured weren’t watching to alert them that something special might happen, I made sure not to tweet at all because when the game started I wasn’t tweeting anything and I wasn’t going to blow this. And when the Mets win a World Series when I’m older than 3 years old so I can actually appreciate and be aware of what the hell is going on it’s going to be amazing, because I invested all of this time through the years rooting for the team. And lord, it hasn’t been easy.


I emcee a trivia night every Tuesday in Brooklyn. I usually write half of the questions but because my writing partner is on vacation I'm responsible for all of them this week. I went from joking that I know what my very first question will be to writing "Which major league baseball franchise is the only team to never throw a no-hitter?" to thinking "When am I ever going to get an opportunity like this ever again? When will us Met fans? Let's celebrate."

1. Who pitched the first no-hitter in New York Mets history?


When June began the Mets never threw a no-hitter and haven't won a World Series in my lifetime.
Now the first thing can be crossed off the bucket list.

One more to go.

No, I'm not telling you what the other questions are.

The Mets and the Success Cycle

When you run a baseball team, the first thing that you should do (and I doubt the Mets have done this in a while) is to take a look at where you are on the success cycle. I haven't been able to find much reference online to this concept as it relates to baseball, but it's an enormously important concept in business. In business, however, it is referred to as the life cycle.

In business, products and even companies as a whole participate in some general permutation of this cycle. A business or product will debut, will grow, and will hit their initial peak. From that point, they can adapt and make changes which will bring them to a new, higher plateau, or they can be allowed to decline until they no longer exist. Where you are on that cycle determines what kinds of decisions you will make - whether to invest in R&D, whether to make capital improvements, etc.

In baseball, however, all 30 teams exist and will continue to exist regardless of their success or failure. One look at the Pirates or Royals will assure you that no matter how bad you are and for how long, you won't go out of business (contraction talk aside). What does remain true, however, is the fact that teams are better or worse equipped to "make a run" at the playoffs or to "rebuild" depending on factors as plentiful as the ages of their star players, the condition of their facilities, changes in ownership, changes in the economy of their surrounding area, and the relative strength or weakness of their farm system.

As far as the success cycle and baseball goes, it appears the most prominent article on it was written years ago by Jonah Keri over at Baseball Prospectus. Although he never explicitly defines the success cycle, he takes an in-depth look at the 2002 Pittsburgh Pirates and discusses the importance of determining your place on it:

The cycle is a baseball continuum on which every team resides. To measure a team's place in the cycle, assess its talent in the majors and minors. Can the players in the organization, mixed with a few trade acquisitions and free agents the team could reasonably sign, yield a competitive team? More precisely, can the team expect to compete while its current core of major-league players remain productive and under contract?

The Mets Salary Catastrophe

Adam Rubin over at ESPN New York had a great blog today outlining the morass which is the Mets current salary structure.

The 2011 commitments:

Santana $22.5 million
Carlos Beltran $18.5 million
Jason Bay $16 million
David Wright $14 million
Oliver Perez $12 million
Francisco Rodriguez $11.5 million
Reyes $11 million
Luis Castillo $6 million
Ryota Igarashi $1.75 million
16 players at major league minimum: $6.4 million

Total: $119.65 million

Hat tip to Metsblog for the link. To continue our horn-tooting, we at Fonzie Forever pointed this situation out in almost identical terms back in February:

The Mets contract commitments in 2011 are horrific:

Santana: $22.5
Beltran: $20.071
Bay: $18.125
Wright: $14.25
Perez: $12.0
K-Rod: $12.167
Reyes: $11.0 club option

I'll save you some calculator time. That is $110 MILLION committed to just seven players.

Awful, ain't it? I'm not sure exactly where Rubin got his numbers from, and there are different numbers floating around all over the place, depending on whether you go to Cot's, or USA Today, or elsewhere, but I got my numbers here.

Here's the reason why this sucks - aside from the obvious, being that Jason Bay and Oliver Perez are owed more than $30 million dollars. There seems to be no plan. Are we building with youth around a core of stars? Are we adding payroll next year? Decreasing payroll? Did we enter 2010 with serious plans of winning this year?

I get more and more fed up with it every day. This started out as a hobby for writing about baseball, but as each day passes it becomes more and more apparent that the Mets might actively need someone (or someones... ahem Amazin Avenue) to expose how foolish Mets ownership has been. They've been awful, and I'm starting to have my doubts that the Mets will ever win with the current ownership[1].

Ownership clearly has the goal of hanging around the fringes of the race every year. Playing meaningful games in September. Adding a piece to get the fans excited enough to sell tickets each season.

Is that good enough for you?

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[1] Notice I did not say management... for the record, I still think that Minaya and Manuel are doing at least an average job.

Opening Daydream

In this writer's humble opinion, baseball is the greatest game ever invented. I could not imagine any other competition matching its blend of power and finesse, of strategy, of dull repetition somehow delivered in short explosive bursts.

It is beautiful in its symmetry (three outs per side per inning, every infield identical) and in its asymmetry (nine random innings, and each outfield unique).

It is beautiful in its democracy - every player must bat when it is his turn to bat. There is no feeding the ball to Kobe every time. You have no control over who the ball gets hit to. It is incredible that baseball will make heroes out of Endy Chavez, and DeWayne Wise, and Aaron Boone just as often as it will of Albert Pujols.

But most importantly, it is beautiful in that the game is not ever over until it is over. In football, you can kneel and run out the clock. Basketball devolves into a bizarre mini-game of fouling. In soccer and hockey you can try to keep possession of the ball until relieved by the clock.

But in baseball, there is no such luxury. You don't get to sneak away from the game until your opponent is completely vanquished. In fact, you must deliver to him his opportunity to come back. In every game, you must attain 27 outs to win.

The same can be said about the course of a long season. Although comebacks from deep in the standings are rare, you can still hope and pray while you remain mathematically alive. There is always hope. Until you are down to your final out and strike, anything can happen.

There is no time that this feeling is stronger than on Opening Day. And for no team is that feeling stronger than for the New York Mets.

Who can explain the Mets and what they do to us? Who can explain the white-knuckle finishes to so many of our seasons? How can you rationalize their incredible record on Opening Day except to say that they have an uncanny ability to provide hope in a way which no other franchise in any other sport can compare.

The Mets were great today, so please forgive me for my one quick tangent. I realize that most of you who read Fonzie Forever look forward to our thoroughly grounded perspective on things. I have been very proud of our willingness to even-handedly criticize the team, and to ground our opinions deeply in statistics, scouting, and other objective fact.

But not today. Today I will allow myself to dream.

Something Ron Darling said during the broadcast today was truly brilliant. At the time, he was discussing David Wright's troubles last year, but what he said is applicable to baseball in general. In fact, it crystallizes into one sentence exactly why hope springs eternal as a baseball fan.

"When you're a major league player and you are struggling," Darling said, "You are an inch away, not a mile away."

And he's absolutely right. On a micro level, he is absolutely correct about David Wright. Only in baseball does a microscopic hitch in your swing turn an All-Star into a journeyman. Only in baseball does a loss of 1 or 2% of your skills knock you out of the game entirely.

But Darling's point has a broader application than that. We wrote a post here in February where we discussed this ephemeral concept:

Baseball is so much more than just a string of isolated offseason transactions. And now, with the snow on the ground in Flushing finally beginning to melt, we as fans are transported to Port St. Lucie, clipboards in hand, listening to the sound of Johan Santana's fastball popping into the mitt of one of our thousand catchers.

And regardless of how underwhelmed you were with how the Mets did this offseason, you've got to find yourself thinking, if only for a moment, "can we do this?"

Tiny little incremental improvements make an enormous difference in baseball. So no matter what position your team is in, and no matter how disaffected you are by the long cold winter of disappointment, there is reason to dream.

In baseball, you can make the playoffs by winning 90 games. That is only eight more wins than a team that is a .500 team. That's eight lucky games, eight fortuitous bounces of the ball, eight great managerial decisions or bad umpiring calls.

So on a day when the Mets play such fantastic baseball, you might find yourself thinking about Darling's theorem. What if the Mets offseason plan executed itself perfectly? What if, for once, we were a little lucky instead of unlucky? Because it truly would not take much to make this Mets team, projected as a middle-of-the-pack team, to put themselves in the playoff picture.

What if...

... Reyes and Beltran come back according to schedule and play like All-Stars?
... Wright regains just SOME of his power and hits 25 home runs this year instead of 10?
... Angel Pagan maintains his level of play and becomes the best fourth outfielder in MLB?
... Just one of Pelfrey, Maine, or Perez takes their game to the next level? It is not so crazy to think that JUST ONE of these very talented young pitchers can elevate themselves to an ace. I wouldn't bet on any individual one of them doing so - but I wouldn't bet against one of the group doing so.
... Jeff Francoeur and Rod Barajas have decently good seasons, giving the Mets one of the deepest lineups in the entire National League?

On Opening Day, you are allowed to dream about these things. Although when all is said and done, over the course of 162 games, the best team will probably win - it does not take much for a contender to put itself into the conversation.

And that's the beauty of baseball. You are always just an inch away.

The Oliver Perez Volatility Experiment

One of the things you hear as a Mets fan over and over again is how there is a "Good Ollie and Bad Ollie." That Oliver Perez is a coin flip. That you never know what he will give you on a given night.

It can be frustrating to watch the guy sometimes, but you may be surprised to learn that Oliver Perez is not much more or less "volatile" than any other average starter.

For the purposes of this discussion, volatility simply means the size of the gap between his good starts and his bad starts. A less volatile pitcher will have, obviously, less variation between the two. I am sure that many other, smarter people have tackled this issue, but I think seeing a graphical comparison between a few Mets will be helpful.

The below chart compares three pitchers. Oliver Perez and John Maine from 2007, the last season they both pitched full seasons, and Johan Santana from 2008. I included Johan as an exemplar of what an ace looks like in comparison to two average starters.

The "Decline" of Johan Santana

We here at Fonzie Forever are beginning to gear up for yet another epic battle in our fantasy baseball league, and in our search came across an article about Johan Santana. The article, by Tristan Cockroft at ESPN, was entitled "Johan Santana's Decline Has Begun."

I wouldn't usually call a fantasy baseball article to everyone's attention, but Cockroft's conclusions in the article are obviously founded in reality - he believes that Santana's decline in real life will affect his fantasy value. Cockcroft, who usually does great work, concludes:

It's at this point I get on my soapbox: Johan Santana's downside is a finish outside the top 100 players of 2010 and easily out of the top 10 starting pitchers. Not only that, but I'd even argue that it's almost twice as probable an outcome as a season that puts his name into serious Cy Young discussion.

That's not based entirely upon concerns with his ongoing rehabilitation from surgery, though that's absolutely a factor. It's more than that: Santana's declining strikeout rate, diminished velocity and the New York Mets' weakened offense are all warning signs that a collapse might be coming.

I agree with much of his premise - it is of course possible that ANY player's downside is a finish outside the Top 100 fantasy players - but his main idea, that Santana is in linear decline, is incorrect.

It is a common mistake by people to look at a series of values and draw a conclusion from them. It pleases people to draw conclusions, even faulty ones, from information we have at hand. If you are a given a series of numbers "2-4-6-8..." you are going to guess the next number is 10. Similarly, if you are given "2-4-8-16..." you will probably end up with 32.

For any kind of rational, mathematical system, this makes sense. However in baseball, it is faulty to look at a set of numbers trending in one direction in a linear fashion and simply to conclude that the trend will continue in that direction. Here is an example from Cockcroft:

Santana's swing-and-miss percentage -- usually a good indicator of a pitcher's strikeout potential -- has been in precipitous decline since joining the Mets, especially last season. Here are his numbers and rankings among qualified major league pitchers in the category since 2004:

2004: 66.3 percent contact rate on swings (1st)
2005: 74.2 percent (2nd)
2006: 74.8 percent (1st)
2007: 73.2 percent (2nd)
2008: 77.0 percent (10th)
2009: 78.4 percent (21st)

In a vacuum, you could easily say that his contact rate on swings will increase yet again this season. However with real life, and baseball is a great example, there are an infinite number of variables which go into numbers such as "contact rate." Could Santana have been pitching to contact? Could the NL East be loaded disproportionately with contact hitters? Could Citi Field have an excellent batter's eye?

The point is, you cannot look at a simple numerical series and assume that it will continue. Doing this is how people get KILLED in the stock market. Sets of numbers -- like a contact rate, or a stock value -- are simply recordings of things that have happened in history. They carry little or no predictive value for the future.

If Santana's fastball was 90.5 MPH on average last season, what do we know about the future? Nothing. All we know is that it was 90.5 last year. Even if his fastball declined 1 MPH per season for three seasons in a row, the most reliable information that we have tells us that his fastball was 90.5 MPH last year. And since we are dealing with a human being - a flesh and bone creature which isn't beholden to any mathematical trend - my money is on his fastball being 90.5 MPH again.

Indeed, real life evidence indicates that Santana has a chance to be better this year than last. Santana himself has claimed that he feels fantastic this year, and that at times last season he couldn't even bend his elbow. He is healthier now than before - and smart money would be on him succeeding greatly this year.

As far as fantasy goes, I actually agree with Cockcroft that there are enough reasons in fantasy to not draft Santana within the first 50 picks. But rumors of Santana's decline have been greatly exaggerated[1].

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[1] As for his claim that he's the best pitcher in the NL East... well... I like Santana and all, but I hear there is a new guy in Philly that might have something to say about that, not to mention a guy in Miami. It'll be very interesting to see how that shakes out.

This Is Why Hope Springs Eternal

For those of you who have followed Fonzie Forever, you know we were less than thrilled with the Mets this offseason. We didn't like the moves they made, didn't make, or tried to make (but failed)[1]. We didn't like the lack of commitment to a plan - to either compete or to rebuild. We didn't like the way they handled the Beltran injury situation.

It is fairly common knowledge, we think, that the general tone of most Mets-related blogging could fairly be described as snide, snarky, or negative much of the time. We've tried not to pile on unecessarily. But no matter where you come from, I don't think that anyone has been a fan of what the Mets have done over the last few months.

With all of that said, hope still springs eternal. The Star-Ledger had a little article on Sunday morning which is a great example of spring training optimism:

What Johan Santana's Pick-Up Line Might Sound Like

Since he is so boringly reliable and awesome, Johan Santana hasn't gotten much press this off-season. That said, I imagine that if Johan Santana were to go out and try to pick up women, his pick up line would go something like this:



I wouldn't bet against him being able to turn tickets into diamonds either, because the guy is just about good at everything. He even had a .255 OBP last season (watch your back, Omir Santos).