The Inner Circle of Baseball Hell

That is where Mets fans are currently residing, myself among them. Clearly God hates the Mets and their fans and has shown this to them by injuring everybody on their roster, presenting them with a succession of Steve Phillips, Jim Duquette, and Omar Minaya, by giving us a Braves-Yankees WS in 1999, and lastly by allowing the abortion that is this year's World Series. This isn't a "Oh, woe is us!" bullshit-Red Sox thing: that happened because of their city's and organization's racism. The Mets are cursed for no good goddamn reason and it has all led to us having to make a choice about rooting for the Yankees or Phillies in the classic matchup of mystique vs. grit.



Now there are those who say we should root for the Yankees. After all, we all know Yankees fans and many of us have friends who root for the Yankees. However, I must explain to you that any Yankee fan friends that you know are decent people are the exception to the rule. Yankees fans are obnoxious loudmouths with a ridiculous sense of entitlement and such a dearth of knowledge about baseball that they immortalize people like Scott Brosius while vilifying Alex Rodriguez. We Mets fans, despite the best attempts of the Wilpons to eradicate it, must not forget our heritage. And that heritage means hating and rooting against the Yankees with every fiber of our being. Paul O'Neill, Chuck Knoblauch, Roger Clemens, Derek Jeter, Andy Pettitte, A-Rod etc.--don't you just fucking hate these guys. I know I do and deep down you do too. We must not root for the Yankees. The Yankees are not our crosstown brethren, they are our crosstown fucking rivals, and if I didn't root for the Yankees after 9/11 when New York "needed " and "deserved" a World Series, then I'm sure as shit not rooting for them now. The Yankees deserve nothing.



"Well, then dtro," you might say, "I guess that means we have to root for the Phillies." To which I say FUCK NO! While it is important not to lose sight of our hate past in the presence of the nouveau-douchiness of the Phillies, let's not pretend that this team and fanbase are not ridiculously detestable. Phillies fans are drunken mongoloids with no loyalty to anyone but the Eagles. They are violent and despicable people who seek out confrontation with other fanbases and others within their own fanbase, because frankly there's nothing better to do in a shithole like Philadelphia but get drunk and fight and then go complain about the best QB in your franchise's history. Philadelphians harbor a pitiful yet grating inferiority complex regarding the city of New York (and well they should) and lack the class, sense of history, integrity, or creativity to come up with their own rallying cries. The Phillies themselves have a roster of fuckfaced fucks. Jimmy Rollins is a douche, who likes to make big claims and shush Mets fans in the CitiField crowd while putting up a .296 OBP. He is probably the second most overrated player in the NL, trailing only Ryan Howard. Cole Hamels likes to call our boys choke artists? Choke on my dick. Chase Utley looks like he should start up a barbershop quartet with Wes Welker where they can sing about their hair parted perfectly down the middle (not to mention he leans into about 15 pitches a year). And Shane Victorino is a special kind of douche, my hatred of whom cannot be expressed in words. We may be in the inner circle of baseball hell right now, but rest assured there is a special place reserved in baseball hell for Shane Dicktorino after his fatal stabbing a couple of months from now. Just kidding...but I seriously wouldn't mind if he got stabbed and slowly bled to death.

That's right Mets fans, our best bet is to ignore this whole fucking thing. This is an opportunity to spend time with family and friends and not think about baseball until we're welcoming Matt Holliday with open arms and preparing for a 2010 Mets team that will exorcise all of our demons. And if you still feel bad about baseball right now, there's always this to cheer you up:

Milledge and Manny for All-Star

Because Major League Baseball and the All-Star game in particular under the leadership of Bud Selig has been retarded. Because noone can really pretend to be that mad at Manny for doing steroids or whatever, because everyone freaking did it for the last 15 years or so. Because Lastings Milledge is one of this blog's favorite players, and we know he is going to turn around his career in Washington and even if he doesn't he was still worth more than a 29-year old platoon outfielder and a douchebag fucking plumber masquerading as a major league catcher. Because the Nationals suck and having a AAA player represent them in the all-star game is a hilarious concept. Because Manny is still entertaining and funny to me. Because fuck the all-star game; it's pointlessly long and stupid and ended in a tie a few years ago and someone from every team has to make it and the managers try to get everyone in the game and the pitchers can't go for more than a couple innings and for some reason Bud Selig thought it would be a good idea to give world series home-field adavantage to the winning league even though the game is often decided by token all-stars from inferior teams that have no shot at the playoffs. Because MLB puts together their all-star ballots before the season and never changes them to accomodate changes in clubs' rosters. Because of all this I encourage everyone to vote for Manny Ramirez and Lastings Milledge to start as outfielders for the National League.

And also vote for Beltran as the 3rd guy, because he is awesome.

Ah, the smell of the fresh cut crack of the bat

Well, baseball is back just in time. My bracket sucked,and the seven months of NBA/NHL playoffs are about to start dominating sportscenter, so thank God baseball is here. Forget for a minute that ESPN realized that the Sunday Night Baseball* team was horrible and then thought to themselves "Hmmm, how can we make this more horrible?...I know, Steve Phillips!" Let's just focus on the good things, like Johan Santana at one o'clock today and Ricky Nolasco hopefully coming through for 3 different fantasy teams of mine.

*I think maybe I'll use a Pozterisk** here to mention that I no longer believe a word Joe Morgan says. He can be talking about anything and I just think "No, he totally made that up. He pulled that out of his ass. This guy's an idiot." Like he said that Chase Utley had trouble on breaking balls last year due to his nagging hip injury, and I thought "No. He made that up. Even if that's true, there's no way in hell Joe Morgan knows that." And Jon Miller's lengthy explanations of OPS in the first inning were just downright insulting. Thankyou so much, Jon, for explaining that, but there's really no need as I have been sentient for the last 10 years.

**Read some of this guy's posts to understand.

Anyway, let's get some predictions going for the baseball season. I was pretty terrible at this last year, but I've got a good feeling this time around:



AL
EAST: Red Sox. Fuck this team and their racist mongoloid fans.
CENTRAL: Indians. The Twins were a fluke, the White Sox are old, the Tigers have meh pitching, the Royals suck. Therefore, the mediocre Indians win a mediocre division.
WEST: A's. Fuck it why not. The Angels let Teixeira walk and thus have a shitty offense. Lackey, E. Santana, and Escobar are hurt at the moment. I'm going out on a limb and saying that the A's young pitching comes through and the Holliday-Giambi-Cust combo is enough.
WILD CARD: Rays. I will never pcik the Yankees, and though their rotation is awesome, I don't think their lineup is amazing, especially with Anabolex out. I think the Rays are all-around solid and that Matt Joyce will have a huge breakout year (just fucking with you LCT).

MVP: Grady Sizemore. Division winner, good player, Jeter black.
CY YOUNG: Jon Lester. If he's really good, the cancer* thing will push him over the top.
ROY: Matt Wieters seems to be some sort of combo of Johnny Bench and Jesus, so we'll go with him.

*Ok, so AIDS was the disease of the 90s and cancer has been the disease of the 2000s. What will be the disease of the next ten years? The leading contenders would probably be heavyweights like alzheimers and autism, but I can't help but root for an underdog like harlequin ichthyosis.



NL
EAST: The Mets of New York town. 4 awesome players + better bullpen - Willie Randolph + Daniel Murphy's unbridled intensity + Gary fucking Sheffield - Aaron Heilman - Scot Schoeneweis = who fucking knows, but I'm not picking the Philthies.
CENTRAL: Cubs. This is definitely the most obvious choice. Why do they even have this division any more?
WEST: Dodgers. Solid lineup, ok pitching. The D'Backs aren't bad and neither are the Giants somehow, but the Dodgers lineup is deep and Chad Billingsley will be awesome (I hope, for fantasy purposes).
WILD CARD: Phillies. Ugh. Braves have a good rotation, but the goddamn Phillies just will not go away.

MVP: Raul Ibanez. If it's not Pujols, it generally goes to the 4th or 5th best Phillie hitter.
CY YOUNG: Johan. The man, the legend.
ROY: Tommy Hanson. I think that's the Braves pitcher who will probably come up at some point. I don't really know. Who cares really? Ben Grieve once won one of these.

Ok, that is all.

Anabolex Roidriguez

Hey guys, I don't know if you've heard the news, but...wait are you sitting down? Wait for it...

ARod did steroids!



That's right. A famous baseball player did steroids. This fresh faced young Mariner you see above will one day take a bunch of steroids and hit a bunch of homeruns and such. Here are some quick thoughts about all this:

1)That sucks. It would have been nice for ARod to break Bonds' homerun record and be clean. At least now we'll have a cheater who was slightly less of an asshole than Barry Lamar.

2) Who cares? I really don't need to read a bunch of shithead baseball writers fume about legacies and the history and integrity of baseball. If I hear one more guy bitch and moan about how betrayed they feel by Mark and Sammy, and Bonds and ARod so fucking help me God. Look, I love baseball, and it's pretty clear that a lot of players were cheating for at least a decade (AKA my entire childhood).That sucks and it really bothered me. But as writers go on and on about steroids, and George Mitchell leads an "investigation," and the government wastes everyone's fucking time and money going afer Bonds and Clemens I just cannot care any more. So fuck it.

3)How awesome would it be if Jeter was one of the other 104 players on the list. God that would be great. I think a number of baseball hacks' heads would explode. Or Eckstein, that would crack me up.

4)God I hope they never catch Piazza.

5)Clearly everyone who has ever been on the Rangers did steroids. Pudge, Palmeiro, ARod, Juan Gon, Canseco, Kevin Elster, Rusty Greer, etc. If anyone has ever played for the Rangers they have done steroids. It's science.

6)It really makes no damn sense to try and keep some guys out of the Hall of Fame just because they were caught. McGwire never got caught. Barry Bonds never actually failed a test as far as I know. It's pretty obvious that fucking everyone was doing steroids and trying to guess who was clean is retarded. Did anyone really suspect ARod before this? No, so just because we don't really suspect Griffey or Frank Thomas or Piazza or Maddux or Pedro or Manny doesn't mean they are more deserving of the Hall of Fame than ARod, Bonds, McGwire, Sosa, or Clemens. Nobody knows, so just compare them to their peers not to what you suspect they might have been or might have done.

7)Wow, the MLB players union really sucks. Way to protect those anonymous samples guys. This seems like a huge fuck up on their part. Still, they're miles better than the NFL players union, which mandates that you play with concussions and gives you a pat on the back after you retire and $40-50 for every post-career stroke (depending on the severity of your resuslting paralysis).

8)Fuck the Yankees!

If you want to read something insightful and pretty much dead on about this whole mess check out this post from ShysterBall.

Who to root for in the MLB Playoffs: Abbreviated Version

Well, not these guys obviously. I still don't think this team is better than the Mets, they're just better at not sucking ass at the worst possible times. Although I must say I really enjoy watching games in Citizen's Bank Park. No, it's not because of the great sightlines, or those Luzinski pork sandwiches, or the newness and cleanness of it. I think it's because it makes me nostalgic for the Amity field on Knapp St. and Avenue V where I used to play when I was 11 and could almost hit homeruns...except Amity had higher fences so you didn't get those real cheap ones like at CBP.

Not these guys either. Why? Well, they traded the only guy I really liked on the team in batshit insane Manny Ramirez (more on him later). Of course you also have the fact that they are from Boston and are not only cheered on by the prejudiced fucks (yes, I am prejudiced against folks from Massachusetts, so what?) but also by a growing legion of bandwagon hopping dicks that rival only the late 90s Yankees fans in their number and loathesomeness. Plus the Sox have already won 2 WS titles in the lsat 4 years, and the Celtics won this past year, and the Patriots cheated teir way to 3 Super Bowl wins. Do the bastards up in Boston deserve to see another championship team? I say hell no. It's really amazing how fast these guys went from a team to root for in '04 to beat the Yankees to becoming the Yankees themselves.

Eric Karros, Mike Piazza, Raul Mondesi, Hideo Nomo, that other guy. Wha's not to like about this team? Wait, what? Why are these guys on this 50 year anniversary 2008 poster dealie? Anyway, I've always been a fan of Manny's (interesting note: I used to get batting lessons from a former coach of Manny's from when he played for Youth Service. Also of note, Mel Zitter never did shit for my swing). Obviously it would be great to see Manny succeed to the chagrin of those knoblickers up in Boston who did not appreciate the fact that, despite not caring whatsoever about the game, Manny is one of the best hitters of all time. Torre getting to the WS a year after the Yanks kicked him to the curb would also be fun. Also, they're not the Phillies and Hiroki Kuroda and Andre Ethier made some contributions to my fantasy team down the stretch. So I say, root for the Dodgers (even if Ned Coletti is a stupid jerk).

And, of course, your obvious choice for most root-worthy team is the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. Yea, Devil. Let's not get bogged down in what the Mets might have looked like over the past four years with Scott Kazmir on the team and instead focus on the fact that this team went from worst to first in a division that includes the Yankees and Red Sox. The Rays winning would be a huge slap in the face to the high-payroll teams in their division and Akinori Iwamura wears a glove made out of the skin of a whale species so rare that none of you have even heard of it (at least, that's why I think he won't let people get a good look at it) which is pretty cool. Also, there's a chance that Matt Garza could hit Youkilis in the face with a fastball, and I think that's clearly a good thing for everyone.

Conclusion: Root for a Rays-Dodgers World Series. That is clearly the outcome that causes the most pain and suffering to the Yankees, Red Sox, and their dimwitted amoral slope-browed fanbases. Also, fuck the Phillies. In the end, I gotta root for the Rays to win it all, because screw Joe Torre.

Baseball is back...

...and guess what? The Mets fucking suck. Well not totally, but they're 2-4 as of today and they already wasted a great start by Santana. And why do the Mets suck?

My short answer is the combination of the two men in the center of this picture. Willie Randolph is still a bad manager and Scott Schoeneweis (correct spelling) cannot get righties out. However, somebody neglected to tell Willie this fact, and so he let that fuck pitch to Rollins and Victorino who got hits and loaded the bases for Carlos "Ironhands" Delgado to make an error(Feliciano was in PR on family business, but I get the feeling Willie wouldn't have used him anyway). Fuckity fuck. That game yesterday (and thank god I can't watch them down here, b/c I would break my hand punching a fridge) was very reminiscent of last September. As I intimated in my reactions to the Santana trade this team's lineup is pretty weak after Beltran (not to mention Jose isn't getting on base so far) so we really need our pitching to step up. Pedro's hurt and Willie really likes Scho and Sosa, so we may be up shit creek here.












In other baseball news: LCT's and Pankey's team suck too. Worse than the Mets, so far. In a comment on my last post I made some cursory predictions for the MLB this year. I have decided to amend these, cop out style, with the benefit of a week+ of games. Here they go:

AL:
EAST-Red Sox---they are the best team in the AL still
CENTRAL-Indians--more complete than the Tigers, w/ the best 1-2 punch in baseball
WEST-Angels--the Mariners still suck in my opinion and the Angels are good enough, even with Lackey and Escobar hurt, to win this shit-ass division
WILD CARD-Tigers--I can't bring myself to pick the Yank$ and I assume these guys are gonna start hitting like motherfuckers
MVP-Manny Ramirez--he's off to a hot start and will get tons of RBIs on that team, barely edges out Miguel Cabrera (EDIT: and maybe ARod)
CY YOUNG-Fausto Carmona--he's my favorite pitcher in the AL; just fucking nasty
ROY-Fuck should I know?

NL:
EAST-Mets--I know I said they suck, but they're still good; I still like their rotation better than the Braves or Philthies
CENTRAL-Cubs--Sorry, peanut. They're better all-around than the Brewers with an adequate lineup and deepish rotation in a weak division
WEST-D'backs--Sorry, pankey. Webb and Haren plus all their young hitters improving makes them my favorite. This division is really tight except for the Giants. To me, the Rockies don't have the pitching, the Padres don't have the hitting, and the Dodgers will find too much time for Juan Pierre no matter what Torre says. (Addendum, Ned Coletti is really really stupid)
WILD CARD-Braves--I know, I know. How can I pick the Braves, when I can't bring myself to pick the Yank$? I hate to pick them, but they have a very good lineup and enough pitching to beat out the Phillies. The Brewers should put up a good fight until Ben Sheets ruptures his spleen in July, and the teams in the West are just gonna beat the shit out of each other.
MVP-David Wright--DWright will lock up his second in a row with another outstanding year...what? what's that you say? Jimmy Rollins won last year because his team won one more game despite Wright outplaying him in basically every facet of the game? Despite him being the 3rd or possibly 4th best hitter on his own team? Fuck that shit.
CY YOUNG-Johan Santana--I don't like to be too homerish or make wild predictions. But Johan will win 42 games with a 0.23 ERA and 400+ strikeouts. Roughly.
ROY-You ever get mad at a roofed-in stadium and don't know exactly how to express your anguish? Say it with me: FUK-U-DOME.

Up next: I feel like I should talk about the pregnant dude. Fucking creepy as shit.