Tuffy’s Refrigerator Logic

There’s 200 days or so of baseball to come this season and it can be quite intimidating to jump into the deep end of the baseball viewing pool.

To help, Refrigerator Logic is providing a list of reasons to watch every Major League Baseball team for the 2008 season. Anyone that’s read all the team lists should be able to pull up the MLB schedule on any day in early June and find reasons to enjoy any contest on the board that night.

Please join in the comments to add your own reasons. Tell everyone why your team is worth three and a half hours of their lives on any given day. Make us care and we’ll be there with a tasty beverage and an appreciation for what you feel each time your team takes the field.

Don’t Be Negative

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
-Albert Einstein

Nate Silver at Baseball Prospectus continues to wrestle with the vaunted player PECOTA cards this winter, trying to get them up in time to keep the nerdy hordes at bay with their ASCII torches on their TI-89 Titaniums. (Full disclosure: it took me forever to get the flicker just right on mine.)

Unfortunately, he’s still working on them. He seems to have run into complications that are keeping him from publishing the cards quite yet. It’s still unknown what might be holding back the statistical goodness.

However, my spies have hacked into Nate Silver’s computing powerhouse and have found the offending PECOTA card preventing Silver from publishing all the cards in good conscience:

That’s right; PECOTA predicts the move to the National League for Johan Santana will yield the first negative ERA in Major League Baseball history. Santana will embarrass the likes of the Washinton Nationals so badly that runs will have to be taken off the scoreboard. The cost to National League ballparks could run into hundreds of thousands of dollars.

No pressure, big man. No pressure.

Big Head on a Little Body

Who doesn’t love Mr. Met? The big ribbed head, the baggy body, the unusually high eyebrows, the constant mute smile…

[youtube:http://youtube.com/watch?v=cz_FSmRBOuk]

…the hips that just won’t quit. Dude knows how to party.

Livin’ on a Prayer

Not only does PECOTA predict the Mets will allow the fewest runs in baseball, but they’ve got a few impressive offensive players as well.

Jose Reyes is one of the most exciting baseball players today. You never know when he’ll take off from first or rip a screaming liner from the sky faster than the human eye can register. David Wright hits the ball like he has to clear a grenade from the home plate foxhole as far as possible.

Of course, no discussion of the Mets’ offensive firepower can be complete without mentioning the huge position player acquisition they made, dumping Lastings Milledge to the south for starting right fielder and catcher… Ryan Church and Brian Schneider? That really happened?

If there’s a picture, then it must have happened. That’s science.

I don’t know if it’s good baseball, but it ought to be good watchin’ to see if those two can provide just enough contributions to get the Mets to the postseason. It’ll be more interesting to see how they stack up against Milledge, who had a big enough chip on his shoulder in the first place.

Summer in the Citi

This is your last chance to see the Mets play in Shea Stadium; next year will be the first in the romantically named Citi Field. Tune in this summer to get your last glimpse of The Stadium That Smells Like Moises Alou’s Hands.

Mangu Very Much

The best reason to watch the Mets in 2008, though, has nothing to do with history or their likely NL East dominance. There have been faint whispers and drunken accusations over the last couple years that General Manager Omar Minaya has been putting together a rather Latin-heavy roster in New York, as if there was possibly something wrong with that.

Instead, this may become the most fascinating team to watch in 2008 because of it. For example, here’s a story off the AP wire entering spring training on Pedro Martinez’s supplement regimen:

“I have a small frame and when I hurt all I could do was take a couple of Aleve or Advil, a cup of coffee and a little mango and an egg — and let it go!” he said.

Already brilliant, right? Quirky, talkative, a little arrogant… who doesn’t want to watch Pedro play now, full of mango and vinegar?

Except that’s not what he said. Our very pale friends with the notebooks wrote down ‘mango’, but Pedro was talking about mangu. Mangu is made by boiling green plantains and then mashing them with butter, water, salt, and pepper. It’s very popular in the Dominican Republic, perhaps just before a cockfighting match where one can befriend a little person.

If you’re not watching the Mets in 2008, you’re missing an awful lot on many levels. For example, where else are you getting a Cy Young-level mangu recipe?

Tags: new york mets

This entry was posted on Monday, February 18th, 2008 at 7:35 am and is filed under baseball, mlb, why we watch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.