This was a pretty easy comparison. Both guys are players that grew up in the teams’ farm system and they are fan favorites. They are among the best players on their respective teams. They are also both a little goofy and have been brought up in some trade rumors recently. One difference between them is that Lopez has never missed an NBA game while Wright has missed games with all sorts of injuries. They are both whiners; Lopez on the court and Wright off the field with stupid injuries.
David Wright and Brook Lopez
Josh Thole and Kris Humphries.
The Hump had his breakout season last year and Thole hopes to do the same this year. However, this is pretty unlikely seeing his start. Both players are still pretty young and have a lot to prove. Off the field, as we all know, The Hump is recently engaged to Kim Kardashian. Thole doesn’t seem to have a celebrity girlfriend as far as I know, but he should change that. Who wouldn’t want to date the Mets’ catcher? I think that if The Hump played baseball, he would be a catcher. He has the body type for that position. He isn’t very fast and I can imagine he would like playing that position. They are both unlikely to be traded anytime soon, though The Hump could choose to leave as a free agent.
Josh Thole and Kris Humphries
Ike David and Derrick Favors.
Both of these guys are young players with infinite potential (Favors probably more than Davis). So far in their careers, they have yet to be spectacular, but their futures are bright. Favors was traded to the Jazz in part of the DWill trade and will continue to grow in Utah. Ike will most likely not be traded because he is one of the few Mets that Fred Wilpon did not harshly criticize. Both of these players seem like pretty nice and relatable guys. I think that Ike Davis might be Jewish and Favors is only 2 years older than us. He is also apparently a Mets fan, so we can relate to him even more. Oh hi Jerry Manuel.
Ike Davis and Derrick Favors
Justin Turner and Anthony Morrow.
The only reason that Justin Turner gets to be compared to Morrow is because of the very nice start to his season. He has led the Mets most of the way this season which speaks to how poorly the rest of the team is playing. For much of the year, Morrow was also a leader for the Nets. He showed up and competed every night and he is a special shooter. I think that Turner’s specialty is hitting doubles, though I am probably wrong because he still does suck. Also, Morrow is an avid twitter user. I feel like Justin Turner should have a twitter account just by looking at him. I’m sure he does. Any conformation on that Raphi?
Justin Turner and Anthony Morrow
Ronny Paulino and Johan Petro.
This might be my favorite comparison. Both of these guys are fat, lazy losers. Both players were acquired this season by their respective teams and are journeymen. Both of them speak another language (Paulino: Spanish, Petro: French). If Petro played baseball, he would be a catcher. Actually, he would be too lazy and probably just play 1st base, which is I’m sure what Paulino wants to do. Both of these players are also very random. Who cares about Ronny Paulino or Johan Petro? Nobody (except kids in hospitals).
Ronny Paulino and Johan Petro
Nick Evans and Ben Uzoh.
The last men at the end of the bench! Ben Uzoh was the 12th man for the Nets all season, playing very limited minutes and whenever he did play, trying as hard as he possibly could. Nick Evans has been going back and forth between the Mets and AAA for a couple of years now and he is currently the last man on the roster (unless Brad Emaus replaces him). I don’t think that we have seen Evans play yet this year, but when we do it will be the garbagiest of times for the Mets, just like whenever Big Ben Uzoh got his minutes with the Nets.
Ben Uzoh and Nick Evans
Daniel Murphy and Troy Murphy.
This was one of my favorite and easiest comparisons. First of all, both of their names are Murphy and they are both Irish (Troy went to Notre Dame). Second of all, they both suck. Surprisingly, we have seen Daniel hit a few home runs this year, including a game winner against the Yankees, but he still sucks. He is rarely clutch and he is a classic disappointing Met. Troy played in a few games for the Nets this season before they got sick of him and told him to stop showing up and eventually traded him. He finished up his season in Boston, which is where I’m sure Daniel wants to be also. I’m sure they are cousins in some way.
Daniel Murphy and Troy Murphy
Ruben Tejada and Mario West.
Both of these players are random, young guys with pretty low expectations. The Nets picked up Mario West after they dropped Q (thank god) and he played a few games for them before he got injured and missed the rest of the season. This didn’t surprise me at all when it happened. He had a few games when he scored 10 points and tried to sit the rest of the games out so that he would be able to stay in the NBA next year. I could see Ruben Tejada trying to do a similar thing with the Mets. He knows he sucks and he just wants to be able to play major league baseball and get paid a lot of money. Neither of these players care about how their team does.
5:40 PM. It’s a rainy day in New York. I am joining the Mets midway through their first game against the Braves, at Turner Field. Their game started 1.5 hours ago, so if I watch both games of their double header – I’ll be watching the Mets for the same amount of time as I watched them with Jonah on Thursday. Six and a half hours.
Here we go.
Before I begin with live updates, here is some important info about this afternoon’s game.
Mets Lineup: (We will likely have nicknames for all these players within a few weeks.)
Jose Reyes
Angel Pagan
David Wright
Carlos Beltran
Ike Davis
Willie Harris
Brad Emaus
Josh Thole
D.J. Carrasco
Pitching Matchup:
D.J. Carrasco (4.05 ERA, 1.50 WHIP, 4 Ks, 3 BBs)
vs.
Derek Lowe (1.45 ERA, 1.07 WHIP, 15 Ks, 5 BBs)
Other notes:
Beltran is slated to start both games of the double header. Pleasant surprise.
According to Mike Puma of The NY Post, Brad Emaus is running on thin ice. He may be cut soon.
Dillon Gee will start for the Mets tomorrow. That will be hard to watch. Michael Baron of SNY.tv’s Mets Blog thinks that Ryota Igorashi will be demoted to make room. That would be a shame.
Remember, the Mets are entering this game after being swept in a four game series by the Rockies. They have lost 5 in a row.
It is Jackie Robinson Day in the MLB. Every player is wearing #42 and no one has names on their uniforms. It just makes it more difficult for people like me to follow the game.
Live Updates
To start the bottom of the 5th, the Mets are down 3-1 to the Braves and D.J. Carrasco has just left the game. He surrendered two solo home runs to Alex Gonzalez. Gonzalez is a Carrasco killer. Pat Misch takes the mound to relieve D.J.
5th Inning
Misch walks Chipper Jones, but survives the 5th inning unscathed.
6th Inning
With 2 outs, Willie Harris hits an RBI double to bring in Beltran, who was on first base after a Derek Lowe walk. 3-2 Braves. Emaus promptly pops out to end the inning.
Freddie Freeman (who??) absolutely demolishes a Misch offering. Wow. Solo home run. 4-2 Braves. Classic. Misch finishes his 2nd inning of work and only gives up one run. As a Mets fan, I’ll take that any day.
On a side note, backup catcher David Ross is mic’d up for this game. He said something hilarious and the FOX announcers started cracking up. I wasn’t listening. Sorry, Mr. Ross.
7th Inning
Eric O’Flaherty (2.08 ERA, 0 Ks, 2 BBs) is now on the mound for the Braves. We’ve already come across some extremely random names. He ousts Josh Thole on his first pitch on a soft dribbler right to Mr. O’Flaherty. Chin-Lung Hu follows and strikes out looking. 2 walks later, O’Flaherty is sent to the dugout. Scott Linebrink (4.76 ERA, 7 Ks, 4 BBs) replaces and gets Wright to pop out to right.
Bobby Parnell steps to the mound for the Mets. Somehow survives the middle of the Braves’ lineup.
8th Inning
Jonny Venters (1.29 ERA, 5 Ks, 1 BB) marches in from the bullpen to pitch. He walks Willie Harris, but strikes out Beltran and Emaus to safely glide through the inning.
Bobby Parnell keeps the Mets deficit at 2 in the bottom of the 8th. The Mets are at bat in the top of the 9th, down 4-2. It’s crunch time for the Mets. Let’s see if they can pull it off.
9th Inning
Craig Kimbrell (0.00 ERA, 9 Ks, 1 Walk, 3 Saves) comes in to close for the Braves.
Kimbrell strikes Josh Thole out swinging. One out. Daniel Murphy nubs it to the pitcher. Easy play. Two outs. Reyes is at bat and is trying to keep the game alive for the Mets. Full count now. He…singles!! Ground ball barely gets past the Braves’ Second Baseman. The tying run is at the plate. It’s Angel Pagan. David Wright is on deck. Pagan…pops out to center. Game over. Braves win, 4-2
A recap of the game is forthcoming. I don’t plan on live blogging for the 2nd half of the double header.
I am exhausted. What a day. After leaving seminar at lunch, Raphi and I embarked on a 7 train journey to Queens to see the Mets take on the Rockies. Twice. Our first baseball game(s) of the season tested our patience and stamina. We saw home runs, errors, and everything in between. I will start at the beginning. (Note: All pictures and videos were taken by us; they are not from the internet).
We arrive at the game and I have already cheated the Mets out of their money before I have stepped inside Citi Field (from now on, we will refer to Citi field as either Shea or Shitty Field. I prefer Shea because it is what I am used to, but Raphi may decide otherwise). Like I do to Nets games, I brought fake tickets, payed for 10 buck upper deck seats, and sat in the third row behind the Rockies dugout. First I will talk about the plot of each game.
We arrived in the 4th inning of the first game and the score was 2-0 Mets. I assume that they got a few lucky runs and the game was probably boring until this point. In the 5th inning, Colorado finally got on the board by scoring 1 run and in the 6th inning, Jose Morales (ew) had a 2 RBI double to give the Rockies the lead. The Giambino also made his presence felt, scoring a run.
The Giambino
In the 7th, CarGo and Tulo hit back to back home runs and it looked like the game was over. Fans were bored and nobody thought that the Mets would come back against Huston Street. But everyone was wrong. Before Street came in, in the 8th, Jose Reyes hit a home run over the right field fence. In the 9th, Scott Hairston, who is the Stephen Graham of the Mets (however, I think there is more than one Stephen Graham on the Mets) hit a 2-run shot over the left field fence to make it a 1 run game.
Mets Home Run Apple
After some questionable pinch running decisions by Terry Collins, the Mets still have a chance in the game. With the bases loaded in the bottom of the 9th and 2 outs on a 3-2 pitch down by 1 run, David Wright was up at the plate. See what happened next below:
It was a heartbreaking loss for the Mets and Mets fans, but people soon forgot about it as the second game was starting. After both teams went back into their locker rooms and changed their uniforms (the Mets went from cream and pinstripes to white and the Rockies went from purple to gray), the teams were ready to return to the field for a second game. The Mets started off the game nicely with a 2nd inning 2-run double by Mike Nickeas (who??) but Colorado soon answered by scoring 2 quick runs in the 3rd. The Mets added 2 more in the 4th and had a lead, but things were about to go horribly wrong. The 6th inning started off for the Rockies with a homer by Tulo and finished with a 3 run homer by Jonathan Herrera (really Mets?). Colorado scored 6 runs total in the inning. Of note, Brad Emaus made a terrible play on a double play ball hit by the Rockies’ pitcher that would have ended the inning, but instead let it continue. The Rockies added 1 more run in the 9th and won easily 9-4. By the end of the game, everyone was sick of baseball and desperately wanted to go home. Not that the games were so heavily attended anyway, but by the end of the second game there were probably not more that 1,000 people at Shea. The Mets are now 4-9.
Brad Emaus
Next, I will talk the pitching in the games. The matchup in the first game was between R.A. Dickey and Greg Reynolds. A pretty disgusting pitching matchup. When we arrived at Shea, R.A. had not given up a run, but by the end of his day he had given up 5. A pretty disgusting performance to say the least. He blew the lead for the Mets and they suffered because of it. Greg Reynolds on the other hand pitched the minimum 5 innings to get the win. He was not very good, but I guess he was good enough. The bullpen for the Mets featured surprise scoreless innings by Ryota Igarashi (from now on will be referred to as either Iggy or Toyota) and Tim Byrdak (who?). Huston Street was close to blowing the save for Colorado, but Matt Lindstrom, former Marlins great, was able to save Street as well as the game.
The Dick
In the second game, the pitching matchup pitted Chris Capuano (Cappuccino or just Coffee, if you like) against Jorge de la Rosa (hip hip Jorge). Neither pitcher was very special. De la Rosa gave up 4 runs and Cappuccino gave up 7. Special shoutout to Iggy who pitched in both games, giving up 0 total runs. The Rockies bullpen was good as it did not give up a run.
Hip Hip Jorge
For Met fans, this was a terrible day. Just think about it. You had to either skip school or work to see your horrible team get swept in a doubleheader. If you came at the beginning and stayed until the end, you were at Shitty Field for over 7 1/2 hours. It became unbearable and I’m not sure it is something that I would ever want to experience again. Luckily for me, I was rooting for the Rockies to win both games; however, if we go to more Met games I plan on eventually rooting for the Mets.
Now on to some of the more hilarious jokes from the game, in order of occurrence:
The Rockies have two Morales’s on their team, Franklin and Jose. We saw both of them today and they are both pretty disgusting. I don’t know which one is worse. They also have two Reynolds’s. Greg started the first game and Matt was a reliever in the second.
The play of the day goes to a combo of Jason Giambi, Franklin Morales, and Willie Harris. Harris hit a hard ball to Giambi who clumsily bobbled it. The pitcher, Morales, went over to cover the base and Giambi threw the ball to him. As he was catching the ball and stepping on the base, his shoe fell off and the runner was called safe, even though it looked like he should have been out. Rockies manager Jim Tracy went out to argue the call, but failed. Tracy then took out Morales who left the game with an apparent injury because his shoe fell off. During the next batter’s at bat, Willie Harris was promptly caught stealing. This was a play for the ages.
R.A. Dickey was terrible. We brought bad luck to The Dick and he gave up 5 runs in only 2 and a third innings while we were in attendance.
A noteworthy moment came in the first game when CarGo and Tulo hit back-to-back bombs. This 3-4 combo is why the Rockies should be a powerful team for years to come.
Also in the first game, I caught a Mets T-Shirt launch shirt (even though Raphi may say that he caught it, it was definitely mostly me). The shirt was nicer than I thought it would be knowing the Mets and the Wilpons. It is orange with Mets script on the front and seems to be made from fairly nice material. I had my hopes up after I saw this, but of course there is an advertisement for Pepsi Max (which is disgusting, by the way) on the back. You just can’t expect the Mets to give you an ad free t-shirt. The funniest part about this shirt was that it was tied with a balloon. Though it is debatable that a balloon may be nicer than Johan Petro’s wrapping tape, a balloon is still a ridiculous way to tie a shirt. Why not just use normal tape??? The balloon was surprisingly hard to take off and it took us a few minutes to get it.
One of the almost-disaster plays of the first game was a hesitation by one of the Mets relievers (I can’t remember which one) to throw Hip Hip Jorge out at first on a sacrifice bunt. The pitcher thought about throwing down to third base to get a runner going there and it nearly cost him. However, de la Rosa was called out and a disaster was avoided.
I had a surprising 3 psychic moments in this game (they are all true, you can ask Raphi). The first came in the 8th inning of the first game. At the beginning of the game, I told Raphi that whenever I go to Mets games, Jose Reyes always hits home runs, which are usually pretty rare for him. I did not call a home run from him until the 8th inning when the Mets were doing nothing offensively. I called a Jose Reyes homer to right, and it happened. Psychic. My second psychic moment came in the 6th inning of the second game. Before the inning started, the Rockies were down by 2. I called that it would be a (and I quote) “big inning” for the Rockies. Tulo started off the inning hitting a home run and the Rockies scored 6 runs total in the inning. Psychic. Later in the inning with 2 outs, 2 runners on, and Jonathan Herrera at the plate, Herrera hit a ball just foul down the first base line that would have been caught by Ike Davis and ended the inning. I predicted a homer on the next pitch and it happened. Psychic. All of this is true. Ask Raphi.
Psychic
The last hilarious moment from the first game was when I bought a Shea Stadium pretzel. It costed $6.50 so I thought that it would be good. I will now describe it. It came wrapped in tin foil and not shaped like a normal pretzel. It was more shaped like a challah (for all you Jews out there). The tin foil was covered in mustard and it was difficult to open without getting mustard on your hands. The pretzel itself was damp and slimy and felt as if it had been in the tin foil for days. When I picked it up out of the tin foil, there was still some tin foil left on the bottom of it that I again had to pick off. I did not want to touch the pretzel, so I had to hold it with a napkin. The napkin then attached itself to the pretzel and the pretzel became fuzzy and disgusting. I don’t think you want to hear any more descriptions.
Now, on to the second game. In the second inning, Scott Hairston hit a shot off the wall in left field that needed to be reviewed as to whether or not it was a home run. One of the umpires of the game was Jim Joyce, the umpire who blew the famous Armando Gallaraga perfect game call, and all the fans booed him when he decided that it was not a home run.
A noteworthy moment from the second game happened when Mike Nickeas and Brad Emaus were on base at the same time. I do not need to say any more.
Emaus is a shithead. This is from Raphi and I do not need to say any more.
One of the funnier plays of the games came when Scott Hairston hit a pop-up in the infield that fell and Hairston ended up at second base. Did you learn anything at Spring Training guys? Call for the ball!
Matt Reynolds, a leftly specialist for Colorado, had his first career at-bat in the game according to yahoo, and promptly struck out. The Rockies were ahead by too many runs that they didn’t think they needed to pinch hit for him and they were right.
Toward the end of the game, only Jews were left in the crowd. Really. Probably about 80% Jews. And they were so annoying as most religious Jews are. And they were all kids. They don’t have any parents. And they were calling each other Jewish names like Chaim and Shmuel. And they were sitting in the first row and annoying the security guard. Yes, I appreciate your concern (and I don’t care) and I know that I am an anti-semite. Go talk about it in seminar.
I have discovered that we were at Shitty Field from 1:15 until 7:30. That is 6 hours and 15 minutes. That is a whole lot of shitiness. This is not an experience that I would want to repeat.
To cap off the day, at the end of the game, I was standing behind the Rockies dugout as players were leaving. One of the players gave me a ball. It is not my first ball at a baseball game, but I will still cherish it forever (awww).
Kim Had Humps 