Misplaced Funny Funds

Wait, let me get this straight ... the Mets made money off the Madoff scandal?

And still never signed an extra bat???

I mean, there was extra money? I don't buy it. If there was extra money, then why did I get an e-mail from the Mets offering a chance to win Dunkin' Donuts coffee for a year ... an e-mail which had absolutely no connection to the Mets whatsoever. Nice. If I wanted offers from Dunkin' Donuts, don't you think I would have subscribed to the Dunkin Donuts' e-mail list???

You can tell me that it wasn't just the Mets that did this. I got the same e-mail from the Cubs ... yeah, the team that filed for bankruptcy!

So all that money sat there doing nothing but collecting interest? F***ing Wilpons. Give it to someone who can actually use $47.8 million.

Like Steve Phillips! Hey, that should cover alimony for a couple of months.

I think I've blown a funny fuse on this. I feel like I'm Cartman in the episode of South Park where he had Kenny take the school picture upside down where you could see his buttocks instead of his face ... and then he took the picture and put it on a milk carton only to have two people come looking for him because they too have "buttocks where their heads should be".

Maybe I feel remorse ... although certainly not for Phillips, who put himself in this mess. More so for the family, in this mess through no fault of their own, who now have to deal with the details of all this get into the papers and thrust into the spotlight where they don't deserve to be. Maybe I indeed just blew a funny fuse. In either event, I hesitate to make light of this. It's too easy to cross the line from justifiable ripping to unnecessary piling on. Besides ... all the really funny stuff seems to have been already written, which would make me a plagiarist.

But in reality, he deserves to be ripped. It shouldn't surprise you that Phillips exhibits horrible judgement ... between trading for Mo Vaughn, discussing a David Wright trade, and unnecessarily ripping Carlos Beltran when standard op procedure on Sunday Night Baseball is to kiss everybody's butt, not to mention his first "fling" with infidelity. But this ... THIS!

...

Nah, that David Wright idea was still the worst.

Okay, now that the obligatory tongue-in-cheek portion of this monstrosity is over, check out Howard Megdal's take at NY Baseball Digest for a great take on the Phillips thing. I couldn't have put it any better.

Grit, It's Not Just For Kissin' Anymore

While watching the Mets on ESPN might be about as frustrating as watching Oliver Perez pitch, it reminds me how thankful I am that Steve Phillips is no longer the Mets GM.

I have to admit I missed the first part of his diatribe during Sunday night's loss to Matt Cain and the Giants, but basically it ended something like this (paraphrasing):

"If the Mets lose again this season, they have to think about breaking up the core. I believe David Wright is part of the solution, and I believe Jose Reyes is part of the solution. If I were the GM of the Mets, I'd take a look at the $17 million contract of Carlos Beltran."

Okay, for those of you who became fans in 2006, let me give you a lesson in recent history. You see, Steve Phillips was the GM of the Mets. And while he was the GM of the Mets, he allegedly offered Jose Reyes to Cleveland for Robby Alomar, and also allegedly offered David Wright to Toronto for Jose Cruz Jr. So of course he would think about trading Beltran. He couldn't trade the other two when he had the chance.

But yeah, Phillips would trade Beltran for Mo Vaughn because his 1.066 OPS is "part of the problem". But why? (Again, paraphrasing from Sunday Night Baseball):

"I just think this team needs more grit."

YES! GRIT! I have Carlos Beltran, I'll trade it for five of what you call ... Eckstein. Yes, let's do that.

If somebody can come up with a good reason to dip into the core, I'm all ears. I've heard multiple people tell me that maybe the solution is to trade Reyes. I'm not ready to agree with that, but I've heard semi-decent reasons ... at least better reasons than "this team needs more grit." Beltran may have his issues, but lack of grit isn't one of them. I take you back to a September night in Houston where Carlos Beltran risked life and limb to save a meaningless game by crashing into the wall and leading with his knees. Prudent? Probably not. But gritty? If David Eckstein had done it he would have been nominated for seventeen ESPY's.

Let's review, trading stars for the intangible idea of "grit" for the sole reason of being gritty without a real, honest plan (like trading a sulking Nomar for defense in the form of Orlando Cabrera and Doug Mientkiewicz, because I know someone will bring that up) is ... stupid. You get grit to complement your stars, not instead of them.

Grit without great is bread crust. I can't live on bread crust.

But the worst part of all of this is not that Phillips suggested this ... and not that he suggested this for dopey reasons. No, the worst part is that Joe Morgan subsequently disagreed with Phillips about Beltran, and I was rooting for Morgan. I was on the same side as Joe Morgan in an argument ... and I'm not sure that's a shame I can ever recover from. My IQ fell so far south at that point that I wanted to slit my own wrists but was so incapacitated that I tried to do it with my cell phone.

But then Morgan said that when a pitcher doesn't strike out batters, a lot of contact is made. Then I felt much better.

I'll never forgive you for this, Steve Phillips.