You Suck, Hat Guy

My girl and I got back together shortly after my first post so no live blogging for a little while. But while we wait, we can always read crappy sports articles and mock them. We’re those kind of people.

Mike Celizic got paid actual money to write the following article. His words are in bold. Mine are in a state of perplexed curiosity.

We all know it’s dangerous to draw conclusions about a baseball season from the results of the season’s first month. So we’re not going to do that. But it doesn’t mean we can’t spot trends that aren’t going to go away quickly.

I love this opening because it basically kicks logic and fluidity in the crotch. Celizic is stating that it is dangerous to do x during y but it doesn’t mean we can’t do x during y. So essentially, it’s dangerous to make hasty conclusions based on limited data but hey guys, here is my hasty conclusion based on limited data.

In New York, the story lines are pretty well set, and they’re not exactly the ones we came into the season with. When the year began, we thought that the local team that was going to be angst central was the Yankees. The Mets had a veteran outfit whose biggest problem — the bullpen — had been fixed in a major way. We figured they’d be right up there fighting for the NL East, and the real suffering wouldn’t begin until September, when the Mets would have to face their late-season demons.

Wow. So… much… stupid. We (apparently all of us) thought that after the Yankees added two badass pitchers and a badass hitter that they were gonna suck but the Mets, who added a few good relievers while aging considerably were gonna be totally fine. We are apparently all a bunch of shortsighted morons. Shame on us.

We were wrong. One month into the season, the trend is already clear. It is the Mets who are team turmoil, struggling along under .500 and near the bottom of a tough division and with a pitching rotation that is in shambles. The Yankees aren’t lighting up the AL East, but things are starting to go right for them. Meanwhile, the Mets just keep getting worse.

This is all kinds of dumb. Yes, as of right this damn second, the Mets have a worse record than the Bombers, but the Mets have also gotten more unlucky than the Yankees. The Metropolitans currently have a run differential 14 higher than the Yanks. Neither are killing the ball but neither are doomed either. There’s more than 130 games to go! Sweet Jesus man, NO ONE knows what will happen based on one month. That was your premise, remember? Remember Mike? Way back at the beginning of this mess? Go re-read that line and just stop writing right now and don’t submit this article to NBC Sports or I just may have to mock it FJM style.

Oh, you continued. Well then, so shall I.

This isn’t the way it was supposed to be. The Yankees were the team with the bazillion-dollar starting pitchers, CC Sabathia and A.J. Burnett, who were going to have to prove they could stand the heat. Alex Rodriguez was going miss the first six weeks. And with the Red Sox and Rays to battle, a slow start could have buried them before they had a chance to get everything working.

Wow. Sometimes things just don’t go as planned. I was, for example, supposed to be a lawyer but I screwed that all up by not going to law school. And that wasn’t the way it was supposed to be!

We were sort of right about the Yankees and sort of wrong.

Wait. We came to two opposite conclusions at the same time? I didn’t think we had met, let alone found a way to create and confirm the impossible. This is so confusing.

The starting pitching has been an issue and middle relief has at times been non-existent. Chien-Ming Wang was a disaster area who had to be put on the disabled list not because he was hurt but just to save him from himself. Sabathia isn’t off to the hottest start ever. The offense has struggled at times, but it’s still scoring nearly 6 runs a game.

6 runs a game is good. You can win with that. Especially if you have good pitching, which the Yanks will probably have before all is said and done here. So your last sentence would negate your point but that’s okay because your first two sentences defeated any possibility of making a point before you even got to the point. So, I guess two negatives equal a shitty article.

And for all the teeth-gnashing and garment-rending in the Bronx over a rough start, the Yankees on May 3 were two games over .500 and in third place in the AL East, a manageable 3.5 games behind the Blue Jays and 1.5 behind their archrivals, the Red Sox. Phil Hughes came up from the minors to show he’s regained the pitching prowess he demonstrated two years ago. Joba Chamberlain has been okay. Sabathia hasn’t been great, but he’s pitching a lot of innings and he tends to get better as the season goes on. And A-Rod is just a week or two away from what promises to be a tumultuous — and long-awaited — return.

In short, there is hope in the Bronx. In Queens, there is only despair and chaos.

Despair? And chaos? That is ALL THERE IS IN QUEENS? Jesus this guy is over the top. A team lost some games at the beginning of the season = despair and chaos. Melodrama much, Mike?

The Mets’ new ballpark, Citi Field, is turning out to be a hitter’s nightmare. The geniuses who approved the design for some reason thought that epic distances in right, right-center and center field would be a great idea. Great for whom is another question. So far, all the enormous distances to the outfield walls have done is keep the Mets from scoring runs they desperately need.

So the Mets can’t hit the ball as far as their opponents and this is the stadium’s fault?

The Yankees are getting A-Rod back. The Mets are getting nothing. So bad have things gotten that the home fans have taken to booing All-Star third baseman and former golden boy David Wright. Playing as if the weight of the entire team is on his shoulders, Wright has become famous for failing in the clutch.

Wright’s numbers with runners in scoring position are definitely down. But career-wise, he’s been fantastic. Let’s not give him the A-Rod Choke-O-Matic Award just yet, Mike.

In the offseason, the Mets lavished $36 million on starter Oliver Perez for the next three years.

For the record, I thought this was a dumb move. Ollie’s maybe a 4 million a year starter so I got to say that I got Mike’s back… er, hat, here.

After putting up a 9.97 ERA in his first five starts, Perez is out of the rotation already. Johan Santana has done his part, pitching to a 1.10 ERA, but the other starters have been disasters. Mike Pelfrey is 3-0 but his ERA is 6.00. Livan Hernandez’s is 6.75 and John Maine’s is 5.75. And unlike the Yankees, the Mets have no one on the farm ready to step into the breach.

Pelfrey’s WHIP is a gawdaful 1.8 something and his career WHIP is a gawdawful 1.50 so he has definitely gotten lucky with the three wins and will probably need to be replaced if he continues at that rate (he ain’t even striking out three a game). Livan Hernandez is old and in decline but still K-ing 5/9. I wouldn’t give up on him just yet but there is cause for concern. His contract was a little stupid, even by New York standards. John Maine has not been impressive, but Mike, he has never been impressive. His ‘09 numbers are almost identical to his career numbers. And while we’re here, Hernandez’s WHIP is also pretty much identical to his career numbers so basically, when you said that filling the relief needs was all the Mets needed to win, you were being shortsighted and dumb. But then, that is your style.

The fans are losing patience and pointing fingers. The first culprit singled out is general manager Omar Minaya and after him manager Jerry Manuel. But the fans also know there’s no hope of either going anywhere. The Mets’ owner, Fred Wilpon, lost hundreds of millions of dollars to Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, and although the Wilpon family has said it has other money to run the team, they don’t have money to keep paying ex-managers and ex-GM’s who still have years left on their contracts, not when they’re still paying former manager Willie Randolph, who got fired early last year for fewer sins than Manuel has already committed this year.

What? What sins has Manuel committed? You can’t just call a guy a killer and then not name a victim. That’s not journalism. Hell, that’s not even logical. And not for nothing, but I would say that the first reason the Mets aren’t doing well is pitching, the second is hitting, the third is Bernie Madoff, the fourth is the teams they’ve played and the nineteenth is Manuel. I mean, what has he done wrong?

Nor are the Mets likely to add payroll in a trade to make things better. Mets’ fans know they may be looking at a very long season, a season in which the September collapse could be accomplished by the end of May.

This is not possible in New York. I guarantee, they will still be in the middle of this thing by the end of May. Your hyperbole is growing tiresome, Mike. Why do people pay you to write again?

While the Mets may be the bigger disaster, the news cycles still revolve around the Yankees. That’s one preseason prediction that never changes. No matter how well or how badly the Yankees play, there will always be controversy surrounding them.

True. Meaningless in terms of your point. But true nonetheless.

It’s not the Bronx Zoo like the maniacal outfit that gave birth to the name in the 1970s when Billy Martin was the psycho whip-cracker, Reggie Jackson was the main attraction, George Steinbrenner was the demented owner and the fractious clubhouse was loaded with bigger-than-life personalities.

Wait. You’re saying that it’s not 1978? Well, I’ll be damned.

Today’s Bronx Zoo has just one exhibit. That would be the A-Rod cage, where the nation’s most famous specimen of Jockus Egotisticus is gawked at and hooted at — and even cheered — by more than 40,000 visitors a day.

What about the Joba Chamberlain’s Mom Sold Meth to a Cop Exhibit or the Derek Jeter is Too Old to Effectively Play Shortstop Exhibit? Don’t sell those short. Also, what is your point?

For the Yankees — and the tabloids — that’s enough.

And that’s how it ends. No prediction, no analysis, no food metaphors, just… nothing. A long rambling spiel that could be summed up in one sentence: Yankees and Mets off to slow starts.

You suck, Hat Guy.