Sports Then and Now

Johan Santana has struggled this spring, but is still one of the best pitchers in the National League.

We are now a weekend away from the start of the 2010 Major League Baseball Season and New York Mets fans all over the planet are pulling out their remaining hair and saying to anyone who will listen “Oh no, here we go again”.

Well not so fast. True the season will start with a third of their starting team on the Disabled List but unlike last year when more than half the starters seemed to be out most of the year, this year the Mets are prepared for injuries and the substitutes they put out on the field will not resemble the 2009 version of “The
Little Sisters of the Poor”..

If Spring Training has shown Mets fans anything other than thank goodness it’s over,is the fact that the players down on the farm are hardly as bad as the media has depicted them to be. Players like Ike Davis, Fernando Martinez, Josh Thole, Jenrry Mejia, Nick Evans and Rueben Tejada, to just name a few, have given Mets fans an opportunity to see a brighter future even if they may struggle in 2010. Read the rest of this entry →

The Mets must decide where Jenrry Mejia will start the season.

This is the time during Spring Training that all Major League teams starts to cut down on its rosters sending some players down to their Minor League affiliates while others are sent on their way right out of the organization.

The funny thing about this process is that there are very few surprises as to who stays and who goes. Sometimes a young player with just a little minor league experience makes such an outstanding impression the management feels that he is ready for the big leagues and they can’t see him not being with the parent club.

Steven Strasburg of the Washington Nationals comes to mind this year as he has not allowed a run in three appearances so far. It was expected that the number one overall player in last years draft would start the year perhaps even as high as AAA. He did have an advantage of playing college ball under Hall of Fame great Tony Gwynn but still there would seem to be no real reason to rush him into the fray. It’s not like the Nationals will be in the playoff hunt this year.

On Sirius/XM Radio yesterday Rob Dibble, who I love as a color commentator and sports talk show host, said when he was in his first couple of years of Spring Training and he knew he wasn’t going to make the Reds big club he actually asked the team to cut him early enough so he could get more work in the level he would be playing at. Amazing. Read the rest of this entry →

The Mets didn't have a lot to cheer about in 2009.

Like all loyal and lifetime New York Mets Fans 2009 will certainly go down in Mets history as the most injury plagued season in their entire 48 seasons of National League play. Everybody knows that every member of “The Core” players were down for various amounts of time during the season and if the core played together for ten games all season long that would probably be an exaggeration.

Dirt was thrown at everybody from the ownership down to and through the medical staff, the Minor League organization and most obviously the Manager Jerry Manuel and the General Manager Omar Minaya . Nobody was as critical of these two so called professionals than me. I gave them some credit for their valiant try to finish on top in 2008 and even went so far to say that the team overachieved in getting down to the last day to decide their fate for the playoffs.

I wrote at least four articles on websites for the Mets to resign Pedro Martinez. Their rotation was a disaster coming out Spring Training and although I like and enjoy the World Baseball Classic it’s timing last year couldn’t have been worse for the Mets as 17 players left camp to play for their countries. Was it a big surprise that so many of those players who did go to the WBC come down with critical injuries during the season? I will address the WBC situation at another time. Read the rest of this entry →

For many Mets fans, the franchise low-point occurred with the trade of Tom Seaver to the Cincinnati Reds in 1977.

1974 was a big transition year for me. For the first time in my 29 years I was venturing out of the safety net of the New York City, Connecticut, and New York State area and venturing into new uncharted Philadelphia Phillies territory down the New Jersey Turnpike to Exit 4 better known to most as Cherry Hill.

We actually didn’t live there but close enough so that when people asked me where I lived that was the most recognizable. Later, after just a few months there, it became simply known as South Jersey which in reality is a state all of its own.

Unlike North Jersey that has a healthy selection of New York Mets fans, in 1974 there was only one New York Met fan in South Jersey. Me, and here I was starting a new job, in a new area still only 90 miles away that seemed like another continent.

South Jersey starts just below Trenton, goes east to the Jersey Shore to Seaside Heights, and south to Cape May. It is completely 100% Philadelphia fans in every sport out there and maybe some time somewhere in the future during football season I will tell a similar story about the Eagles, but for this series the Phillies ultimately play a pivotal role in my life. Read the rest of this entry →

After their miracle season in 1969, the Mets remained a contender for the next five years.

Bob Scheffing was promoted to the Mets General Manager after the untimely death of Johnny Murphy in January 1970. The Mets had just come off their “Miracle” season of 1969 with their first Playoff, World Series and Championship in its brief seven-year history.

The two sided answer to the question, was 1969 a fluke? That would be answered in the next coming months as the Mets prepared for yet another Spring Training in St. Petersburg Florida where they shared the training facilities with the St. Louis Cardinals.

Bob Scheffing came to the Mets organization after a career as a player with a little over 500 games with the Cubs, Reds, and Cardinals. A rather pedestrian .263 career lifetime average set no fires blazing in that realm. He managed both the Cubs and the Tigers, did a little broadcasting and some scouting before becoming the Mets GM.

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Tom Seaver

The Sports Then and Now Vintage Athlete of the Week was the staff ace on a team that pulled one of the greatest upsets in baseball history 40 years ago.

“Tom Terrific” Seaver won the first of his three career Cy Young Awards in 1969 and won a crucial game in the World Series as the New York Mets captivated the nation by winning the 1969 World Series over the seemingly invincible Baltimore Orioles.

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