The Futility Infielder

Here is the starting lineup of a baseball team:

   AGE   AVG   OPS  HR  RBI  

C   29  .328  .960  32  111

1B  30  .337  .993  40  115

2B  30  .282  .765  14   56

SS  30  .285  .686   2   30

3B  32  .251  .785  20   67

LF  25  .282  .818  22   90

CF  23  .242  .644   2   17

RF  29  .263  .838  38  125



   AGE   W-L    ERA

SP  32  20-6   2.47

SP  32  17-6   2.47

SP  35  20-7   3.55

SP  27  15-8   4.46

SP  28  13-14  6.23 

If you were the GM who assembled this lineup, you'd be sitting pretty. A starting eight which accounts for 170 homers and has four players with over 90 RBI would make a potent offense, even if a couple of youngsters at the glove positions were easy outs. That rotation looks sharp as well, with a pair of 20-game winners and an 85-41 record, even if the fifth starter needs asbestos pants.

This team actually exists... sort of. They're the 2003 New York Mets. But those statistics aren't current; they're five years old and the players, as you might expect, have aged just as much. Therein lies the problem with these Mets. It's as if GM Steve Phillips is saying, "Sure, it's not 1998 now, but who knows what year it will be in August?"

[Those numbers above, in order, belong to Mike Piazza, Mo Vaughn, Roberto Alomar, Rey Sanchez, Jay Bell, Cliff Floyd, Roger Cedeno, Jeromy Burnitz, Tom Glavine, Al Leiter, David Cone, Steve Trachsel, and Pedro Astacio. Bell's not really the starting 3B, but Ty Wigginton was in Class A Pittsfield that season. Astacio spent '98 in Coors, hence the inflated ERA.]

The vultures are already circling around Shea Stadium. The team is 11-17, last in the NL East, batting a collective .230 with a .664 OPS, scoring only 3.8 runs per game while allowing 5.3. Vaughn and his $15 million salary are being outplayed by non-roster invitee Tony Clark, who leads the team with 4 homers despite only 32 at bats. Vaughn's been anemic at the plate (.197 AVG, 3 HR, 15 RBI and a .668 OPS), even worse in the field (5 errors and the range of a sedated hippopotamus), and now he's hinting that he'd rather retire than wallow around for the $29 million he's due over the next two seasons (yeah, surrre). Piazza's been slowed by a four-game suspension and now a bum knee. Burnitz got off to a hot start, then broke his hand. Cliff Floyd needs surgery on his Achilles tendon. Cedeno has been a travesty in centerfield, and Timo Perez and Tsuyoshi Shinjo aren't helping much. Roberto Alomar has officially joined the undead. Astacio and Cone are on the DL and have been pretty lousy when they've pitched, save for Cone's triumphant first start. Trachsel's been equally lousy. And the closer... talk about needing asbestos pants.

Phillips could use some asbestos pants himself, because he's the one on the hot seat for assembling this cast of expensive zombies. He painted himself into this corner, one expensive contract at a time, after the 2001 season, beaten like a rented mule by the game's other GMs. His charges performed so poorly that he couldn't unload their large contracts this past winter. Sooner or later, owner Fred Wilpon has to give him the bullet, it's just a matter of time.

The Mets may save a bit of face and level their stats off once they fall completely out of contention (see Mo Vaughn's split statistics last year). But you can kiss Phillips goodbye. Just don't let him slip you any tongue.

• • •

I'm headed to Shea next Tuesday to see the Mets take on the Dodgers. My friend Lillie mailed me my tickets, which arrived today. In order to conceal them from those greedy little postal workers, and also to give me a laugh, she wrapped them in a coupon for BlownSave.com, which sells T-shirts that say "Trade Benitez," "Blame Benitez," and now "Cedeño Cücks". If you want to start pointing the finger early, you can even get $2 off your order with the code APRILSHEA.

• • •

Despite all of my recent hyperbole, I don't really advocate throwing things at players on the field (though I'll cop to "not discouaging it" and would probably shell out for a Fans Gone Wild videotape if a low-budget infomercial pops up in the next fifteen minutes). With Carl Everett and Sean Burroughs hit by errant cell phones in the space of a recent week, Village Voice writer Paul Lukas brings us a brief history of players wearing their batting helmets for protection in the field. Not surprisingly, Branch Rickey's got his hand in there -- at one point his intent was for all fielders to wear them, but then John Olerud got into a time machine and told the '53 Pittsburgh Pirates they were biting his style.

Lukas, author of the hilarious zine Beer Frame: The Journal of Inconspicuous Consumption (the best of which was collected in a book called Inconspicuous Consumption), writes a regular column for the Voice called "Uni Watch" focusing on fashion trends in sports uniforms. The aforementioined article has links to several of his pieces, including a good one on Stargell Stars and helmet merit stickers.

• • •

Oh, and my regular email address, jay@futilityinfielder.com seems to be working again. I got this one Wednesday night from somebody calling himself Bubba:

So Jay Jaffe is intolerant of intolerance. That in a word, is golden.

Though I think he meant that as a slur, Bubba summed up my position quite succinclty. Few things provoke my ire more than intolerance, and while I don't seek to make this column an outlet for my politics (been there, done that), I do feel compelled to stand up for what I think is right and speak out against what I feel is wrong. And I should point out that despite my aforementioned hyperbole, nowhere did I say anything about how Todd Jones should be fined, punished, or told what he could or couldn't say. His views -- however repugnant I might find them -- enjoy the same protection as any other American's. And the rest of us are free to show our displeasure at what he said. That right IS golden.

I did make one factual error in my Jones piece which I should correct: Marietta, Georgia is in fact a suburb of Atlanta, not a small town, as I implied.