Ask Dr. Morbius

i KNEW that was comin, just not from you!

I'll keep this *mostly* to players I actually saw:

ALL-TIME
Seaver
Mays
Satchel Paige
Ruth
Joe Morgan
Rickey Henderson
Aaron
Barry Bonds
Tug McGraw
Bill (Spaceman) Lee

ACTIVE
David Wright
Pujols
Beltran
Sizemore
Mauer
Haren
Brian McCann
Utley
Pablo Sandoval
Ichiro

Dear Dr. Morbiouss,

What was it liek seeing babe ruth pitch?

--JTM

cheap

hahahaha

also surprised joe's unfortunate post-player career hasn't soured your opnion of him

I'm Solomonic that way.

lol Sandoval token bear

Esteem'd Morbius, Base-ball Physician,
Are there any managers, in your opinion, who help their team more than they hurt it? If so, what admirable qualities do they possess?

beats me

I think Scioscia and (it pains me to say) LaRussa and Cox come to mind first.

Dr. Morbius,

Given that Jim Riggleman is still allowed to manage a major league baseball team, even if it is the nationals, does that mean there is still hope for any of us who've thought "shit, I could manage a team, probably"?

Dear Dr. Morbius,
Did you know that many years ago Joyce Dewitt and Orson Bean were married, for a period of about 3 months?

Dear Dr. Morbius,
Who the fuck is Orson Bean?

dear doc morbs - has there been a time sum mets rooks have tore up the spring as much as ike davis & fmart have so far?

JD: Tailor your resume, emphasize people skills.
JR: I did not -- was Joyce into Wilhelm Reich too?
TT: A comedic actor and game-show panelist (b.1928 as Dallas Frederick Burrows) who you may have seen as the old millionaire who "pisses orange" in Being John Malkovich.
JC: Way too many times.

what is your would blap starting nine lineup for 2010?

i remember mauer and wright from last year, who else?

insufficient data.

aka he won't admit jeter's on it

he's not.

grit hater

ANSWER THE QUESTION OR YOU WILL BE ASSIGNED DAN UGGLA

Dear Doc,

Minus Perez, is the rest of the Mets starting pitching made up of clones of Steve Trachsel or does it just seem that way?

no, there was only one Trachsel

lol

Shot in the dark, but I wonder if you've ever come across a guy named Ed M3nt@ in SABR circles? I don't know how active of a member he is, but I do know he's published a couple of articles in the Baseball Research Journal.

nope, don't know the name.

Ah, OK. He's a theatre prof who directed me in a couple of plays in college. Kind of an old-school working-class lefty type, so you might get along, but he's also a Yankees fan.

Dr Morbius, I will be in New York at the start of May and am thinking of going to see a Yankees baseball match. Please keep in mind that I know almost nothing about baseball beyond the basics when I ask the following:

How easy or otherwise is it get tickets on the 'day' of the game? Is there a better way of getting tickets? How much should I expect to play for an OK seat?

I see from the Yankees schedule that they play the same opponents for three or so nights in a row - is that one loooong game, or three different games? What times do games start and finish? And is it possible to travel by subway to the Yankees stadium?

Thanks very much for any advice you might offer.

lol baseball 'match'. i am not the fabled doctor and cannot really speak to the ticket situation (it depends on the opponent, and stubhub.com is a good place to seek tickets), but:

three different games. starting at 7:05pm, ending between 10 and 10:30 typically (always later against the red sox). subway is the preferred method of travel.

and if you'd like company, we can probably arrange it.

what mook said. Buying tix directly from the Yankees must be avoided.

I am not sure I can ever set foot in the new Yankee 5-Star Hotel tho

Thank you mook and morbs.

Company would be v welcome (I shall be on my own) - will try not to overdo it on the Britishes tourist asking dumbo questions front. Looking at the Yankees' schedule, the best bets for me are either of their matches against the Astros on Tues 30th April or Weds 1st May. Shall investigate tix further.

LOL saying 'matches' is obv a v ingrained soccerball habit

against the Astros

ooooh, that's unfortunate

tell me more, WC!

think the Yankees are playing the Oakland As on the Friday, who obv I know from Moneyball etc, but that kinda clashes with my plan to go for the free late entry at MOMA on Friday

MoMA is horribly overcrowded at all times, but I could get you in cheap if I knew my going-out status for late April.

The Astros were the worst team in baseball last year and are moving into a tougher league this season.

Astros are comically bad, though perhaps sufficiently so for a baseball noob to find mirth in their brand of inept slapstick.

Yeah, Oakland might be a more entertaining game. On the other hand, if you want to see the equivalent of a 16-year old beating up a 2nd-grader on the playground and taking his lunch money away, the Astros might be the way to go.

xpost

Thanks Morbs - I can of course afford the entry fee, though it would be a delight to go with you, if/when you know yr plans - and it might free me up to go see a better team rather than these Astros losers (tho' quite often I find that seeing something done badly helps you better appreciate/understand the good)

Ward, here's a taste: http://www.cbssports.com/mlb/blog/eye-on-baseball/19938647/gif-the-astros-do-it-again

looks like they haven't got their hussle together yet, as lucy van pelt might say

Morbs,

What do you remember about the Mets trading Seaver to the Reds in '77? Was there more to it than just a contract dispute? Free agency was new and maybe the fans didn't know exactly what to make of it, so were Mets fans mostly on Seaver's side or did they turn on him for being "greedy"?

I think most fans were disgusted and turned off by ownership, and the attendance for the next 6 years showed it. Apparently Seaver had essentially reached an agreement with the Mets, but Daily News columnist Dick Young, who'd been waging a "greedy bastard" vendetta in print vs Seaver, wrote something about Nancy Seaver being jealous of Nolan Ryan's contract that Tom believed had been fed to Young by the front office. So Seaver called the Mets and said "Get me out of here."

I heard about that fake jealousy thing re: Ryan. The Mets more or less cratered from '77 until the Davey Johnson years, but they'd been mediocre for a few years (including '73 which was a bit of a fluke) and they were a losing team in '77. Some people must have turned on Seaver and blamed him for all the losing, and then blamed him again for asking for a new contract (whose value must have seemed astronomical at the time) in the midst of a losing season. Or was it more like "give him whatever he wants, he's Tom f'n Seaver!"

This feature in the Daily News from the 30th anniversary seems fair:

The seeds of the ugliest episode in Met history were planted on July 12, 1976, when a new Collective Bargaining Agreement was reached, following another bitter and protracted labor dispute in the wake of arbitrator Peter Seitz's strike-down of the reserve clause, and the dawn of free agency was ushered in. Four months earlier, the Mets had locked Seaver in with a three-year, $675,000 deal, making him baseball's highest paid pitcher - temporarily - with a base salary of $225,000....

But in the spring of '77, Seaver, who had been the Mets' player rep in the labor negotiations, was elated over the riches suddenly being reaped by others. He was upset, however, that the Mets, who had finished third, 15 games out of first place, in 1976, had made no effort to sign any of the new free agents. He made note that despite a glaring need for offense and a significant financial advantage over their competitors, Grant and general manager Joe McDonald had failed to make a bona fide offer for center fielder Gary Matthews, who looked like a perfect fit for the Mets but wound up signing a five-year, $1.2 million deal with the Atlanta Braves.

"How can you not even try?" Seaver had asked in an impromptu session with the writers at the Mets' spring training complex in St. Petersburg on Feb. 26, 1977.

As for his own contract, which had been finally settled after a lot of public acrimony with (board chairman M. Donald) Grant, Seaver said: "I was made an example of. I was pictured as the ingrate after nine years with the club. I was to be punished. And even now, a year later, I still resent the way they did it."

Thirty years later, Seaver still feels nothing but contempt for Grant, who died at 94 in November 1998.

"There are two things Grant said to me that I'll never forget, but illustrate the kind of person he was and the total 'plantation' mentality he had," Seaver says. "During the labor negotiations, he came up to me in the clubhouse once and said: 'What are you, some sort of Communist?' Another time, and I've never told anyone this, he said to me: 'Who do you think you are, joining the Greenwich Country Club?' It was incomprehensible to him if you didn't understand his feelings about your station in life."

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/baseball/mets/true-story-midnight-massacre-article-1.224970

bump!

still hoping to see the Yankees/Oakland game on Friday 3rd May - can I just buy a ticket on the day?

if you know you're going then get them in advance from http://www.stubhub.com/new-york-yankees-tickets/yankees-vs-athletics-5-3-2013-4168610/

/gabbneb

Thanks caek, will do that - any particular place I should sit?

to answer that would be truly gabbnebian, but the one time i went i sat in 420A

behind first base (413) is good too. Try not to sit in the first row of a section, you have assholes walking past for 3 hours.

morbs i did not like my visit to the yankees. didn't particularly like the mets either. are the any nyc minor league teams you recommend for drinking in the sunshine?

well, the Brooklyn Cyclones play in Coney Island if that's your tourist-friendly destination. Always plentiful tix for the Staten Island Yankees too, right by the ferry dock.

Bobby Bonilla day will never be the same. :(

Who was the good doctors favorite Met?

Wright for a while, I think.

seaver, far and away

i miss you morbius

every time I see a terrible take on "film twitter" I think, "god, I miss the guy but I'm glad Morbs never had to see this"

to be fair, he'd probably have dismissed most of the nonsense out of hand and gotten back to telling us about what he was never going to watch :)