Timesman Michael Powell dug in. The Californian on the mound wore a fleece vest and wraparound shades. He turned and tossed his junkball with an air of moneyballed insouciance. Powell held back, kept that shoulder in like Keith Hernandez has urged generations of Little Leaguers (and Darryl Strawberry) to do. Then he unleashed a short, powerful stroke. Good lumber met junk with a manly smack. And the hurler went down, clothes awry like Charlie Brown.
As least that's how I took Powell's vicious comebacker at the Mets front office in the wake - and wake it surely is for real Mets fans - of the disastrous and disappointing R.A. Dickey trade. Reading it in The Times this morning, I made like Howard Cosell witnessing serious sporting mayhem: "Down goes Alderson, down goes Alderson!"
The lead went all in on the hapless, meandering GM:
“Day to day, game to game, Alderson wants to win, and he wants to win now.”
The New York Times, May 21, 2011
I’m glad Sandy has come to terms with his win-now mania.
His eyes apparently now fixed on contending in the 2019 baseball season, the Mets general manager has decided to off load pitcher R. A. Dickey on Canada.
A 20-game winner and the National League strikeout leader, Dickey had no place on the 2013 Mets, a team for which mediocrity will be a high aspiration.
The Mets now have pulled off a perverse daily double, in consecutive seasons dumping the N.L. batting champion, Jose Reyes, and the Cy Young Award winner, Dickey. God help a Mets player if he wins the most valuable player award this season. That player should immediately call a transcontinental moving company.
Standing eight count right there. Yes, I'm mixing boxing metaphors with baseball metaphors. So did Grantland Rice, bub, so wander, will ya? There's more, focused on the organization's decision to plant stories in the friendly media about how Dickey wasn't such a good Met after all:
R. A. Dickey is erudite, funny and offbeat, and has a knack for striking out batters. He embraced New York City, was involved with worthy charities and wrote a literate memoir. None of this seems to have made much of an impression on Fred and Jeff Wilpon, the penurious father-and-son combo who run the Mets like bargain-basement impresarios.
For them, cheap linens beat silk sheets every time.
So when Dickey asked this autumn for an eminently reasonable new contract, the Mets responded in patented fashion, which is to say unidentified Mets somebodies began whispering calumnies about Dickey. (Similar somebodies spread nasty rumors about Reyes, Carlos Beltran and even David Wright, until the Mets decided to re-sign Wright, their third baseman.)
Dickey, a New York Post writer told us, has an “unwieldy personality,” which makes the pitcher sound like an oversize couch.
Dickey, other writers suggested, is self-regarding. O.K., sure, maybe he talked a little too much about Kili, short for Mount Kilimanjaro, which he climbed last winter rather than engaging in the time-honored off-season ritual of getting blasted on microbrews and chasing women.
On Twitter, the usual sabermetricians and Alderson fanboys didn't like it. The Times was out to get their pal "Sandy." The trade is a great one. You'll see (and can we get a few more steak sandwiches). Just not in 2013, a season the Mets will open without an ace in a game for which the cheapest seat sells for $63. Onward.
