213 Miles From Shea

Want to hear a joke?

THE METS OUTFIELD. HAHAAAA.

But seriously, if nothing happens with Bourn, or even if something happens with Bourn (this article is being written on the morning of 2/9), the outfield has a lot of problems. It’s worth it to go though all of the possible outfield candidates, no matter how far away, because the depth chart is so incredibly shallow.

Juan Lagares is 23 years old (will turn 24 during Spring Training) and is on the Mets 40 – Man. He’s played with the Mets since 2006 at age 17. During his time in the Mets system he is a career .280 hitter with 2,322 AB’s, 28 homers, 115 doubles, 40 triples and 98 stolen bases. Last year he had 499 AB’s while scoring 69 times, with 141 hits containing 29 doubles, 6 triples and 4 homers. He walked 37 times and stole 21 bases. All of this led to a .283 BA, .334 OBP and a .723 OPS.

I highly doubt Lagares will break camp with the team as things stand right now. But if Kirk doesn’t work out, JV1 isn’t used, and den Dekker doesn’t impress, I don’t see the harm in giving Lagares a shot. He’s on the 40 man and his stats look very similar to a lot of other triple A players we tried to push into the majors last year. He’s young and if anyone gets injured could see his way to Queens by the end of the year, especially if impresses in camp.

Brandon Hicks, who was purchased by the Mets from the Athletics earlier this off-season, will be trying for a utility position on the Mets roster outside of camp. He has a few things going for him and some critical items against him.

On the positive side he can play short stop and third base, which makes him valuable for a late inning defense replacement.

Through age 26, he has had 90 at bats in the majors with only 12 hits (.133 BA) while scoring 16 runs, hitting 5 doubles and three homers while walking 8 times. So the positive: when he hits, he hits for power, some nice pop on the bench. The negative: he doesn’t really hit, at all. He didn’t really hit in the minors either. In six years, he’s hit .241, however the power game has always been there in the minors. Last year, in only 90 games, he hit 18 homers. The year before, in 104 games, he hit 18 homers. In 2009 (128 games) and 2010 (77 games) he had a bit of a power outage hitting 10 homers and 7 homers respectively. The previous years he had 19 and 20 homers.

The potential for power off of the bench is seductive, however the lack of consistent hitting is something to be concerned about. Hicks is the type of player for this team that could be memorable or completely forgettable. He can join this team or not out of camp and I’m not sure I would personally care.

In short, Hicks is an interesting player. He fills a defensive need and has some mysterious power. He just doesn’t hit. If he did hit though, he wouldn’t be a utility player, so there’s that.

And by awkward, I just mean awkward for people who want to write stories counting down to Spring Training.

I used to try to do that one year, every day go through a player profile, or an area of the team leading up to pitchers and catchers, but its messy. A lot of players come to camp early now, and not just pitchers and catchers but position players. Then when players don’t come early, like Tejada last year, it becomes a story about how the player didn’t come early!

So, Spring Training starts sometime this week, but it really already started with images of players in cages and on mounds.

Happy early but actually already started spring training season everyone!

We’re 9 days away from pitchers and catchers reporting, we’re in February and Ike Davis will be reporting to Florida on Wednesday, so baseball season must be right around the corner.

Topps has already released their 2013 Series 1 Cards and my first impression is a positive one. Here’s a picture of some of the cards I found in a blaster box (10 small packs – retail):

The card design is nice this year. 2011 just screamed, “HEY WE HAVE EXCLUSIVE BASEBALL RIGHTS SO HERE’S A GIGANTIC LOGO FOR EACH TEAM BECAUSE NO ONE ELSE CAN SHOW THEM” and 2012 had a pretty busy front. This year is fairly minimalist as you can see with the Lucas Duda, R.A. Dickey and Justin Maxwell card. I included the Maxwell card to show Topps updated the Houston logo. The glue to the set is this idea of “the chase”. Every card features the career stat that player is chasing. For example, on the back of the Duda card it reads, “Career Chase: With 29 home runs, Duda is 733 away from Barry Bonds’ all-time record of 762”.

I wasn’t too impressed with the majority of the inserts, “Chasing the Dream” and “Calling Card”. However one series looks awesome. Some packs have 1972 mini cards that look sharp and authentic. They are well done.

The parallel cards are fairly similar to previous years. You have the gold cards that are numbered to 2013, emerald cards (that I think are new for this year), black bordered, one of one’s etc. Joining them this year is a pink bordered and a camo border, which I think is rather hokey but whatever. For the second year in a row, if you buy retail packs at Walmart, you can get a blue set, at target a red set, and at ToysRus a purple set. This makes collecting the cards less linear than just retail vs hobby. The red parallel is pictured above, so I guess you can figure out I got these cards at Target.

If you get blaster packs, you can collect a manufactured relic series. A Matt Holiday manufactured patch card is pictured above.

Verdict: If you like the basic Topps set, you’ll like this set. The cards look clean and there are a lot of different parallel sets to collect.

Tejada’s team was eliminated in the qualifying round of this year’s tournament after disappointing performances in 2009 and 2006. Their uniform set was very similar to those years as well.  The jerseys look the same as they did last time, which is a good decision, you can see them here and the hat below:

Chinese Taipei is playing in their third tournament, and as far as I can tell, they may be the only team this year coming out with uniforms that have the logo on one side of the jersey (sorta softball style). Now they haven’t released uniforms for sale, so for the picture we have to go off of the style guide. There is only one uniform so far and it looks like this:

It looks like they aren’t going for the underarm panels, so I guess their road uniforms will be gray. It’s a uniform that stands out purely because it’s so different than the rest of the teams.

Short note today as my teaching job is taking up a good chunk of my time tonight.

213 MFS turned 6 today! Thank you all for reading this blog and spreading the word. Without you this blog would be nothing!

Keep reading and LETS GO METS!

South Africa was in the 2006 and 2009 World Baseball Classic. Last year, they didn’t win a game at all so they had to go to the qualifying round where they were beat out to the show by Spain. Anyway, their uniforms look the same, which is fine. The green uniforms look good and the font size is correct on the jersey front.  You can see pictures of the uniform in action here, and the hat below:

The Philippines were another team eliminated in the qualifying round of the World Baseball Classic. On the uniform front, they did a good job. The hat and uniform both have colors that pop and match the country flag. Nice looking set. You can see the uniform in action here and the hat below:

Wanted to watch Oliver Perez again? Of course you do. Oliver Perez will be playing for Mexico in this year’s World Baseball Classic. Mexico is keeping the same color pallet from last year and the same hat however the uniform update didn’t go so well:

The hat still looks good. The uniform is suffering from the same characteristic as a lot of other teams, the small jersey font. If the jersey said “Mexico” in larger letters, it would look a lot better.