I’ll refrain from tearing my hair out over Marcus Giles scoring from 2nd on a groundball back to Pedro (!) and instead fixate on a depressing fact cited by Peter Gammons last night : the combined .295 OBP for the Mets’ 1 and 2 hitters, the worst in the league.
The high price of Carlos Beltran’s 2005 mediocrity has been cited again and again, almost as often as Fran Healy whips himself into a frenzy over Jose Reyes hitting a ball 2 feet off the plate for a triple. Gammons, however, is one of the few TV mouthpieces to explain there’s a correlation between Beltran’s dire production and the fact that the table settters are bringing nothing to the table.
Other than Billy Wagner and Mariano Rivera both losing, Tuesday was not a happy TV night. Too many hours spent flipping around the news channels searching for footage of John Franco sleeping on the Astrodome floor.
Among the revelations in Jack Curry’s NY Times column today : Lou Piniella probably wants out of Tampa Bay, the Devil Rays don’t want to pay him the full value of the contract if he leaves, and the Yankees might be amongst the other clubs interested in Lou’s services. If you don’t own a radio, television, have internet access or read another newspapers, the Times does a fine job of summarizing stories everyone else has been covering for months.