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Friday, April 28, 2006
Mets have a lot to prove
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
The Mets are full of themselves. Even before they sprinted from opening day to the vicinity of justifying their hype with a five-game lead in the National League East heading into Friday night’s game at Turner Field, they were talking big and bad. They were so cocky after the additions of standouts Billy Wagner, Carlos Delgado and Paul Lo Duca during the offseason that they decided to pair another song with their eternal “Meet the Mets.”
All you need to know is that the title of the new jingle commissioned by Mets honchos is “Our team, our time.”
We’ll see. The Mets haven’t been more than a creation of that powerful East Coast PR machine for the longest time. The reality is the Braves have a tendency to rattle the psyche of the Mets. To translate, this latest series between the two is more about the Mets than it is about the Braves. This is more about whether the guys from New York can stop reaching for their personal Big Apples (as in the ones along their throats) at the sight of a tomahawk across a baseball uniform.
At least on this particular night, the Mets played self-imposed shrink by taking a couple of deep breaths and blowing their Braves’ phobia away after doing enough on the mound, in the field and at the plate for a 5-2 victory. There was that manufactured run in the first, when a hit-and-run led to a sacrifice fly. There was a two-out triple that produced another run in the fourth. There also was that solo homer in the fifth that pushed the Mets to a 3-0 lead. You’d have thought that all of that would have been more than adequate for the Mets with the great Pedro Martinez spending inning after inning embarrassing the slumping Braves hitters even more.
Instead, Chipper Jones returned as a serial Mets killer with a two-run homer over the left-center field fence in the sixth. If you combine that with the great John Smoltz keeping the Braves within a short rally of a comeback with 10 strikeouts through his seven innings, there was plenty of time for the Mets to get spooked.
It didn’t happen after the Mets responded in the ninth with another manufactured run on a single, a stolen base, a sacrifice bunt and a sacrifice fly, then a solo homer. Then Wagner ignored a bases-loaded jam in the bottom of the ninth to throw smoke past the overmatched Todd Pratt for the save.
This was one game, though. The Mets have to conquer the Braves physically and mentally for another game and a slew of them after that to prove their time truly has come. Take it from the great Tom Glavine, the former pitching legend with the Braves who left after 16 seasons to spend the previous three with the Mets.
“My first year here, we probably didn’t have a good enough team to beat the Braves, but you hope you do,” said Glavine, rejuvenated at 40 with a 2.78 ERA entering Saturday night’s Game 2 of the series. “Last year, we still were a little more realistic about our chances of catching the Braves, but, there again, we knew that a lot of things had to go right in order for that to happen.”
Glavine paused to smile. After all, he was thinking about now. “Yeah, this year is a little bit different in that we feel that talent-wise, we have what it takes to win,” he said. “Now whether or not we do that, that’s a different story.”
So far, it’s been the same, old story for a Mets franchise that has contributed often to the Braves’ record streak of 14 consecutive trips to the playoffs. Since the Braves switched from the NL West to the NL East in 1995, the Mets have won the season series only twice, and the Mets haven’t done so in eight consecutive years.
Not only that, with much of the early season featuring the Mets streaking and the Braves reeking, the Mets still discovered ways to drop two of three games to the Braves last week at Shea Stadium. Then came this one that featured the Mets winning in the first of six games against the Braves over the next 10 games.
Is that the Fat Lady clearing her throat in Queens to sing down the stretch of this season, or just the sound of overconfident Mets fans? Yeah, well. I’m still betting against the Fat Lady.
Permalink | Comments (15) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Terence Moore
Darting the intangibles a draft specialty
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
It is NFL draft day, and there is a chance Falcons fans might become comatose waiting for their team’s first pick, which will take place sometime during dinner or, in T.J. Duckett’s case, midway through the third dessert.
But picking 47th really isn’t so bad, especially considering some of the gems this franchise has taken at Nos. 1 though 46. (Grab hold of something.) Aundray Bruce, Marcus Cotton, Shawn Collins, Steve Broussard, Bruce Pickens, Mike Pritchard, Tony Smith, Roger Harper, Devin Bush, Ron Davis, Michael Booker, Nathan Davis, Byron Hanspard, Reggie Kelly and Duckett (who went two picks before Javon Walker).
What the NFL doesn’t want you to know about this weekend is it’s a glorified game of darts. Personnel chiefs look at stats, game tape and combine results and confidently proclaim they have put together the perfect draft board.
It’s such a perfect science that none of the league’s 32 draft boards match.
Bart Starr, the MVP of the first two Super Bowls, lasted until the 17th round (200th overall).
Joe Montana, the greatest quarterback these eyes have ever seen, was taken with the last pick in the third round in 1979. Weak arm, they said. Then they watch him win four Super Bowls.
“I wasn’t very big and I didn’t have big numbers,” Montana said by phone. “I threw the ball 19 or 20 times a game at Notre Dame. Jack Thompson threw 40 or 50 times a game. It would take me three weeks to catch up to him. But it’s hard sometimes to see how competitive a guy is.”
Thompson was the third overall pick, 79 spots ahead of Montana. Turned out, he was Jeff George before Jeff George — a punt-pass-and-kick poster boy who couldn’t play.
Today, Montana has only a mild interest in the draft. He spends most of his time with his family and promotes a blood-pressure drug, Lotrel, doing media spots urging people to get their blood pressure down (He was diagnosed with high BP in 2002).
“They think they’ve got it figured out,” Montana said. “But if they had it figured out, why are they putting guys like Matt Leinart and Vince Young and Reggie Bush through the combine? If you look at first-round picks through the years, you’ll find just as many busts as great players. There’s so much emphasis on how big a guy or how fast he is, how much he can lift, what he does on this test or that test. But can the guy play the game? It’s a difficult thing to figure out.”
There is no perfect formula, Montana said. But there are things that generally should be ignored: like statistics.
“How do you compare a quarterback at a small college with someone like Matt Leinart, who’s been playing in an NFL style offense and with other great players?” Montana said. “Other quarterbacks may not have the protection he does. The important thing is, does the guy make plays at key times in the game? Defensively, are there guys who find a way to get to the ball? Whether it’s a bad week or no matter what the competition is, are they always making plays?”
Scouts missed on Montana because they overlooked his decision-making, his accuracy, his cool. This was a quarterback who, during a timeout just prior to a Super Bowl-winning touchdown drive against Cincinnati, turned to lineman Harris Barton in the huddle and said, “Isn’t that John Candy sitting up in the stands?”
They missed on Bart Starr for other reasons. “I didn’t have much of a resume,” said the former Alabama quarterback. “My first two years were good, but I was injured my junior year and in my senior year we had a coaching change and I didn’t play much.”
But while saying NFL teams generally get their picks right, he acknowledged the process is somewhat flawed.
“You can measure some things with tests,” he said. “But you can’t measure mental toughness and level of commitment. You can’t measure preparation or courage.”
So if some general manager says today, “We can’t believe that player was available at 79th,” don’t be fooled into thinking he knows something nobody else does. He just has a different set of darts.
Permalink | Comments (14) | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Jeff Schultz
