John Harper has a new column up at the Daily News which is basically an interview/post-mortem with Mets' owner Fred Wilpon on this past offseason. If you weren't already sure of the Mets' intentions regarding Daisuke Matsuzaka after their $39 million bid fell short, here it is from the horse's mouth:
"I thought we bid $10 million over the market," he said. "I was crying and moaning that we were bidding too high. There was no way of knowing what other teams were doing, and when we bid (nearly) $40 million, it took a little bit of a gulp to do it.Adam Rubin has an article, also in the Daily News about the strength of the Mets' lefty setup men, Pedro Feliciano and Scott Schoeneweis.And the thing I was scared of was not getting beat by $10 million or $12 million. I was more scared we were going to beat everybody else by $10 million (and thus overpay). Believe me, we had a whole package, we had a plan. The Red Sox got themselves a hell of a pitcher."
In their latest installment of Flashback Friday, Jason at Fear and Faith in Flushing pens a rather outstanding piece on card collecting and prospecting for rack packs:
I never did get all the '76 Topps cards -- I wound up missing like 50 or 60 of them, somehow. Years later, at card shows, I'd occasionally flip past one of the missing '76es and stop and stare at a card that my seven-year-old self swore couldn't exist. (On the other hand, I think I got about 54 Mike Anderson Traded cards.) I did get all the Mets, and I still have them tucked away in a binder. Jerry Koosman and Del Unser are practically round. Randy Tate is liberally splotched with what I'm pretty sure is now 31-year-old Nestle's Quik. They're testaments to the fact that children love things half to death, and I've kept them because there's nothing whatsoever wrong with that.F&FIF is a daily stop for me, often just to measure how poor a writer I am by comparison.
Lastings Milledge got hit on the hand in Wednesday's spring opener against the Tigers, but he's fine. Also, check out his interview on WFAN with Mike and the Mad Dog yesterday.