Beltran SelfLESS?

On Monday, Carlos Beltran walked into manager Terry Collins' spring training office and told him he was ready to make the defensive switch to rightfield.

Beltran is being lauded for this move by most accounts I have heard or read. Beltran said, "I believe the best decision is for me to play rightfield. It's going to be less active, and I am looking forward to saving my knees for the long run."

Here's the thing. This is a selfish move by Beltran. Yes, I believe the Mets are a better team with Beltran in RF, potentially saving his knees and helping his offense. However, Beltran is only doing this to save his career and potentially cash in again next off-season. Beltran made this move on his terms. I think Carlos' ego wasn't going to be able to handle struggling for a whole season in centerfield and potentially being moved by the manager to RF. So Carlos did it himself.

The Mets were too sheepish to come out and just make the decision on their own. Luckily for Collins, Beltran realized he needed to do this for himself.

Another issue I see with this is, Beltran's not healthy. If Carlos was healthy, he wouldn't be moving himself to RF. Basically, he's saying, "I'm hurt, I can't play CF properly." Moving to RF didn't fix his knee, it's just an attempt to hide the problem.

Summer of '86 Review

Yikes. What was that pile of shit that I watched last night? How is it possible to take the story of the 1986 New York Mets and ruin it? MSG pulled it off with Part I of the Summer of '86.

First, this whole thing turned into some kind of scam to get us all to watch the Knicks post-game show. The Summer of '86 was supposed to start at 10pm, but didn't actually air until sometime around 10:45. This post-game show consisted of a bunch of terrible interviews and bogus "analysis" from Kelly Tripucka. The only thing worse than NBA basketball is people talking about NBA basketball.

Moving on to the actual show, I must start by reminding everyone how awesome the '86 Mets were. They were the last REAL baseball team. They drank, did coke, brawled with opponents, picked up women, and won the World Series.

There has not been a team in America that has since come close to having as much character and talent as Davey Johnson's boys. The '93 Phillies were close and the '04 Red Sox were closer, but not quite.

So I was excited for this new show on the best team of all-time. I wanted to hear about the Scum Bunch. I wanted new stories about bar sluts and Colombian cocaine. I wanted to know how many punches landed on Tom Niedenfuer's face.

Or, as one Mets-Thing insider described to me last night by text, "I will only watch if Doug Sisk is interviewed with his voice garbled and his identity protected".

We want the real shit, not more of the same lame-ass baseball cliche talk about how Keith Hernandez was a manager on the field.

But that's what we got. It was 15 minutes (the other 15 minutes were all commercials and self-promotion) of fodder. Everybody in New York knows who the players were and who the manager was. MSG did not need to rehash all that nonsense.

The narrator sucked too.

The highlight of the show was everything and anything Davey Johnson said, telling the team "we're going to dominate" in spring training. Nice.

Part II will be airing tonight at 10:30pm.