Mets Issues: Rat or Raccoon? ZZ Top Imitator?

5/8/2021

New Mets hero named Mazeika looks like ZZTop

So many questions from Friday night's Mets game.
Who was that guy wearing No.76 who plunked a 35-foot dribbler to win the game?
Back in the day, they used to talk about banjo hitters. This guy could be a guitar hitter.
And Patrick Mazeika's moment of glory came on the very same week that a hoax was circulating that ZZ Top's guitarist , Bill Gibbons, was rumored to have died in a car crash. Total hoax.

Speaking of hoaxes, something happened in the runway behind the Mets' dugout Friday night.
Francisco Lindor and Jeff McNeil, who had just botched a possible double play were the source of the commotion -- other Mets running down the steps to investigate something.

No problem, the lads assured reporters in the antiseptic pandemic press conference after the game. (No more sidling up to trusted sources in a crowded post-game clubhouse. Something precious has been lost in coverage of baseball and other sports. I always had a player or three in any clubhouse who would clarify stuff for me, quietly. Not gossip, usually....but a different perspective. Even for papers that cover clubs regularly, access is going, going....)

No fight, claimed Lindor, who had just crushed a game-tying homer in a season of grinding frustration. He and McNeil had been discussing, in raucous decibels, whether the giant beast they had both sighted was either a New York rat or a New York raccoon? Or was it a possum? Or one of our alligators from the marsh not far below the Mets' playground?

Basic New York street rat

Garbage pail raccoon

Nice try, boys. We New Yorkers can tell the difference, and so, I am sure, can you both.
Please coordinate your stories, and while you are at it, please coordinate your footwork around second base.

I can understand why Mets might be edgy these days. A few days ago, the Mets fired Chili Davis, a well-respected batting coach. (Reminds me of when the Mets fired my friend Bill Robinson to send a message to whom? the manager? the players?) Cheesy, either way, but Davis' firing highlighted the current make-it-up era. It didn't seem to dawn on the new owner, Steve Cohen, that fans will suss out the scapegoating of Davis. I guess that's how it goes in the hedge fund game. Now the Mets are being "run" by people who were second or third choices. No wonder tempers are fraught.

Plus, the domination by anonymous types in some underground bunker, running statistics through a computer. One result is defensive shifts, changing pitch by pitch, from hieroglyphics placed by the Analytics Crowd on plastic crib sheets, stuck in hip pockets, are confusing fielders.
Next time the mad analytics types are preparing their instructions for players who must react, in split seconds, to baseballs spinning in play, perhaps they could include photos to differentiate between rats (left) and raccoons (right.)
Meantime, fielders still have to deal with baseballs wriggling in play, put there by some new Met who looks like a ZZ Top musician. The human touch. That's our Mets.

Billy Altman

5/8/2021 11:01:07 am

George -

One of the things I always loved about ZZ Top was the fact that the only member of the trio without a beard was their drummer. His name is Frank Beard.

GEORGE VECSEY

5/11/2021 08:08:14 am

Billy, I knew ZZTop by their look...not their music. My awareness of them leaped when Lucinda Williams recorded "Metal Firecracker," with the stanza:

“We'd put on ZZ Top
And turn em up real loud
I used to think you were strong
I used to think you were proud
I used to think nothing could go wrong"

If ZZ Top meant that much to Lucinda Williams..etc.
GV

ahron horowitz

5/9/2021 12:09:02 pm

george-when i went to trade shows in the garment busneiss i was called zz and not because i looked like frank beard

George

5/9/2021 05:29:59 pm

Ahron: I think it's safe to say that in the garment district there are a number of ZZTop lookalikes, you included.

bruce

5/10/2021 01:29:19 pm

george,

i enjoy baseball stats--to a point.

hockey is matching baseball with stats.

dizzying. i have no clue what most of the acronyms mean.

and talking about stats...cnn just reported 400 gun murders/woundings over the weekend. six of them mass killings.

good god.

as an aside, did you see juventus is being threatened with being turfed if they don't disown the super league?

bruce

George

5/11/2021 07:49:26 am

Bruce, that's how these people got rich. Live by the gouge, die by the gouge.

bruce

5/11/2021 09:28:40 am

george,

good golly you're losing your youthful faith in the goodness of billionaires to do the right thing.

bruce

Jeff Geller

5/10/2021 06:00:51 pm

HI George,. Here is a word of advice for Mr, Mazeik. He should try to keep his shirt on and smooth out the beard, because, as all baseball fans know, there is nothing like, wait for it. . . all together now. . . A SHARP DRESSED MAN. Cue the music and the coupe!

George

5/11/2021 08:01:02 am

Jeff: He couldn't help the shirt situation -- that's a Met thing, rip off the guy's shirt is a walk-off thing. A lot of my favorite people have -- or had -- beards. Fact is, I have one, blessedly trimmed for the first time in a year. I could only wonder what would happen if Mazeika got traded to the Yankees -- I think The Boss's ban of beards is still in effect. GV

Jeffrey Geller

5/11/2021 07:06:49 pm

George, The Yankees beard edict is still in effect. Recently, when a player that they acquired shaved his beard. his young daughter would not go near him. He made up for it by doing several walk offs.. As for the shirts, I wonder who has the Mets concession for their replacements? Stay well

George

5/12/2021 07:14:12 am

Jeff: another shirtfest Tues evening. The same Mazeika, another game-winning fielder’s choice. Mets might gig him for cost of the shirts. GV

Ed Martin

5/10/2021 11:07:58 pm

Any of you old timers, ever see “The House of David” baseball team play? As a kid, I saw some of what were called “The Semi-Pro” teams play on LI. All HOD had beards.

George

5/11/2021 08:04:26 am

Ed, I remember them. In fact, Babe Ruth barnstormed against them...maybe even played with them. The Babe never met a goofy hat or costume he would not don. For a photo of him with a House of David fake beard, just do a search for Babe/Ruth/beard/House of David. GV

Alan Rubin link

5/12/2021 03:42:54 pm

Unless there was more than one House of David team, my uncle played for them. He was a very colorful individual who eventually settle in Syracuse.

My grandparents lived in the Rosedale section of the Bronx near the Cross Bronx Expressway. Uncle Sam would always talk about when was a catcher for the House of David team as an eighteen year old. They would play games with the prison team at the Sing Sing correctional facility. Most, if not all of his teammates were older, and they introduced him to chewing tobacco. He did not realize that you were not supposed to swallow the juice, so he got the runs during a game.

Uncle Sam would have been worthy of one of your "unusual characters" posts.

My athletic ability came from my mothers side. My father's bowing would have been a funniest family video's highlight.

Comments are closed.

QUOTES

Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

Mets Issues: Rat or Raccoon? ZZ Top Imitator?

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