Hey, They Listened to Me!

Last installment of the Look Back trilogy on posts during the 2012 baseball season that either left the yard or whiffed. 

This June 26 post suggesting the Mets should eject their most powerful booster rocket engendered some indignant emails. Ha! Take that indignant emailers! Not only was it right, the Mets took the advice and traded R.A. Dickey while his value was high. 

Where the post went wrong was in suggesting that Dickey couldn't possibly keep up his first half heroics. Technically speaking, that was true: everything about R.A. Dickey is an impossibility, and yet the 38-year-old fireballing Scroogie artist manages to astonish us anew every fifth day. Only now he'll do it for Toronto while the Mets develop C Travis d’Arnaud, and RHP Noah Syndergaard.

This report of the Phillies' death as contender was not exaggerated. Nor was it premature. The core of the team in 2012 was crippled, two of the triumvirate of pitchers expected to provide ballast came up short and the franchise is left betwixt and between -- neither a contender nor a rebuilder.

This fact was underscored by the assertion in the aforementioned post that the Phils had to make a run at a pennant in 2013 given the boatload of investments in their expensive and aging core. That was followed five months later with this post, which flambe'd GM Ruben Amaro for signing another aging veteran when he should be punting the season. 

Ding this blog for being inconsistent and the Phillies for being in no-man's land. Their only hope is that Howard, Utley, Rollins, Polanco, Young and Halladay have one last burst in them, like a Phoenix, or a bag of microwave popcorn.

Finally, on a romp through the Majors at around the three-quarter pole of the season came three notable assertions that rang the distant echoes of Meat Loaf. Two out of three ain't bad.

First the losing proposition: that Mike Trout and Andrew McCutcheon seemed MVP locks, not withstanding complete collapses. Well, McCutcheon and his locks collapsed nearly completely in the second half while his Pirates skittered into the record books on the futility side. Trout continued to amaze, as did the baseball writers who picked the wrong guy -- by a country mile -- for the award.

On the other hand, the same post suggested the Dodgers should find a new home for Hanley Ramirez  after a .330/.392/.549 performance and good behavior in 23 games following his trade from Miami. Put this way:

Now if the Dodgers are smart, they'll flip Hanley's re-motivated self to another club while his value remains spiked and let his next sulk come at someone else's expense.

Ah, but they held on in the vain hope that he could help them slip into the playoffs. Instead, a .268/.305/.375 September drained most of his trade value and for the second time in five years an uninterested "Ramirez" will plague the Dodger roster at high cost. 

Carl Crawford, however, did listen, just from the other end of the country. Attempting to play through the lost Red Sox season with a torn left (throwing) elbow tendon, Crawford finally heeded the same post, which urged him to bag the season and accede to Tommy John surgery the next day. Nearly the next day . . . Crawford was packaged up with Adrian Gonzalez, Josh Beckett and Nick Punto to the Dodgers, whereupon he went straight into the operating room. With eight months to heal, Crawford is expected to be ready for Opening Day.

We all will be. See you there with a new batch of provocations, some of which will even be right.