It’s spring ahead, fall back tonight at 2 AM, so in honor of the clocks jerking forward three weeks earlier than necessary, I suppose it’s time to take Spring Training a little more seriously.

The Mets have just allowed their pretend record to dip to 3-8 with an irritating-sounding loss to the Nationals. It may have looked bad, too, but it was a WFAN-only affair (which, with Hockey Howie otherwise engaged in Uniondale, only made it sound worse). Once I get past the gee whiz, good golly, Donald Rumsfeld-type exclamations of awe that there is baseball being played somewhere, I’ve noticed that almost every game to date — eight of eleven, to be exact — has involved a shoddy display of Met defense, Met offense, Met fundamentals, Met relief and Met starting in roughly that order.

They don’t sound ready for spring or spring ahead or even Spring Training. Thankfully it matters not a whit in real time, but it gets late early around here, y’know?

Speaking of whom, what the fudge is up with Duaner Sanchez? Last year we discovered Duaner, Duaner discovered Queens and all was good with the world until Cecil Wiggins discovered his car keys. We enter these seasons taking several things for granted based on widely held assumptions. One of them was that Sanchez overcame the car wreck, the surgery, the winter and now he’d be ready for Opening Day. It appears very much that he won’t be. And that’s cool, because who the hell are we to tell a guy who’s been through that kind of trauma to get his body in gear exactly when we want it?

But Duaner, you can get to camp on time every morning. That’s big with managers and coaches. Even John Madden, the quintessential loosey-goosey head honcho who harbored the hijinks of John Matuszak and all those wacky Raiders, said he had but three rules:

• Be on time
• Pay attention
• Play like hell when I tell you to

The on-time part came first (which means I never would have made it with the Raiders; or the Randolphs). So wake up, Filthy. We need you eventually. And it’s your job.
As for everybody else, whatever percentage of life Woody Allen ascribed to showing up isn’t getting it done. Are we really going to war with the bench we have and not the bench we want? Jesus Alou, this is not encouraging. Castro is Castro. Fine. Franco’s a legacy. Whatever. Endy is awesome. No complaints. I don’t begrudge Easley or Newhan for that matter.

But we could use a guy who could hit one out now and then as a matter of course, not as a total surprise. Ruben Sierra probably won’t limp across the finish line, but he can pop. Ben Johnson has been mighty intriguing. Is there room? Do we have to carry 12 pitchers, thus making it untenable to have more than five role players, all of whom left the yard a grand total of 22 occasions last year?

Yeah, probably. We need to carry those seven relievers. But which seven?

Wagner and Heilman (you’re a reliever, learn to deal). Schoeneweis and Feliciano (yes, we have us some lefties). And? No Mota until at least June. No Sanchez until nobody knows. That leaves…

Ambiorix Burgos? I’d like to think so. The wolves will be out for his first mistake, no matter what cooler heads advise, yet he’s kind of my cause this spring. But those ninth-inning, Bo Diaz-style grand slams aren’t going to cut it (he pitched much better today…by the sound of it).

Joe Smith? Now there’s a baseball name for you. I get the sense, based on my two glimpses thus far, that he’s a novelty that will only go so far. But then again, I don’t wear a jacket all the time, so what could I possibly know about pitching?

Jason Vargas? We could use a long man.

Jorge Sosa? We could use a long man, but not him (he’s sort of the rule-proving exception for In Omar We Trust, at least until I’m presented compelling and overwhelming evidence to the contrary).

Alay Soler? Not after today. I could dig up the stats, but suffice it to say Tom McCarthy and Eddie Coleman weren’t impressed, and if you can’t impress Eddie Coleman, you’re coming up way short. (And if you want a terrific take on Mets broadcasters, take a gander at a terrific new blog, The Ballclub; gads, we so have to update our links.)

Jon Adkins? I’m too focused on Ben Johnson among the ex-Padres to have noticed much from him.

Chad Bradford? Crap. He’s not here anymore.

Some years this would be window dressing. This year it’s critical. Even with Maine and Perez in the rotation (I think they’re givens at this point), you know inning-eating is going to be at a premium among these five starters, whoever these five starters are. Almost nobody goes seven anymore. Hardly anybody goes six. Whether rookie Pelfrey or wily Park gets the fifth spot — it’s got to be one of those two, and in a chilly April, I wouldn’t mind it being Park — there will be work for the bullpen. It’s amazing how quickly a seven-man corps can deplete itself after a couple of quickie hooks.

My analytical skills are rusty. If any of this made sense, I’d be surprised as anyone. Either way, it doesn’t count. Clock ahead, clock back…it’s still spring. We may be 3-8, but we’re really still oh and oh.

Seriously, though. Duaner Sanchez, take your wakeup call.

Last night, after Varsity Letters, a few of us blogger types were sitting around drinking beer and talking baseball, and the conversation came around to baseball names. And the one that I found myself groping for was Stubby Clapp — not for anything fabulous he did (5 for 25 as a 2001 St. Louis Cardinal), but for having the greatest baseball name in at least a generation.
I remember Stubby Clapp (you have to say or type his entire name every time, just because you can) coming to bat at Shea and hearing the rather strange sound of half a stadium laughing. Not in derision, but in appreciation. You knew before you even looked that Stubby Clapp would be squat and not hugely talented but full of grit and fire, that he was one of those guys they'd have to tear the uniform off of, that 20 years from now he'd be a roving instructor or coaching first base in the Appy League. Stubby Clapp sounds like a guy who would have raised hell in a roadster barnstorming with Ty Cobb and Rabbit Maranville, or maybe won a batting title in Altoona before the war interrupted his career. After Class D ball and Dubya Dubya Two I did a stint in the merchant marine, kid, running cargoes from Java to Peking. Lemme tell ya, them port girls were wild, but they'd kill ya soon as look at ya. Woke up once in this flophouse in Formosa with this tattoo…don't tell the missus, but those were some times. Stubby Clapp. He'd have gnarled fingers and hate doctors and refuse to wear reading glasses and wait up all night for his grown children to arrive safe for Christmas but never tell them he loved them. (It's OK. They'd know.) Stubby Clapp. Close your eyes and you can see him clear as day, can't you? (He's actually Canadian, which is just so…disappointing. I say we all pretend he isn't.)
Baseball has always been a wonderful source of names, from American classics (Smokey Burgess) to primally minimalist (Ty Cobb) to gleefully silly (Hank “Bow Wow” Arft) to evocatively mysterious (Greg's recently mentioned Van Lingle Mungo) to not-so-evocatively mysterious (Sibby Sisti). As relatively recent arrivals, the Mets have missed out on some of the fun — sportswriters had abandoned much of the purple-prosed mythmaking that bred great nicknames by 1962. But there's still plenty to love in four and a half decades of Met names.
With some exceptions (Stubby Clapp), names inevitably pick up characteristics from the players who bore them. The pleasure of Nolan Ryan's name comes from its deceptive mildness, but take away 5,600 strikeouts and it would just be mild. Gary Carter and David Wright's gee-whiz, can-do spirits are perfectly reflected in their utterly ordinary names. Ron Darling's name sounds smart and a bit fancy, but has a certain “Boy Named Sue” quality that a fiery competitor could build upon — a not-bad description of Ron Darling. Edgardo Alfonzo's name is at once faintly exotic (at least to whitebread Americans), sensibly balanced and musical without being showy about it — which sure sounds like Fonzie to me. In hindsight, the name Gregg Jefferies is self-absorbed and too complicated (you can easily misspell both ends). That's a match.
A good name needs balance — it's the double repeated consonants that make Todd Pratt, Eddie Murray and Bobby Bonilla good baseball names. (Not to mention Stubby Clapp.) But too much balance and a name feels fussy. To switch to that other team in town, the repeated M makes Mickey Mantle a good baseball name, but it's the way the vowels and sounds keep changing that makes it a great one. Leaving aside his vaguely girly first name (which isn't his fault), Derek Jeter isn't a great baseball name for all kinds of reasons — it only has one vowel, that one vowel appears twice in each name in the same exact places, and the first and last name have the same number of letters and sound the same. It's the baseball-name equivalent of a matchy-matchy outfit.
Baseball names rely on nicknames — Danny Staub, Clarence Coleman and Steve Wendell are all crummy baseball names. (As is Richard Clapp.) Baseball names sometimes need middle names to pinch-hit, as Lynn Ryan, George Seaver and Cornelius Floyd could tell you. And then they need a certain, hard-to-pin down something — a certain quality that makes you want to tuck your chin and try for the timbre of a PA announcer. “Now batting….” I envy my co-blogger's perfectly respectable baseball name; I knew I was doomed as a big-league player because there was no way my name would ever sound cool echoing around a stadium. (Well, that and hitting .080 as a Little Leaguer.)
Without further ado, eight classifications of great baseball names (and interesting failures), as typified by New York Mets….
AMERICORN: These are those names that just sound like baseball names. Nicknames help, though they're not everything. Choo Choo Coleman and Vinegar Bend Mizell are obviously names thought up by wise old syndicate writers of 50s serials. Tug McGraw, Rico Brogna, Henry Owens and Mo Vaughn should have razzed each other from Omaha Beach to Berlin, smoking and shooting Germans and balling French girls along the way. Their names ensured Duffy Dyer and Mackey Sasser would be backup catchers the day they were born. You know immediately Turk Wendell is a character. And Buzz Capra gets not only a no-BS nickname (real name=Lee), but also the last name of the director who personifies Americorn.
FUSSY: These sounds like baseball names, but they're a bit complicated, with a whiff of the manor. And as such, they present the bearer with a stark choice: succeed or come in for an extra heaping of scorn. Marv Throneberry is a fussy name redeemed by that plain-as-mud first name. Darryl Strawberry is a fussy name redeemed by towering home runs. (And a well-chosen repeat consonant — Daryl Strawberry doesn't work.) Because Brock Pemberton didn't hit, he sounds like a product of inbreeding and English public schools. Skip Lockwood (real name=Claude) sounds like a guy wearing glasses, which he was. Joel Youngblood's usefulness didn't redeem his comic-book-hero name. The convoluted last names of Jason Isringhausen and Bill Pulsipher, in retrospect, spelled trouble. If Lastings Milledge hits .300, his name will be complicated and interesting. If he hits .240, it'll be vain and showy.
DIFFERENCES: OK, this isn't really a category, but it's worth noting that baseball names walk a knife edge between success and utter failure. Gerald Wayne Grote chose wisely in choosing a J instead of a G: Jerry Grote looks satisfyingly plain and direct, while Gerry Grote is effete. Tommie Agee has a grace and glide that Tommy Agee could never aspire to. The simplest subtraction turns run-of-the-mill Mike Hampton into pretty-cool Ike Hampton. Bobby Valentine is a bit too blandly all-American, but Ellis Valentine sounds slightly off and therefore interesting. Elliott Maddox has four vowels, triple repeated consonants and a final X. Very cool. Kelly Stinnett has triple repeated consonants, but weak vowels and a girly first name. Not so cool.
FUN TO SAY: Ron Swoboda's name just begs to be mispronounced Suh-boda. (On the other hand, you fear to mispronounce Philip Humber, and then fret that you added an extra L.) Carlos Delgado arcs off the tongue like a long double headed for the gap. Bartholome Fortunato is a name to be savored. Marco Scutaro's last name sounds like something an agitated third-base coach should yell.
NO-FRILLS KILLERS: These are my favorite baseball names — simple, short, and blunt to the point of brutishness. Names that'll get up out of the dirt after you put one under the chin, then crack a clean single to left. Ron Hunt. Cleon Jones. Amos Otis. Rusty Staub. Hank Webb. Cliff Floyd.
WONDERFUL: Donn Clendenon sounds like rolling drums. Felix Millan sounds brisk and athletic and flashy. Dave Kingman had to be a slugger. Lenny Randle sounds sneaky and speedy and vaguely illicit. Clint Hurdle's name alone should have been worth 200 home runs. You knew Butch Huskey was at least a XXL before he arrived. A great name is no guarantee of anything, as Royce Ring (real name=Roger) could tell you. But it sure doesn't hurt.
WHA?: There really is a Yogi Berra. Nolan Ryan. Bob Apodaca. (Imagine if he'd had a complicated first name. Ambiorix Apodaca? Now that would be something.) Mac Scarce sounds like an invisible private eye, but he existed. (Real name=Guerrant McCurdy Scarce. The nickname was a good choice.) Del Unser. Brent Gaff. Wally Whitehurst. Esix Snead, who sounds more like a Star Wars alien. Xavier Nady. Braden Looper, the closer with the least-threatening name ever.
And yes, someone really did name a child Orel Hershiser.

Spring Training proceeds. I’m sure fine things are taking place on the field, right alongside not so fine things. That’s baseball last I checked. But it’s still a week in. Until some strangers in Mets uniforms are told to shed them and hit the minor league complex or the road, I still can’t get excited or agitated over a single personnel development. Excited and agitated that they’re there, sure, but not over what anybody in particular does.

Thanks to the near-saturation coverage provided by SNY (can’t believe they’re pre-empting Northeast Angling as often as they are for something as esoteric as the team that owns a third of their channel), I’ve certainly kept an eye on our surfeit of Mets. I’m beginning to notice some things about some players, none of which I choose to put any emphasis on whatsoever. The ones who look good? They’re professionals. They’re supposed to look good. The ones who are not so sharp? Tempting as it is, I’m not going to write them off a handful of games into the meaningless exhibition season.

How meaningless is the exhibition season? It’s no Mr. G when it comes to reliable forecasting. The Mets posted the exact same record of 13-13 in 1967 as they did in 1986. They won the World Series in 1986. They lost 101 games in 1967. They were also impressed enough by rookie George Thomas Seaver to add him to the rotation, but not until after he worked some relief early and then got a couple of starts late in camp. Tom didn’t reveal himself as Terrific in the first week of March. I doubt anybody does. Hence, I’ll continue to enjoy the sights and sounds of all that orange and blue beamed north to us polar bears but I refuse to take it seriously as death even though I’m kind of dying to.

Toting this uncommon maturity regarding exhibition games has left a void in my soul. I have to find something to rile up the blood (it’s the blogger’s code). I think I have it. And wouldn’t you know it comes in pinstripes?

No, not the Yankees. I don’t have the foggiest what they’re up to lately. I’m sure the sleepovers have recommenced and all is peaches and cream in Tampa.

But yes, the Yankees. Through no fault of their own (except for existing, the bastards), they continue to infiltrate our benign good times.

Three recent examples of a disturbing long-term trend…

1) A profile of Mike Pelfrey by John Harper in the News last week:

You go from one side of the state to the other, from the Yankees to the Mets, and after watching Phil Hughes wow onlookers in Tampa, it felt important to see Mike Pelfrey as soon as possible. It’s the year of the phenoms, after all. For both New York teams this seems destined to be remembered as the spring training in which an ace was born, and as such Hughes and Pelfrey may be linked forever.

I understand the itch Harper describes. On my few sojourns to Yankee Stadium, I couldn’t wait to go home, take five showers and head to beautiful Shea — as soon as possible. If that were John’s angle, I’d applaud mightily. But it wasn’t. Instead he couldn’t just tell us, “Mike Pelfrey is quite the prospect, here’s how he’s doing.” Why oh why was it necessary to couple him with Hughes? I’ve been aware of each pitcher independently since 2005 and it’s never once occurred to me that they need be linked. Did it occur to Harper that when covering Hughes it was required to note, “The Yankees may have an answer to Mike Pelfrey on their hands and his name is Phil Hughes”?

We know the answer.

2) A Tuesday story in the same paper by Peter Botte about the defensive prowess of Jose Reyes:

[I]t’s not far-fetched to believe the 23-year-old rising star soon will join three-time winner Derek Jeter as Gold Glove shortstops in New York.

Would it be far-fetched to have framed Reyes’ ascension into the ranks of elite defenders by pointing out he could soon join Bud Harrelson and Rey Ordoñez as Gold Glove shortstops who have won the award as Mets? What in the name of Dick Schofield does Jeter have to do with any of this? That he plays in New York? So have lots of shortstops. That he’s won Gold Gloves? So did Ozzie Smith. There was no reason to inject him into a story about another player on another team except that there’s apparently a rule that Mets can only be explained in certain quarters by using Yankees as examples. The next time Jeter steals second, will Botte liken the footwork involved to “the speed shown off by Jose Reyes”?

We know the answer.

3) Bob Klapisch’s followup on the Wright/A-Rod nonstory at ESPN.com:

None other than Derek Jeter says Wright has to be careful about choosing his friends as his star quotient grows.

It would be amusing if Jeter were referring to Rodriguez as the unsavory character to steer clear of, but he’s talking about…oh, who cares who he’s talking about? Who cares what a guy on the Yankees says about a guy on the Mets? I’ve never for a second bought this “Wright could be the Mets’ answer to Jeter” line they’ve been pushing down our throats since David came up. Why should we? Because David’s talented? Because David’s first language is English? They play different positions, they have divergent offensive skills and David, as my partner pointed out, comes off as a helluva nicer guy than Captain Automaton.

If we were living in the distant past, say 1998, ’99 or thereabouts, I wouldn’t be any happier with the contexts presented by these writers but I’d have to grudgingly admit that the Yankees are such consistent champions that it’s no wonder they come up so often in conversation.

But have you noticed? They’re not consistent champions, at least not in terms of the only championship they institutionally claim to care about. A Yankee ticket brochure fell into my hands (don’t worry, I washed them) the other day and it’s right there on the second page: “Thank you for supporting us as we give everything we have toward winning a 27th world championship. Yankees fans deserve nothing less. Sincerely, George M. Steinbrenner III”. I imagine it’s the same closing he’s been using since the winter of 2001.

Do you realize that 12-year-old Yankees fans may as well be hundred-year-old Cubs fans for all the World Series they’ve seen their team win? A whole new generation of long-suffering Yankees fans is actually taking root — if we are to assume they consider perennial participation in the postseason without ultimate reward to be suffering. (Not everybody thinks so.)

Listen, it’s easy enough and always fun to creep into Yankee-bashing without really trying. That’s not my mission, not today anyhow. What I’d like to contract from the sport at the moment is not New York’s American League representative but rather this rancid notion that too many card-carrying baseball writers cling to: that the present-day Yankees — not the 1927 Yankees, not the 1936 Yankees, not even the 2000 Yankees — define baseball and that you can’t report on the doings of another baseball team, especially one in New York, without invoking them relentlessly. To a certain extent I can understand the easy segues from February, the lazy “…unlike in Yankeeland, all’s tranquil for the Mets in St. Lucie as Otis Livingston tells us…” But once you’ve cleared out the cobwebs, you have two disparate organizations to report on and two disparate fan bases to report them to. Unless we’re trading Rafael Santana for Phil Lombardi again, keep them disparate.

What is the point of namechecking Yankees in so many Mets stories? Will we not understand what a pitcher does if you don’t illustrate his job by elaborating that pitching is what we see a Yankee do when he throws a ball from the mound? Will we not grasp the concept of shortstop defense if you leave us without a reference to a Yankee practicing it? Will we not be able to identify a burgeoning star in our midst if we are not spoonfed repeated reminders that a star on the Yankees once burgeoned?

C’mon, give us some credit. If you’re going to write about the Mets, write about the Mets. I’ll bet we can figure it out from there.

When you're a basically solid team without a lot of job openings or questions, spring training is, ideally, all about what you're not. News? Bad. Questions? Generally bad. Particularly any that start with formulations like, “Can the Mets survive…” or “What's Plan B now that…” The absence of questions, beyond banalities such as work visas and days off to attend to personal matters and commonplaces such as working on new pitches and re-examining swings? That's good. Or, rather, it's not bad.
So far, it's been a camp of nots. Orlando Hernandez's neck pain? Not thought to be serious. Lastings Milledge's hand? Not broken. John Maine leg after that comebacker? Not injured. Not exciting, but that's not disappointing. Exciting is so overrated this time of year.
But it occurred to me today that there's something else we're not.
There's been a lot of speculation about Alex Rodriguez and that opt-out Scott Boras built into his contract all those years ago in Texas — speculation that the clause was designed to let the Mets correct their mistake of having Steve Phillips call in a pre-emptive strike on A-Rod's supposed contract demands during the winter of 2000. The Mets were the team A-Rod loved as a kid (and seems to genuinely have loved, unlike, say, the diplomatically variable childhood loyalties of Al Leiter) and had always wanted to play for. As it's a rarity for agents to be dealing with the same GMs seven years down the road, the opt-out would give both player and team a second chance to make things right.
It's a great story. Great stories always make me suspicious. It seems a lot more reasonable to think that seven-year escape clause was designed to let A-Rod catch back up to a salary curve that in 2000 sure looked destined to rise above $25 million per for the game's greatest stars by 2008. That sounds a lot more like Scott Boras than any kind of sentiment about what logos were on a client's jammies once upon a time.
But it's spooky how the Mets' lean seasons did track the opt-out pretty closely, from 2001's gallant near-miss to the travesty of Alomar and Vaughn, Art Howe lighting up rooms, Jeff Wilpon running down Jim Duquette's cellphone batteries, Kazmir for Zambrano, pitchers running the clubhouse and every other disappointment and embarrassment of that wretched era. Shaun Powell doesn't mention A-Rod, but he does a nice job in Newsday today discussing how these Mets are not those Mets anymore. If Boras really was plotting a course for A-Rod around the Mets' fallow years, his only mistake was being pessimistic by a season.
This isn't a plea to put A-Rod in orange and blue for 2008. That's not going to happen. Though if there were a chance, I wouldn't be so high and mighty that I'd turn up my nose at a player who's going to wind up owning every offensive record in the book and, as no less than dedicated Yankee hater Jim Caple has pointed out, seems like a decent guy whose biggest fault is letting his emotional neediness guide his foot to his mouth. A-Rod would be insane to go for double or nothing on the other side of town. The Mets would be taking an awful risk letting him take that gamble with an enormous amount of their money. And that's not what got me thinking anyway.
What got me thinking was David Wright's reaction to the idea of A-Rod as a Met. Wright is an All-Star, the recipient of a six-year, $55 million contract, a marketing phenomenon and one of the faces of his franchise. So what would he do if A-Rod arrived in Flushing? That's easy, he told Bob Klapisch — he'd change positions. Really? To where? “Anywhere.”
On one New York team, when you're Alex Rodriguez you pull into town, are left to read the writing on the wall and decide you're the one who's going to change positions, even though most everybody except geeks who do motion capture for videogames thinks you're far superior at the position you're vacating. On that team the guy you moved for is more interested in punishing you for something stupid you said a long time ago than in drawing down the venom of the fans, even though he could accomplish that with a sentence or two and thereby allow you to relax and just be who you are, which is only one of the best players in the history of the game.
A-Rod seem stunned by Wright's comments, and who can blame him? In the Daily News today, Wright calmly acknowledged he'd said what he said, then cracked that “I really do hate” Reyes. In Port St. Lucie, one half of the left side of the infield saying that about the other half is a laugh line. In Tampa, it'd launch half a billion headlines.
I can't wait to find out all the things the Mets are this year. In the meantime? It's nice taking stock of all the things they're not.
Reminder: This Wednesday March 7, we'll be reading at Varsity Letters, the monthly sportswriting event hosted by Gelf Magazine's Carl Bialik. The night's other readers will be True Hoop's Henry Abbott; the Dugout's Jon Bois, Nick Dallamora and Brandon Stroud; Deadspin's Will Leitch; Dan Shanoff of eponymous sitedom; and With Leather's Matt Ufford. If you're in or near New York City (or have a sudden urge to visit), please come cheer us on and/or laugh after we fall on our faces. Admission is free; full details are right here. Carl even interviewed us, the sucker.