Good Morning,
Today we’ll talk with Anthony DiComo, Mets beat reporter for MLB.com, about his interesting perspective on the game (and his job), but we start with the news.
⏰ Catch me up in 60(ish) seconds…
🚨 BREAKING: The Mets finally found the starting pitching depth they needed, as they have a deal with right-hander Taijuan Walker, per Andy Martino. The terms of the deal have not yet been reported.
UPSIDE: After missing most of the 2018 and 2019 seasons due to injury (Tommy John), the 6-foot-4 starter made 11 starts for the Mariners and Blue Jays last season, pitching to a 2.70 ERA over 53.1 innings. He is still only 28-years-old, and a former elite prospect, ranked as high as #6 in the sport by MLB.com in 2014.
REPERTOIRE: Walker went to Driveline baseball after the 2019 season to learn how he could improve his repertoire (read much more here), and he should be a good fit with pitching coach Jeremy Hefner. While he doesn’t strike a lot of people out, he uses a mix of pitches and location to reduce hard contact. He throws a four-seam fastball (93.1 MPH) up in the zone and changes the batter eye with a slider (varied from his cutter) low and to the glove side. He also has a sinker and curveball. He uses a split-change against lefties, but has had trouble getting them out.
ROTATION: With the addition of Walker, the Mets’ rotation will likely start the season with Jacob deGrom, Carlos Carrasco, Marcus Stroman, David Peterson, and Walker. And Noah Syndergaard is expected back in June. This allows Joey Lucchesi and Jordan Yamamoto to serve their intended roles as depth starters. Lucchesi is also a pitcher who could be an opener.
⚾️ BULLPEN HELP: While Walker helps the rotation, the Mets still need bullpen help and they missed out on one of the top remaining free agent targets with reliever Trevor Rosenthal signing a one-year, $11 million deal with the Oakland A’s on Thursday.
CONTEXT: Rosenthal passed on multi-year offers to take a higher AAV in Oakland where he can close and try to cash in on a long-term deal next winter, per Jeff Passan (and logically looking at the structure of the deal).
WHAT NOW: The front office could look to make a trade, or if they stay in the free agent market, Jeremy Jeffress might be the best option remaining.
🗣 UNCERTAINTY: Meanwhile, centerfielder Jackie Bradley Jr. remains unsigned, and Jon Heyman believes he could still be an option for the Mets if the designated hitter ultimately returns to the National League. Andy Martino later reported that the Mets’ pursuit of JBJ “was never a serious pursuit, and now it has fizzed to nearly nothing.”
🍎 OPENERS: After manager Luis Rojas hinted the Mets might use openers (pitchers who start the game and only pitch 1-2 innings) this season, recently-acquired reliever Aaron Loup gave the early quote of the season:
🗣 STROMAN SPEAKS: Never lacking confidence, right-hander Marcus Stroman put the Mets’ offseason in perspective during his first press conference of the season: “If we’re nitpicking, you can nitpick with any team and say, ‘Oh yeah, it would be better if they added this, this and this.’ But let’s be real here. Look at who we added in the offseason, and let’s be thankful for that.”
⚾️ FUTURE VALUE: Luis Rojas’ likes what he is seeing early from pitching prospect Matt Allan: “It was impressive,” Rojas said of Allan. “The ball looks really good coming out of his hand.”
🔝 PLAYERS: The Mets landed 7 players on MLB Network’s Top 100 Right Now countdown, including the game’s top-ranked pitcher and #3 overall player Jacob deGrom. The Mets were tied with the Yankees for third most players on the list, behind the Dodgers (8) and White Sox (9).
💰 EXTENSION: “[Francisco Lindor] will probably ask for $350 million now that it’s out there,” one MLB team exec told SNY’s John Harper in reference to Fernando Tatis signing a 14-year, $340 million extension with San Diego this week.
🎰 ODDS: The Mets are 10-1 favorites to win the World Series this year, according to the latest odds from Caesars Sportsbook. They are +145 to win the National League. And their over/under win total is 89.
🗓 MINORS SCHEDULE: The minor league schedules of the Mets’ affiliates were released yesterday. To reduce travel, teams will play 6-game series each week with Mondays off. You can find Triple-A Syracuse’s schedule here.
📚 February 19, 1962: The Mets open their first ever Spring Training at Huggins-Stengel Field in St. Petersburg, FL.
Friday Q&A: Anthony DiComo of MLB. com
🧑🦱 by Blake Zeff
If you watch SNY before or after Mets games, get Mets coverage from Twitter, or have the MLB app on your phone, chances are you’re familiar with Anthony DiComo, the Mets beat reporter for MLB.com.
In addition to covering the team every day, DiComo also recently wrote the acclaimed book, The Captain: A Memoir, with an up-and-coming writer named David Wright.
We spoke with Anthony this week about whether he roots for the Mets, how working in the game has affected his love of baseball, and what surprised him most about the captain. A transcript follows below:
You get to watch baseball for a living. Would 10 year old Anthony be pinching himself that this would be his job?
I think 10-year-old Anthony would be absolutely stunned to learn that this is what adult Anthony is doing for a living.
I was born in New York but moved to Massachusetts when I was eight, so I grew up a big Yankee fan in the heart of Red Sox country. As much as any kid can know from a young age what they want to do for a living, I understood that sportswriting was something that interested me greatly. Each morning (starting probably when I was in elementary school), I would spread out the Boston Globe sports section across the kitchen table while I was eating breakfast and read the whole thing cover to cover, from Dan Shaughnessy and Bob Ryan's columns on Page 1 to the agate on the back. I went to Boston University and became a fixture at the daily student newspaper there, then wound up interning at the Globe.
Out of college, I landed another internship at MLB.com and have been here ever since. To this day, and I truly mean this, it never ceases to amaze me that I get to watch baseball for a living.
As someone covering the team, are there unwritten rules about whether you can/should “root” for it? Obviously we know others (Gary, Keith & Ron, radio hosts, columnists, etc) don’t hide their allegiances. How does it work for a beat reporter?
I always laugh to myself when people ask this question, because -- and I don't know if this is just me being a little unique, since it does seem a little rarer than it should be -- I've never felt the pull of fandom while doing this job, and I don't think that's because I grew up pulling for a different team than the one I cover now. Even as a Yankees fan in college, I began naturally looking at things through a more objective and analytical lens than I had as a kid. By the time I was inside the industry and the novelty of "Oh my God, I'm interviewing Derek Jeter right now" wore off, the rest came naturally. You see how the sausage is made, and you can never un-see it.
The cliche of sportswriting is that you root for short games and great stories, which is true. If there's a struggle with objectivity, it comes in more subtle ways -- low-key rooting for players who are kind, or with whom you have a good relationship, for example. Those biases shouldn't exist, but we are only human, so I think it's important for us to self-evaluate as journalists and make sure we're guarding against letting them color our coverage in any way.
It's different for broadcasters who work for rightsholders, RSNs, team-owned stations, etc., as those guys literally are employed by the team. Journalists aren't. So yeah, I've never felt a strong pull for OR against the team I cover, and I think that's the way it should be -- not just in sports, but all areas.
I've had long conversations on this topics with players who don't quite understand that, but it's true. Is it helpful to my coverage when the Mets win? In a way, yes, because more people care and more eyeballs are on my work. But do I personally find myself rooting for or against the Mets during games? Truly, no.
Has no longer rooting for a team made baseball less enjoyable for you? Has the sausage-making aspect you just mentioned done that?
I often say my favorite part of my job is from 7-10 p.m. each night. Sometimes when I get home, I'll even throw on the Dodgers or the Padres or whoever happens to still be playing. I am a baseball junkie and just because I don't root for a team, or just because I can't sit in the stands drinking beer with my buddies, doesn't mean I can't enjoy the game. It's a beautiful game, and one of the nice things about covering baseball exclusively is that I still have other outlets for fandom in other sports.
How much time do you spend on studying the latest analytics and data vs. traditional aspects of the job like cultivating sources? Is there a divide among beat reporters similar to what we’ve seen in front offices?
There is definitely a similar divide among beat writers although, just like front-office executives, the best beat writers are the ones who can do both well. I don't think cultivating sources is something I spend a ton of active, conscious hours doing...it's something that happens naturally over the course of years based on the reporting that I need to do. I have more sources in my circle of trust today than I did five years ago, and I hope to have more in five years than I do today.
As far as analytics, it's kind of the same deal. It's not like I'm sitting down with a glossary in hand studying every last term, or running regressions at my computer. But over the course of covering a team and reading -- always, always reading -- anything and everything in the baseball world, I think you naturally gain a base level of knowledge.
As a journalist, you learn by being observant and asking questions. In this area as well, I know more now than I did five years ago, and I hope to know more five years from now. Everything changes at such a rapid pace...seven or eight years ago, no one outside a Major League front office had ever even heard the term "exit velocity." Now, if you're a beat writer, that's one of hundreds of things baked into the base-level knowledge that you're required to know. So you learn it, or you become someone not worth reading.
How has the beat reporter’s job changed with the proliferation of blogs/newsletters? Are they nuisances? Competitors? Resources?
I think blogs and newsletters are wonderful when done well. That means adding content that you can't find elsewhere. So many people want to start a blog that just regurgitates what other people are writing. When done well, blogs/newsletters add original reporting, which can take the form of hard news, analysis, Q&As or anything, really -- tell me something I don't already know, and I'm interested. And yes, if that's what's indeed happening, then blogs can be competition for traditional media -- which isn't a bad thing. Competition in the marketplace means readers win.
What is a sign that you are doing your job well? (Page-views? Scoops?)
This may seem like a political answer, but I don't think there's just one thing. To be a successful modern beat reporter, you need to be well-versed in so many areas: writing and reporting, because those are the cornerstones, but also social media, multimedia, on-camera work, and so much more. Page views are one metric, but they aren't the only thing, as they are often dependent upon subject matter.
I could write the greatest long-form feature in the world, but it's still not going to get as many page views as "Mets trade for Francisco Lindor." I get much more satisfaction from a reader, an editor or a colleague sending me a positive note about something I've written. To get that sort of validation is always rewarding.
You wrote an acclaimed book on David Wright. For the fan who thinks they already know everything about DW, why should they read it? What is the most surprising thing you learned?
You know it's funny, because anyone who knows the first thing about David Wright understands he was never going to write a controversial book, or one that threw anyone under the bus. Given that, I can't tell you how many people have asked why the book would be worthwhile -- as if salaciousness is the only thing that matters in the world. David's story is flat-out inspiring, and I believe the passages that detail just how much physical and mental strain he put into his goal of returning to play are the best proof of that. The dude grinded, at a point in his career when he certainly didn't have to. He lived his life and went through his career as living proof of the value of hard work. I'd want my children to look up to someone like that as a role model, and I think in those ways, his story is so important.
I covered David for twelve seasons and had a vague sense of what he was going through, but until I wrote this book, I didn't really understand the extent of his mental and physical challenges, especially toward the end of his career. That's what surprised me the most, and what gave me even more respect for David than I already had.
⚾️ Phillies catcher J.T. Realmuto broke his thumb, but is expected to be back by Opening Day.
⚾️ Indians starter Shane Bieber will join his team late in Spring Training after testing positive for COVID-19.
⚾️ Former Twins All-Star Brian Dozier announced his retirement from baseball.
🔗 Mets' Updated Top 20 Prospects for 2021 season, by Joe DeMayo, SNY:
🔗 Mets’ fundamental problem never seems to change, by Joel Sherman, NY Post: “I have wondered these last few seasons why the Mets underplay the computer-generated prognostication systems and the eye test for their strong talent level. I asked an NL executive that last season and the reply was that in every more nuanced item that determines a close game, in particular, the Mets were terrible. Cut a ball in the gap. Take an extra base properly. Stop a secondary runner from gaining a base.”
And we leave you with this amazing video…
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Great piece Blake. I dont really read Dicomo peices (espcially since the Metropolitan is out now :)). I'm a Jets fan and follow everything that Connor Hughes writes and podcasts. He is not a Jets fan. Most of us Jet fans thinks he gets up in the morning to find ways to piss us off (while being a really good writer). I find it hard to beleive that they have no allegiances to the teams they cover. I am almost done with David Wright's book who is probably my second favorite met ever (behind Seaver). I think they went out of thier way to make the most vanilla sports book ever written by man. The trials and tribulation of the injuries and trying to get back at the end of the book probably the most interesting.