Kazzy

Edgy MD
Jun 20 2014 01:10 PM

Wheeler appears to line up next against... Scott F. Kazmir at Citi Field, making his long-awaited Queens debut.

bmfc1
Jun 20 2014 08:34 PM
Re: Kazzy

I thought that this was a thread about Cazzie Russell.

smg58
Jun 21 2014 02:55 PM
Re: Kazzy

I thought Kazmir was done for a couple of years ago, but it's nice to see him back pitching and pitching well.

Frayed Knot
Jun 21 2014 03:16 PM
Re: Kazzy

Kazmir had the bad timing to:
- be coming up through the Mets system at the time when the Wilpons decided that their GM, Jim Duquette, wasn't ready to operate without training wheels so they hired a group of 'wise older men' to oversee things only to see them decide that the future was NOW!!!! and the team had no time to wait for even well-regarded prospects.
and
- get dealt to Tampa Bay before they had people in place smart enough to know that rushing him up to the big leagues wasn't in anyone's best interest.

Kaz's clone coming up today under the same circumstances wouldn't be traded away by the current Mets mgmt and, even if he were, he would be treated better by the Rays current brain trust.

metirish
Jun 21 2014 07:12 PM
Re: Kazzy

Such a cautionary tale , hard not to root for the guy, would love to see him pitch well for the Mets one day.

John Cougar Lunchbucket
Jun 21 2014 07:32 PM
Re: Kazzy

Hey man. He changed the radio station without John Franco's permission.

metirish
Jun 21 2014 07:38 PM
Re: Kazzy

John Cougar Lunchbucket wrote:
Hey man. He changed the radio station without John Franco's permission.

lol..Christ, have a vague memory of that , that era Mets team had such a clique

John Cougar Lunchbucket
Jun 21 2014 07:44 PM
Re: Kazzy

I was never sure if that was actually true because it was such a perfect narrative for the wound-lickers of that moment.

Frayed Knot
Jun 21 2014 08:01 PM
Re: Kazzy

The story was accurate, I've heard Leiter talk about it.
That it was blown up into the sole reason for the trade was, of course, the bullshit part of it all - but the 'wound lickers', at least half of whom were predisposed to blame bad weather on Leiter & Franco, gobbled it up with a spoon and had no problem treating it as stone-cold fact.

Edgy MD
Jun 21 2014 08:15 PM
Re: Kazzy

It's been a while. I wouldn't be shocked if Leiter himself heard the story second-hand and nonethless has come to accept it as fact, and believe he was there. Again, it's just too perfect, and, well, ballplayers can be like that. 'Specially ones who talk for a living.

Ceetar
Jun 22 2014 07:07 AM
Re: Kazzy

You know, if Peterson really DID see something that could make Zambrano better and/or he wasn't hurt, and it results in the Mets actually winning in 2006, we might even be able to forgive. Plus they were probably right about Kazmir's delivery and chances it would lead to injury, just not how long he'd be able to succeed before it happened.

Frayed Knot
Jun 22 2014 07:10 AM
Re: Kazzy

Edgy MD wrote:
It's been a while. I wouldn't be shocked if Leiter himself heard the story second-hand and nonethless has come to accept it as fact, and believe he was there. Again, it's just too perfect, and, well, ballplayers can be like that. 'Specially ones who talk for a living.

This was a bunch of years ago--IOW, much closer to the incident itself--and he certainly didn't sound like he was bullshitting, intentionally or otherwise.
It was more like; 'Yeah that happened', before going on to say how ridiculous it would be for a couple of veteran ballplayers to go running to upper management demanding the kid's banishment over a five second incident involving a clubhouse radio, and how even more absurd it would be for mgmt to both listen and follow through on it as if acting on orders. But for those already pre-disposed to think that way I'm sure it makes perfect sense - but then again the CIA hiring a barely literate loner and supplying him with an $18 mail order gun in order to kill the leader of the free world makes perfect sense to a lot of people.

Frayed Knot
Jun 22 2014 07:22 AM
Re: Kazzy

You know, if Peterson really DID see something that could make Zambrano better and/or he wasn't hurt, and it results in the Mets actually winning in 2006, we might even be able to forgive. Plus they were probably right about Kazmir's delivery and chances it would lead to injury, just not how long he'd be able to succeed before it happened.

That brings up the other Kazmir conspiracy: that it was Peterson who ordered the whole thing. Again, the blind leap of logic where underlings call all the shots being totally embraced in both cases.
Joe Benigno was big on the Peterson as dark angel angle. For maybe four years after that trade he'd ask each baseball insider guest on his show whether Peterson was the real force behind the deal and each one of them would totally dismiss the idea of a pitching coach ordering trades. And then at the end of each interview Joe B would tack on; 'Well I don't care what [he] said, we all know it was Peterson'

smg58
Jun 22 2014 09:10 AM
Re: Kazzy

I wouldn't argue with anybody who looked at Victor Zambrano before the trade and saw buy-low potential. I also wouldn't argue with anybody who thought Kazmir's motion gave him a high enough injury risk to justify selling high if an opportunity presented itself, and I don't doubt that Peterson suggested both things at different times to the front office. The problem is that somebody equated the two, and a costly mistake was made. We could argue over whether Duquette came to that conclusion himself or somebody talked him into it, but that dead horse has been beaten enough.

Frayed Knot
Jun 22 2014 10:44 AM
Re: Kazzy

Peterson's side of the story was always that
1) he barely saw Kazmir pitch aside from once or twice during ST and therefore had very little opinion of him one way or the other. He was the ML pitching coach remember and SK spent very little time on the big league side of camp.
2) his only pre-trade recommendation about him was that, with few exceptions, HS-drafted pitchers usually need 5-600 innings of minor league pitching under their belts before they're ready to pitch at the big league level. Kazmir, just 20 y/o at the time, had around 200 and only 26 above A ball
3) the 'fix him in ten minutes" comment about Zambrano was about a specific and minor flaw in his motion

Peterson never claimed that he thought Kazmir was an arm injury waiting to happen or that those 'biometric' check-ups they took the staff to that one spring in Brmingham, AL threw up any red flags, nor do I remember any legit news hound claiming that Peterson said or thought so. Somehow though, that Peterson personally denounced Kazmir and/or declared his motion to be a disaster in waiting became gospel among certain crowds, and of course the "fix in ten minutes" comment was twisted into a promise to turn Zambrano into an All-Star.

And look, none of this is to argue that it was anything other than a monumentally stupid trade. It's just that those who go out of their way to stick the blame on their favorite targets just make the situation worse because then nobody learns anything from it.
At least one of the "wise old men" in Fred's kitchen cabinet was a big Zambrano fan although for the life of me I had no idea why; my sole memory of him prior to all this was him walking Yanqui hitters all over two ballparks. But because the team was 2 games over .500 and as little as 1 game out of 1st place in mid-July, the brain trust decided it was a 'Go For It' year and had no time to wait for a maybe prospect (pitchers are always 'maybe' prospects ... until they're not) still at least 300 innings away from contributing according to their pitching guru. Problem was that, between July 10 and the trade weekend at the end of the month, the Mets went 5-14 including 0-5 to Atlanta to fall to a full 9 games out. By then the reasons for doing this type of deal had almost totally reversed themselves but, hey, the wheels were already in motion and, because there was no specific captain to even give the orders to start turning the ocean liner around, the deal got done by its own momentum.
(The Bay of Pigs failed with similar logic. By the time the go-ahead was given at least half of those involved knew it was both a stupid idea and probably doomed to failure ... 'but we've put too much planning into it to stop now')

The trade was ten years ago next month.

batmagadanleadoff
Jun 22 2014 02:22 PM
Re: Kazzy

Kazmir was a star from 2005-2008 when the Mets were seemingly always one game short of their goals.