Yakkin' About Baseball: Operation Shutdown Comes For Us All

Welcome to Yakkin' about Baseball with David Roth and David Raposa. It's Friday and we're, uh, yakkin' about baseball, life, death, and Gregory Polanco, so it's going to be great. Come on in.

David Roth: I am glad that the Mets are playing Michael Conforto, and as you have somehow opted to care about this stupid team I imagine that you are, too. I want to treasure every moment before they trade him for like Brett Anderson and Jeff Wilpon gives catty anonymous quotes to the Daily News about how he saw Conforto drinking a beer one time.

David Raposa: To quote the title of the very good Fangraphs piece I'm about to link to: "Let Michael Conforto Play." Unfortunately, riding the Hot Jay Bruce or Sunk Cost Grandyman train just long enough to flip a superior player for spare parts sounds very Mets. A throwback of sorts to the Kazmir/Zambrano days. Or maybe it'd be karma for yoinking Thor from Toronto in the Dickey swap? Baseball: it is a mystery.

David Roth: Truly our dumbest mystery.

David Raposa: Sorry to #actually you, but in fact the dumbest mystery was the identity of the demonstrative nattily-dressed artisan-chocolatier-looking fellow in the ESPN Monday Night Baseball broadcast booth.

David Roth: You know, it's easy to ding Dallas Braden for dressing like Sean Penn's character in Carlito's Way, but I thought he actually did a good job in the booth. The Mets' free-jazz broadcast experience has spoiled me to a great degree, though. It's weird to me watching a baseball game on TV where one of the three people in the booth doesn't spend the whole game talking about not the last time he cooked leg of lamb on the grill, but the time before that. Although I imagine Kruk could actually do okay, there.

David Raposa: Way too many ex-Phillies have graced the ESPN baseball broadcast booth. The wrong ones, I mean. Definitely give me Darren Daulton's Art Bell shtick over Curt Schilling talking bloody-sock grit bullshit.

David Roth: Yeah, if I'm going to listen to an ex-Phillies washout talk, I want it to be Bruce Ruffin trying to sell me Herbalife. Or I guess Von Hayes, also selling Herbalife. I would also buy Herbalife from Wes Chamberlain, while we're getting this on the record.

David Raposa: Ah Wesley. He's bound to win Rookie of the Year one of these days.

David Roth: I vividly remember canvassing for Obama in South Philly in 2008 and there were these Catholic saint tableaus in some people's front windows that had Shane Victorino pics studded in there with St. Christopher.

David Raposa: Studs for the stud!

David Roth: He was worth six wins four years ago. I can't even imagine how much more valuable I was four years ago.

David Raposa: Eventually, time throws high and tight on us all.

David Roth: The thing I have thought about, with Papi out of the game, is how long it would've taken him to get bad. Because you can definitely just sort of fudge out, physically, if you're a DH over the course of several years, and it sure didn't seem like the necessary hand-eye stuff had declined at all. So would it be like five years before he stopped mashing taters? Three? Nine?

David Roth: I respect his decision to go out on top, and also to opt out of another year or so of flying to Milwaukee late at night in his early middle age. But as a Baseball Scientist I would love to see whether he would in fact even have had a decline phase, or if he would've just kept refining his beard and hitting homers indefinitely.

David Raposa: I think Papi had a "decline phase" a few years before he pulled the plug, when he hit a paltry .260 with only 20-something HRs. Then he borrowed one of Manny's pregnancy aids or the prayers of a million New England guys named Kevin came true or something. And then he spectacularly, and so very slowly, trotted off into the sunset.

David Roth: If you have to spend the rest of your career with one perfect breast in the middle of your back, you might as well go out leading the American League in RBI.

David Roth: This is a thing for me, though. Like, how good would Barry Bonds be, now, at 50. Good enough to start in left for the Giants, obviously. But how much better than Chris Marrero, really?

David Raposa: Pretty sure 2017 Barry is good enough to play center for them this year, with or without flax seed oil. In all seriousness, though, I have to think he'd probably be a better pinch-hitting option than whatever third catcher Bruce Bochy covets instead.

David Roth: Bartolo is our working test case for this scenario. If you are just a middle-aged dude with decent habits and one transcendent skill that you are burying under a moraine of Long John Silver's crispies, how long can you make it work? If the answer is "indefinitely" then I want to know about it.

David Raposa: Bartolo is our Brando, thankfully with fewer dashikis.

David Roth: The Island Of Justin Morneau.

David Roth: Sorry.

David Roth: Wait, also: Don Juan Demarco Scutaro.

David Roth: At this point you have to say that Late Barto is better than Late Brando. He's embracing the decline and fighting it in the right proportion. Whereas at some point Brando was like "I only wear elaborate Barry Lyndon-style 19th century hats now, and also all my characters are slathered in zinc oxide for reasons that only I understand and which I will absolutely not explain."

David Raposa: Maybe Bart could give Andrew McCutchen a blood transfusion before the year is out?

David Roth: Do you think Cutch is done? That would make me sad. He was such a cool superstar. I think he'd still be an okay Richard Hidalgo if it comes to that, but I honestly like him better as a superstar.

David Raposa: I don't think he's done done, but the sudden downshift into sub-stardom is disappointing, if not outright shocking. He wouldn't be the first, of course, but seeing that sort of decline happen so suddenly still surprises me. It's like going to a family function, and the one relative you don't mind chatting with suddenly starts in on some anti-vaccine stuff out of the blue. I appreciate the risk in emotionally investing at all, but I need those rails greased a bit—a little truther foreplay before bringing out the heavy/disheartening artillery, you know?

David Roth: Suddenly being roughly as good as Gregory Polanco is…honestly something we should all hope for in our declines. I guess that's the easiest way to see how hard it is. In a lifetime of watching the Mets I have seen this a lot. There are these players for which this impossible thing is easy, and then it's impossible again, and then very quickly you are shooting a commercial for Jason Bay KIA And Hyundai, which is on a ring road outside Tacoma and also is your job now. You don't always get the decline phase you want, or the one you deserve. Operation Shutdown comes for us all.

David Raposa: Love too keep our convos light and breezy

David Roth: That reminds me: have you thought much about D R E A D?

David Raposa: Is that the new colossal pillar of wasp eggs?

David Roth: I mean that video where the guy pokes the thing and 3000 spiders come out, except all of them are circa-now Matt Holliday. "I can play first base actually" they shriek as they devour your dermis.

David Raposa: Damn it, now I need to actually clean my entire apartment. I've seen Lucio Fulci's The Beyond, I know how that mess goes down.

David Roth: Ordinarily I would tell you not to worry about it, but a Matt Holliday Spider can skeletalize a blogger in like 90 seconds. Teams pay them $6 million a year not to do it to the ones they like.

David Raposa: Once a Cardinal, always a Cardinal.

David Roth: Say it in a doomy Donald Pleasance voice and it sounds just about right.

David Raposa: We need Robert Shaw in a front office drinking ditch beer and scheming on how to trade for Mike Trout.

David Roth: "Tony La Russa's eyes are dead eyes, like a doll's eyes. He'll trade you David Peralta for a piece of copy paper with TAXATION IS THEFT written on it."

David Raposa: Then Roy Scheider's head pops into frame. "We're going to need a bigger farm system."

David Roth: Show me the way to go home, I'm tired and Jeff Mathis is going to get 350 plate appearances.

David Raposa: The movie ends with Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss swimming to shore while holding onto a floating bit of the Marlins home run statue.

David Roth: Roll credits.