Baseball Preview, Part 2: The Mets

Meet the Mess, meet the Debts, step right up and meet the Mets…

The New York Mets will not be good in 2011. Sorry Met fans. It’s just reality. Actually, most Met fans already know this. It's no secret, as Marty Balin would say. …I am picking the Mets to finish dead last in the National League East, behind even the Washington Nationals. The reasons for this gloomy prediction are many, but let’s start with the dark cloud of the Madoff affair and how it’s likely to affect the ongoing operation of the ballclub. The trustee and lawyer in charge of the class action suit seeking to recover losses for the victims of the Madoff Ponzi scheme, one Irving Picard, is suing the Wilpon family for about $1 billion. That’s billion, with a B. Picard alleges that Sterling Properties, the Wilpon family’s commercial real estate entity that owns the Mets and the SNY cable network, actually made money on the Madoff scheme and either knew or should have known that something was fishy with Madoff’s methods. A number of damaging details regarding the Wilpons’ relationship to Madoff have emerged, not the least of which is that Saul Katz, a close business associate of the Wilpons and a partner in their ownership of the Mets, took an active role in attracting new investors for Madoff. Could Katz have been doing this without very specific knowledge of the means by which Madoff was consistently winning outsized gains, even in down markets? I highly doubt it. My guess is that Katz knew, and the Wilpons knew as well. I think the class action suit has legitimacy. But what does this have to do with baseball you ask? The Wilpons had reportedly been using proceeds from their Madoff investment to fund daily baseball operations, and they are now struggling to finance debt associated with their ownership of the Mets. The family has put a minority stake in the team up for sale, and they have recently had to borrow $25 million from MLB to cover shortfalls, so it wouldn’t be a shock to me if they have to sell the team outright, especially since they’re reportedly having trouble finding new lenders. One hopes they won’t try to hang on, which would be to the detriment of the ballclub and its loyal fans. And if they do try to hang on, then MLB should do the right thing and seize ownership of the team until a more financially viable owner or ownership group steps up to buy the team. Bud Selig is supposedly close to Fred Wilpon, which I pray won’t cloud his judgment or the aggressiveness with which he might have to push his friend to sell. Baseball is like religion in New York City. If run properly, instead of with flim-flam leveraged paper wealth, the Mets can be a huge money maker again. I can’t imagine it will be too hard to find a qualified and enthusiastic buyer.

Ownership’s involvement with Madoff is one of the reasons the Mets were so inactive in the offseason in terms of acquiring quality players. The organization sacked GM Omar Minaya, as well they should have, and replaced him with Sandy Alderson, who then hired his loyal lieutenants, Paul DePodesta and JP Ricardi. But the new brain trust managed to do nothing much more than pick up inexpensive journeymen pitchers from the scrap heap, some of whom are coming back from protracted injuries and surgeries. ...Along with the Madoff affair, a second reason the new Front Office didn’t do much in the offseason is that the club still has five very bad contracts on their books left over from Minaya’s reign as GM. Lefty Oliver Perez is owed $12 Million this year, but he does not figure to make the team out of spring training, not even as a middle reliever/mop-up guy. Luis Castillo, the 35-year-old washed-up second baseman, is owed $6 million this year and is also unlikely to make the trip north when the team breaks camp. Carlos Beltran, now 34 with diminished skills after knee surgery, is owed $18 million this year. Lefty Johan Santana, whose velocity was already down from his peak years with the Minnesota Twins, is still recovering from shoulder surgery. He is owed 22.5 million this year but is not expected to pitch again until at least July. And while righty head case Francisco Rodriguez is still an excellent closer, he is owed $11.5 million this year. And if K-Rod finishes 55 games this season, a clause in his contract will pay him a staggering $17.5 million to close games for the Mets in 2012. Omar's ghost will be haunting the Mets clubhouse for quite some time...

On a team with a payroll of $126.5 million for 2011, well over half of those dollars are tied up in these five players. What’s worse, only Beltran and Rodriguez can be realistically viewed at this point as players who’ll be useful to the Mets, both on the field and hopefully in trades that would help the team re-stock its depleted farm system. But the Mets will not be able to trade K-Rod, I don’t think, without assuming a sizable chunk of his salary. The good news is that Beltran will have every incentive to play well and win one final good contract, and only Santana and maybe K-Rod will remain on the books after this season. The bad news is that that Beltran, Castillo, Perez, Santana and Rodriguez are all still on the books right now, and the combined weight of their contracts and the looming financial damage from Madoff lawsuit has kept the Mets mostly on the sidelines during the offseason. The whole situation is a mess. A big fucking mess.

But they have to play the games, and this year the Mets will be going to battle with a new skipper at the helm, the great Terry Collins. Or maybe not so great. I remember Collins from his days managing the Angels, a position from which he was forced to resign in 1999 after several key players, including Mo Vaughn and Jim Edmonds, staged a clubhouse mutiny. It was ugly stuff. Over six seasons of managing the Houston Astros and the Angels, Collins has compiled a record of 444 – 434, a winning record, just barely (he's also managed in Japan). Collins is very intense and has a raging temper, kind of in the same vein as Larry Bowa. We’ll see how his style flies with multi millionaires like Beltran, Wright, Bay and Reyes...

I’m not fully sold on the club's new stat-based Front Office, though I agree with their approach to the 2011 Mets, viewing the season as a bridge year in which they’ll see what they have and start making plans for the future. And in spite of all the shit surrounding the team and the organization right now, the Mets have some compelling pieces. If nothing else, there’ll undoubtedly be some interesting things happening on and off the field in 2011. Let’s take a look at the on-field “product”…

At first base, Ike Davis will be coming back after an encouraging rookie season in which he fielded well and produced a 264/.351/.440 line with the bat, including 19 HRs, 71 and RBI. Davis strikes out a lot and has a tendency to act like a little bitch when he gets wrung up by a plate umpire, but he’s learning and played to a 2.5 WAR in 2010. He figures to be a big left handed stick in the middle of the Mets’ lineup for years to come… The team’s two most valuable players at this point are on the left side of the infield. Third baseman David Wright’s batting average was down more than 20 points last year, but he hit 29 bombs, drove in 103 runs, and yielded almost 4 WAR. He’s very solid defensively, plays the game the right way, and is just someone you root for because he seems like such a good guy. It’s a shame to see his peak years getting pissed away with such a train wreck of a team… When healthy, Jose Reyes is one of the most electrifying players in the game, a rare five-tool shortstop whose speed might make you think of him as an ideal leadoff hitter, except that he’s a bit of a free swinger, strikes out more than he should, and has a just-ok career OBP of .335 over eight seasons. Still, he steals bases (a maligned skill among the new stat intelligentsia), hits for some power, and has an unbelievably live arm from the hole at shortstop. The biggest issue for Reyes is that he’s somewhat brittle and has spent a fair bit of time on the DL over his career. He’s a lot of fun to watch when he’s not on the mend…Second base will be a black hole for the Mets in 2011. Luis Castillo will hopefully get his walking papers before the end of spring training, leaving Daniel Murphy, Ruben Tejada, Brad Emaus and Luis Hernandez to compete for the opening. [editor's note: As we go to press, Castillo has at long last been released. Fare thee well, Luis. Have fun spending all that money you'll be getting paid for doing absolutely nothing.] Personally, I’d like to see Murph and Tejada split the second base duties, but it looks like Hernandez will begin the season as the everyday guy. His career offensive numbers (.250/.298/.409) are ho-hum, at best… Along with Ike Davis, catcher Josh Thole is one of the team’s talented young players. He reminds me a little of a young Jason Kendall, only not as skuzzy. Unlike Kendall, Thole bats from the left side, but both are slap hitting gritty catchers, and Thole can even yank one out of the yard on occasion. He also handles pitchers well and plays solid defense. Thole will get the bulk of the playing time behind the plate, with Ronny Paulino playing Duffy Dyer to Thole’s Jerry Grote…

The opening day outfield will feature Angel Pagan in center, Jason Bay in left and Carlos Beltran in right. Pagan had a decent year last season (.285/.335/.435, 11HRs, 69 RBI, 4.8 WAR (!)). He cut down on the mental mistakes, played hard, and became a quiet team leader. He’ll be key to any success the Mets have this year…Bay struggled to find his footing in New York last season before a collision with the leftfield wall at Dodgers Stadium shelved him for the remainder of 2010. But nobody plays the game harder than he does. He’s a gamer when he’s right, and I’m pulling for him to have a bounce-back year. …Beltran is not nearly the player he was just a few years ago, but he’s a savvy, switch hitting veteran. The Carlos Beltran era in Queens is drawing to a close. The best the fans can hope for is that he plays well enough to garner some decent trade value before he walks at the end of the season.

The weakest link for the Mets, a team with a lot of them, is the pitching, both in the starting rotation and the bullpen. The top 3 starters are not bad. Mike Pelfrey had his best year in 2010, going 15-9 with a 3.66 ERA, but was 10-2 going into June and then regressed to the mean. Knuckleballer R.A. Dickey is my favorite player on the team. He transformed himself from a power arm to a knuckleballer after his career appeared to be in the toilet, and then last year, after getting sent down to the minors during spring training, he fought his way back onto the team and became one of the rotation’s most reliable arms (11-9, 2.84 ERA). On top of all this, he’s an eccentric southerner who reads books in the bullpen on his days off and likes to quote Faulkner in interviews with the beat writers. Armed with his knuckler – which he throws harder than most, sometimes up into the 80s – Dickey’s career may only just be getting started at age 36… Lefty Jonathon Niese had a better rookie year than his numbers suggest (9-10, 4.20 ERA). He doesn’t throw hard by today’s standards, but he’s got a nasty cutter and a lot of upside.

After Pelfrey, Dickey and Niese, Met fans should pray for rain. Chris Young, the likely number 4, has pitched in 18 games over the last two seasons. Who knows what we’ll be getting. Chris Capuano will anchor the staff. He’s 32 and has had Tommy John surgery, twice. Don’t expect a lot, even though he was once a solid pitcher for the Brewers.

The bullpen will be a fingers crossed kind of thing. K-Rod is the closer. One of the compelling stories for the Mets in 2011 will be whether the club tries to prevent him from reaching the 55 completed games he needs in order for his $17.5 million kicker to activate. The Players’ Association will undoubtedly be monitoring the situation very closely…The Mets lost a lot of bullpen arms in the offseason – Pedro Feliciano, Hisanori Takahashi, Elmer Dessens, Fernando Nieve, and Raul Valdes are all gone…Bobby Parnell will be back and is likely to be the set-up man for K-Rod. Parnell looks to me like a closer in waiting and has already lit up the gun at 103 MPH. I like his demeanor on the mound and I’m rooting for him to succeed. …Manny Acosta, picked up from the Atlanta Braves, will be another power arm in the pen….Journeyman DJ Carrasco, 34, was picked up cheaply off the junk pile and will be a middle reliever, and Taylor Bucholz, with one of the best curve balls I’ve ever seen, will try to reassert himself in 2011 as a major league caliber pitcher. …Like I said, keep your fingers crossed when the Mets have a lead and you see Terry Collins signaling for the bullpen.

It's not unlikely that the instability of the ownership situation will force the Mets to hold a fire sale before the end of the 2011 season. Jose Reyes and Carlos Beltran will both probably be dealt by the trading deadline. But it may not end there. Jason Bay could be traded, David Wright could be traded, and even K-Rod could be traded, provided the team is willing to assume some of his remaining salary. A house cleaning would not be the worst thing in the world. I like the idea of the Mets going with a nuclear option, torching the whole thing to the ground, and starting from scratch. They are probably 3 to 5 years away from being good anyway, and trading high-octane players now is a good way to get a head start on building for the future. I would welcome being able to see what some of the younger players can do at the Major League level, guys like Lucas Duda, with his Dave Kingmanesque power; Fernando Martinez, who always seems to be the next big thing but never gets enough playing time to adequately demonstrate his talents; and Jerry Meijia, with his lightning-fast heater. As much as I hate watching the Mets lose, this is the scenario I’m hoping for in 2011. I predict the team will finish 70-92, good enough for last place in their division. It’s gonna be a long summer in Queens, but the situation at the top of the organization is fluid, and maybe we’re now in a bottoming-out phase, the lowest low point immediately preceding a new period of ascendancy...

Baseball Preview, Part 1: The Halos...

We’re about two weeks away from opening day of baseball season. It can’t come soon enough! I’m already dialed in with my MLB Extra Innings package. I realize it makes me sound like a dweeb and a no-life loser, but the first thought I have at the start of every season is that I’ll have something to do for the next six months. ...Today I’ll touch on what I expect to see from the Angels in 2011. I’ll preview the Mets in the next few days, and then try to get in an overview of the league as a whole before the games begin...

The Angels will be mediocre in 2011. They should remain within pissing distance of first place deep into the season, but I doubt they'll have the horses to close the gap. ...Angels GM Tony Reagins and owner Arte Moreno really fucked up this offseason, showing themselves to be overmatched little boys in a man’s world. They added outfielder Vernon Wells in a head scatchingly confusing trade with the Toronto Blue Jays in exchange for Mike Napoli, a useful, cost controlled power bat who was then flipped over to the Texas Rangers, where he will undoubtedly haunt the Angels and have a career year. Acquiring Wells was an act of sheer desperation after Reagins showed up late to the winter meetings and failed to land either Carl Crawford, Jayson Werth or Adrian Beltre, the three major offensive producers in the free agent market. Wells, who has one of the absolute worst contracts in the history of the game, is a serviceable right handed bat who can hit for some power, but he has a fairly pedestrian lifetime career line of .280/.329/.475, with 25.6 WAR over 12 seasons in the bigs, good for an average of about 2 wins per season. If he plays to this average in 2011 - and keep in mind that he's no spring chicken at 32 and has probably already begun his age related decline - the Angels will be paying him approximately $10 million per win, not an especially efficient deployment of funds. And with the onset of decline, Wells has become no better than an average defender in the outfield. There are even some advanced defensive statistics that show him to be a below league-average outfielder at this point in his career. Several commentators have pointed out that the best thing about the Angels getting Wells is that it means they won’t have to trot Bobby Abreu out into the field anymore. Abreu, now 37 years old, will DH, and the Angels’ outfield will be Wells in left, the speedy youngster Peter Bourjos in center, and Torii Hunter in right. So there's some worrisome age at the corner outfield spots. It may not be as bad as last season with Juan Rivera and Abreu at the corners, but Father Time spares no one, so I don't see the revamped outfield this year as a much of an improvement.

The Angels also picked up Scott Downs and Hisanori Takahashi in the offseason, two versatile lefties who should bolster what was a shaky bullpen last year. But the club still lacks a go-to, lights-out closer. The job is likely to be Fernando Rodney’s to lose, though I’d rather see Kevin Jepsen or even Jordan Walden get the job, both of whom throw harder than Rodney, which is what you want from a closer, a guy who can take the rock in the ninth and blow batters away. I could see Rodney getting booed out of town if he starts to blow games. He gets easily rattled and walks the bases loaded with alarming regularity. Should he struggle early on, I wouldn’t be surprised if Mike Scioscia goes with a closer-by-committee approach until somebody emerges as the trusted guy to finish out games.

The infield will be a little bit (but not much) improved with Kendry Morales coming back from injury after missing most of 2010. But you never know how a guy is gonna come back from an injury like the one he sustained being an ass clown last season. It’ll be interesting to watch what kind of start Morales gets off to. …Second base and shortstop will be Howie Kendrick and Erick Aybar, two replacement-level players, more or less, and switch hitters Maicer Izturis and Alberto Callaspo are likely to split duties at third base until or unless one of them wins the everyday job. Neither of them inspires too much excitement, and they both seem like they’d be better suited as guys providing bench depth. Perhaps Brandon Wood can work his way back into the lineup this year and show that he can hit major league pitching. It would be a real gift if he panned out and gave the Angels the kind of power they really need out of a third baseman.

If the Halos are to have any shot whatsoever at winning the AL West this year, the starting pitching will have to pick up an otherwise middling squad. The club should have one of the more solid rotations in the game. Jered Weaver has emerged as the face of the franchise and the ace of the staff. With his deceptive mechanics and killer changeup, Weave has evolved from a finesse pitcher to one of the top strikeout artists in the game. Monterey Park's own Dan Haren is almost like a co-ace, and the Angels will get a big boost having him for the whole year. Ervin Santana is a solid number 3, even if there are times when he seems to lose focus and mental toughness. Joel Pinero is about as good a number 4 as you can hope for. He throws strikes, eats innings, and keeps his team in the game. He is also playing for a new contract in 2012, so don’t be surprised to see him bring a little something extra to his starts this year. Scott Kazmir, the only lefty in the rotation, may be washed up at 27. Isn’t that sad? Nice Jewish boy. There was a time when he had dominant stuff and was a dude opposing batters didn’t want to face. It seems like ages ago. If/when he falters, Michael Kohn or Matt Palmer can hopefully fill in competently.

Several rookies could have an impact. Hank Conger is battling it out with Bobby Wilson this spring for the second catcher spot behind Jeff Mathis. Mathis, for reasons known only to manager Mike Scioscia, was tendered an offer at the conclusion of last season, even though his career line in six seasons with the Angels is .199/.265/.311, with a -2.3 WAR. You’d be better off bringing Bob Boone out of retirement than having Mathis behind the plate every night, but Sosh seems to think he’s a good defensive backstop, so he’ll be the guy going into the season, at least. I’d really like to see Conger make the team. He seems like a good guy, and sooner or later he'll probably be the everyday catcher, unless the Angels trade him for some 37-year-old worn-out veteran with a horrible contract, which is sadly a distinct possibility. …First base prospect Mark Trumbo is having a good spring and there’s a chance he’ll start the season at the major league level since Kendry Morales is not fully recovered from his leg injury. If Trumbo turns out to be something good, he could be made into an outfielder, giving Wells and Hunter rest periodically and coming off the bench, or Morales could be turned into an outfielder if Trumbo shows a good glove at first base. But the guy everybody’s talking about is 19-year-old phenom Mike Trout, who was recently voted the best prospect in all of baseball. He’s a five-tool player, and an outfield with both Bourjos and Trout would prevent a lot of runs from scoring on the basis of speed alone. The Angels are very conservative when it comes to bringing up rookies, so I don’t expect to see Trout at the major-league level this year unless the team gets hit with a lot of injuries or is badly out of contention. Maybe we’ll see him as a September call-up, who knows?

I think the Angels are about three wins better than they were last year. That’s pretty disappointing given the money they're throwing at Vernon Wells. What makes the Wells trade all the more frustrating is that his contract is likely to hamstring the ballclub over the next few seasons in terms of acquiring the kind of high priced talent they'll need to improve. In any case, your 2011 Halos will finish the season at 83-79, six games back of the Oakland A’s, who will pull an upset and beat out the Texas Rangers for the division crown, possibly by one game. This is based on the admittedly dicey assumption that neither the A’s nor the Rangers will be seriously affected this season by injuries, which is why they actually have to play the games. But if it comes down to the last week of the season, the Angels play their last six games at home against Oakland and Texas. Even if we don’t have much of a shot at the division this year, it’ll be nice to get a chance to play the spoiler. I most emphatically do not want to see either of those ballclubs celebrating on our field...

songs for broken hearts, no. 36

There are many times in my life when I feel sorry for myself for having been born too late. Mainly it has to do with music and missing the 60s. But recently the disappointment has been more general since it feels like, at least here in the USA, we're living through a nasty era of crisis, stagnation, and national decline. A lot of the things we all took for granted up until 9/11 won't be so easily available to us any longer, if they're available to us at all. But in the end, fretting about when you were born is a waste of time, and at least I got to experience a nice little chunk of the pre-9/11 world. One thing that makes me feel very lucky is that I got to see Bruce Springsteen on several occasions when I was a kid, the first time in 1981 at Madison Square Garden, exactly one week after my bar mitzvah. Childhood memories are always more vivid and have a tendency to become larger than life as you reflect back from the standpoint of a world-weary adult, but that Springsteen concert, in support of The River, stands in my mind now as the greatest show I ever saw, and I think that's saying a lot...

With all the thinking I've done about Dion over the past week or so, it was inevitable that I'd make my way to the Springsteen records in my collection. There's a direct line connecting Dion and Phil Spector to Springsteen. That same line, incidentally, also connects to the Ramones, Blondie, the New York Dolls... That's a story for another day... Springsteen's connection to the early 60s is quite interesting and weirdly contradictory. He hit the scene right around the time when a feeling began to emerge that rock had become overly serious and self-important. The 60s dream had crumbled, America was on the verge of losing its first war, the president was shown to be a two-bit crook. It’s not surprising given this context that nostalgia for a simpler time would grip the masses. American Graffiti, Happy Days, Sha Na Na, the renewal of interest in the early Beach Boys... So Springsteen comes along and he’s also a throwback to the days when rock ‘n roll was fun and innocent. He's a revivalist. And yet, he can't be so easily reduced to nostalgia for the time before the 60s got all hairy and serious because his music both harkens back to the halcyon days of Dion and Spector and also has people talking about him as the new Bob Dylan. Perhaps we can see him as a revivalist who takes the art of pop seriously. A serious revivalist. Something like that. But however you choose to view Springsteen, there's no denying that the dude's always been a very complicated cat. He seemed so god-like when I was a kid. There was a kind of religious devotion to him, a messianic aura that I got swept up into. I can recall counting down the days to the concert, feeling like it would never come, and then it finally came and it was so much more than what I could have imagined. How often does that happen? I think part of it had to do with growing up in New York. I know

Springsteen's a Jersey guy but, let's be real, Jersey is just a New York satellite, and there’s always been something very Nu Yawk about the Boss. It’s his 1970s New Yorkness that somehow always seems to pick me up when I’m feeling sad and blue… Springsteen was in heavy, heavy, heavy rotation on WNEW-FM, ‘where rock lives.’ (Interesting that even back in the 70s there was already this serious anxiety about rock ‘n roll burning out or fading away). I used to call the station all the time and ask Scott Muni, Pat St. John, Vin Scelsa, Meg Griffin, Richard Neer, and even the late Allison ‘Nightbird’ Steele, to play songs like Badlands, Rosalita, Backstreets, and, of course, this one, which might be my favorite...

songs for broken hearts, no. 35

A hep cat interpretation of Purple Haze. Dig the groovy flute and bongos, and check out how to the menacing sounding strings add drama and a low-level sense of unease. ...I picture myself in a Greenwich Village bachelor apartment, sitting Indian style on a Persian rug with a handful of friendly strangers. A peace pipe gets passed around and a beautiful orange cat sleeps peacefully in the bookshelf. I'm in a semi-trance as I watch a blob moving on the wall, created by the reflection of the overhead light on the record as it spins round 'n round on the phonograph. 'What's your trip?' the girl sitting next to me asks. Her hair is black. She wears colorful beads and smells like strawberries. The question startles me out of my waking reverie. I tell her I'm searching for something, trying to make sense of life's riddles. 'I don't like riddles,' she says. 'Jokes I like, riddles not so much.' But it's all a big riddle, I tell her. Not liking riddles is kind of like not liking air or water. Elemental substances. 'Air I can deal with she says, as long as it's clean. You wouldn't know much about clean air, coming from Los Angeles and all.' I tell her that cleanliness is next to godliness. It's a stupid cliche, and I regret saying it the moment it escapes my mouth. I was just trying to impress her. She has striking green eyes. I often regret things I say right after I say them. 'I don't believe in god,' she says. I ask her what she does believe in. She takes her turn with the peace pipe and thinks about my question. 'I believe love will get you to where you wanna go,' she finally says after blowing out a large cloud of smoke. I tell her I don't have anyplace to go. 'Then just be here now,' she says. And wait for love to give you the call.' She closes her eyes, takes in the music's dazed vibe, and smiles blissfully. I go back to watching the light blob rotating on the wall...

songs for broken hearts, no. 33

I'm feeling quite shaken, no pun intended, by this massive earthquake that has rocked Japan. The aerial footage of the tsunami wave advancing over the land is just horrifying. Really chilling stuff. The whole thing hits close to home for us Angelenos because anybody who lives here and has half a brain knows that the Big One is not a question of if but only when. I think about it every time I drive into the tunnels on the 110 freeway, or under a freeway overpass, or if I'm sitting under a deck at Angels Stadium, and when I'm at any number of the other precarious places in which one can find themselves over the course of a normal day. It's yet another of those things that makes you realize how important it is to not get cheated. Try to enjoy every day as best you can, hard as it may be to do so these days. Enjoy every sandwich, as Warren Zevon says, because it can all get taken away from you without warning. Death don't have no mercy in this land. So take pleasure in the little things. Like a great song from Dion and the Belmonts, even one you've heard a billion times before. Try and listen for something new every time. Let the song remind you of the good things in your life. I know I'm starting to sound religious here, which is funny since I'm a proud atheist. Tragedy has a way of bringing out the magical thinker in me. Magical thinking for me serves as an obsessive-compulsive bulwark against bad stuff happening, if that makes sense, even though the rational, scientific, evidence-based materialist in me knows that we're all in this alone. We only have each other. This is all there is...

So Dion and the Belmonts. So great. As you watch and listen to tonight's clip, it's weird to think that there's heroin coursing through the guy's veins. I don't think the backing singers behind him are the real Belmonts, but I dig the way they shuffle, and the way the three of them look like they're about 50 years old. You'd never see that today, where youth has become the only thing that matters in the entertainment business. ...There's great little touches in Dion's performance, like when he drapes the microphone cord over his shoulder. That's the move of a total pro, a real entertainer, and he can't be more than 19 or 20 at this point...

Dion's music in this period was a product of the seedy underbelly of the Bronx in the 1950s. I'm obsessed with the whole milieu. Underworld. The Polo Grounds. The Grand Concourse. The L Train. Last Exit to Brooklyn. Jackie Gleason. The Wanderers. C. Wright Mills. The Power Elite. The Naked Kiss. The Killing. Sterling Hayden. J. Edgar Hoover. Whitaker Chambers. Alger Hiss. American Tabloid. City of Night. Phil Spector. Frankie Valli... And Dion. A guido from the rough backstreets who had a monkey on his back for a long time, but he still found a way to shine. I find inspiration in guys who are deeply tortured yet manage to dig way down and find something incredible in themselves. I wonder why. Teenager in love. Love came to me. Gonna make it alone. Donna the prima donna. The wanderer. Lovers who wander. Runaround Sue. No one knows. Where or when. Lonely teenager. The majestic...

On this somber day, I feel blessed to be able to sit here in my home and say a few things about how much I love Dion...

songs for broken hearts, no. 32

Dion is a hero of mine and one of the genuinely compelling figures of the 1960s. He's also been somewhat forgotten, probably because of the way the British Invasion rendered the Golden Age of American rock ‘n roll obsolete. Interest in doo wop in particular remained dormant from the mid 60s onwards, until a wave of nostalgia for the relative placidity of the late 50s and early 60s swept across America in the wake of Watergate, Viet Nam and race riots. Even though you can find him among the cast of characters adorning the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s, Dion went through a bit of a lost period after the Beatles first came to America. But in 1968 he got clean for good – he’d been a heroin addict from the age of 15 – and he returned with a completely revamped orchestral folk sound. Tonight’s song was his comeback single, and I think you’ll agree that it’s a total gem. Ethereal, nimble, and lovely in every way, it’s the sound of a man who’s had a huge weight lifted from his shoulders and now wants to offer soothing music to those feeling shaken by the ugly side of social upheaval. His voice is what gets me more than anything. I get such goose bumps when he sings it seems the good they die young / I just looked around and he's gone. The adenoidal quality of his earlier singing, which might very well have been a consequence of his addiction, is a distant memory, replaced by a warm and inviting expressiveness that'll relax you and make your pain all better. Abraham Martin and John is truly a song for broken hearts.

PS - Apologies for the cheesy video attached to the song this evening. YouTube is an incredible, seemingly limitless resource for virtually any interest under the sun, but sometimes you have to deal with other people’s “creativity” in order to access the things you want. The advice I would give to my legion of readers is to close your eyes or minimize the window and just let the beauty of the song work on your imagination and transport you. You’ll be much better served by the images that projected on your mind's movie screen...

songs for broken hearts, no. 31

Pop music is an exhausted medium today insofar as inventiveness is concerned. This is probably true of art more generally. Everything refers to something else. I can only speak for myself, but I can’t really hear something new without thinking that it sounds like something I’ve already heard, can’t see a movie without thinking the director is borrowing his style from another director, can’t read a book without thinking it’s an attempt to parrot another author’s style. Jean Baudrillard talked about how in a media saturated society all culture would increasingly become a simulation, and then a simulation of a simulation, and then... And it's come to pass. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that new music is bad or tired, though it does suggest that it’s not realistic to expect much in the way of innovation anymore… Which brings me to my main point about music making in the 60s, at a time when it was still possible to do new and fresh things. What fascinates me is not just how sounds and styles changed so quickly from one year to the next, and even from one month to the next, but also the uneven way change occurred. Some artists transitioned from naïve teenybopper pop to headier drug influenced music as early as 1965, while others didn’t really catch up until 1969 or 1970, by which time the first few rounds of psychedelia were already being surpassed by pioneers who moved into harder FM radio rock with longer, more ‘serious’ songs.

Tommy James and the Shondells were among those who were late to the psychedelic party, and in retrospect that’s not a bad thing. During parts of 1968 and 1969 - when the Beatles were doing the white album and Abbey Road, and the Who were doing A Quick One and Tommy, and pieces of the Hollies, Buffalo Springfield, and the Byrds were breaking off and forming Crosby Stills and Nash - Tommy James was only just starting to move from bubble gum music to psychedelic pop. This resulted in some of his best singles, songs like Crimson and Clover, Sweet Cherry Wine, Ball of Fire, and tonight’s song, Sugar on Sunday. The brilliant thing about all these songs, though, is that Tommy James never abandoned pop for rock, never tried to get too heavy in any sense of the word. With the Shondells’ psychedelic pop singles, you hear harpsichord, and flanged guitars and vocals, and peace and love, but the songs remain light ‘n airy and have a naivety and enthusiasm about them that you rarely get from heavier rock with its more jaded and self-important approach to music. Even though James supposedly took umbrage with the bubble gum label, you can tell that the guy has always been in love with pop, and he held onto that side of himself even as his sound evolved. His music gives me a warm romantic feeling inside, perfect for the onset of spring. The days are getting a little longer, flowers are blooming, and the air is pregnant with possibility...

songs for broken hearts, no. 29

Have you ever had one of those days where you have a rocky time of it just as soon as you get out of bed, and then the rest of the day goes down the toilet as a result? That's the kind of day I had today. The first 15 waking minutes are so key to the way the rest of my day goes. If I stumble out of the gate, I rarely recover and it's best to just put the day to bed as quickly as possible. So I'm not gonna have much that's all that scintilating to say about tonight's song for a broken heart, except that Paul Revere and the Raiders are one of my favorite American bands of the 60s. I don't know how much these guys played their own instruments and how much was the work of LA session players, but the music that came came out under the Paul Revere banner was some of the most electrifying shit you'll ever hear. They worked a lot with Terry Melcher, the guy who produced the Byrds (and, as an aside, was the real target of the Manson Family on the night of the Sharon Tate massacre), and I think he had a big hand in their rough-and-tumble sound. It's a sound you don't really expect when you see the costumes they wore and the somewhat prissy dance routines they did. But lord have mercy! Their stuff is undoubtedly garage punk-ish and, in the absnece of their silly costumes and dance routines, they would have been remembered much more fondly. Most people when they think of Paul Revere and the Raiders remember them as a joke. It's really too bad. Check out the rockingness of the Telecaster in tonight's song, for starters. I think it might be the rockingest guitar playing I've ever heard, and the added vibe you get from the go-go dancers gives you a taste of how exiciting it was on the Sunset Strip at the height of human civilization...

songs for broken hearts, no. 28

Another dispatch from the peak of human civilization, a clip capturing all the burgeoning possibility and optimism of the mondo mod era. I think folk rock - or folk pop, as it were - might be my favorite type of music, especially in the way it was played on the Sunset Strip in the mid 60s. If you get uneasy and a little down on Sunday nights the way I always have, this here is just the stuff...

songs for broken hearts, no. 27

Years before he became the desperado under the eaves, Warren Zevon had a patchy if also fascinating career that included being one half of the Sonny and Cher inspired outfit, Lyme and Cybelle, and a stint as the keyboard player for the Everly Brothers. My obsession with Zevon stems from his embodiment of the lurid glow of 70s Los Angeles. It's a persona that's right in my wheelhouse, as they say in baseball, so much so that I based one of the characters in my 'novel' on him. None of Zevon's records are perfect, but each has at least two or three must-have songs. He is an extremely gifted songwriter, as you'll hear in tonight's song, a tight little number he penned and gave to the Turtles in the glorious summer of '66, the very peak of human civilization. What I find particularly striking about the song, aside from the its proto-power pop punchiness, is the image it conveys of a man who carries his misanthropic dissociation like a badge of honor. Stone walls surround me, I'm surprised that you even found me. I wouldn't necessarily say these are good words to live by, but it's impossible for me to avoid identifying with them at the moment...

songs for broken hearts, no. 26

I know I'm given to hyperbole when it comes to talking about the music I adore, but I truly believe that The Turtles Present The Battle of the Bands is one of the great records in the history of rock. The concept is fantastic, a battle of the bands with the Turtles playing the parts of all the bands, showing an incredible stylistic range without ever moving too far afield from the spoofy, goofy spirit that makes them so much fun. Elanore was the record's big hit single - peaking at #6 on the Billboard Hot 100 in late 1968 - and it's a dead ringer for Happy Together. I think the song's basic premise is that the Turtles are playing themselves. It's the sort of meta-niftiness that only appeals to pop geeks with way too much time on their hands. Guys like me, in other words. According to our crack research staff here at the Lonely One, Elanore is also the only charting single to ever work the word 'etcetera' into its lyrics. ...Beyond Flo 'n Eddie's delightfully zany stage presence, tonight's clip shows Johnny Barbata in top form behind the skins. With some drummers it's not as much a matter of technical prowess as it is an ability to achieve a distinct percussive resonance. Which is not to say that Barbata is lacking in virtuosity or showmanship. Check out the way he twirls his sticks between those immensely satisfying high-hat beats, and the jazzy briskness of his high-wire snare drum fills. He's the genuine article. God bless J. Barbata, and god bless the Turtles. They've always been there for me when my mood needs lifting...

songs for broken hearts, no. 25

The Neil Diamond kick I've been on has me thinking about Jeff Barry (nee Joel Adelberg). Barry produced many of Diamond's early hits on the legendary Bang Records label, including Solitary Man, Shiloh, and Cherry, Cherry, and along with being a key Brill Building guy and collaborator with Phil Spector, he was the evil genius behind the Archies... It wouldn't be an exaggeration for me to say that the Archies are one of my favorite bands – if, that is, they were in fact a band. To this day, I have an image in my mind of Jughead on drums, Reggie playing bass, Betty shakin’ the tambourine (and her hot miniskirted bod), Veronica on keyboards (foxy raven haired teaser), and Archie belting out the lead vocals and playing guitar. But the music was really just the work of various groupings of studio musicians, assembled by Don Kirshner, and playing Barry’s unrelentingly upbeat songs, which almost always clock in at less than three minutes and are each crack-like in their addictiveness. With Ron Dante assuming the real-life singing voice of Archie, the songs offer up a sanitized version of 60s youth culture, about three or four years behind the curve, and they sound like the theme music for a California GOP convention, which is to say that the rebelliousness is completely scrubbed clean, and any allusions to drugs or social strife are strictly verboten. Sex figures into things only to the extent that teen romance is the dominant theme throughout. Like the cartoon and the comic book, the music is truly manipulative stuff, but I bow down before it as my master. Rip any one of the dozen or so Best of the Archies compilations into your iTunes and I guarantee you’ll be walking around like a teenage zombie for weeks. And sometimes when you’re hurting, or when things aren’t going like you hoped they would, or maybe if you're just depressed because the world today seems to be such a cold and bitter place, it helps to get in touch with your inner teenage zombie...

songs for broken hearts, no. 24

I first heard Song Sung Blue when Mac Davis sang it on his variety show. Remember The Mac Davis Show? I must’ve been 5 or 6 years old, and for many years afterwards, whenever I heard the song come on the radio, I thought the words were ‘Sun Sun Blue.’ I’ve always loved its sing-songy-ness, especially the part with the girl echoing the words on the final time through. There's also a subtle but very lovely use of horns on the instrumental break. And once again, Neil gets to the heart of things when he sings, ‘funny thing, but you can sing it with a cry in your voice / And before you know, start to feeling good, you simply got no choice.’ Yes indeed…

songs for broken hearts, no. 23

I love the way the emotion builds in tonight's song. When Neil Diamond does the confessional thing, I feel like he's speaking to and for me. I've got an emptiness deep inside, and I've tried, but it won't let me go... Wow. Simple words, and a fairly common feeling to have in the modern world, but he manages to convey it in a way that shakes you down to your core and rocks your soul. By the end of the song, no matter where you are, don't be surprised if you find yourself standing tall with a fist raised in the air and tears streaming down your face...