It's not for the reason (make that word plural if you're feeling dirty-minded) you might think. But before we get to Anna, some other business.
My own overreaction will come if they trade Lastings Milledge for Barry Zito. I know prospects turn into suspects all the time, but I'd like to see us take a page from two much more successful organizations (I'm thinking of the Braves and the Yankees, and yes, I'm grinding my teeth to powder to type that) that always seem to have at least one prospect coming to the big-league level. We've got the money to play the closely related games of filling with free agents and trading away prospects for salary dumps, but without a certain contribution from the prospect pipeline things inevitably go wrong that way — pretty soon the machine is blasting out smoke and shedding parts and the margin for error has shrunk to zero and if things go the slightest bit awry, the whole contraption blows itself to Kingdom Come. (This, I hope, is the tale of the 2006 New York Yankees.) I'm not shedding tears for Mike Jacobs or Gaby Hernandez or Yusmeiro Petit, but given that people have questions about Brian Bannister, Philip Humber's rehabbing and Mike Pelfrey just got here, let's please not strip the entire system bare. Give us one Binghamtom Met or Norfolk Tide we're ready to see and the rest of the baseball establishment thinks is worthy of the hype. Give us a young, cheap core player to go with Wright and Reyes. Give us Lastings Milledge. (And then we'll all pray that “Lastings Milledge” turns out to mean what we hope it will.)
Assuming Lastings' tenure here is lasting, I've little quarrel with Benson for Julio and Maine. Jorge Julio's young, has great stuff and has been successful in the big leagues. My faith in Good Doctor Peterson has taken some dips since his arrival from Nirvana, but Julio seems like the kind of pitcher that really could be fixed — for one thing, he'll immediately look a whole lot better in a pitcher's park. As for the young and anonymous Mr. Maine, my cursory investigations show he's always struggled moving up a level and then righted himself. Besides, do the Orioles strike you as a smart organization?
Speaking of which, if the O's expect Kris Benson to be their #1 starter, they'd best beware. He's not close to that. He's…average. Kris Benson was like a bath that took 20 minutes to fill at the end of an exhausting day and was lukewarm the second you got into it — not so cold that you pulled the plug, but not warm enough to keep you from repeatedly dunking your knees until you realized you were enduring what you thought you'd be enjoying. He's injury-prone, seemed to hit the finish line early despite not having thrown very many innings, and he's 31, so I doubt his oft-heralded renaissance is coming. Will Leo Mazzone fix him? Maybe — but with a flyball, low-K pitcher moving to Camden Yards, he'll have more to fix.
Having bid Kris a not terribly fond farewell, I really will miss Anna. Part of it is that I was raised on tales of plucky Met wives: It started with reading about Nancy Seaver in her tam o'shanter, and the tale of the Miracle Mets looking up in Game 2 at Memorial Stadium to see four pretty women carrying a LET'S GO METS banner and being pelted with peanut shells. They were Mrs. Seaver, Ruth Ryan, Lynn Dyer and Melanie Pfeil. Heck, George Weiss wound up as our first GM because his wife booted him out of retirement, declaring that “I married George for better or worse, but not for lunch.”
Sure, Anna's Web site's kinda scary (Guns! Dogs! Michael Moore!), her comments on Delgado were unhelpful, and the feud with Adam Rubin was ridiculous, but she had more interesting things to say in one interview than your average clubhouse full of Mets did in a year. A year ago Anna did an interview with ESPN's Jason McIntyre in which she dismissed New Year's resolutions (“I don't believe in that crap”) and, after good-naturedly revisiting her famous Howard Stern comment about sleeping with the whole team if Kris cheated on her, put the endless sex talk in amusing, world-weary perspective when McIntyre asked if she got tired of the sex questions: “Everybody knows sex sells. And I'm mostly interviewed by men, and that's what they want to know about.” (Points to McIntyre for letting his article end with himself getting zinged.)
But what really won me over was her matter-of-fact discussion of being a teenage mother and a stripper: “I had my first child at 17, and it was a mistake, but I got a beautiful child out of it. Things are different down south. A lot of girls get pregnant and married young, and I did that. And if I had to go out and dance, I would do it tomorrow if I had to. I'll do whatever I have to do to feed my kids. I don't give a (expletive). I don't care what anyone else thinks. I didn't want to do it, but I'm a tough broad because of it. Not a lot of people mess with me. I'm rough and tumble.”
Indeed. Anna's a classic American type — the grab-your-own-bootstraps climber who makes her own luck by being shrewd and opportunistic and well aware of where the klieg lights are, but whose real rocket to the top is her own indomitable will. What made me like her was that in riding that rocket, it never occurred to Anna to waste a lot of time and effort trying to reinvent herself — there's an unbroken line between who she was then, who she is now and who'll she'll be when she's finished, if she ever is. She's not the slightest bit embarrassed by her humbler-than-humble early days — in fact, God help you if she ever catches a hint that you're embarrassed by them or by her. Because if she does, she'll show you what embarrassed really is. (Welcome to the 2005 Mets Christmas Party, Mr. Minaya!)
I can't say that I'll miss her husband, but I will miss Miss Rough and Tumble. She was genuine to a fault, but there are worse faults. And Baltimore just became a much more interesting place.
Jason, this is seriously the first non-flippant/boob-related repose to Anna Benson that I've ever read; thanks for giving us some food for thought.
I'd understand Lastings-for-Zito in theory, but the thing is We can get him after one more season anyway without giving up anybody. I do want Zito, but Milledge's whole career isn't worth just one extra year of Zito.
There may have been a spork instead of a silver spoon in her mouth when she was born, but I see little difference between Anna Benson's fame and that which oozes out of Paris Hilton. It's fame for fame's sake on the basis of a famous (it's all relative) name and lewd, look-at-me behavior.
I can't say I paid all that much attention to Mrs. Benson's monkeyshines while she was a Met wife. I can't say I've ever paid much attention to the public demeanor of Met wives, Nancy Seaver's admirable pluckiness notwithstanding. The sex stuff was a harmless sideshow. Her political opinions were her business. Lashing out at Carlos Delgado, though, was plain idiotic and potentially detrimental to the team's well-being — and that's where her soundbites become my business. We'll never know if that was going to be a clubhouse zit dying to pop. I think it could've been ugly.
My general distaste for Anna Benson's act, if moved to consider it at all, has nothing to do with her not playing the role of prim and proper baseball wife and everything to do with being a person with whom one would want anything to do.
Put it this way: Would you want to find yourself next to this woman as she presents herself at Shea? On the 7? In line at Macy's? I didn't find her entertaining, I didn't find her intriguing, I didn't find her — even with the thoughtful backstory — sympathetic. I just found her creepy.
To be fair, the Post published her moment-by-moment diary of the days leading up to her husband's start at Shea against Randy Johnson in May. After Kris easily dispatched the Yankees, Anna promised she would provide the winning pitcher with something special in appreciation of his job well done.
Now that's good judgment. Spanking the Yanks certainly merits more than a mere curtain call.