7-30 from: - link - Amid a seven-game losing streak, the catcher for the St. Lucie Mets visited the Helping People Succeed summer camp Wednesday to teach the kids that with perseverance and determination, no slump lasts forever. German-born Kai Gronauer, who dons No. 2 for the minor league team, educated 19 campers about goal-setting and how to follow through with hopes and dreams. “I want to help the kids and pass along knowledge,” said Gronauer, 23, who has played with the baseball team for the past three years. “It’s very important for everybody to give something back and help the community.”
link - "He was someone who was an iconic figure," Hershiser said of Gooden, "someone you were jealous of because of his ability. Even when we had his pitches, he was still hard to hit. He was hard to bunt. You didn't know if the ball would stay up towards your face or come back down. It was always quicker to show bunt and then pull off and get out of the way, rather than wait and try to go towards the ball." "Electric," said Hershiser's former catcher, current Angels manager Mike Scioscia, who hit a famous game-tying home run against Gooden in Game 4 of the 1988 National League Championship Series. "I remember facing him when he first came up. You could see the talent was above and beyond what you would expect not only a 19-year-old kid to have, but what you would expect from a major league staff. They were all tough. He could move that fastball around. Elevate it. Pitch in. That curveball was as good as you're going to see. It was just sharp and big out of the same look as his fastball. It was nasty. If you did a pitch that was in your zone, you just hoped you were going to square it up and hit it hard. He didn't make many mistakes when he was young. He was certainly dominant when he first came up."
7-28 from: - link - Holt wasn't good in Double-A last year, perhaps because he hurt his ankle after his first start, but that can't be the reason he has been awful for most of this year, necessitating a demotion to Double-A. He has one of the better arms in the system, but he's more thrower than pitcher and still needs to learn there's more about pitching than velocity. I wonder if he's going to be more than a reliever in the long run.
link - The Mets had Tovar up at St. Lucie to start the season, a very aggressive promotion for someone who hit .243 in the GCL in 2009. And he hit about as well as you would expect, batting .246 with no patience or power. Tovar's principal skill is as a fielder, so it came as a surprise when he showed up in Savannah and suddenly started to hit, batting .338 over his first twenty games. There is a qualification, however. It's still unclear whether this is just a hot streak or whether his bat speed has caught up to better pitching, but any improvement is something. And best of all his age: he won't turn 19 until August 11. I wouldn't get too excited yet, especially since all he's really doing is hitting singles, but keep your eyes peeeled.
link - A man who admittedly drank a little too much and once popped Rolaids in the Mets’ dugout like M&M’s, Johnson, 67, has survived a bad case of managerial burnout, the loss of a daughter to a degenerative tissue disease and a stomach ailment that might have killed him had he not checked into the Mayo Clinic. It was in 2005, right after his daughter, Andrea, died that Johnson experienced a stomach pain worse than his old Mets teams ever caused him with their world-class carousers.
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