Benjamin Grimm

I was in Toronto on Sunday, and we were in the plaza just outside the stadium. The Blue Jays were playing the Giants, and the stadium roof was open, but I didn't hear any sounds at all coming from the ballpark. I had this conversation with Microsoft Copilot about it:

He had a very short tenure, but he did swing the Francisco Lindor trade, so that will forever be on the plus side of his ledger.

I'm reminded of this thread: https://phpbb3.ultimatemets.com/archives/29800/f1_t29877.shtml

Juan Soto has walked 72 times, and the Mets have played 92 games. He's on a pace to walk 126.78 times this season, although it's unlikely he'll finish with that exact amount. The club record for walks in a season is 125, by John Olerud in 1999. No one else has come close. The next highest total is 97, by Keith Hernandez in 1984 and Darryl Strawberry in 1997. Meanwhile, Pete Alonso is now only five home runs shy of Strawberry's all-time club record. Brandon Nimmo recently became the 14th Met to have 900 hits. (He's currently at 905.) And Francisco Lindor became the 12th Met to steal 100 bases. 1. Jose Reyes 408 2. Mookie Wilson 281 3. Howard Johnson 202 4. David Wright 196 5. Darryl Strawberry 191 6. Lee Mazzilli 152 7. Lenny Dykstra 116 8. Bud Harrelson 115 9. Wally Backman 106 10. Roger Cedeno 105 11. Carlos Beltran 100 11. Francisco Lindor 100

Do you want to reach out to Michael Douglas, or should I? He's still 23 years younger than his father was when he died.

I looked it up, and examples were Vic Morrow and Brandon Lee, who died of accidents. Actors on set who died of natural causes include John Ritter and Tyrone Power.

Michael Douglas, 80. Says he doesn't want to be one of those actors who drops dead on a set. Not baseball, I know, but he played Ant Man! That has to count for something.

I'm as enthusiastic about Tong as I used to be about Sproat.

So it's possible but very unlikely that he'll pitch again this year.

With his home run last night, Juan Soto now has 13 homers as a Met, putting him in a tie for 148th place with Dave Marshall, Ellis Valentine, Matt Franco, Roberto Alomar, Eric Valent, Moises Alou, and James McCann. Hmmmm... Maybe this isn't as interesting as I originally thought. But... Dave Marshall!

I'm guessing a swarm of bot activity came through. We have a lot of pages on this forum, and if a bot decides to index each and every page, it will definitely but a strain on the database.

Pete now only two home runs away from tying David Wright for second place.

METS HOME RUN LEADERS Francisco Lindor's next home run will knock Todd Hundley out of the Top Ten. And Lucas Duda's spot in the Top Ten is in jeopardy as well, with Brandon Nimmo coming on. Also, Pete Alonso is now only four behind David Wright for second place. 1. Darryl Strawberry 252 2. David Wright 242 3. Pete Alonso 238 4. Mike Piazza 220 5. Howard Johnson 192 6. Dave Kingman 154 7. Carlos Beltran 149 8. Michael Conforto 132 9. Lucas Duda 125 10. Todd Hundley 124 10. Francisco Lindor 124 12. Kevin McReynolds 122 13. Edgardo Alfonzo 120 14. Brandon Nimmo 119 15. Ed Kranepool 118 16. Jose Reyes 108 17. Carlos Delgado 104 18. George Foster 99 19. Bobby Bonilla 95 19. Curtis Granderson 9 METS HIT LEADERS There's a cluster of active Mets in the Top Twenty, all poised to knock Carlos Beltran down a few notches sometime this season. Lindor, with 664 hits, is currently in 26th place. 1. David Wright 1,777 2. Jose Reyes 1,534 3. Ed Kranepool 1,418 4. Cleon Jones 1,188 5. Edgardo Alfonzo 1,136 6. Mookie Wilson 1,112 7. Bud Harrelson 1,029 8. Mike Piazza 1,028 9. Darryl Strawberry 1,025 10. Howard Johnson 997 11. Jerry Grote 994 12. Daniel Murphy 967 13. Keith Hernandez 939 14. Carlos Beltran 878 15. Brandon Nimmo 867 16. Pete Alonso 844 17. Jeff McNeil 842 18. Lee Mazzilli 796 19. Kevin McReynolds 791 20. Felix Millan 743 METS SAVE LEADERS Edwin Diaz recently moved past Jay-or-Reese Familia to claim third place. Getting to second place this season is possible, but he'll have to pick up the pace. 1. John Franco 276 2. Armando Benitez 160 3. Edwin Diaz 129 4. Jeurys Familia 124 5. Jesse Orosco 107 6. Billy Wagner 101 7. Tug McGraw 85 8. Roger McDowell 84 9. Francisco Rodriguez 83 10. Neil Allen 69

I'm beginning to feel less optimistic about this guy.

I hope it doesn't mean that Russian hackers are trying to influence your Schaefer vote! If Brett Baty suddenly has a surge in Schaefer points, we'll know that the election has been rigged.

They pretty much don't want to spend much time supporting a site that doesn't use WordPress. They tell me I have to "optimize" the site, but don't tell me where it's not optimum. So here's what I did. (This is kind of like "inside baseball" isn't it?) I looked at log files to see what pages were getting the most activity in the UMDB and I disabled two features that the bots were murdering. There was a tab on the player page that looked at play-by-play data (the same data that is used to generate the scorecards) and allows a visitor to see how a player performed in different situations. Runners on first and third in the seventh inning against a left-handed pitcher, for example. The bots were rampaging through that page, "clicking" on all of the possibilities. So I got rid of that tab. It was probably used far more frequently by bots than by humans. The other feature was on pages like these: Ultimate Mets Database - Willie Stargell and Ultimate Mets Database - Juan Marichal In the section that shows how the player performed against different Mets pitchers or hitters, each of the columns were sortable. The bots were killing this page too, going through player after player, Mets players and opponents alike, sorting all of the columns. The automated abuse of these two features put quite a load on the server, and overloaded the so-called "unlimited" bandwidth. This should make things better, but how much better remains to be seen. There may be more features that I'll have to cull, but for now this is it. We'll see what happens.

I think what it really means is that BlueHost sucks.

Baty may be easier to add because he's on the 40-man roster and I assume Singleton isn't.

Mets named Blade: 1. Blade Tidwell Mets named Tidwell: 1. Blade Tidwell Mets almost named Blade: 1. Blaine Beatty 2. Blaine Boyer Mets almost named Tidwell 1. Dick Tidrow

As of this morning, I see that the account access issue I've been having has finally been resolved. According to the vague explanation I received from customer service, the migration of the databases that run this forum and the UMDB were only partially migrated. The data itself was migrated, but there were some other steps that they were having issues with that caused the slowness and the occasional error messages (such as "Too Many Users") that we've been seeing. Now, if all the loose ends have been tied up, the issues should stop occurring. Or so I've been told. Time will tell if this is actually the case. I'm providing this update with hope, but not with confidence.

I tried looking into that. Apparently Manaea is progressing, throwing from 75 feet. According to an update from Mendoza a couple of days ago, he expects that Manaea will be activated before Montas, barring any setbacks, of course.

An update. I'm not sure how much faith to put in any of this, but I'll just report what I've been told. This site has, for quite a few years now, been hosted by a company called JustHost. They were recently acquired by a company called BlueHost, and that may be what triggered things going so badly. Until this week, however, I was still able to access the tools on the JustHost server. Now it forces me to a BlueHost login, and from there I can't even get to the files or the database. So even if I wanted to migrate to a different host (and it's definitely being considered!) I can't get access to anything. They tell me that there's an issue with the migration. Something about database cross references. I couldn't get a clear explanation. But they're working on the issue. ("Rest assured," they tell me.) The "Too Many Requests" errors, they say, are because of database pointers that need to be resolved. I opened a case on Tuesday and was told it would take 48 hours to resolve. I checked in today, and they're asking for another 48 hours. Needless to say, I'm not filled with confidence. I guess that if the issues get resolved and things look good, we'll stay where we are. And if not, I can start looking for an alternative once I get access to the files and database once again. Migrating to a new host is more of a project than I care to take on, but if I have to I'll get to it when I can. And that's where we're at.

I was just looking at some site metrics, and found that in the last month, 60 percent of traffic came from Georgia (the U.S. state, not the Eastern European country) and was sourced from Facebook's site in Ireland, somehow. I've blocked the series of IP addresses used by Meta Ireland in Georgia. We'll have to see if that helps.