Benjamin Grimm

Number 21 would be Toronto Blue Jays. Dickey, Thole and that other catcher whose name I forget for d'Arnaud, Syndergaard, Buck, and Beccera.

You'd think so. Hopefully they keep and commit to the right one!

Texas Rangers: Mazzilli for Darling and Terrell, spring 1982.

I'll start with a guess that's very likely to be wrong: Keith Hernandez, Neil Allen, Rick Ownbey.

A few years ago I was thumbing through a Mets yearbook and was surprised that the favorite TV show of many Mets was Duck Dynasty, a show I hadn't yet heard of at the time. (Maybe this should be split into the "Baseball Players are Uncultured Louts" thread.)

John Cougar Lunchbucket wrote: disgusting duo watching on. He'll take any excuse to get out of New Jersey, won't he? I suppose he missed out on attending the World Series because he was sampling every diner in New Hampshire?

Hey! I've heard of this guy. Put me down for 35 homers and 105 runs batted in.

It may just be a spring training thing. I don't think these games have the same copyright protection that regular- and post-season games have. I know I can watch Mets spring training games on SNY from where I live (at least I could last time I tried, which was at least a few years ago) but SNY is blacked out during the regular season when the Mets are playing.

Well, let me apologize for continually annoying you for the last eleven years! (Although, if one thread a day "floods" the forum it means that there's not much else going on.)

Edgy MD wrote: Is it possible to display the scorecard next to ballot, to allow the voter to view the players' performances in context? Unfortunately, no. Scorecards don't come about until after the season, when Retrosheet posts its play-by-play data. (Which reminds me that I still haven't processed the scorecard data for 2015.) I don't expect that the brief line of stats included on the voting form would really be sufficient for determining how to allocate points. It would probably make sense to refer to an online box score instead.

Has Tejada actually lost any income? I don't see that he has.

It wouldn't have to be a massive conspiracy, but I'm not really seeing a plausible motive.

Based on your avatar, I was certain that you looked like Jacob deGrom. And I was right! (More or less.) (What does this mean about what people think I look like?)

themetfairy wrote: I have two questions - 1) Is it possible to segregate pitching statistics from offensive statistics, so we don't have to look up and down the list to figure out how the pitchers did?; and 2) As a related question, will a pitcher's hitting statistics be included with his pitching stats or listed separately? 1. That's a good idea. Right now I'm just listing it in box score order, but I guess I can maybe do a separate section for pitchers. Or maybe just a different background color so it's easier to spot. Don't know if I'll get to it before Opening Day, but I'll keep it on my mental to-do list. 2. Maybe I can do that as well. It would have to be on the same line item, though, because if the form had two lines for each pitcher that would make the validation more complicated.

Edgy MD wrote: You can post to social media whenever a nu game is up for votes. I guess I could. I still have yet to tweet, but there is the UMDB Facebook page.

I know that there's nothing compelling the Mets to be overly generous at this point, but they really should have offered deGrom more than 20 per cent over the major league minimum.

Voting for the 2016 Schaefer Mets Player of the Year Award will begin on Monday, April 4, the Crane Pool Forum has announced. This will be the twelfth season that Crane Pool Forum members will be participating in Schaefer voting. The Schaefer Mets Player of the Year Award was established in the 1970's, and Schaefer points were awarded by Mets broadcasters Lindsey Nelson, Ralph Kiner, and Bob Murphy. The award was re-established by the Crane Pool Forum in 2005. Third baseman David Wright has been the winner in in six of the eleven years of the revived prize. The other winners were Johan Santana in 2008, Jose Reyes in 2011, Daniel Murphy in 2013, Lucas Duda in 2014 and Jacob deGrom in 2015. Voting will no longer take place in the forum itself. Instead, voters will go to http://potg.ultimatemets.com and fill in an online Schaefer ballot. Voting for each game will open automatically as soon as the box score has been pasted into the Ultimate Mets Database. This will usually be the morning after each game has been played, but may in some circumstances be considerably later than that, according to CPF spokesmodel Benjamin Grimm. Voting will stay open for up to two weeks, after which the votes are tallied and the results are posted in the IGT thread. In addition, says Grimm, each month a Schaefer Mets Player, Pitcher, Relief Pitcher, and Bench Player of the Month will be named. Yes, Schaefer will continue, but it will be different. I have come up with a new method of voting that will take up a lot less of my time, but may as a result cause a further decline in participation. That's a tradeoff that I'm willing to make. This will be a one-year experiment. The level of participation will determine whether we'll see more Schaefer in 2017. Either way, I plan to vote for every game in 2016, even if it turns out that I'm the only one doing so. Here are the differences: There will no longer be the individual POTG threads in the forum. Voting will instead occur at http://potg.ultimatemets.com. It is currently possible for you to vote for games from the 1964 season. This will allow you, if you're interested, to see how voting will work. These games won't ever be tallied, so you can feel free to enter whatever numbers you want. Don't worry too much about examining old box scores from over fifty years ago! The online form will enforce the rules (no more than 6 points per player, no more than 10 points per game). Since all of the voting will be stored in UMDB database tables, the magic Schaefer spreadsheet that I've been using since 2005 has been retired. Custody of the spreadsheet is still in dispute. The Smithsonian has requested it as part of their collection, but the Swedish government is trying to stake a claim. We hope that this will be resolved amicably. I should, therefore, no longer have to fix spelling errors, or prorate votes that total over 10 points. It will also no longer be possible to vote for players who did not participate in the game for which the votes are being cast. Voting will have to wait until box score data has been pasted into the UMDB. That means that the practice of opening a POTG thread shortly after the game will no longer occur. Instead, I will post an update in the game's IGT to let you know that the game is ready for Schaefer voting. Typically, this will be the following morning, but it could be a few days, or even weeks, later, depending on my availability. (I'll be away for almost three weeks this summer, and while I'm overseas I don't expect that I'll be keeping up with box scores.) If you like voting right after the game, I suggest you log your votes somewhere, either electronically in your favorite app, or on a piece of paper, or in Magic Marker on your elbow. You can then enter your votes later, when the game becomes available. I expect that games will be open for at least two weeks, as opposed to the two business days that had previously been the norm. This means that we won't know the Players of the Month for April until some time in mid-May. In the past I used to make announcements like "voting for Tuesday's win over the Marlins will close on Friday morning, some time after 10 a.m." Now, instead, I may say something like, "voting for all games between April 3 and April 20 will close on the morning of May 5, some time after 10 a.m." And here's what remains the same: The rules are the same. Points will still be awarded just as Lindsey, Ralph, and Bob used to do it. There will still be the six Player of the Month threads, which should look pretty much the same as you're used to. I'll still post the results for each individual game, either in this thread or in the individual IGT threads. (Final determination has not yet been made.)

Rohlfing? Isn't that Craig Swan's current profession?

I don't like the idea of relegation/promotion either. It might be a fun thing to play around with in OOTP or something like that, but in real life it's not at all practical, at least not as long as AAA teams get their players supplied to them by the big league teams.

You forgot Von Hayes.

I think I would too, and I live in the Philadelphia market. I know Ryan Howard is still there, but I'm drawing blanks on anyone else. Ask me again in July and I'll probably be able to come up with a few more.

I can name the guy on the far right; it's gotta be Tug McGraw. Don't know who the other one is.

I'm looking forward to this season more than I have any season since 2008. But not enough that I'll watch any spring training games. A few years ago I turned on a spring training game for the first time in years. Lucas Duda was batting. He struck out. In the course of that one at bat I was already bored and turned off the TV.

It should be the Ruben Tejada Rule.