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Eight new Mets appear on the Opening Day roster (28 players in all): Max Scherzer Starling Marte Eduardo Escobar Mark Canha (and his pretty wife Hannah) Chris Bassitt Adam Ottavino Travis Jankowski Joely Rodriguez One former Met returns from outside the organization: Chasen Shreve Two Mets have played on postseason Met teams, if not in the postseason: Brandon Nimmo (here since 2016) Seth Lugo (here since 2016) In order of longevity. dating from their first appearances as Mets, the rest are... Dominic Smith Tomas Nido Luis Guillorme Drew Smith Jeff McNeil Pete Alonso Robinson Cano (after a year's absence) Edwin Diaz J.D. Davis Francisco Lindor James McCann Trevor May Taijuan Walker Sean Reid-Foley Tylor Megill Carlos Carrasco Trevor Williams

After the Mets passed, the Padres found a taker for Paddack and Pagan.

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John Ellis, caught and played first base for 3 AL clubs from 1969 to 1981, 73. John Ellis, a New London High School graduate who had a Major League Baseball career and went on to found the Connecticut Cancer Foundation, has died at the age of 73. Ellis, a cancer survivor himself, died Wednesday after a second bout of the disease, according to his wife, Jane, and Jim Smith, who wrote the book “Baseball's Greatest Players: The Story of John Ellis and the Fight Against Cancer.” He died at Yale New Haven Hospital, former Day Publisher Reid MacCluggage said. Ellis was born in New London in 1948; his father, Louis Ellis, was a Coast Guardsman. John was a high school star athlete in football, basketball and baseball. He was drafted by the Yankees in 1966 and joined the team in 1969 after three years in the minor leagues, Smith wrote. He retired from the major league after the 1981 season with a lifetime batting average of .262 and went into real estate in New London, building his fortune. John and Jane Ellis established the Connecticut Cancer Foundation after he was first diagnosed with cancer in 1986; his older siblings Richard and Molly both died of the disease, Smith wrote in an obituary. Besides his wife, Ellis is survived by his daughter, Erika; his son, John; and his brother, Dave. https://www.theday.com/article/20220406/NWS01/220409652https://www.theday.com/article/20220406/NWS01/220409652

OPTIMISTIC VERSION 1. What will The Mets record will be? 93-69 2. Where will The Mets finish in the NL East? 1st 3. Will The Mets make the playoffs (yes/no)? Yes 4. If so, A. Where exactly will their record land, 1 through 6 (remember that there are 3 Wild Cards), in the NL; 2 seed B. How far will they advance World Series ; and, C. The number of games in their final round? 6 5. Who wins the World Series (can be the same answer as Q.4.B.)? The New York Mets 6. How many home runs will Pete Alonso hit? 44

Dodgers give ol' No. 68 a minor league contract. I mostly remember him standing alongside Cano, Conforto and Smith as they Zoom-elaborated on the Mets' decision to support BLM and postpone their game vs the Marlins.

The 2017-2018 Met follows his former teammate's example announces his retirement on the eve of the new season.

Brent Strom keeps it comin', via the Athletic (paywall). Standing at his locker one March afternoon, Madison Bumgarner classified the style of his new pitching coach. “He's probably the first mixture I've seen of the old school and new school,” he said of Strom, and from the gruff star, that amounts to high praise. “Everybody claims to be,” Bumgarner added, “but I haven't ran into anybody I thought was an actual mixture until now.” If Strom is the authentic hybrid, it's because he's spent five decades bridging the divide between analytics and the old school. Many of his “new-school” philosophies can be traced far back into the old school's heyday. After undergoing Tommy John surgery in the early 1970s — he was the second person to ever have it — he became interested in biomechanics and “optimal movement patterns.” “That's been a driving force,” Strom said. While coaching in the Dodgers' system for the entirety of the 1980s, Strom picked up nuggets from Hall of Fame left-hander Sandy Koufax. If the Astros succeeded so much with the four-seam at the top of the strike zone, it's because Strom first learned that approach from The Left Arm of God. He has rapaciously educated himself on pitching over the years, picking up information from sources within and without Major League Baseball. By the time he reached the Cardinals as a minor-league pitching instructor in 2008 — after a series of stops with the Padres, Expos, Royals and a previous stint with Houston — that research had congealed into a general philosophy. He preached certain principles of velocity enhancement and “understanding the value of the top of the zone.” The problem was, the Cardinals were often preaching the exact opposite in the big leagues. https://theathletic.com/3228451/2022/04/06/a-new-challenge-for-brent-strom-baseballs-best-pitching-coach-the-diamondbacks-you-can-take-us-to-the-next-level/https://theathletic.com/3228451/2022/04/06/a-new-challenge-for-brent-strom-baseballs-best-pitching-coach-the-diamondbacks-you-can-take-us-to-the-next-level/

Thank you. And the Tommy Davis Experience is undeniably groovy.

Those young rascals at hot new Mets podcast National League Town addressed McCarver's potential induction into the NYM HOF in their second episode (they were fully in favor of it). https://www.podpage.com/national-league-town/more-about-the-mets-hall-of-fame/https://www.podpage.com/national-league-town/more-about-the-mets-hall-of-fame/

A heartfelt appreciation of Tommy Davis's 1967 Mets season and Tommy Davis's 1967 Mets card http://www.faithandfearinflushing.com/2022/04/06/my-gateway-met/here.

7:05, friends.

Tim McCarver, who made his regular-season Mets booth debut 39 years ago today, has retired from broadcasting. It's now official. One of the legendary careers in baseball broadcasting — all of sportscasting, for that matter — has ended. Tim McCarver, who was the television analyst for more World Series than anyone — 24 — and a fixture on the air for decades, is retired from the business. The acknowledgement by McCarver, who spent the final six years of his unparalleled run in the booth covering the Cardinals for what now is Bally Sports Midwest, comes three seasons after he called his last game. In the interim, he had been in limbo during the height of the coronavirus pandemic. “I think I'm happy about it,” he said of putting down the microphone. “I think that's the best.” McCarver, now 80, was at his best for decades and worked for all four major American commercial broadcast networks. ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox. You name it and he was on the call for the big games. His final fling on the national stage came in 2013, when he called the Cardinals-Red Sox World Series with Joe Buck — his partner for 18 years. https://www.stltoday.com/sports/subscriber/media-views-tim-mccarvers-unparalleled-baseball-broadcasting-career-officially-is-over/article_cf92783a-eb57-5b0b-81df-767ccf19049d.htmlhttps://www.stltoday.com/sports/subscriber/media-views-tim-mccarvers-unparalleled-baseball-broadcasting-career-officially-is-over/article_cf92783a-eb57-5b0b-81df-767ccf19049d.html

Jon Heyman will take Davidoff's role at the Post.

Todd Frazier has announced his retirement from baseball.

Meet your new Mets radio fill-in voice: https://nypost.com/2022/04/04/mets-hire-jake-eisenberg-as-new-voice-for-radio-broadcasts/https://nypost.com/2022/04/04/mets-hire-jake-eisenberg-as-new-voice-for-radio-broadcasts/

1967 was a legit comeback year for Davis, who'd been hampered by injuries since being one of the NL's best players in 1962 and 1963. And when you can garner any kind of MVP support for a team that lost more than 100 games, you must be doing something right. The Edwin Jackson of his day as well in that he played everywhere, man, sense.

Just last night I was thinking Castro might really step up this season. I didn't mean up onto the 7 platform to switch to the 4 at Grand Central. I liked how he seemed to rescue his season in the second half last year and not be a total disaster, which is sometimes the nicest thing one can say about a wayward Met reliever. Five Mets pitched in more than 60 games in 2021. Three — Loup, Familia, Castro — are now gone. Way to drain 'em and discard 'em.

The three Black Friday free agents have all looked sensational this Spring.

Jake speaks, via SNY: Mets ace Jacob deGrom spoke to reporters on Sunday morning for the first time since the team announced he will miss Opening Day due to a stress reaction in his right scapula. "Yeah I mean I'm really frustrated," deGrom said. "Like I said I came into camp feeling really good, felt like my elbow and shoulder were in a good spot, and then to hear a stress reaction in the bone was definitely something I was not expecting. Level of frustration is really high right now." DeGrom went on to explain that he isn't sure how the injury happened, and that he felt prepared to pitch a full year after a strong offseason. "That's something that I've been trying to figure out," deGrom said. "I felt like I put myself in a good spot this offseason to be ready to make 30-plus starts. So I'd be guessing if I said exactly what happened. I tossed around, short ramp-up. I haven't pitched competitively in what 10 months, if you really looked at it that way. But that would be a guess if I said exactly what happened." DeGrom added that doctors said his shoulder looked as good as it did from previous MRIs, and that once the bone heals, he'll be ready to get back on the mound. "Like I said I felt good, through my bullpen I felt good," deGrom said. "Then I went to play catch and felt a little something in my shoulder. Honestly I was expecting to hear, 'take a couple of days off and you'll be ready to go.' But talking to the doctors about it and it being bone, they said as far as that, once it heals it's healed and then be ready to go. We're asking them how my shoulder looked overall, and they said it looks the same from previous MRIs and that part looks good, I guess that's the only plus that came out of this." The two-time Cy Young Award winner then confirmed that he still plans to opt-out of his contract at the end of the season, despite his most recent injury. He's set to make $33.5 million this season, and if he were to opt-in for the 2023 season he'd make $30.5 million and the Mets would have a club option to pick up for the 2024 season at $32.5 million, per Spotrac. https://sny.tv/articles/mets-jacob-degrom-injury-update-frustrationhttps://sny.tv/articles/mets-jacob-degrom-injury-update-frustration

Real-looking lineup.

Former Mets manager Carlos Beltran says some in-house higher-up should have stopped him and his Astro teammates from their clever sign-stealing scheme, but nobody did, so they just kept on banging their can to victory. In his first interview since the Astros sign-stealing scandal, former outfielder and recently hired YES Network analyst Carlos Beltrán said on his new network that the 2017 Astros “felt in our hearts that we were being more efficient and smarter than any team out there.” “We all did what we did,” Beltrán said on CenterStage with Michael Kay, per a YES Network transcript of the program, which airs Monday. “Looking back today, we were wrong.” Beltrán pointed the finger at his bosses in Houston, suggesting the players would have listened to a demand to stop the scheme. At the same time, Beltrán suggested it would have been impractical for the players to stop themselves from cheating when they believed the scheme was working. “A lot of people always ask me why you didn't stop it,” Beltrán said. “And my answer is, I didn't stop it the same way no one stopped it. This is working for us. Why you gonna stop something that is working for you? So, if the organization would've said something to us, we would've stopped it for sure.” As The Athletic first reported, Beltrán helped devise the Astros' sign-stealing scheme that linked a camera in center field to a video screen situated in the tunnel, steps from the dugout. Astros players and staff would watch the video screen and communicate what pitch was coming to their hitters in real time at Astros home games in 2017, often by banging on a garbage can with a baseball bat. Beltrán suggested there was no communication between the Astros front office in September 2017 about a warning commissioner Rob Manfred issued to all teams that month, saying that his office would treat electronic sign-stealing more seriously moving forward. Manfred cited the insufficient relay of that message in the league's announcement of its findings. “Well, if they (the Astros front office) got the letter, they knew, but they never shared it with us,” Beltrán said. “Nobody said anything to us, you know, nobody said anything. I wish somebody would've said something.” Athletic (paywall) story: https://theathletic.com/3226834/2022/04/03/no-one-stopped-it-carlos-beltran-addresses-astros-sign-stealing-scandal/https://theathletic.com/3226834/2022/04/03/no-one-stopped-it-carlos-beltran-addresses-astros-sign-stealing-scandal/