smg58

So Peralta is coming in to tonight's game with a 1.08 ERA and a 5.73 xFIP for the postseason. His 3.4% HR/flyball rate, and even more so his 96.8% strand rate, are ludicrously unsustainable. But if he sustains it for one more game, he gets called clutch and somebody gives him five years and $200M.

You could also make the argument that the Rays and the Brewers have the two most analytics-minded front offices in baseball.

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If the Dodgers lose to the Brewers, the World Series will have two small-market, low-budget teams just before the league tries to make the argument that small-market, low-budget teams can't compete so we need to punish the players for accepting the contracts that were offered them and to punish the fans for, um, something. So yeah, go Brewers.

No love for Chase Utley? Sheesh.

The Soto deal showed he'd could go out and get the best guy available, and the player option was written in a way that ensures Soto stays.

Ewing is not the first rookie to get overeager on breaking pitches after hammering a few that hung, and he won't be the last. It's a process. But considering he was not on anybody's radar for making the team this year, and especially considering all the other things that had to go wrong first, the good with him greatly outweighs the bad.

Probably not a major injury for Soto on the HBP, but I have a feeling his season might be over.

Mauricio hits another one, this time righthanded and to the opposite field. There is nothing wrong with Mauricio that wouldn't be fixed by staying healthy and getting regular at bats.

So there I was, thinking that Ewing needs to get better at knowing what pitches to take, and he gets a fat one on 0-2. And then Mauricio just destroys the first pitch he gets.

Nuñez really looks all the way back.

I would like to see Tong finish well. The Mets took a gamble adjusting his mechanics and the short-term results were predictably not good, but going into the offseason thinking the Mets did right by him just might do more than anything else to give me optimism.

I think Senga has some hope as a reliever moving forward, at least enough not to just drop him. Manaea could be the fifth starter on a winning team. I wouldn't expect more than that, and I wouldn't wait if I think Tong or another younger pitcher is better, but he's worth something. He got lucky enough in 2024 that the extension was clearly overpaying-- and you didn't need to be an analytics expert to see that, you just needed to read Fangraphs -- but Manaea's here, he's under team control, and he's not going to kill the team if expectations are kept reasonable.

The Fielding Bible had pegged Semien as declining defensively over the previous two seasons, which should have been seen as a red flag given that his offensive decline was much less equivocal. But we're stuck with him, or at least his contract. Bichette's glove was never a problem. The question is whether he stays, or tests a market that is really thin at third base despite not performing anywhere near his $42M salary. Soto's glove can be lived with if center and right are positions of strength, as I think they will be. I'm willing to pass on the righthanded outfield free agents if we get Ty France, who is a Gold Glove contender at first base. But second base absolutely needs to be addressed and third base might as well.

https://www.mlb.com/news/ex-mets-executive-zack-scott-shares-background-of-pete-crow-armstrong-trade Hindsight is bionic.

You can still hope for more from Alvarez, but catching has not been the Mets' problem this season. Torres hits lefties well enough to be a must-start when you factor in his glove, and I think more games at DH will help Alvarez stay healthier in the long run.

Vientos can platoon at third, if Bichette decides that his .704 OPS is worth more than $42M over the next two years. He hasn't handled first base, and as long as Torrens hits lefties reasonably well then Alvarez is the DH against lefties and that's OK. You'd still need a lefthanded complement, and Baty just hasn't done enough with his chances.

The .185 BABIP and 0 HR/FB rate are obviously unsustainable, but Lavender still looks like a very viable option moving forward. It's one less item on the offseason shopping list.

The Fielding Bible has Semien at exactly average, which is noteworthy since he was at -4 about a month ago when I last checked. That being said, their defensive numbers for him were already declining sharply since 2023 when the trade happened and have continued to do so. Stearns had reasonable concerns about paying for Nimmo's decline, but he addressed them by trading him for a player whose decline is already here. The more important question now is what to do with Semien. Do we simply eat the contract? Do we hope somebody is willing take on a portion of it? Or do we think he'll provide enough value as a bench player? Because second base strikes me as the easiest position for us to upgrade this offseason.

Teams (other than the Brewers) seem to have forgotten that OBP is more important than slugging. Any player can become more selective at swinging, and it will help them. That was always the basic rule. There is a tendency in baseball right now to take a one-size-fits-all approach with hitters, but that does more harm than good with a lot of them. As a Mets-related example, Jeff McNeil has actually hit over .300 since July started. His power isn't where it was in his best seasons, but it's almost like somebody finally told him, "Just do what got you here." With Kristian Campbell, I think the bigger issue is that he hurt himself. If it were as simple as him not swinging at sinkers that drop out of the strike zone, that wouldn't be Driveline's problem. Just like it's not a tech guru's problem if AJ Ewing can't stop chasing curve balls down and away. But I think the big problem -- and it's far worse with pitchers -- is that people have all these data now but don't know how to use them, Geeks are crunching out the numbers, but they're still being interpreted by dumb jocks.

A big part of the problem is that it is common knowledge what players get paid -- and oh boy, do they get paid -- but what the teams take in is not common knowledge. So if the last agreement expires, and the owners impose a work stoppage, at what point is the non-disclosure agreement for the teams' books no longer in effect? That would be a ticking time bomb that gives the players some leverage. That, and nobody likes billionaires right now. And while the Angels are a big-market team, the fact that a perennial non-contender just got purchased for $4 billion should tell people something about the value that teams have.

I'm not sure that the Dodgers have been any more dominant than the Chiefs in the 2020s. And the Jeter/Rivera-era Yankees were not nearly as dominant as the Brady-era Patriots.

I've been to a couple of Long Island Ducks games this year, and when a batter or new pitcher gets introduced I like to search for them on Fangraphs to see how far they got. Basically, the profile of a typical Independent League player is somebody in his late twenties who either got a brief visit to the show, or aged out at AA or AAA. People like Dylan Ross, basically. There was one guy who was 1 for 9 in the majors, and I can only imagine how much that one means to him. So if a reasonable opportunity presents itself to give somebody like that a game or two before I clear space for younger guys in the offseason, I'm doing it.

What I get out of this is that any of the offers on the table for Robert required the Mets to eat most of the salary and still not get a prospect the other team thought it might miss. So the Mets figured they might as well use the player they already paid for, and see if a couple of good weeks at least frees them of the remaining salary plus buyout. I was just about to say I doubt it will, but the Orioles (one game out of the last AL wildcard spot, which looks completely up for grabs) have apparently claimed him.

You can be an effective pitcher without a high K rate as long as you're not walking anybody (2.05 walks per 9 IP is very good) and you're keeping the ball in the yard (1.03 HR/9 IP is OK but not great). Thornton has had some luck -- his 82% strand rate is unsustainably high -- but a 3.88 FIP suggests that he is holding his own regardless. For a rookie who wasn't really on the radar coming into the season, he's doing super. Moving forward, I think you try to find the balance on getting more ground balls without adding to the free passes.