smg58

I'm also going to bet that Jake deGrom is on this.

Darryl.

The Mets were sufficiently well-covered in the infield that if they had any reason to think McNeil wasn't right -- and TOS doesn't strike me as something you can easily hide, especially if you abruptly stop hitting -- he should have sat. Mauricio got criminally few ABs in the last two months, playing behind a second baseman who became severely compromised in September and who had himself been returned to the infield to accommodate a new centerfielder who was simply bad. Preach, brother.

I stand by this.

His peripherals suggest things weren't nearly as bad as they look. His K/BB ratio of 6.25 was actually superb. But he had at .314 BABIP this year after a .245 BABIP last year, so luck was involved in both seasons. He also had a 19.4% HR/FB rate, which is way worse than normal and may not all be luck. Personally, I wouldn't panic. He may not be as good as his 2024 made him look, and the Mets probably overpaid to bring him back, but as long as he's healthy he'll be a pretty good part of the rotation.

I went three stars. Obviously money will never be an obstacle under his watch. But the Dodgers never seem to have to sweat out the last week of the season. Cohen has yet to demonstrate that he knows how to hire the people who'll make the most of his resources.

I'm not sure what to do about center. Taylor screams "non-tender" at me, but you'd have to be willing to go with McNeil in center (and Mauricio at second or third against righties) if you go that route. I don't think the free agent CFs are worth the trouble, but I'd be in on Jarren Duran or Wilyer Abreu if the Red Sox make them available because I think their gloves will work in center. Free agents who could compete with Vientos for a DH spot (or an extra righty bat in general) should not be expensive.

He has a year of options. Not knowing which prospects are Rule V eligible, I can't comment on who won't make the 40 as a result. He doesn't strike me as somebody I'd clear a roster spot for in early November, but Stearns for better or worse always makes these kind of moves.

I don't think money is an object. The bigger concern is how to keep too much of it from being eaten by hurt or bad players.

Lindor had a bit of a down year defensively, with the biggest issue being throwing. Hopefully this fixes it.

I'd be shocked if he gets traded. It would be one thing if the Tigers weren't serious playoff contenders, but I'm not sure how you sell slamming your window of contention shut a year early to your fans. That being said, it's kind of like Johan Santana. He's one of the top two or three best pitchers in baseball, so why WOULDN'T you be interested if he's actually available?

I don't know if you really need to get into a microscopic analysis of sim scores to know that the chances of Alonso's performance declining significantly over the next couple of years are high enough to advise caution. The questions that need to be asked are (a) how far are you willing to go to try to keep him, and ( what's plan B?

I don't know if it's incomprehensible. We had worse "luck" in 2020. It does happen. And it's worth pointing out that basically the same team minus Soto fared significantly better in clutch situations last year. A number of things could have broken differently, and it would only have taken one to put us in the playoffs. But I wouldn't expect sympathy from fans of teams with lower payrolls. The question we need to ask (and answer) moving forward is why the money put into this team didn't eliminate the need for luck, at least in the regular season.

It was the White Sox. The Rays couldn't keep him on the big-league roster and the Sox, who are as close to starting from scratch as a non-expansion team can get, were happy to take a flyer on a Rule V pick. His FIP was 4.32 -- he left an unsustainably high 83% of runners on base -- but he was a serviceable innings eater mostly out of the pen. Stearns simply discarded optionable arms like Vasil and Hamel before they really got a chance at this level, in favor of dumpster diving, and I don't get that either.

I'm not really sure how/why Mendoza got spared in all this. I thought Hefner had to go on the day of the trade deadline in 2021, when it was clear that DeGrom was not coming back. The Mets didn't need 100 mph from DeGrom, they needed 200 innings. And this year's team needed more than one of their army of starting pitchers going into camp to avoid coming completely unglued. As scary as it sounds, I'm not disagreeing with Alpodaca's suggestion that somebody will pick him up -- nerds might be crunching out a whole lot of data, but the info is still being interpreted by dumb jocks. I hope he goes to a division rival. I do feel some sympathy for Chavez, though. It's not his fault that Alonso/McNeil/Lindor/Nimmo have all already had their best seasons. And if you blame him for other things, doesn't he deserve credit for Alonso's resurgence, or for getting Baty to finally look like he deserves to start on a big league team? Now granted, maybe somebody else can unlock Alvarez on a consistent basis and get the 2024 Vientos back. But I think on the whole that he served the team well.

I'm going to give myself a few days before I think in detail and in a cool-headed fashion, but I'll say a few things here. I do think CF is right about the pitching lab. Our pitching staff collapsed. Whatever metrics they looked at had nothing to do with pitching sustainably. Mendoza seemed to have a gift for making the wrong decision on when to stick with a pitcher and when not to every single time. Or at least it felt that way. Good relief pitching is necessary but it can also be a crapshoot. Plus it was a sellers market for pitchers (the deadline almost always is), but a buyers market for hitters. Perhaps they should have looked at Mullins' defensive numbers this season, realized he wouldn't be an upgrade over McNeil or even Nimmo in center, and gone for a better bat.

Holmes has at least been steady, and we could use a lot more steady right now.

This seems more like a Stevie Cohen problem than a Jeremy Hefner one, and since Cohen is unfireable, a David Stearns problem. All Hefner can do is use the guys Stearns gives Mendoza. Do you really think Hefner's the driving force in deciding which pitchers to sign and which ones not? Hefner was brought in (several years before Stearns) to execute a philosophy, but I think the philosophy needs to be changed. Cohen is definitely unfireable, but I hope realizes that the system we have is broken and needs fixing. As for Stearns, you have to ask yourself what decisions looked good at the time but backfired because of injury or unforeseeable implosions, and what decisions didn't look good in the first place.

Hefner's philosophy seems to be modeled on the Rays' approach. While the Rays have had some success, they also run through pitchers like my dogs run through toys. They had a season a couple of years ago where they entered June looking like they were in the middle of a historically good season -- then their pitching collapsed in a bloody heap, they limped into the playoffs, and went away quietly. The Rays' approach is designed to maximize bang for the buck on a team that has no bucks to spend, and is not a model a big-budget team should be trying to emulate. Nor is it a model that should be applied to genuinely valuable pitchers (like, say, Jake deGrom); the risk more than negates the reward. But it's not clear what the best philosophy is. The Phillies have had the most consistent success with their rotation recently, but even they lost Wheeler.

That looks a lot like a statistical fluke to me. If our comebacks were split 4/4 over the last two years, this season looks salvageable and last year would not have been. There's a limit to how much you can fix the intangibles, you either get them or you don't. But I think we were all hoping and expecting this year's team wouldn't need any luck to cruise into the playoffs, and it certainly looked that way at the beginning of June.

#1 is their pitching philosophy, which produces short-term positive results that can't be sustained. Even Peterson's ERA is above 4 now, when it was 2.83 after his August 1 start. I would not trust the continued development of McLean, Sproat, or Tong to Jeremy Hefner, or anybody who thinks like him.

The weak link is center field. You have to do something there. Otherwise there was nobody who really killed them, but I would not oppose exchanging a couple of low-to-mid 700s players for a bigger bat. And the other concern is defense. These are the Fielding Bible stats: Alonso -8 McNeil +2 at 2B, -5 in the OF Lindor -4 Baty +2 at 2B, +3 at 3B Vientos -10 Nimmo +3 Taylor +8 Siri -2 Mullins -14 Soto -6 Alvarez -3 It's not all bad, and I think Alvarez and Vientos would have fared better if they were consistently healthy, but Alonso is not going to get better and Lindor might not be an elite shortstop anymore. Soto was not good, but he's not actually our biggest concern. That makes CF that much more critical. You can slide Vientos to DH full-time -- or perhaps do that with Alonso (assuming he stays) and hope Vientos looks better at first with more experience -- but we need a centerfielder who can either hit without killing us in the field, or field without killing us at the plate. As for Mullins... his defensive numbers should have raised a bigger red flag than they did, and it's not like his hitting has made up for it.

What made him the right guy in the right place at the right time, I think, was his ability to get the most out of his young players quickly. I remember at the beginning of 1984 season that none of the sportscasters I listened to thought the Mets were even close to contending, but Davey had a different idea.

Manaea's FIP is exactly what it was last season (3.83), which tells me keep expectations realistic but don't panic. Senga is a bigger concern, because he just hasn't been right. I think he and Helsley need a week or two off to clear their heads more than anything, but that would mean going down the stretch with essentially two fewer roster spots. Holmes has been decent, but he hasn't forced the Mets to keep him in the rotation and we know he can be a high-end reliever. He still starts for now. I've always seen Megill as a reliever long term, and I think that starts now. And hopefully we'll have four good options going into October. I'm cautiously optimistic.

(sniff) Our work here is done...