smg58

He's polling ahead of the mayor...

=Centerfield post_id=13509 time=1560957180 user_id=65]I wonder if Familia really is pitching hurt, or if this is an excuse to let him find himself.

I'm betting Familia will be like Bruce last year -- after insisting that he was healthy for too long, they put him on the DL and he winds up staying there for two months, and comes back and performs well but the team is long since out of contention. Maybe Nogosek will give the Mets one decent reliever to show for the 2017 deadline deals. Or, maybe not.

Like that Hech is playing short. Don't like that McNeil is sitting.

Conforto should have waved off McNeil. Of course, if he did that and still didn't catch the ball, the game is tied. The third base coach gambled on McNeil not anticipating the runner might try to score from first. Given that there were two outs and McNeil was running the opposite direction and could only guess at what was going on behind him, it was a better gamble than it wound up looking. But I'm all for heads-up defense making the other team look bad.

A tweet from Tim Healy: "Matt Kemp update: He has experienced “lingering effects” from his broken rib from his Reds stint, the Mets say. So he's on the minor league injured list." The good news is we have a perfectly valid explanation for why he wasn't hitting with the Reds. Maybe some R and R will turn him into a useful righty bat down the stretch. And if not, it's not like we lost anything out of it.

It can't take any longer than getting to Citi from Miller Place, right?

McNeil and Smith both sitting against a righty; Rosario, his sub-.290 OBP, and his brick glove never get a day off.

Nothing would surprise me.

Seattle could have sold higher on Swarzak and Bruce had they been more patient. But the thought of the Phillies and Braves benefiting from that deal is disconcerting. So the Yankees were the "clear favorites" to land Keuchel, until somebody else bid on him. So when do their fans revolt at their non-existent trigger finger? When does signing DJ LeMahieu, when Machado was available, backfire? When does filling their depth charts with established AAAA players with negative career WARs like Gio Urshela blow up in their faces?

I'm with G-Fafif. Knight was genuinely terrible in 84 and 85, and there was no good reason to think 86 would be different.

Solid inning from Jeurys to close it out.

So I was just about to say I was less on board with pinch-hitting for Smith with Davis...

Smith follows up his homer by giving the shift the middle finger. I guess somebody finally taught him to bunt.

Lagares looking like a few years ago chasing down a hard-hit fly ball.

Back-to-back homers from Rosario and Smith to start the game. I should watch more often.

Rosario never sits, Frazier never sits, but Smith was out yesterday and McNeil today, against righties.

Will spend the second half of the season as the starting shortstop. And the team will be better off for it.

According to the Fielding Bible, we are at -50 runs saved on the year. That's at the bottom of the National League, although the Mariners are worse. It's worth pointing out that the next worst team in the NL is the Nationals at -30, and then the worst team after that is the Pirates at -9 -- so we are a LOT worse than most of the league, if not necessarily "historically bad." We have the worst defense at the pitching position, the second worst defense at the shortstop position (apparently Trea Turner is an even bigger liability than Rosario), and we are bad at shifts, too. Our -7 at catcher is tied for worst. Where are we above average? Believe it or not, at first base (Smith is a +2 and Alonso -- yes, Alonso -- is a +1). Jeff McNeil is on the good side of average at three different positions, but the team is negative overall at all three. J. D. Davis has a remarkably bad rating (-9) for limited work at third. Our outfield is at -6 overall, which is not unacceptable, but Lagares hasn't done anything to bring that number up and neither did Broxton. Conforto has held his own at a +1 though.

=Centerfield post_id=12078 time=1559748008 user_id=65]And here we are, 7 months later, the trade having been every bit as bad as we had feared. But watching games anyway. It really says something about the psychology of being a sports fan. What we are doing makes no sense on any logical level.

You just knew that was going to blow up in Callaway's face. It's not that Lugo is theoretically a worse bet to get the third out, or that his failure to do so isn't mostly on him. But the bullpen is performing at a level where you don't bring them in when you don't need to, and there was clearly no need. Gsellman's performance was, unfortunately, predictable. We know from last year that he should be fine if you put him on a 70-inning pace but will cave in if you put him on a 100-inning pace. And he has 35 innings under his belt the first week of June. Mickey needed to learn from last year, but didn't.

He has speed. I don't think that's enough either, but McNeil and Nimmo aren't here right now and the options are very limited. To be honest, with his defense at -13 runs saved at the beginning of June and Hechavarria at least giving us some pop, I think a trip to Syracuse would do him and the Mets some good once either Cano or McNeil comes back.

A sub-.500 record in spite of a +42 run differential.

Closer Greg Holland (1 year, $3M plus possibly another $3M in incentives) has been a great pickup (1.53 ERA so far).

There's got to be somebody who can look that up. I would think it happened at least a couple of times when four-man rotations were common. I could picture Seaver facing Gibson, Jenkins, and Carlton in successive starts.