Chad ochoseis

Bumping so it doesn't get lost in the shuffle. I owe youse guys a Pirates KTE by tomorrow evening.

d'Kong76 wrote: 3. Mets LF Michael Conforto, who fell off the toilet in the batting order, went 0-for-4 with two strikeouts in the opener to drop to 1-for-26 in his last seven That SportsDirect. Not a slave to the AP stylebook, eh?

Oh, I recall. But I've lost track of how many days until his next one.

I'm following along on gameday. Syndergaard out of the bullpen?

Yes, this does seem to be a thing. What I haven't noticed is who takes off Asdrubal's helmet when he hits a home run. OE - No more auto-replace with KABOOM!?

Frayed Knot wrote: Familia owes Grandy a week's worth of dinners for that one!! First walk-off of the season for us, no? First walk-off home run...Wright had that walk off hit last week against the Brewers.

There's a closer somewhere who owes Grandy a steak dinner.

blech

In right field, Yasiel Puig is still an asshole. And he joins Giancarlo Stanton, Joey Votto, and our own Matt Harvey on Team What Happened to that Guy?, as he's currently OPSing .667.

Two starters on the DL. Our ace pitcher sucking badly. So-so hitting. And, still, 5-1 over the last six. Not bad at all.

That old Murph glove!

Zvon wrote: Conforto ain't the best outfielder. He's better than I thought from initial reports, but still. If we move him to first other better options open up. I don't want to mess with Conforto's head but this might be needed from a team standpoint, and I think he'd take it in stride. Would he be good @ 1st? No clue. But he's a lefty and he's gonna be a hitter like Keith. I would love to see him try first base. Hmmm. And then an regular outfield of Cespedes-Lagares-Granderson, with Conforto getting to sink or swim as an everyday player at first base, or possibly in a platoon with Flores. I'd rather take a chance on this than Flores/Campbell/Kelly as the regular 1B. At the very least, we get the good outfield defense every day.

Cespedes adds some egg.

David Wright. You've got to be a freaking idiot to doubt that guy.

Don't want to get too far off the Wright topic, but nobody has proved that OPS isn't a useful statistic, or that it's highly deceptive. It's flawed, certainly, for the reasons you mentioned - that's why I said that the stats I was using weren't perfect. But if team X has an average OPS of .750, and team Y has an average OPS of .700, it's a good bet that team X will be more productive, by any offensive measure you're willing to use. I used OPS because that was the stat that was easy to copy off the web quickly. wOBA might have been better, but I don't know where to download up to date wOBA quickly, conveniently, and cheaply by player. Regarding exit velocity, the FiveThirtyEight article seems to imply that exit velocity isn't particularly useful unless coupled with launch angle, with the exception that home runs have a consistently high exit velocity. And simply looking at average exit velocity and average launch angle wouldn't be helpful, as you'd need to look at each instance in tandem. That is, an average exit velocity of 85 mph and an average launch angle of 12 degrees may represent a good line drive hitter (if there isn't much variance in that launch angle's distribution) or just a stiff who pops up and grounds out a lot (if the launch angle's distribution has a high variance).

If Sandy's reading this, I hereby apologize for all the nasty words I muttered under my breath when you signed Cabrera.

Overmatched? Slump inclusive, he's the third-most valuable bat on the team this year, and top-20 in average batted-ball exit velocity. In other words, very few hitters in baseball are consistently hitting it harder. This got me curious, so I checked the correlation between OPS and exit velocity for those fifty players - it's 0.001. The correlation between strikeout:AB and exit velocity is 0.157. Those stats aren't perfect, but it certainly looks like there's no meaningful relationship between how hard a player hits a ball and how productive of a hitter he is, and only a little bit of a relationship between how hard he hits the ball and his strikeout rate.

Dux 5, Mets 2. Flerg. Gsellman gsot hit hard in the 5th. I did get to see Maikis De La Cruz make a badass diving catch. Now to figure out how to get out of Akron.

Greetings from Akron, Ohio, where every game is a rubber game. Stud Muffins are up 2-1 after 4, and my boy Gsellman looks like a man among ducks, though he's having some trouble controlling his curve. LJ Mazzilli has looked particularly lost at the plate today. Also, it's Superhero Night. Had I gotten here in time to be one of the first 1000 fans, I would have gotten a spiff Rubber Ducks foam superhero shield.

I turned on the game in the 4th and he was already gone, so I didn't actually see him, but the consensus seems to be that it's his head, not his arm. So he needs to spend a few weeks somewhere that he can get his head straight again. Somewhere quiet and peaceful, away from all the excitement, bright lights, and wild women. Where he can just focus on pitching, and not his image. Somewhere like Vegas.

I just got done working. I take it that I shouldn't bother turning on the game.

batmagadanleadoff wrote: But that is a lot of money for David to walk away from. How does the insurance work? Can David just sit on the 60 day DL until 2020 and collect his money while the Mets collect a portion of it from insurance? That depends on whether Wright himself took out insurance on his inability to complete his contract. And if so, we'd then need to know the terms and conditions of the policy to determine whether and when Wright could collect if he's forced to retire from health/injuries before his contract ends. We already know that the Wilpons took out insurance on Wright's contract. The best article I could find on insuring contracts is this one: http://www.sportsbusinessdaily.com/Daily/Issues/2008/05/Issue-162/Leagues-Governing-Bodies/MLB-Teams-Insure-Long-Term-Deals-To-Protect-From-Player-Injury.aspx. This one is long-winded and has some BS in it, but sounds logical as far as the discussion of Wright: http://metsmerizedonline.com/2013/02/understanding-the-business-of-baseball-insurance-on-player-contracts.html/ Wright gets paid by the Mets unless he does what his buddy Michael Cuddyer did and voluntarily retires before the contract expires. If he's injured, he can go on the 60-day, which I believe means that (a) he collects his full salary; ( he doesn't take up a roster spot on the 40; and © from the above articles, chances are that the Mets don't collect anything, because they likely had to renew their policy in 2016 and the renewed policy likely had exclusions for Wright's pre-existing conditions, including the spinal stenosis.

Looks like Scherzer isn't getting a no-hitter this time.

If our rough stretch this season means one player with a .900+ OPS and one player with an .800+ OPS, and a won-loss record around .500, sign me up. - Chad Ochoseis, the optimistic Mets fan

Giving this a bump. You're up tomorrow, lefthanded one.