batmagadanleadoff

Edgy MD wrote: There's certainly good players to get if your home is a big field. 1) Good pitchers whose main vulnerability is to the deep fly. 2) Fleet-footed Willie McGee-type outfielders, who on defense can cover more real-estate than the opposition, and on offense can hit one into the gap and run forever. 3) Anybody else that's good. The deeper the park, the better. Bandboxes stink. The smaller the park, the more it makes bad hitters look good, without proportionately making good hitters better. Cavernous parks make every pitcher look better. And getting Willie McGee in the prime of his career when he was putting up MVP caliber numbers ( though not as MVP caliber as Dwight Gooden) is easier said than done. Because every other team would also want that Willie McGee.

Busch Stadium wasn't a cavern. And the myth about Whitey Herzog's Missouri teams being tailored to their parks was just that, a myth, Those teams were so talented, they would've won anywhere.

It's not the same and it doesnt even out. The bigger the park is, the more skill that's taken out. I was actually happy to see the Mets buck the trend of building bandboxes that took most of the "skill" out of hitting home runs. Places like Camden Yards, for example. I'm sure Jimmy Wynn was quite pleased to have to play in the Astrodome for so long. It might've cost him a spot in Cooperstown. I don't like bandboxes either. I don't like extreme stadiums in general. But you can build for a bandbox. You get top flight pitchers who, the idea is, could pitch anywhere. That's what the Phillies did 10 or so years ago, though they could rake too. But what do you do in a cavern? The ideal player there doesnt exist. He'd be someone who hits the ball so far so often that he'd hit 85 HRs in a neutral park.

It's not the same and it doesnt even out. The bigger the park is, the more skill that's taken out. The more luck factors in and the more of a crapshoot each game is, which is especially a problem in baseball, which is already teeming with luck. This might help a perennially underfunded team that can't compete on a level playing field. But big market teams shouldn't build cavernous pitcher's parks, which the Mets are and Citi Field was and maybe, still is. But whaddya expect when you let Jeff Wilpon run wild? You get a plastic Camden Yards knockoff with the stupidest gimmicky dimensions ever and the ugliest scoreboards in all of baseball. Or you know, Jake deGrom couldve joined this forum, beat me to it, and instead, named this thread "Pretty Field'.

Mookie? Pretty much just about every Expo that played with him, too.

why is something that favors pitching over hitting "shitty"? Ask David Wright.

https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/even-the-mets-home-stadium-is-mocking-them-11554292802https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/even-the-mets-home-stadium-is-mocking-them-11554292802

=41Forever post_id=6212 time=1554305303 user_id=69] =batmagadanleadoff post_id=6209 time=1554304454 user_id=68] =41Forever post_id=6187 time=1554293690 user_id=69] I learned yesterday only two Mets have been Baseball Digest's Player of the Year -- Seaver and Gooden. The list I saw started in 1969, so I don't know if Seaver was the first, or the list I saw on the semi-reliable website is incomplete.

Darling dishes on Gary Carter; sez Carter had an ego. I'm shocked, shocked SHOCKED, I tell youse. https://nypost.com/2019/04/02/ron-darlings-tell-all-skewers-others-not-just-lenny-dykstra/amp/https://nypost.com/2019/04/02/ron-darlings-tell-all-skewers-others-not-just-lenny-dykstra/amp/

=41Forever post_id=6187 time=1554293690 user_id=69] I learned yesterday only two Mets have been Baseball Digest's Player of the Year -- Seaver and Gooden. The list I saw started in 1969, so I don't know if Seaver was the first, or the list I saw on the semi-reliable website is incomplete.

I figured that the SI Seaver cover would romp in this bracket. Aesthetically, it just might be the best cover of this lot. I know how popular that cover was and just how well received Seaver was upon his return. But I never cared much for that cover. I always though it a somewhat odd picture of Seaver, captured at a precise moment in time to make it appear as if Seaver threw like a girl. That was my very first reaction to that cover. And emotionally, I was never sky high on Seaver's Mets return. Those Mets were still dreadful. This was before Darryl Strawberry was called up, before Doc Gooden was on anybody's radar and before the Mets got Keith Hernandez for a relative bag of balls. And on top of all of that, the Mets big splashy recent acquisition -- maybe the Mets biggest get in franchise history to that point -- George Foster -- who when the Mets signed him, was in any reasonable conversation of the best hitters in the game, goes out and has the worst season of his career since he became an everyday player almost 10 years before. And then the whispers began about how Foster had permanently lost significant bat speed somewhere between his 1981 strike shortened MVP caliber season with the Reds and his first season as a Met. Those Mets still looked like they were mired in the dreadfulness of the deRoulet era and getting some pitcher clearly past his prime who, I thought, was guaranteed to stink it up pretty soon wasn't doing it for me. Talk about putting a silk hat on a pig. So I went with the Murphy cover, flaws and all, which represents perhaps the most exciting moment in the Mets history of the last 10 or so years and one of the best feel-good stories in franchise history.

Is the Pedro cover accidentally out of order? It's from 2005, not 2015.

I don't agree. Once you hit the bottom of the ninth in a tie game, it's sudden death. I'd put in the best available pitcher. And after he's all used up, I'd put in the next best available pitcher. We've gotten to the point where teams have a zillion pitchers on the roster and a miniscule bench, but still, there aren't enough pitchers to manage for an extra inning game so Justin Wilson has to pitch with the game on the line while Familia and Diaz sit and watch. How screwed up is that? I just hope that the "save" didn't affect Callaway's decision.

Let's Go Matz! Show us whatcha got, Matzie, or else Lunchie's gonna be up your ass all season long.

Straw, Mitch and Dykstra. That woulda been some damn outfield late 80s-early 90s.

Johnny Lunchbucket wrote: You'd think it would be Koufax considering how much the Wilpons must love this guy. Hey have you heard? HE'S FROM LONG ISLAND Nah. Koufax wasn't much of a pitcher for his first several seasons, even if he was a flamethrower from the get-go.

Johnny Lunchbucket wrote: Ordonez made it look easy most of the time. I think he might have made some hard plays look harder but he could play. I'll tell you something that I think about Ordonez, apropos to your comment quoted above, that I've kept to myself for more than 20 years. I've never discussed this publicly until now. I've seen a lot of Ordonez up close. I was a full season ticket holder at Shea for many years, including Rey's entire Mets stint. I had excellent seats and I could pick up elements of the game that you couldn't sense from watching on TV. Once in a while, I'd sit right behind home plate, in the first few rows of Shea, sometimes in the very first row. On those days, I had a better view than the view the actual players had from sitting in the dugout. There's no question that Rey was a defensive whiz, quick agile and acrobatic. But I'm convinced that many of his highlight reel plays were staged. Fraudulent. I'm convinced that Rey, on occasion, would intentionally hang back on a play for just the right amount of time, a second, or a microsecond, so that he could purposely make a routine play look outstanding. And he could pull it off because he was so mobile at shortstop. I'm convinced that I'm right in my observations and nobody will be able to talk me out of this. And then, taking in the whole Rey Ordonez experience, I believe that he had the personality consistent with this type of behavior. Like throwing a hissy fit whenever Valentine gave him the, unfortunately, rare day off, as if he was Lou Gehrig or something. Like wasting an out trying to bunt the runner over to second with the pitcher due up next -- so that he wouldn't be charged with an official at bat because of the sacrifice rule unless the bunt rolled in such a way that he could beat out the throw to first and he'd then be credited with a single. What a selfish thing to do -- making an out on purpose to preserve his crappy batting average and leaving it to a sub .100 hitter to drive in the run. Off-topic -- I started to write this post on my smartphone. It took me about 10 minutes to get through the first sentence and a half. I think I had to correct every single word at least twice, and fix words I hadn't even intended to type because there's some wacky spellchecking auto-filling going on there. I finally gave up in frustration and wrote this post on my PC. I don't know how anyone can type on those smartphones. You need fingers like the size of the fingers on a GI Joe doll to type on those things.

After Matz's first full season, the player he was most similar to, according to Baseball Reference's similarity scores, was ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Warren Spahn.

NL Comeback Player of the Year.

size=23https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/KDtuDng3lNtc4Nx2YYKRqtoRi1JrX_qei6vJDA-bvQ8-US-5tnPTJLhYJBdPhjpuurcqQBh_U8LXAD6ZiJsc1VKxRQIyE_Qzv56bcPHP84uuMRSf7egG1kWGuZaxofxxJaGNL4icjVXes7T2CBxiee_3P3Qg9eh25lpaWeg8oDc4pqqdaawcFySPsNNcGebog4u5KWXhA9Ot3jMFxORjhyCV64YzCTZjz0dpG0X0-4pVWXh2T_tZQ_pQ-qzp6Nbtb7E54sp8u-8FMQQFeZuPT9NV6u7lkDv8GYCuhcSOqoWm8FHG1BNlJRqnY75AVg4txN4CuEngZp9p4j2-HAW5gAqqi9GyCIgRuy1o0KQaEn4eUWHOzZYWoFa3Q2kvRA5GdHFLCATfc26KXPl7gOSwPx0jWKKxglBj1r8nj-kfL5zR7QmcwRlSYvxAtZSAbAw3WhdSMDNioCM_BzoJzYUg9Eldk9yWr0y_urg8lnybhfp2oMrtNqjKT_TtbrN5UNZscGy-0mPjax_c_CmHaI1qOvwTpyuWGkfyRIG9avYcnSg5Q1JU5E1B36PqkvnU4yOVnM1LkgAwa7nW5DSpzUpoxanZJKuMv-iAHqxwl8AA2VSDExU3Kfegmbx5KPN9ECN-19I21YwAMan4mjakkNYgpQVzosJfIqnh=w390-h358-nohttps://lh3.googleusercontent.com/KDtuDng3lNtc4Nx2YYKRqtoRi1JrX_qei6vJDA-bvQ8-US-5tnPTJLhYJBdPhjpuurcqQBh_U8LXAD6ZiJsc1VKxRQIyE_Qzv56bcPHP84uuMRSf7egG1kWGuZaxofxxJaGNL4icjVXes7T2CBxiee_3P3Qg9eh25lpaWeg8oDc4pqqdaawcFySPsNNcGebog4u5KWXhA9Ot3jMFxORjhyCV64YzCTZjz0dpG0X0-4pVWXh2T_tZQ_pQ-qzp6Nbtb7E54sp8u-8FMQQFeZuPT9NV6u7lkDv8GYCuhcSOqoWm8FHG1BNlJRqnY75AVg4txN4CuEngZp9p4j2-HAW5gAqqi9GyCIgRuy1o0KQaEn4eUWHOzZYWoFa3Q2kvRA5GdHFLCATfc26KXPl7gOSwPx0jWKKxglBj1r8nj-kfL5zR7QmcwRlSYvxAtZSAbAw3WhdSMDNioCM_BzoJzYUg9Eldk9yWr0y_urg8lnybhfp2oMrtNqjKT_TtbrN5UNZscGy-0mPjax_c_CmHaI1qOvwTpyuWGkfyRIG9avYcnSg5Q1JU5E1B36PqkvnU4yOVnM1LkgAwa7nW5DSpzUpoxanZJKuMv-iAHqxwl8AA2VSDExU3Kfegmbx5KPN9ECN-19I21YwAMan4mjakkNYgpQVzosJfIqnh=w390-h358-no>

I have no idea what Casey was talking about when he said that Gil could "squeeze your earbrows off", but still, I knew exactly what he meant. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/27/sports/baseball/gil-hodges-tom-seaver-mets.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/27/sports/baseball/gil-hodges-tom-seaver-mets.html

Edgy MD wrote: Willets Point wrote: Is the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Av throwing out the first pitch? I don't think he's done a ball game yet. Besides, I think he's up in Grand Rapids, visiting 41 and throwing one of his authoritarian clambakes. Isn't Grand Rapids liberal? I know that its suburbs are a hotbed of deep red Republicans.

=kcmets post_id=5357 time=1553785429 user_id=53] =batmagadanleadoff post_id=5345 time=1553782323 user_id=68]This cover gets my vote. Plus, it's a vote against this absurd policy of upliftingness.

Benjamin Grimm wrote: Even though it pictures Seaver in a Reds uniform, I included "Look Who's In Cincy" because it represents a major turning point in Mets history. I agree. I've always considered that cover more of a Mets cover than a Reds cover. The trade was such a painful event in Mets history, and the cover and Seaver's expression seems to capture the poignancy of it all. Seaver is now a Red, but apparently, grudgingly so. Plus, the red in the Reds uniform contrasts nicely with the green background of the Olympic Stadium dugout.. This cover gets my vote. Plus, it's a vote against this absurd policy of upliftingness. This is a minor point but that Strawberry cover always annoyed me, the way the top of Straw's head and helmet is cropped out. It's one of those annoying flaws, that once I noticed it that's all I seem to see with that cover. The Harvey cover, when contrasted with the Seaver cover, illustrates the demise of SI, with its cluttered composition, and practically an entire page worth of text on the cover and (though you can't tell from that photo) the shrunken footprint and cheaper quality paper stock.

Kooz and the Miracle Mets on the cover of America's most widely read general interest mag during its peak era. Hard to top that. Looks like it's gonna be Kooz Life over the Seaver family on Parade in a landslide. This might be the first time Kooz out-polled Seaver in anything. Not even Nancy could push Seaver over the top here.