batmagadanleadoff

Benjamin Grimm wrote: It's nice that Lindor is being considered as a candidate, but I'd be very surprised if he won. Especially since it's looking more and more likely that his team won't make the postseason. So sad. See my post above.

Edgy MD wrote: Plenty o' season left for the factors to change, of course. I tend to think, as valuable as All-Star-level hitting while playing shortstop at a high level is, hitting more productively than anybody in the league while sipping martinis in between plate appearancess may be an even more impressive trick. Exactly. Otherwise you're punishing a player because the game comes easier to him. Who cares how much effort a player has to give? It should be about production and only about production. If a player can hit a HR with his eyes closed and hung over from last night's out on the town with the boys bar crawl, then so be it. All that matters is the HR itself.

=metsmarathon post_id=167966 time=1724940801 user_id=83] i think the mets need to make the playoffs for lindor to have a real shot at the mvp, and even then it might not be enough.

I also agree that Lindor is a great player. It could be difficult to properly appreciate him because so much of his value is in his defense. He's about as good a fielding shortstop as there is, but without necessarily being spectacular looking in the field. And shortstop is one of the two or three most important every-day playing positions in baseball, maybe even the most important. There is a lot of season left to play, but right now I would say Lindor is the MVP. The other candidates have missed a significant number of games or have sat comfortably on the bench with a martini while their teammates slogged through over 1,000 innings of playing defense. But what if Ohtani's offensive output is more valuable than Lindor's entire output and it can be proven indisputably -- statistically and mathematically? What if Ohtani were to hit 80 HR's? Just sayin'. Would it be fair to punish Ohtani in the MVP vote for DHing with that kind of production? If your answer is "yes", then what you are actually saying is that Ohtani has to play the field to win an MVP award even if his defense turns out to be horrible and detracts from, rather than adds to his offensive value.

The Mets are 18-8 when Manaea starts this season. No team has won more games behind a starter on the mound. https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5728184/2024/08/28/mets-sean-manaea-chris-sale-pitching/https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5728184/2024/08/28/mets-sean-manaea-chris-sale-pitching/

=MFS62 post_id=167864 time=1724879680 user_id=60] I want Manaea, I'm still not sure about Severino and I definitely don't want Quintana. So I picked Manaea only. Later

Benjamin Grimm wrote: There's a difference between the raw number of runners left on base and the batting average with runners on base. If you leave three runners in an inning in which zero runs are scored, that's frustrating. If you leave three runners in an inning in which seven runs are scored, that's satisfying. A team that leaves 2,000 runners on base but hits .400 with runners on is doing very well. A team that leaves 100 runners on base but hits .100 with runners on is doing very poorly. FK wasn't talking about the raw numbers. He was talking about the production with runners on. I agree. But only to a point. You're gonna have LOB's. It's inevitable. It's baked into the way the game is played. You're gonna have your runners on second and third with one out that aren't always driven in. That's baseball. The odds are stacked against runners scoring in general just like the odds are stacked against you hitting your number on the roulette wheel. But the Mets have the sixth highest BA with men on base in all of baseball this season. Hitting is not the Mets problem. At least it hasn't been since Martinez and Vientos began playing every day. https://www.baseball-reference.com/tools/split_stats_lg.cgi?full=1&params=bases%7CRISP%7CML%7C2024%7Cbat%7CAB%7Chttps://www.baseball-reference.com/tools/split_stats_lg.cgi?full=1&params=bases%7CRISP%7CML%7C2024%7Cbat%7CAB%7C You can cherry-pick one of his posts here and there. I'm talking about his incessant, daily griping about the Mets leaving men on base in every imaginable situation. I'm talking about the unmistakable totality of his LOB posts.

Frayed Knot wrote: Maybe if you read what I wrote rather than what you want me to have said so that you could in turn lecture me/us on the non-correlation of LOB and overall record, two phrases I neither used nor hinted at, then you might figure out what my point was. I've been reading that post for years. You write it hundreds of times a year, multiple times in seemingly every IGT. I know what you wrote and what you're driving at. You expect better and view the Mets LOB rates as a failure or a weakness. If anything, high LOB rates indicate a healthy offense. A team's gonna leave runners on base, especially a good team, because it's putting more runners on base in the first place. The odds are stacked against most runners ever coming around to score because every single batter is likelier to make an out than to not make an out. Even the MVP caliber players make outs about 60% of the time. It gets progressively worse from there as the quality of the hitter declines. It's the same principle that explains why you're likely to lose all of your money the longer you gamble it away at a casino: because the odds are stacked against you on every single roll of the dice and on every playing card hand dealt to you. It'd be nice for the Mets to have one of those Gas House Gorilla conga lines around the bases like from that Bugs Bunny cartoon but it ain't ever happening because the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against it. You seem to think that every Mets inning should end with a bases-clearing Grand Slam HR. Jeez, whining about LOB rates. It doesn't matter much. You might as well be complaining about how many brand new baseballs the team has to use to complete a game.

=ashie62 post_id=167804 time=1724850747 user_id=90] Great win! The playoff math is frustrating but just keep winning and it might all work out

Frayed Knot wrote: There's practically zero correlation between an MLB team's record and the number of runners they leave on base. Never said there was. So then what's your point that it has to be made 300 times a year? Fail.

Frayed Knot wrote: Not to throw cold water on an otherwise tidy win, but the Mets run production with the bases loaded (or even with just two runners on) continues to be almost comically bad, except it's usually not so funny. In the big 5th inning, starting with no outs, six Mets came up with the bases loaded in a seven batter span. The results were: K (Alonso) Sac Fly (Winker) ... HBP (Taylor) Walk (McNeil) E6 (Alvarez) K (Lindor) So that's six plate appearances, no hits, two Ks, and just one ball (but not a hit) left the infield. And the gap in that seven hitter span was a (mis-played) infield single by JDM to re-load the bases so that one didn't leave the infield either. Fortunately they got all their hitting in prior to loading the bases and that the lone hit in the subsequent sequence was followed by our long-time favorite sacks-loaded weapons, the HBP & BB, or else that big inning would have wound up a considerably smaller inning and quite possibly a different game outcome. Fail. Even when the Mets win resoundingly, in a laugher, there you are complaining about left-on-base runners. I know. They scored three runs on one single yet we only scored one run on three singles. How many times a year are you gonna write this same post over and over? Two hundred times? Six hundred times? The IGT's aren't even readable anymore between the Mets are leaving runners on base all the time every other post and the other guy handing out Nobel Peace Prize awards to Mets batters who strike out taking all three strikes because at least they didn't swing at the first pitch. There's practically zero correlation between an MLB team's record and the number of runners they leave on base. In fact, if there's any correlation at all, it's the best teams that tend to leave the most runners on base. That's because the best hitting teams put more runners on base than the lesser hitting teams. Do you expect the Mets to drive in every single base-runner? Hitting is the least of the Mets problems. Ever since Martinez and Vientos began playing every day, the Mets have been one of the best hitting teams in all of baseball. The Mets have one of the highest left on base rates this season. Wanna know who else has the worst LOB rates. Pretty much all of the first place teams and all of the playoff contenders. Wanna know who has one of the best LOB rates this year? The White Sox.

Maybe the Mets just need a better floor-setter. Was today's game one of the games they set the floor to win? Does anybody know? Did anybody ask? They can get swept by the DBacks and still make the playoffs. Or sweep the DBacks and still not make the playoffs. They only need to beat one of the teams ahead of them and they're just two and a half games behind the last team presently in the money. Of course they're fucking flawed. And you don't have to blow out your brains trying to analyze whether they're flawed or not. They have the seventh best record in a 15 team league. Isn't that enough to tell you whatever you need to know about how flawed they are? Sounds pretty fucking flawed to me. But in this day and age, the eighth best team in the league is a contender. And flawed teams, even badly flawed teams, now have a shot at winning the World Series.

Mark Vientos drinks the golden nectar from the bosom of Wonder Woman.

=kcmets post_id=167534 time=1724620018 user_id=53] On my screen, Derek Rodriguez looks like he's donning the bow tie.

Is Eddie Rosario wearing a bowtie? A fucking bowtie? What else? Did he take the field in suspenders, too? No wonder he was released.

“It has been an honor and a privilege to work with this incredible piece of American history, and I am proud that it will now be part of one of the finest private collections in the world,” [ivy, Director of the auction house] said in a statement after the sale. I wouldn't be surprised if Cohen himself bought the jersey.

Babe Ruth ‘called shot' jersey sells for record $24 million at auction [FIMG=444]https://cdn.theathletic.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1440%2cquality=75%2cformat=auto/https://cdn.theathletic.com/app/uploads/2024/08/25094659/babe-ruth-jersey-auction-1-1024x683.jpg[/FIMG] The jersey was first sold in 1990 for $150,000.00 Excerpt: A New York Yankees jersey said to be worn by Babe Ruth in Game 3 of the 1932 World Series sold for $24.12 million at a Heritage Auction on early Sunday morning, smashing the record for the most expensive piece of sports memorabilia in history. The road jersey was photo matched by multiple sources to Game 3 at Wrigley Field — when Ruth hit two home runs, including the famed, and debunked, “called shot” — though one leading photomatching company was not able to “match” the jersey after multiple attempts in recent years, sparking a conversation before the sale. The previous record price for a game-worn piece of memorabilia was a Michael Jordan Chicago Bulls jersey from Game 1 of the 1998 NBA Finals, which sold for $10.1 million in 2022, while the most expensive price for any sports collectible sold at auction was $12.6 million for a Topps 1952 Mickey Mantle card that sold the same year. This specific Ruth jersey was last sold at auction in 2005 when it went for $940,000. It was originally discovered around 1990 when a well-known collector purchased it from a woman in Florida. According to the official story, the woman's father had received the jersey from Ruth after a round of golf. The collector sold the jersey to another private collector for $150,000. In 1999, the jersey was consigned back to Grey Flannel Auctions and advertised for auction as a 1930 Ruth road uniform. It sold for $284,000 and was eventually loaned to the Babe Ruth Birthplace and Museum in Baltimore. When the jersey returned to Grey Flannel in 2005, the company elected to do additional research, which is how it first became advertised as the uniform Ruth was wearing on Oct. 1, 1932, the day of the “called shot.” The attribution to Game 3 was heavily debated at the time, but the recent rise of photomatching as a method of verification gave more credence to its connection to the “called shot” game. Chris Ivy, the director of sports at Heritage, called the jersey “the most significant piece of American sports memorabilia ever offered at auction.” go-deeper https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5722039/2024/08/25/babe-ruth-jersey-called-shot-auction/https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5722039/2024/08/25/babe-ruth-jersey-called-shot-auction/ Steve Cohen purchased the Mookie/Buckner baseball for $450,000.00 years ago. That ball should fetch $5M today, easily. Maybe twice as much -- $10M. Who knows? All it takes is two determined multibillionaire bidders who really want that ball and for whom $5M to them is like a pizza pie to us regular folk.

=ashie62 post_id=167370 time=1724456617 user_id=90] 34 games to go I'm kinda nervous about Blackburn tonight I'll be beating on my tv with a baseball bat

I did. Youse only let it go though, because youse didn't have a good enough answer. I let the kunt klub go, too. But then I got skullfucked. I guess it's OK to express total disinterest for next year's schedule so long as I'm not the one expressing that disinterest.

Benjamin Grimm wrote: What if someone posted "Bananas are tasty" and you responded with "Who the fuck cares about bananas! Why are you wasting my time talking about bananas! What the fuck does that have to do with what's going on today!" Don't you see that that's a bit extreme? And would feel like an attack? What if the roles were sort of reversed? What if instead, he started this thread by linking to next year's Mets schedule, informing everybody here that the new schedule was just released and then commenting that he couldn't give a flying fuck about next year's schedule? That the Mets are scheduled to play 162 games in 2025 just like they're scheduled to play 162 games every year -- against all of the same teams that they play this year, more or less the same number of times that they'll play those same teams this year? And then adding that what's the big deal if the Mets travel to San Fran in August next year even though they traveled to San Fran in June, this year? And then I responded by writing that I'm very much into schedules and care very much about when the Mets play their opponents. Then what? Do you think that this thread would evolve into a clusterfuck and he'd insult me personally? Or is this hypothetical version of posts more acceptable? Under this hypothetical sequence of posts, would FK chime in and post "Fail" at me? Would FK post "Fail" at the thread-starter? bump

=CitiFieldPornRoom post_id=167357 time=1724450751 user_id=194] But bottom line is that if Manfred hadn't watered down the playoffs without complementing with expansion, the Mets wouldn't seriously be thinking they were in it.

=Centerfield post_id=167354 time=1724445929 user_id=65] Some splits. The Mets are now 8th in MLB in runs scored. Tied with San Diego, though we have played one less game. They were 8th in MLB in runs scored Pre-All Star, and are 9th in MLB in the second half. So while they've definitely cooled down from their torrid stretch, their second half hitting is more or less like their first. As far as pitching, the Mets are 19th in team ERA, and 22nd in WHIP. Obviously not great. The high WHIP is due in large part to the large number of walks (4th highest in MLB). Their starter ERA is 4.21 (18th) and WHIP is 1.29 (21st). Bullpen numbers are interesting. Their ERA is actually lower 4.01 (15th)., but their WHIP is similar to that of the starters: 1.31 (21st). I would have thought our bullpen numbers would be a lot worse. I guess the numbers back up our overall impression of the team. They hit well enough to make the playoffs, but the pitching isn't really there.

I also agree that Lindor is a great player. It could be difficult to properly appreciate him because so much of his value is in his defense. He's about as good a fielding shortstop as there is, but without necessarily being spectacular looking in the field. And shortstop is one of the two or three most important every-day playing positions in baseball, maybe even the most important.

=Centerfield post_id=167254 time=1724348411 user_id=65] I guess it's still a big series in that we need all the wins we can get, and we're playing two teams that have been on fire.

Johnny Lunchbucket wrote: whoa the 2024 Typewriter cards are finally here. I'd like to see the backs of these cards Typewriter Chewing Gum 2024 Total+ Mets set - Code Name: Bratwurst [FIMG=333]https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53938264267_688fac51a5_h.jpg[/FIMG] Typewriter Chewing Gum 2024 Total+ Mets set - Code Name: Bratwurst; Brat Variation [FIMG=333]https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53939169601_8eeb307ec4_h.jpg[/FIMG] Typewriter Chewing Gum 2024 Total+ Mets set - Code Name: Bratwurst; Card Back [FIMG=333]https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53939169666_19acd73794_h.jpg[/FIMG]