batmagadanleadoff

=Cowtipper post_id=159477 time=1718655161 user_id=166] I still want to see my pet group of guys traded (Alonso, McNeil, Garrett), but if the Mets push toward .500, I might actually say keep Martinez and SRF, who I've suggested trading. Martinez was brought on board to make the team competitive, and if the team is competitive then he's doing his job, so I don't see why they shouldn't keep him.

2 ---- [FIMG=444]https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLS4zIB-MVyoGpf6K1HJvEh2ONLctR2FFtZmCFJIY59N_grfLJU8BUhGdWF-GWxPaykC-Y9mb8__xSJWBuCv8wKGOpkPE6fW9VJmf3OtYaQlsbZpCVTTMEZbvcXLti-zah4NcAHsjBRO8/s1600/jorgensen_rusty_staub.JPG[/FIMG]

Johnny Lunchbucket wrote: I traveled through the cassava fields of Northwest Columbia in search of a hobby store that sold Typewriter Latin America Batman Cards You should've went to Mexico. Or Argentina, where Batman was huge. If you didn't go to Mexico, though, I don't blame you. I wouldn't go there even with a Secret Service detail guarding me. "The mayor-elect of a small municipality near the crime-plagued Mexican resort city of Acapulco was assassinated early Monday, local prosecutors said — the latest in a series of attacks targeting politicians." https://www.aol.com/mayor-elect-pulled-off-bus-174600022.htmlhttps://www.aol.com/mayor-elect-pulled-off-bus-174600022.html For many years, Acapulco was the vacation and honeymoon capitol of the world.

I thought I'd be reading about fire sale chatter. It's hard to say if Conforto fully recovered from that injury. He bounced back right after surgery but he kinda went into a decline soon after ... and before his age 30 season.

Edgy MD wrote: I think a lot of the ones ranked high can go low, and the ones ranked low can go high. Makes sense to me. There's a fair amount of subjectivity to all of this. One of the big complaints about the Mets CCs is that they went with NYC on the shirt front instead of something more "Queensy". I'm not sure I agree with that. That'd alienate the other boroughs and "Queens" has a certain connotation that many would find somewhat distasteful. Or if not distasteful, then certainly an aura of LOLMets.

=metirish post_id=159432 time=1718636270 user_id=72] Why don't the MFY have a CC ? Too proud ,or is this a MLB rollout?

The Athletic ranks all 28 City Connect uniforms. The Mets unis are ranked 19th out of 28th. I think this ranking is even worse than is sounds given how vomit-inducing ugly the CC unis that are actually ranked below the Mets are. The Rockies CC's are ranked the best at #1. [FIMG=444]https://cdn.theathletic.com/app/uploads/2024/06/16231107/USATSI_23250262-2048x1535.jpg[/FIMG] https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5560347/2024/06/17/mlb-city-connect-uniform-rankings/https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5560347/2024/06/17/mlb-city-connect-uniform-rankings/

2018 Typewriter Chewing Gum Total Mets set - Code Name: Puppet, Pauper, Pirate, Poet, Pawn, King; (Subset - 7 Up Rookies) [FIMG=355]https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53796128172_cd1d7fc008_b.jpg[/FIMG]

Edgy MD wrote: I certainly don't advocate a batter never swinging on anything. Agreed and not explicity. But that would be the result of your idea, stretched out to its extreme. There's no advantage to deciding to take the first pitch sight unseen before it's even thrown, late in the game when the batter's team is trailing. But if there was an advantage, which there isn't, that advantage would exist just the same when the team is ahead, and in the early innings. Jimmy Page and his vinyl record collection: [FIMG=666]https://i.pinimg.com/736x/68/bc/57/68bc577268916c2d1c2e6c0e78d0fdcf.jpg[/FIMG] [FIMG=333]https://www.rarerecords.net/wp-content/uploads/yardbirds_classic_sealed_us1a-1-scaled.jpg[/FIMG]

Edgy MD wrote: Automatically taking the first pitch isn't a logical move. It's a logical move in certain situations. Yes. It's acceptable to automatically take the first pitch on a case-by-case basis -- depending on who's pitching, how he's been pitching and who's batting. Francisco Alvarez, for example, is a high ceiling youngster who's demonstrated that when he gets a good hold of a pitch, he can hit the pitch to Jupiter. But he hasn't shown a good command of the strike zone yet or reliable contact skills. He wouldn't be a good candidate to automatically take the first pitch. The case-by-case context approach is a far cry from having every player automatically take the first pitch because it's late in the game and the team is trailing. Edgy MD wrote: I disagree that something isn't logical because it hasn't been thought of yet. Lots of logical things have been thought of, but they aren't universally adopted because the logic behind them is resisted or elusive. But there's nothing elusive here. The information needed to understand this issue has been available since the dawn of baseball, the math is basic and the logic is straightforward. If there's an advantage to taking the first pitch when the team is trailing, then that advantage should also exist when the team is ahead. And on the second pitch. And the pitch after that and so on. By that logic, a batter should never swing at anything. This isn't like studying dark matter or black holes. Also, here's Robert Plant sitting among a strewn pile of his records. https://scontent-iad3-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/448305428_477198871342744_2813054775244731923_n.jpg?_nc_cat=103&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=5f2048&_nc_ohc=AdJM9zfgJuAQ7kNvgG4qqPf&_nc_ht=scontent-iad3-2.xx&oh=00_AYBxVWigslx2KJKNW7ecjyH0K7q7p_5ptmsUSCCGbzn2Nw&oe=6673601D> [FIMG=444]https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71D2e83ln0L._UF1000,1000_QL80_.jpg [/FIMG] Muddy Waters at Newport - bottom right. Plant's copy, though, is obviously smaller in size than an LP -- it's an EP, with just some of the songs from the album release.

Frayed Knot wrote: Jose Abreu was the 2020 AL MVP w/CHW [987 OPS / 165 OPS+] He followed that up with good years .... He was also the AL ROY in 2014, the same year that Jake deGrom won the award with the Mets. Anyways, right now, the Mets are the hottest team in all of baseball.

Frayed Knot wrote: Frayed Knot wrote: Ted Williams, who rarely swung at the first pitch (at least in his first AB, although he would do so occasionally just so pitchers couldn't take his taking for granted) Well, yeah. But hardly anyone else is Ted Williams. Williams supposedly had about as good a batting eye as anyone in baseball history. And he was impossible to strike out. A batter with command of the strike zone and excellent contact skills can do whatever the hell wants to do. If he wanted to take the first two strikes, that would've been fine by me. Who the hell am I to second guess Ted Williams? But my point in telling that story wasn't just to say, 'Hey, just do it like Ted did', but to get to the point where Ted said the goal was to get to where you could anticipate (he hated the word 'guess') a predictable pitch and, if you were to get it when and where you were expecting, to tee off on it. I appreciate the act of taking pitches that aren't to one's liking, but that's a means to an end rather than the goal itself. I knew. I was going along with you. Ted was setting up the pitcher. That also supports the idea that a batter ideally would swing at the most hittable pitch in the sequence. I say "ideally" because the batter won't always know when that it is until it's too late -- that is until after that pitch was already thrown. The most hittable pitch could be the first pitch, another reason not to automatically take it. Anyways, if automatically taking the first pitch was a logical move, it would have been figured out by now and everybody would be doing it all the time.

Frayed Knot wrote: Ted Williams, who rarely swung at the first pitch (at least in his first AB, although he would do so occasionally just so pitchers couldn't take his taking for granted) Well, yeah. But hardly anyone else is Ted Williams. Williams supposedly had about as good a batting eye as anyone in baseball history. And he was impossible to strike out. A batter with command of the strike zone and excellent contact skills can do whatever the hell wants to do. If he wanted to take the first two strikes, that would've been fine by me. Who the hell am I to second guess Ted Williams? But batters who draw a lot of walks do so because they have tremendous command of the strike zone and can tell the difference between a ball and a strike better than most other players. And they also usually gave great contact skills so that they can occasionally foul off tough strikes intentionally in order to wear a pitcher down into throwing a hittable pitch or ball four. But they don't draw a lot of walks by deciding, sight unseen, to take the first pitch before that first pitch is even thrown, for reasons already stated all over the place this past week, and many other times. That's nuts. There's a great anecdote I came across in recent years where Fernando Valenzuela walked past Keith Hernandez during batting practice and told him (paraphrasing): "Man, you don't swing at anything that isn't over the plate, even if it's just a tiny bit off the plate". What I don't know is if that happened during Keith's Cards or Mets days.

I know.

Edgy MD wrote: Getting folks to chase that slider has long been a big part of his game, though. Fortunately, San Diego doesn't adhere to the "Don't swing 'til you gotta" ethic. That had nothing to do with your so-called "Don't swing 'til you gotta" ethic and everything to do with that the batter was already dead meat because he had two strikes against him. The Padres batter had two strikes against him. With two strikes, a batter could be struck out. A batter can't be struck out with less than two strikes. So with two strikes, the batter now has to protect the entire home plate. All of it. To protect against a strikeout. And the batter has to guard more than home plate. He has to guard against pitches slightly off of home plate because his ability to gauge balls and strikes in the tiny fraction of a second that he has to do that isn't infallible. So there's a margin of error when the batter is trying to determine whether or not the incoming pitch will be a ball or strike. The batter protects against his infallibilty by swinging at balls, pitches slightly off of the plate. And even if the batter was infallible, even if the batter had perfect command of the strike zone, the umpire might make a mistake and call a pitch slightly off of the plate as strike three. So the batter has to guard all of the plate and then some. With two strikes, the strike zone is now expanded. This is a huge fucking problem because the baseball bat isn't nearly long enough to cover all of home plate, let alone slightly off of the plate as well. Oh, the bat is technically longer than home plate, but the sweet spot of the bat is relatively tiny. And the sweet spot of the bat is where the batter hopes to hit the pitch with. Contact with any other part of the bat that isn't on the sweet spot will result in crappy contact and a bad or weakly hit ball. Also, the batter is likely to crack his bat if he hits the ball on any part of the bat that isn't the sweet spot. The sweet spot can't even cover half of home plate, let alone all of it and on top of that, the edges off of the plate. With less than two strikes, a batter can focus on sections of the strike zone that he knows he can reach comfortably with the sweet spot of the bat. With less than two strikes, he has the luxury of letting some strikes go for called strikes. Not all strikes are the same. Some strikes are less hittable than others. That's why a batter doesn't wanna bat with two strikes. It's the worst position he could be in. With two strikes, a batter now has one foot in the grave With two strikes, the batter is dead meat. With two strikes, the at bat is practically over. That's why a batter shouldn't decide ahead of time to take strike one, sight unseen, before the pitch is even thrown. Because with one strike against him, he's now one pitch away from the dreaded strike two, the absolute worst case scenario for a batter.. That last Padres batter, Cronenworth, was eaten up alive on strike two with a classic nasty 90+MPH Diaz slider that dropped about a foot at the last second. The batter had little choice because he had two strikes against him. That's why you don't decide to take strike one sight unseen. You don't give away strikes.

Correction: Will Sammon, writing for The Athletic, opines that it will be hard to predict what the Mets might get in return for slugger Pete Alonso. Even though Alonso will be a free agent right after this season and thus a half-year rental, and he's guaranteed $10M for the last half of the season, making him an expensive get for many small market teams, and he's closing in on 30 at a position that historically, ages terribly, despite all of that, it will be a [CROSSOUT]buyer's[/CROSSOUT] seller's market because 40% of the teams make the playoffs and so the majority of all teams will be buyers at the deadline and not sellers.

I think that among the new baseball unis of the last few years, the Padres are the nicest. Wanna know what other new uni I'm really liking a lot? Youse are gonna hate this. The new Yankees road unis. They removed the white trim from the "New York" wording on the front of the road shirts and those jerseys now look awesome. Awesome, I said.

Will Sammon, writing for The Athletic, opines that it will be hard to predict what the Mets might get in return for slugger Pete Alonso. Even though Alonso will be a free agent right after this season and thus a half-year rental, and he's guaranteed $10M for the last half of the season, making him an expensive get for many small market teams, and he's closing in on 30 at a position that historically, ages terribly, despite all of that, it will be a buyer's market because 40% of the teams make the playoffs and so the majority of all teams will be buyers at the deadline and not sellers.

=Cowtipper post_id=159191 time=1718400377 user_id=166] Baseball must really be in bad shape if a team like the Mets is just 3 games out of a wild card right now.

=kcmets post_id=159194 time=1718400758 user_id=53] =Cowtipper post_id=159191 time=1718400377 user_id=166] Baseball must really be in bad shape if a team like the Mets is just 3 games out of a wild card right now.

Edgy MD wrote: Rashomony is a good word. It kind of sounds like a name for what Toshiro Mifune had to pay his ex-wife for support every month. [media=youtube]oShTJ90fC34[/media]

Edgy MD wrote: Hey, maybe that's how we alienated Met Fairy. I think she left because she didn't like my response to her post about how Michael Conforto was going to fully recover from his serious shoulder injury and surgery all because her husband, who probably doesn't have to lift anything heavier than a pencil, recovered from the same injury. If that's true, and I hope it's not ... whatever. This is so Rashomony. Everybody thinks they're to blame for her departure.

Edgy MD wrote: Hey, maybe that's how we alienated Met Fairy. I think she left because she didn't like my response to her post about how Michael Conforto was going to fully recover from his serious shoulder injury and surgery all because her husband, who probably doesn't have to lift anything heavier than a pencil, recovered from the same injury. If that's true, and I hope it's not ... whatever.

https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5558039/2024/06/14/bobby-valentine-orel-hershiser-new-york-mets-disguise/https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5558039/2024/06/14/bobby-valentine-orel-hershiser-new-york-mets-disguise/ Bobby Valentine dons "the mustache". [FIMG=555]https://a2.espncdn.com/combiner/i?img=%2Fphoto%2F2019%2F0605%2Fr552388_935x526_16%2D9.jpg[/FIMG] Click on the NYT link for video of the incident.

=Fman99 post_id=159045 time=1718302260 user_id=86] =metirish post_id=159043 time=1718300934 user_id=72] Yes ,I believe Seo reached out