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NY Mets Hall of Fame under construction at Citi Field By Brian Costa/The Star-Ledger January 13, 2010, 4:53PM NEW YORK -- Construction of the new Mets' Hall of Fame is underway at Citi Field, and the team expects the museum to be ready by Opening Day. The Hall is being built to the right of the Jackie Robinson Rotunda in the area previously occupied by the team store. There will still be a team store on the first-base side, but the area is being expanded to make room for the museum, Mets vice president for business operations Dave Howard said. The construction of the Hall of Fame is one of two significant offseason renovations underway at the ballpark. The bullpens are also being rebuilt. And the Mets have added some smaller touches, like painting the stairwells orange and blue, to -- as the Mets put it -- expand the club's presence at the club's ballpark. Look for more details about the Hall of Fame to be announced between now and Opening Day, including the induction to the Mets Hall of fame of honorary Met Jackie Robinson. http://www.nj.com/mets/index.ssf/2010/01/ny_mets_hall_of_fame_under_con.html

I suppose that the lazy thing to do would be to take Pujols for all the hitting stats, Santana for pitching and Mariano for relief pitching.

It's true that the Mets did not extend another offer to Ed Kranepool after the 1979 season and the expiration of what would turn out to be Krane's last MLB contract. But it's also true that Kranepool tested the '79-'80 free agent market -- with no success. During the interview, Krane danced around the fact that no other team was interested in his services after the '79 season. Here's an excerpt from Roger Angell's Wilver's Way, which first appeared in The New Yorker in the Fall of '79 and later, the anthology Late Innings: "Some old favorites of mine took their leave during the summer, or at the end of it, and some others will probably disappear during the winter. Eddie Kranepool, who is thirty-five, left the Mets and is trying his luck on the free-agent market.*" *He found no takers there and retired from baseball. (footnote added for the anthology, first published in 1982) Here's Angell's Spring Training 1979 take on the Mets: ...I was depressed that evening only by the sight of the thinly talented, semi-anonymous Mets making their earnest preparations for another season of losing baseball. Having failed to make any significant improvements in the last-place club over the winter, the Mets front office has evidently decided upon cheese-paring as a prime tactic with which to win back the lost affection of millions of Gotham fans: manager Joe Torre has been told to make do without a bullpen coach this season. The Charles Shipman Payson family, which owns the Mets and easily has the means to match George Steinbrenner in the winter money wars no longer seems to care for the business or sport of baseball. I wish it would sell the club to somebody who does.

I never saw Walter Johnson pitch in person.

The luck won't necessarily even out over five years time because it's the number of trades/moves that make up the sample size, not the amount of time over which they occur. OE -- On the other hand, if the sample size is too small for whatever luck there is to even out, then one can also say that Minaya's record is too small to be accurately judged. What say we stipulate to ignore the luck factor other than for unanticipated injuries for the purposes of this thread? After all, there's always an element of the unknown in these trades/moves - the GM is essentially trying to predict the future.

Smoky's closest modern-player similarity score comps are A.J. Pierzynski (906), Mike Lieberthal (898) and Bengie Molina (893).

If I had to guess how the HOF voters would assess Helton and Walker's careers within the context of Coors Field, I'd guess that some of the voters would get it right and make proper and accurate adjustments for the extreme hitter's park. But among those other writers that would fail to properly adjust for Coors, I'd guess that more than half of those would under-adjust and thus, overestimate the value of the two Rockies. If most writers knew how to adjust for Coors Field (and Dodger Stadium), Mike Piazza would have won the 1997 MVP (his last full season as a Dodger) in a landslide, and Larry Walker would have one less MVP award.

A response to the Klapisch piece at the top of this thread, in the stlye of Fire Joe Morgan dot com: Sometimes I actually think people are a little too hard on Bob Klapisch. He at least thinks differently than his hordes of mainstream media columnist brethren, and sometimes he stumbles upon an interesting idea. And I think it�s become sort of a knee-jerk reaction among Mets fans to assume everything he�s written is bad and dumb and too harsh against the Mets without giving it a fair shake. Then he writes something like this. Holy crap, Bob Klapisch. First of all, this is completely pointless. If the Mets were going to move in the fences, they�d be working on it by now, and they most certainly wouldn�t have said yesterday that they decidedly weren�t moving in the fences. So this column is useless. Second, holy crap. I�m sorry but some things require the ol� Fire Joe Morgan treatment. Here�s to heroes Ken Tremendous, dak and Junior. Bold words are Klapisch�s. Here we go: Whatever you think about the $66 million the Mets have invested in Jason Bay � whether it could�ve been better spent on John Lackey or tucked away for a run at next year�s elite crop of free agents � this much is irrefutable: Home runs have become the most critical currency at Citi Field. Is that irrefutable? I could refute that. Wait, I don�t know if I can. Hold on a second. I�m not entirely sure what you�re saying here, Bob Klapisch. Why are they the most critical currency? Because the Mets didn�t hit many? Other teams did. Other teams hit plenty. Everyone forgets that. It�s a ambitious change in philosophy, considering the Mets hit the fewest HRs in the National League last year. No, silly! It�s an ambitious change in philosophy. Plus, I�m not sure the Mets� decision to hit the fewest home runs in the National League last year was a philosophical one. Actually, I�m pretty sure it had to do with everybody in the freaking lineup getting hurt. But whatever, let�s move on. With Bay coming off a 36-homer season in Boston, Mets now have the potential to rival the Phillies in sheer muscle. That is, if Carlos Beltran can stay healthy all year, if Carlos Delgado returns and David Wright finds his 2008 stroke. And we haven�t even mentioned Jeff Francoeur, who could bat as low as seventh in this power-laden lineup. Wow. And guess what? If the Carloses Beltran and Delgado were healthy all last year and David Wright had his 2008 stroke � even without Bay in the lineup � the Mets would not have hit the fewest home runs in the National League. They�d actually probably have landed somewhere right in the middle of the pack, and so your whole premise would be shot, and so no one would need to be writing columns about bringing in the fences at Citi Field. That�s the whole thing. But wait, here comes my favorite part: The Mets don�t appear to be close to any significant up grades [sic] in their starting rotation, so if they want to improve their run-differential why not maximize their HR quotient by reconfiguring the ballpark? Differential? Maximize? Quotient? Klapisch must be onto something smart here, right? Oh, wait. He�s just using big words to shroud the dumbest f@#$ing thing I�ve ever read. Reconfiguring the ballpark around the same crappy pitchers will not alter the home run quotient. Reconfiguring the ballpark will only make those pitchers allow more home runs. Yes, the Mets will hit more home runs, too, but they�ll be yielding more at the same time, since they�ll be playing in the same ballpark as the other team, no matter how it�s configured. Unless Klapisch has some plan in mind for a radical newfangled wall that changes heights between the tops and bottoms of innings, the home run quotient will stay exactly the same. And then, the kicker: According to ESPN.com�s park factors that were released Tuesday, Citi was the major leagues� seventh-easiest place to hit a triple in 2009. Holy crap, sir. You found your way to ESPN.com�s park factors? While you were there, did you miss the part that showed Citi Field played as a slightly homer-friendly field in 2009? Or, worse, did you see it and think, �meh, it doesn�t really aid my point about how the Mets should move the fences in so they can hit more home runs like the Yankees and Phillies, so I�ll pretend I didn�t see it and cherry-pick this tidbit about the triples�? I�m done here. There�s more fodder for comedy, but I�m bored with it. Look: I don�t know the truth about whether Citi Field squashes home-run totals and I don�t purport to. I don�t think anybody does. It certainly looks big and it�s obviously earned that reputation. But there�s no evidence yet that it plays big, and everything we�ve learned so far says that it takes years to reach a definitive conclusion about a park�s effect on ballgames. It�s baffling how many people think otherwise. http://www.tedquarters.net/2010/01/06/holy-crap-bob-klapisch/

LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr wrote: the far more interesting story is being missed here by most MSM-ites-- that Wright's power drop last year is historically WEIRD. This is the most interesting aspect of Wright's drop in HR's. Have you come across any worthwhile articles attempting to discuss Wright's power shortage in historical context? I haven't.

LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr wrote: It's weird to me how many writers jumped on the CitiField-is-killing-David-Wright bandwagon, when two mouse clicks over to Baseball-Reference's 2009 splits* show you that the stadium didn't cause the power outage** Ten HR's (Wright's 2009 totals) is too small a sample size to exonerate Citi Field as the cause of Wright's power shortage last season. One possible explanation for Wright's neutral home-road splits might simply be that by sheer coincidence, the four or five longest balls that Wright hit in 2009 were all hit at Citi Field. This would mask the possibility that CF is reducing Wright's home HR's.