A Boy Named Seo

Aside from Mickey saying "We suck right now" instead of "There's a lot of pressure to win here", I don't know why anyone, outside of maybe Chad Ocho Seis and his fellow Clevelanders would be bothered over this. He did it clumsily, but he's just trying to protect his players and say the fans have high expectations.

I find myself really hoping we land that India kid. 'Best all-around college hitter' were things being said about Conforto, too, and it didn't take him long to get to the bigs. India or bust!

I don't if we known thine enemy, but reliever Josh "Player" Hader has a 17.8 K/9 over 29.1 innings. He strikes out 2 of every 3 guys! Wannabe hitters are batting .086 against him. With Jeremy Jeffress and his equally freakish 0.35 ERA and Corey Knebel closing things out, if they're ahead after, like 5 innings, we're prob fucked. Lets go Mets!

Poor young Lenny looks like a sleaze-in-training.

And the Dodgers will probably have their shit together by then. No time to be mediocre!

[tweet:garuz1a1] [/tweet:garuz1a1]

The boat race is no more! I think I was out of first place for 1 solitary day since Opening Day, but I've now been eclipsed by Mohawk and Muddy Chickens with Snukes and Smiggy right behind. Carrying the rotting corpse of former superstar Paul Goldschmidt has finally caught up to me!

Benjamin Grimm wrote: 19.68 inches is 50 centimeters. They must have measured him using the metric system and Jerry and Shirley converted the number to inches. The baby's initials are ELB. Those are the letters I always saw on the old Montreal Expos caps. No wonder they measured him in centimeters! ELB immediately conjures Emmett L. Brown for me.

Sorry, guys, I clicked it. Harper gets his paycheck this week. Of course it's ridiculous, but 3 elite prospects is just the kind of haul for deGrom I think the Mets should think about if they continue to be shitty. Just not, you know, them.

Baby. 2002 is a little too black and sepia toned for me.

You had a nice run, 2011.

Help is on the way to the highest bidder! I see an auction has starter for super hawt Detroit prospect Christin Stewart!

I think what CF came up with is about right, although drafting a Bryce Harper or Steven Strasburg depends a lot on how bad you tank and how high your picks are, and signing a Ronald Acuña or Vlad Jr. depends on how committed the team is to dumping resources (human and financial) into international scouting. And luck! Lots of luck! The Astros swung and missed on Mark Appel (along with every other draft prognosticator) but they struck gold with George Springer, Carlos Correa and Alex Bregman with more studs waiting in the wings. Good fortune, for sure, but they had a plan and were committed to it and good things happened. I'm sure if they only got 1 ring out of this reboot, they'd be disappointed given the collection of talent, but they still got a ring out it. And the supposed advantage of being a New York team is that if you could tie up your new budding stars to long-term deals in pre-arb, you could make your trade for Verlander or Andrew Miller, but could still do something outrageous like trade for Manny Machado and get right up to the luxury tax line if you needed to. That's something the Astros, or another small- to mid-market rebuilding team just couldn't do.

I am also conflicted as to whether my parenting is any good. My friends brought this gift for my pooch, Willie Nelson, but now I am a person who has put clothes on a dog. #conflicted

Some of that saved money now spent on May break-outs seems to closing the gap, too. The Drunken Savages are adjusting the rear-view mirror and not happy about it...

The top of the standings are starting to bunch up now. I was hoping this would be a boat race, but it's not looking so likely anymore.

In context, it's less damning. He's trying to defend Noah from criticism, but the way he said it was dopey and it sounds like he's taking a swipe at him instead. https://nypost.com/2018/05/14/mets-rotation-defense-includes-an-overhyped-noah-syndergaard/

Edgy MD wrote: It may have been a fuckup. But the point is the strategic intent. You can argue that drafting José Fernandez was a fuckup. Of all the things the Marlins and their fans regret about Jose Fernandez, I bet drafting him is not one of them. Ceetar wrote: You can't knock the process in Nimmo and ignore his major league value and also not call the Wheeler acquisition/process a fleecing. They got a talented arm for literally nothing but some sentimental AB. I'm not knocking the process on Nimmo, but I do think the direction of the franchise might have been better served (in hindsight of course) by drafting someone else who was more of a known quantity. I hope Nimmo shuts me up and gets 2500 hits and becomes Wyoming's most famous citizen while leading the Mets to a bunch of trophies. But Jose Fernandez would've been pretty nice #4 starter in the 2015 World Series, too. All I'm sayin.

Ceetar wrote: Lefty Specialist wrote: Well, the problem is 2009-2014 and 2017 with an end date to be determined. 2009 and 2010 were the last ditch efforts to keep the last window open after the injuries started caving it in. they drafted deGrom in 2010 and fleeced the Giants for Wheeler in 2011. in 2011 they signed Nimmo. in 2012 they fleeced the Blue Jays for Syndergaard and d'Arnaud and drafted Plawecki. They extended the contract of their Hall of Fame caliber 3Bman. They signed Rosario They drafted Conforto in 2014. They extended Lagares. So really that period you're talking about IS the rebuild. They made the playoffs in 2015 and 2016, and were extremely injuried in 2017. They did a lot last offseason, despite it maybe not being exactly what some people think was best, to make this part of the 2015+ window and not the end of it. And it shouldn't be! Conforto, deGrom, Thor, Plawecki, Frazier, Rosario, Smith, Cespedes are all still here. they're all good pieces, and it's unlikely all the rest of them will suddenly be worthless. We're in the damn window, let's stop pretending they're not good enough just because we're in the middle of a rough patch. I think you could argue that drafting Nimmo was more of a fuck up, not a clever part of a rebuild. They passed on Jose Fernandez to draft a guy who didn't even play formal baseball in high school. Wheeler has worked well in our favor so far, but I wouldn't call it a fleecing. Good trade, though. I don't know that extending Lagares should be viewed as necessarily a positive move either. I think and hope Conforto will be a great pick. deGrom genius. Syndergaard = fleecing. We suck. Blow it up. #TrustTheProcess. Sell the Team NOW!!!!

I don't think we're necessarily at that point. This team will prob, hopefully get hot one more good time, and could win 83-86 games. Maybe catch a wild card. Maybe get lucky from there. I don't think they're currently built for sustained greatness (or very goodness) though.

Ceetar wrote: That's because it's a bad plan, that could end up meaning 'just suck' for years and years. There's no guarantee prospects turn into a good core. Hell, if Smith and Rosario were as good as once projected we'd be running away with this thing. But on that same front, the Braves and Phillies rebuild looks okay, but it's not necessarily complete and the Nats window is probably closing. The time seems ripe to double-down. Though that's what I felt like they should do in the offseason with Darvish and/or Ohtani. Yeah we could suck, or we could be like we've been the last 10 or 20 years, decidedly mediocre with winning seasons about half the time and a few playoff appearances that didn't quite work out. The nuke was great for the Astros and the White Sox are still shitty, but have accumulated a mass of elite prospects that they'll control for a long time. I think it's ballsy to recognize you're not as good as you wish you were and realistic to acknowledge that $100M of immediate spending is not on the horizon. Then when it comes time to spending, an acquisition like Verlander on the Astros makes so much more sense than say, Arrieta on this year's Mets team does.

Maybe we have to realize that as constructed, we're not championship caliber and should think hard about blowing it up. Certainty: Ownership is not going to pump Red Sox-level payroll into this team, and maybe they shouldn't. I think we have 1-2 years of peak deGrom left and he'd be the guy I would entertain trading to loot the top 2 or 3 guys from another team's system, like the White Sox did for Chris Sale, getting Yoan Moncada and Michael Kopech and some other dudes. I love deGrom, but if we can't get over with him, we're prob not going to get over with him when he starts to decline, and if we could get a guy like Walker Buehler with a pre-hype Clay Bellinger for deGrom, a mediocre team like the Mets that wants to build a long-term winner should prob do a trade like that. Move Yo to a contender and you could land another nice, young piece. Trade Bruce again at the deadline (and Frazier and whatever reliever is pitching well) and try to get a bunch of middling dudes and hope 1 or 2 of em stick. Trade Familia. Trade Cabrera. Trade Dom Smith! Trade em all! It will be super unpopular, but being mediocre and signing Adrian Gonzalez and Jay Bruce is unfulfilling too. But if we're aggressive and cleared everyone out at the same time, in a few years we could be the Astros 2.0 with young stars all over the field and a rotation led by 30-year old Syndergaard. Then trade him, too.

Fboy in the Yo compression sleeve is one of my favorite tidbits of all the cool stuff in this thread.

Smarmy turd-in-training. [youtube:2sdadkh3]tPTCq3h639c[/youtube:2sdadkh3]

Like G said in the 67 v. 87 yearbook matchup, it's easy to get excited about a championship team. We all wish the Mets were great at baseball and won all the time, but the pain of failure grows us as humans and makes us genuinely appreciate the things in our lives that will make us pause and remember them before we die. This includes the sweet windows of time that cracked open for the briefest moments to let us experience this weirdly powerful and irrational joy that sprung from watching a baseball team beat all the other baseball teams one year. Your kid will remember that stuff one day. I'm sure some of these Yankee kids are fine children who get good grades, don't litter, and are generally nice to their parents. But they won't have the strength of character your kid will have from growing up loving the shitty New York Mets. PS - I thought you were gonna say you punched out a dad wearing a Paul O'Neill jersey. That would be bad parenting.