Frayed Knot

Another scintillating day of offense I see -- 13 half-innings, 4 hits.

I'm OK with this - especially knowing that all moves at this time of year are temporary anyway.

Dickey - 4.8 Rauch - 0.4 Francisco - 0.5 Edgin - 0.1 Bay - 1.1 Torres - 1.0 Turner - 1.4 Hairston - 0.7

Niese - 3.1 Wright - 1.5 Francisco - 0.2 Acosta - 0.2

Deal done, former Red Sox are in LA, in uniform, and in the game. 1st AB for Gonzalez = 3R HR

Ceetar wrote: 1. Greene laced a single to right field, and the throw was headed to third. Ruben Tejada jumped like he was going to cut it off, and seemingly deked Green into not taking second. Heads up. Also, just the simple act of getting the throw low enough and accurate enough to where the runner thinks it could be cut-off is enough to hold runners, with or without a good deke -- and that's what our outfielders have not been doing a good job on all year (hence our whole thread here somewhere on our pitiful OF throws) Josh Thole came to bat to "Who let the dogs out" in one at-bat. I'd bench him on those grounds alone.

Harder maybe. Not the same thing as hard. Although two of the three times he got the ball out of the infield this week were in his final two ABs

Since I first posted this (3 games ago) Thole has gone 0-for-10 with three Ks, one walk (intentional), and one GiDP He's gotten three balls out of the infield.

DocTee wrote: The waiver deals are confusing. BoSox placed Gonzalez on waivers-- LAD claimed him, meaning the Sox either had to deal him or pull him back...but I had no idea they could expand the parameters of the trade to include folks the Dodgers had presumably not claimed. Well of course those other guys had to pass through waivers too - and either have the Dodgers be the "winning" claimant, or for them to go unclaimed entirely which frees those particular players up to be dealt anywhere. Claims go from worst record to best and from own league to the other, so that means that Gonzalez went almost unclaimed for the Dodgers, being in the NL and nearer to the top of the standings than the bottom, to get awarded rights, and the others were either in the same boat or went all the way through cleanly.

And there was much rejoicing YAY!!!

Lefty Specialist wrote: Is Bay allowed to do that? Once a month he is - whether it's necessary or not.

A [u:1xq30z2t]3rd Run[/u:1xq30z2t]!!!! - for the first time in a week. The fact there there were two on and one out after that and no more came in is still a problem but, baby steps.

Reportedly needing only MLB approval for the trade to go through .... IOW - teams and players have all agreed. Commish still has to OK the deal because of the large amount of money heading to LA even through, in the grand scheme of things, the cash will be a relatively small portion of the contracts as a whole.

Couple of GiDPs are what's keeping us on the right side of the ledger so far.

Abad: 19 batters faced - 10 retired - 1 run allowed This team isn't just straining the limits of credibility but also the limits of math.

Abad has retired eight of the fourteen batters he's faced ... yet is unscored upon. Seems to me that I've seen this movie before and I don't like how it ends.

NYM offense held hostage: Day 8? The previous 7 games have featured 2 runs or less, and have done so against some of the worst pitching the NL has to offer. And today we're facing a bad pitcher, a really bad pitcher. Or, at least, a pitcher whose name really is Abad. Fernando Abad is making his first start of his career following 30 relief appearances this season [3.86 ERA; 1.41 WHiP] and 81 overall Today's players voted most likely to hit into weak ground-outs include: CF - Torres SS - Tejada 3B - Wright RF - Hairston 1B - Turner 2B - Cedeno LF - Bay C - Thole P - Dickey

Edgy DC wrote: Yeah, that's pretty much the long and short of it. And plus there's the whole Monday off-day thing so it would have been about 7 or 8 days between starts for McHugh if they had kept him up. In all, I think they did him a favor by sending him down for a week (assuming he's back as soon as conditions permit). think this thread title has been sadly overlooked, and we all owe G-F a Vegemite sandwich for his fine effort. Oh yeah, yeah.

"Offensive" review from last night: 4 hits -- 3 singles and a HR. But one of the singles was turned into an out 3 walks plus a HBP 6 fly-outs and then there were the 17 ABs that failed to get the ball out of the infield: 5 Ks; 12 GOs for 13 outs (1 GiDP); plus 2 "line-outs" although I think even that is a rather generous term for a ball that just happened to be caught in the air by an infielder, certainly there was nothing hard-hit about either of them. The wet-newspaper syndrome continues

Beckett, btw, also has full N-T protection (he's 10-and-5) and Gonzalez has partial veto power although, as a SoCal native, you wouldn't think he'd block a trade to LA. The larger point being there are a lot of details to work out beyond just the two clubs agreeing. Gonzalez - signed thru 2018 Crawford - signed thru 2017 Beckett - signed thru 2014 Hell, even Nick Punto is signed thru 2013 Plus the contracts of Papi and Dice-K run out at the end of this year IOW, that's a whopping big pile of cash the Sox would be getting out from under - and that the Dodgers would be taking on (plus Hanley, plus Kemp, plus Ethier, plus Kershaw ...)

Mets � Willets Point wrote: I don't know of any precedent for a trade this big in late August, but apparently the Red Sox and Dodgers are working on a trade that may send Adrian Gonzalez, Josh Beckett, Carl Crawford and Nick Punto to Los Angeles and Rubby De La Rosa, James Loney and prospects Ivan De Jesus and Jerry Sands to Boston. Seems almost too good to be true for the Red Sox who've had a lot of bad blood with the players they'd be giving up. I don't even know where to start with this (proposed) deal. Obviously the Sox are looking to get out from under a whole slew of long and expensive contracts so the balance player-wise doesn't have to come close to being even. Ivan de Jesus Jr is supposedly a good SS prospect and those aren't too easy to find so there's that. But Loney is at least as big an enigma as Crawford and not as good as even the 2012 version of Gonzalez. De la Rosa might be good but I don't think has all that high a ceiling and I don't know anything about Sands. What it would allow Boston to do would be to get the payroll flexibility to seek out next year's FAs to replace the ones they just purchased but already have buyer's remorse about, although who says that round will work out any better plus they'll still owe money to the likes of Lackey and Matsuzaka. Crawford apparently has a no-trade to LA clause which he'd have to waive. As far as the DL thing I think you can deal DL'd guys but only with their permission which, because of the N-T clause, they'd have to get anyway. Crawford is due for TJ surgery next week although the rehab time for non-pitchers is about half the 12 months normally expected for hurlers. Meanwhile the new Dodgers ownership - having already shelled out a stunning $2+ billion for the club - is adding payroll and coughing up big deals for little-known Cuban defectors like there's a lot more where that came from. Wanting to "make a splash" early on can be a good thing but one can go overboard with that line of thinking and I'm wondering how much of a kick in the pants this week's sweep by the Giants plays into all this. And then you wonder how much Bobby is a factor here.

bmfc1 wrote: That was an awful AB by Ike. He's had about 400 of those this year.

Let's see now ... - we're into a battle of the bullpens - we don't hit other teams' pens - other teams hit the crap out of ours - we need more than two runs if we're going to win this game - we haven't snagged more than two runs in a full game in nearly a week IOW, it ain't lookin' good.

OK we're all pissed off, both teams suck, it's Friday night, we're up against the last full week of summer, and MGiM - the guy who was supposed to do the KTE - hasn't been around in a few days and, with less than an hour until game time, he's likely either forgotten, is busy, or has died from apathy. So since I - and I presume most of the rest of youse - have barely any idea who's on this team, who's pitching, or even who their manager is (hell, they changed last week and no one here even commented on it) any last minute projects would probably confuse things as much as anything. But it also seems like the final in-league series between us and our fraternal NL twin shouldn't go un-commented-upon, so I went through great lengths to steal a preview from another site. The site, as you'll realize by about the second sentence and often after that, is an Astros site and it probably won't surprise you that they don't like the Mets a whole lot. A combination of being in NYC and that whole 1986 thing seems like a combustible mixture. But you should take it in the spirit in which it's intended. Which isn't to say that the writer doesn't mean every word he's saying - trust me, he does - but it's funny none the less and is certainly no less direct than some of what we've said about other teams. And that board has a long history (in several forms) of intelligent baseball talk and have even tolerated some of my posts over the years. Enjoy: http://www.spikesnstars.com/2012/08/23/astros-at-mets-�-a-heartfelt-goodbye-to-the-new-york-mets/

Well, they had to reactivate Hefner because the paternity leave thing has a quick expiration time (3 days I believe) and he was already scheduled to go on Sunday, a spot where McHugh certainly can not. Now I suppose they could have taken the path where they activate and then immediately send down Hefner while bringing up some other guy to start on Sunday --although that could trigger some 40-man decisions that might backfire down the road. And, really what's the whole point in that ... so that McHugh (a guy most NYM fans had barely heard of prior to yesterday) doesn't have to pitch once in Buffalo before he can be recalled and join the rotation in September?