Frayed Knot

And what is it you think that 26 y/o career minor league corner IFers with back surgery in his history are fetching in exchanges these days? ... y'know, besides other older career minor leaguers with health issues.

Yeah what's that, like 3 XBHs for their pitchers in the last six ABs?

I know that it sometimes just seems this way when you're not playing well, but are we going to get a call in our favor this year? Tonight there's been two close calls at 2nd and we haven't gotten either of them. One cost a run directly, the other maybe prevented from building one.

So where Krane's team doubles record can fall as soon as tonight, by the end of next season we could start seeing a whole bunch of NYM offensive records start to crumble. Assuming good health and more or less average (for them) seasons, Wright could grab the all-time Met marks in: Total Bases (from Krane); plus RBIs, Runs, and Walks from Straw. Reyes - who already has Triples & SBs - is neck-and-neck with Dabidrye for most runs but will need four more seasons before stealing Eddie K's all-time longevity mark of most NYM ABs These numbers should be up-to-date as of last night's disaster ... I mean game. STATRECORDHOLDERREYESPLACEPctProj?WRIGHTPLACEPctProj?ABs5,436Kranepool3,36610th62%20133,20611th59%-----HITS1,418Kranepool96411th68%-----99010th70%2012DOUBLES225Kranepool16310th72%-----2232nd99%2010TRIPLES73Reyes731st100%XXX1330th18%-----HRs252Strawberry6326th25%-----1425th56%2013Total Bases2,047Kranepool1,4629th71%-----1,6657th81%2011RBIs733Strawberry32521st44%-----5655th77%2011Stolen Bases301Reyes3011st100%XXX1216th40%-----Walks580Strawberry26022nd45%-----42410th73%2011RUNS662Strawberry5527th83%20115576th84%2011Strike-Outs960Strawberry41021st43%-----6436th67%2012

Valdes - 1.0 Mejia - 0.6 Takahashi - 0.6 Reyes - 1.5 Wright - 1.5 Bay - 0.6 Barajas - 0.2

Valdes - 0.7 Igarashi - 0.5 Rodriguez - 0.5 Jacobs - 2.0 Francoeur - 1.0 Reyes - 0.5 Wright - 0.5

Here is one of the Reyes/Wright 'projection' threads I was talking about. http://archives.cranepoolforum.net/7500/f1_t7566.shtml I think I updated that at least once since this one but can't find it at the moment. on edit: And here's the other: http://archives.cranepoolforum.net/10300/f1_t10322.shtml Maybe I'll get around to updating this in the next few days.

I posted a chart at least two years running showing the progress both Wright & Reyes were making towards various NYM career offensive records - although with the search feature here not working with older stuff I'm having trouble finding it/them. Reyes already snagged both triples & stolen bases but his lost season last year screwed up some of the future projections.

Benjamin Grimm wrote: I don't know if the 20-day thing that I mentioned in another thread is accurate or not. (If Davis stays off the big-league roster for the first 20 days of the season, his free agency gets delayed by a year.) Yes it is - if not exactly then pretty close. For accounting purposes, the ML season is divided into 182 days (note days, not games), but if a player accrues time on the ML roster (or DL) within 20 days of that he's given credit for a full season (that's to prevent the sort of brief demotion or late call-up specifically designed to screw a player out of one year of FA-gency). But a player who get less than that not get credit for the full year and therefore 6 seasons later will - even if he never gets sent down again - have only 5+ years in the bank and would have to wait another season before he could declare himself a FA. That said, I don't think the team is keeping him down with that day as a call-up target. For all his nice work in the AFL and ST (small samples both) he's a guy with ~750 PAs in pro ball under his belt and less than 250 of those above A ball. Even for a player coming out of college that's not a lot. Plus I would think they'd like to see the questions about him coming into the season - about hitting LHPs and breaking balls better - answered over a more sustained timeframe, particularly now that he's made a bigger name for himself. Ideally, I'd like to see him get a solid half-season at Buffalo before coming up. Now maybe that timeframe gets sped up if either the situation in Queens really falls apart or if he's so tearing things up at AAA that he forces a decision, but we're certainly not in either place yet nor will that change in the next two weeks.

Flip Castillo & Pagan and I like that lineup even better.

Centerfield wrote: The Dickshot thread has some great work in it. Several retroactive BoCs in there - particularly Soupy's cynicism and Vic's Act1/Scene 1 screenplay

1 - Nationals (a Strasburg-Harper 1-2 combo would cost them a pretty penny but might be the best back-to-back amateur picks ever and would go a long way towards turning around that franchise should everything work out as hoped) 2 - Pirates 3 - Orioles 4 - Royals 5 - Indians 6 - Diamondbacks Mets blew the sixth spot by winning their final three games last year

Some Bryce Harper hype - just in case you weren't sure he'd get enough. You ought to wear a bib while reading, although the odds of him dropping to #7 overall can't be too good. From BA: Unsurprisingly, College of Southern Nevada coach Tim Chambers has fielded plenty of phone calls from reporters about Bryce Harper this year. He's given up trying to temper expectations for Harper, the phenom who graced the cover of Sports Illustrated as a sophomore and then earned his GED so he could skip the final two years of his high school career and enroll at the Las Vegas area junior college. "Sometimes I don't know how to answer it," Chambers said. "I think he's the best player ever to play the game. I swear to God, I've never seen anything like it in my life. I've been coaching 21 years. If you factor age and the league he's playing in, he's the best player ever to play the game�it's amazing. I am dumbfounded. I knew he would do well, but I didn't expect this, I really didn't." No one has ever doubted Harper's talent. Capable of hitting 500-foot home runs, throwing 96 mph off the mound and doing just about everything in between, it's no wonder Harper was dubbed "Baseball's Chosen One" and "the most exciting prodigy since Lebron (James)" by Sports Illustrated. But there was some sentiment among baseball people heading into 2010 that Harper might not live up to the gargantuan expectations facing him this spring, as a 17-year-old against much older competition in a wood-bat league. But after going 5-for-13 with three home runs in Southern Nevada's four-game sweep of JC of Southern Idaho this weekend, Harper is hitting .422/.516/.891 with 15 home runs and 42 RBIs in 128 at-bats. He has already breezed past the single-season school record for home runs (12, by Joe Wagner, with metal bats in 2001). He has 54 hits�29 of them for extra bases. "He's destroying our league, and we're in a good league," Chambers said. "It's wood bat, we have really good pitching in our league, and he's just freaking destroying our league. He should be a junior in high school right now. It's sick, it really is�it's just disgusting. It's unbelievable what he's doing." Shockingly, just two of Harper's 25 walks have been intentional, a benefit of playing for a very good team that is 34-6. The Coyotes seemingly always have runners on base when Harper comes to the plate, forcing opponents to pitch to him. After Harper hit his third home run this weekend, Chambers stood in the third-base coaching box and had a conversation with Southern Idaho's third baseman. "The third baseman looks at me and says, 'Shoot, if you throw him a strike, he hits a home run. What do you do?' " Chambers said. "You walk him, I guess. He's special." Chambers said the 6-foot-3, 205-pound Harper has also done a fine job behind the plate handling CSN's power arms, and one American League scout last week told BA that he also thought Harper's receiving and throwing were both showing progress, projecting Harper as an average big league defender eventually. He also praised Harper for his play at other positions. Because the Scenic West Athletic Conference schedule includes doubleheaders on Fridays and Saturdays, Harper has split time between catching and playing right field, center field and even some third base. He'll usually catch one game in each doubleheader, and Chambers said Harper will likely catch more often in the postseason. He said he believes Harper could be in the big leagues as a catcher within three years, but his bat could carry him to the majors in two years if he moved to an outfield spot full-time. And the AL scout said that while Harper wasn't ideal in center field, he's also good there defensively due to his athleticism. That's high praise for a 17-year-old, but high praise is nothing new for Harper. When a player generates as much hype as Harper has, there inevitably will be skeptics, but Harper is gradually making believers out of all of them. "The rest of the world, the critics, all the smack-talking everybody does�come watch him, and you'll go, 'Whoa,' " Chambers said. "Bottom line, he's the best amateur baseball player in America. Bottom line."

Francoeur - 2.0 Blanco - 0.5 Igarashi - 1.0 Feliciano - 0.7 Mejia - 0.7 Perez - 0.1

Pelfrey - 3.0 Francoeur - 3.0 Barajas - 3.0 Wright - 0.4 Takahashi - 0.3 Nieve - 0.2 Mejia - 0.1

Maybe that Francoeur throw will get the fans off their asses and cheering, even without scoreboard-led help. The only things Mathews needed to make those two catches were a bicycle, a ladder, and maybe a ticket.

Mix in the effects of a smaller stadium, a newer stadium with a mix of event-attracted 'fans' more curious or interested in the amenities than the game itself, an extremely pessimistic fan-base with short memories and shorter attention spans, more expensive tickets less likely to draw in the younger and louder, and a decades-long trend of fans being increasingly conditioned to not only expect to be lead by electronic cheering but also to be drowned out by it if they try to do otherwise, and I'm neither surprised not optimistic that this is likely to change anytime soon.

So that's got to be at least three game-saving catches against the Mets by Harris, right? One back w/Atlanta and two now with the Nats. That's almost freakish.

OK, the Nats removed the effective pitcher to go to the designated closer. Let's fuck up that strategy.

Ryan Zimmerman removed from the game with a tweaked hammy -- maybe one of Dibble's whammies found the wrong target.

The Nats are wearing their blue hats today but Pudge has on a red helmet under his mask. Let's protest the game.

Obviously the Francoeur AB killed that inning. That's at least the third time in five games where one of our guys has hit the ball less than 2 ft from home plate. Wright did it once in the Florida series and so did at least one other guy. btw, 2.5 runs is the average number a team should expect from a bases-loaded/no-outs situation. - so we're down three today since it happened twice and only 2 runs came out of them.

Yes. There are two basic rules for drafting: Rule 1: Draft the best available talent regardless of position or perceived need Rule 2: See Rule 1

Options are on a 'per year' basis, so Tejeda (or someone like him) could be brought up and sent back down multiple times during a year and it burns only one option. At least part of Omar's thinking in using him this first week is that they figured to likely use him at some point later this year anyway (even if just in September) so "saving" an option year or keeping him off the 40-man so as to save a protected roster spot this coming winter were probably not going to happen anyway. As far as service time goes, all this week did was add 5 days of ML time so it's not going to make a difference in future arbitration or FA status down the road either. ** Partially cross-posted with above