Frayed Knot

I think part of the sudden focus is the same thing that triggered me to start this thread; because the plays not made are often being turning into runs. Nothing tends to make you focus on a problem then getting burned by it. Has it gotten worse? - I think Reyes has. I've never thought him to be anything spectacular to start with, but he was fairly efficient and mistake free prior to this season. Other than him no one else is suddenly bad, but those who are deemed to be not hitting enough (Castillo, Delgado, Schneider) are going to be easier targets. btw, Baseball Prospectus list our "defensive efficiency" (the rate at which non-HR batter balls are turned into outs) at .712, or 12th best of the 30 MLB teams.

Armas - 2.7 Wright - 1.2 Castro - 2.2 Delgado - 1.2 Church - 0.7 Easley - 0.4 Chavez - 0.7 Wagner - 0.5 Sanchez - 0.4

And a drama-free 9th from Billy boy!!

Ya gotta like Brian Barton as a bench player just because it's cool to have a dreadlocked aeronautical engineer on your squad.

Duaner looks completely different without the cap and glasses. Not sure I've seen him that way before.

Rangers 3 - Yanx 2 Mariano entered a tie game in top-9 and gave up the winner That's 3, 1, 1, & 2 runs scored for them over the last 4 games 7.5 out of 1st; 5.0 behind Boston

There ya go Ramon!

The only team to run itself out of more runs tonight is the frickin Rangers who let Joba the Hut off the hook big time with some real dumbth.

I think I was saying something about a "Murphy's Law" season earlier? Wellemeyer retires ONE batter gets out of the inning unscathed. Meanwhile, Reyes's SB pct = barely adequate 28 of 37 ~ 75% and when you add in the pickoffs it's worse still

Benjamin Grimm wrote: I bet the Rays fans feel like I did in 1984. '84 will work if that was your first 'out of nowhere' team. But the more exact comparison is 1969. Both teams had/have been total doormats for their entire existence (Mets for 7 years, Rays for 11) never having won more than 68/70 games. And then, right about at mid-season (July 8-10) with the Mets in 2nd place 5.5 GB, the 1st place Cubs come into town for the first meaningful series in franchise history: Game 1 (with Moi in attendance) sees Kooz out-duel Fergie Jenkins as Eddie Krane HRs in the 5th and knocks in the walk-off winner w/a 9th inning single Game 2 becomes a legend even as it falls just short of perfection and while they lost Game 3 notice had been served that there was a new kid in town btw, check out those game times: 2:09; 2:02; and 2:23

Boston is in Tampa this week for what is probably the first important series in TB history. Brings me back to a mid-June '69 series vs the Cubs. Rays have their top 3 hurlers lined up and took game 1 behind Shields Monday night. Kazmir & Garza to come - TB now leads by 1.5 games Yanx meanwhile, are hosting Texas (lost first game last night) before getting visits from Boston (4 games) and Tampa (2) starting Thursday. Nothing will get decided this week obviously. But the young Rays get to see if they can swim with the big boys and a tough week could puncture a big hole in the Yanx fan's sense of inevitability.

The problem with Endy is that he was slated to be a 5th OFer but has been shoved into the role of a 3rd and even 2nd for much of the season. I know virtually nothing about Pascucci including whether or not he can play the OF. I suspect the reason Phillips was promoted instead (insider info on the MFYs aside) is that he has played there before and that it was destined to be a short-term promotion so you bring up the guy you don't care about losing when he's dropped. Maybe this little move preserved Pascucci for later on. I didn't think F. Martinez was anything other than a 2010 option even before he missed 6 weeks of the season (again!).

And again, the main problem isn't just the defense (it's bad but not THAT bad) it's that the errors manage to combine with poorly timed pitching to allow those baserunners who should never have been there in the first place to score. Other teams have more or similar numbers of errors yet fewer unreaned runs. The most obvious example was the Santana/Felix H. GS last week. But even last night (runs which probably weren't included in the above numbers and would make this look even worse if they were) Castillo gets a bad hop ... OK, it happens, but OF COURSE there were two outs and a runner on when it happened so a run scores. And Wright tried that off-balance throw which winds up in the dugout and the runner takes 2nd ... which is immediately followed up with a run-scoring single. Fans always talk about how it SEEMS like their team allows every mistake to come back and bite them, or how it always SEEMS like their guys are forever giving up 2-out runs ... but in our case, for this season, it actually is true and what it's created is a team whose total is WORSE than the sum of it's parts.

JUNE EDITION Rant of the Month Seawolf: IT'S NOT JOE FUCKING TORRE. It's the Dodgers, it's the first weekend of the summer, it's a million things. You see Joe Fucking Torre shirts in the crowd? Yankee hats? NO. You see Mets hats, and Keith Fucking Hernandez shirts, and Russ Martin shirts for the Dodger fans, and Ricky Fucking Otero shirts (Yes, I saw one yesterday afternoon). Those are Mets fans, Joe & joe. Mets fans. I know ... stunning! Mets fans?!? In New York?!? But this is Yankee Country! These must all be Joe Torre fans! It has nothing at all to do with the last year of the ballpark, or Johan Santana pitching, or the fact that the team has won 4 of 5, or because we all have man-curshes on David Wright. It's all Joe Fucking Torre. When's the Schnitzelgruben vendor coming by? Vic Sage: The gray monolithic-type design of the new Yankee Stadium recalls the Nuremburg rallies. A sort of art deco-fascist motif ... the sort of place you could imagine hosting a great big book burning. Whatever one may thing of the faux nostalgia of the new CitiField, at least it doesn't make one feel like goose stepping. The Safety First award MFS'62: You may be thinking it's not safe to go boating alone ...but those of us who remember Lynda Carter know that she was fully equipped with a magnificent set of flotation devices Can't anyone here play this game - in ANY season? GfaFiF: Richard Todd was going to come [to Shea's Jet Appreciation Day] but he was intercepted on the way Clutch gifts that keep on giving Met Irish: Jeter has things that simple stats can't measure, like herpes

I keep getting this nagging feeling that we're in the midst of a Murphy's Law season; that even when the individual actions aren't that bad the results still are. The two-out runs is an example. That we've given up a larger pct of our runs w/2 out than any other team implies that we're almost getting out of innings without further damage, but not quite. Well defense looks like it's another. Gary mentioned on TV the other day about how the NYM infield had the lowest pct of turning grounders into outs - and he said it wasn't even close. But even beyond those 'outs not made', the errors they are making are hurting more than they should. The error total is somewhat high to start with (4th most in NL) - but they compound it by having those errors lead the most unearned runs allowed. In other words, not the most errors but the most damage from them: over half a run per game. The Mets have the league's biggest gap between ERA and Runs/Game (.52 runs), double the gap of the league leading Cardinals.

Castillo - 0.75 Phillips - 0.5 Chavez - 0.5 Beltran - 0.25 Schoeneweis - 0.25

Baseball America says It's All Ovah! as far as the signing of this year's teen queen from the Carribean with Oakland walking away with either the biggest prize or the biggest bust -- status to be determined a half-decade or so from now.

btw, tonight's game is at 7 EDT - an early start local time for the ESPN telecast Tues, Wed & Thurs will be at the usual local time so 8PM here in EDT

Now that's my idea of a KTE !! ]Is Big Mac being straddled by his own wife, or Aaron Miles' wife? A: It doesn't matter since, on account of all the steroids, he can't do anything about it anyway.

Except that it's not like the first 28 teams get stocked and then the two "extra" NL teams get only the leftovers. Those 'would still be in the minors guys' should be spread out over all teams and not just confined to one league. The DH is usually the first cause mentioned but the same rules existed for the first 8 years of IL when play was more or less ever. I just think that, for whatever reason, the AL has had the better talent for the last few seasons. It's actually good for us this year as we played over .500 (9-6) while most of the rest of the league was comparitively sinking.

Now that it's all over (there might be a makeup still somewhere that needs to be played) the AL comes away with a significant edge for the 4th consecutive year. 149-102 in 2008 or 59.4% vs 40.6% - the second largest gap between the two since IL started 12 seasons back. The NL actully held a small edge through the first 8 years - but in the last 4 combined the AL has played to a .565 winning pct to the NL's .435 Another way to look at that is that, during IL play, the AL wins like a 93 win club to the NL's 69 win pace. That's a pretty big gap.

If we call him up just for the one game and then send him down right afterward we can label the thread 'A Farewell to Armas'

Half-way home: . TEAMProj O/UWins thru 54Proj thru 162TrendNYM93.54080UNDERPHIL87.54386CLOSEATL84.54080UNDERWASH70.53264UNDERFLA68.54284WAY OVERCHIC87.54998OVERMILW84.54488CLOSECINC79.53672UNDERStL78.54692WAY OVERHOUS72.53876CLOSEPITT68.53876OVERARIZ86.54182UNDERLAD87.53876UNDERSD84.53264WAY UNDERCOLO82.53264WAY UNDERSF71.53570CLOSE

Perez - 4.8 Feliciano 0.5 Wagner - 0.7 Castillo - 1.0 Delgado - 1.2 Reyes - 0.6 Wright - 0.4 Chavez - 0.6 Church - 0.2

Zvon wrote: Ill consider this a 4 game series and I'm happy with the split. I wanted 3 this weekend -- but overall I consider this a 6-game series and am happy with the 4 of 6