Frayed Knot

Ranking Differences:Met LFerFaFiFCPFJones158Kingman2732Agbayani45107McReynolds4818Mitchell64193R. Henderson69138S. Henderson7242Gilkey9163

Yeah, it was about a month ago that he passed like a pitch in the World Seri ...oh never mind.

The number 23 sticks in my head for Vail.

The Rockies played a DH yesterday starting Sun-Woo & B.Y. Kim in each of the games.

- They pitch well. Real well.- Ozzie loves the small ball better'n Willie ever dreamed of. - Posednik's running wild but gets thrown out alot.- This Rowland guy can play the heck out of CF and their defense overall is good- No one in the lineup hits .300- Their 2nd sacker Iguchi is what we hoped Kaz would be- Big Hurt is likely out for the season with another ... well, big hurt of some kind- I'm not sure if they'll hit enough. They don't have a ton of power so they need their hits in bunches and when they don't get 'em they'll lose while out-hitting the Yanx 9-4 like they did tonight.- Who's older: El Ducky or Contreras?- Dustin Hermanson was terrible closing for the Giants last year but is good this year. Can he be trusted in October?

I kinda lost track of Mauch somewhere along the wayI either would have guessed that he was already dead or, if living, pushing 90-something.He seems to occupy a spot from long ago in the way back machine even though he was still managing in the late '80s.

Mets sit on their asses and catch the Marlins tonight as Fish get stomped twice by Rox.

]Quality Start is a quality stat -- just one-third of all games started meet the specificications (6 IP, 3 ER or less), and the ERA of 4.5 that produces drops to below 4 in just one more inning. Teams whose starters get a QS win 67% of the time.I never understood why the 'Quality Start' takes the beating it does among fans & media. Sure it's not a perfect stat (like there's a stat out there which is!) but it's clear that (like stealing bases or getting the leadoff man on) a larger pct is better than a smaller one and that even reaching the minimum requirements represents a decent, even if hardly spectacular, outcome.And even the 4.50 ERA figure - something which gets quoted extensively whenever the stat is being put down - represents the statistical maximum that could possibly happen if and only if the pitcher just reaches the min-IPs/max-RAs level each and every time; which is sort of like pointing out that a 70 game hitting streak could be accomplished by a .250 hitter.

Zambrano - 5Wright - 1.5Floyd - 2Beltran - 1Cairo - 0.5

Anderson Hernandez gets some big city pub:http://www.nypost.com/sports/mets/26720.htm

Well, 4 of 6 is certainly OK. It just didn't come the way one would expect it and it certainly could have been better.]St. Louis 5, Atlanta 4 (on a walkoff grand slam in the bottom of the ninth by Eckstein)Weird stat of the night:David Eckstein has 22 career HRs; 4 of those are Grand-Slams and, of those four, two are walk-offs!Among active players, only A-Rod and Steve Finley have as many as 2 WOGSs and both of them have considerably more careers HRs to draw from.

]He survives the eighth with the shutout intact.Umm, no he didn't.

Floyd "ruins" our singles only streak.

What a difference 5 days makes.4 HRs inside 2 innings on Tuesday vs 3 singles thru 7 tonight

Seo - 5Reyes - 1Beltran - 1Wright - 1 Hernandez - 1Looper - 1

Glavine - 2.5Reyes - 2.0Beltran - 1.5Cairo - 1.0Floyd - 1.0Wright - 0.5 (hey, 3 walks is worth something)Koo - 0.5Cameron - 0.5Woodward - 0.5

]Great bullpen use by Randolph tonight.First post-game call I hear: 'Why didn't Willie have Glavine pitch the 9th?'

BA: The Mets are trying to get Mike Jacobs more innings behind the plate as the season winds down. Jacobs, a 38th-round pick in 1999, has played primarily first base this season. Wherever he plays, Jacobs shows no ill-effects at the plate--he's hitting .358-7-34 in 134 at-bats when he catches, .296-13-41 in 203 at-bats when he plays first base, and .308/.360/.584 in 377 at-bats overall this season at Double-A Binghamton.

- Bunting in the 5th inning:I agreed with Willie there. I'm not normally a 'bunt' guy but with the pitcher up, a runner on 2nd, and a short bench due to Mient's unavailability I've got no problem w/saving a PH there and bunting w/the guy you're going to pull anyway. He was prepared to PH until Jose O got on. And Benson was gone either way, none of this affected the pen use.- 6th - don't PH for HeilmanYeah, you can do that to 'save the pen', except that Heilman's now at 75 pitches over the series (1-1/2 days). At what point does he also need to be saved? It comes down to the assumption that Roberto's collapse was inevitable (49 pitches over 2 games) but Heilman batting w/runners was a no-brainer because he's likely to continue tossing zeros (75 over 3).- 7th - leave in PadillaThat's probably the best complaint although Padilla has a better argument for keeping himself in the game had he not hit 2 of the 5 guys he faced. If the pen is spent then you're going to use everyone available and that was the likely time for Koo.- 8th - Keep Graves for the 9thYou gotta PH there, you just gottaHey look, I could make arguments against the moves from Thursday too. It's just that I could also make ones against the alternatives and I'm of the opinion that the reason the 'totality of the moves' turned out bad was because the totality of the pitching turned out bad moreso than the other way around.

Feh!It only reached a mere 97 yesterday. Plus there was a breeze and even a brief shower ... not even a comparison. Those in attendance yesterday got off with practically a day at the beach.Of course that it not only turned out to be a miserable loss but also the longest 9-inning game in Shea history no doubt made things a bit tougher to take.

I did hear some late night radio "analysis" and, yes, all of it killed Willie for his pen use -- all while being oddly silent on suggested alternatives.My point is that each of those alternatives - if/when they failed - also could (and likely would) be interpreted as "misuse" by a guy who misused this supposedly horrible pen into a sub-3.00 ERA in July.Hell, a sizable chunk of fans will refer to it as abuse simply for bringing in Graves or Koo in the first place much less leaving them in for the 8th & 9th innings of a 2-run game.Other alternatives could also be picked apart along the lines of:- 'He left Pedro in after the magic 100-pitch mark right after he served up a HR? WTF was he thinking ... didn't he learn anything from watching Grady?'- 'How could he leave Heilman/Graves in to hit w/runners on on a day where it's obvious we're going to need all the runs we can get?'- 'As soon as Padilla plunked his 2nd guy in 5 batters it was clear he'd lost it and should have been pulled right then'(btw, "dominant" all year? He's pitched 11 innings all season and all of 37 in his ML career)and so on.Yes Willie could have done things differently and the game may or may not have turned out better. Of course things could hardly have turned out worse but let's not pretend that that that was an easily known fact going in. Willie trusted Hernandez and got burned by it but I don't see where his meltdown on his 3rd consecutive day was any more foreseeable than trusting Graves into a 2nd inning, or a similar one by Pedro could have been as he headed toward pitch #120.

Sage cant spel four shit

I don't PH Cliff for Cairo because he's not the tying run.And, no, I'm not PH-ing him for Castro either. Especially since Minty's health was in question.And while we're on academic questions, can anyone here build a scenario where Willie could have made some moves and NOT been accused of misusing the pen? And claiming that he should have used guys who aren't on the roster at the moment doesn't count.The arguments on the "misuse" today are (among others):- using Heilman only 1 inning. Except that he threw 49 pitches on Tuesday, and 24 in his 1 inning today (closer to a 2-IP load) ... PLUS he was pinch-hit for, not merely pulled on a whim.- not sticking w/Padilla longer.First of all, when did he become a sure thing? And he did start the next inning and would have stayed in longer had he not plunked the leadoff batter after he had 2 strikes on him. He was then pulled for Koo vs the lefty.- then when Koo couldn't get Jenkins, it led to Graves.Nice inning by Graves getting out of the mess - and I myself would have been tempted to roll the dice with Graves in the 9th - but tell me you couldn't shut off your radio and still hear the cries of anguish if the game went down the tubes w/Graves toeing the slab? And besides, he also was PH-ed for when his spot came up w/2 out and 2 runners on in an attempt to increase the lead. Go ahead; make the argument that a 2-run lead is comfortable enough w/Graves on the mound to allow him to hit there.- which leaves you with the choice of Hernandez (49 pitches over 2 days) or Santiago (34 on Tues). Willie's comment was that he went with his best there - Hernandez. Now you might want to make the case for Santiago instead based on Roberto's workload & age -- but, let's face it, none of us had even heard of this guy until 3 weeks ago so again, how loud would the crying be if we blew a game with the unknown while Hernandez is saying to the press afterward that he felt good and was rarin' to go?- the ony other angle is that Pedro should have been allowed to continue after 105 pitches on a hot night after he himself had allowed an HR in the 7th based on the long night the day before. Arguable? -yes. A no-brainer? - hardly.I find that 'Misusing the pen' is often fan code for either;- he brought in guys I don't like (NYY fans do this all the time if Torre uses anyone except Rivera/Gordon/Sturtze)or- the guys he brought in didn't pitch wellThe main problem here was that the the guys who have been pitching well simply didn't this week, no doubt caused by the fact that they had to cover 16 innings over the length of the series thanks to the bad starts in 2 of the 3. I find the culprits to be the guys who threw the pitches today (and yesterday, and Tuesday) not neccesarily the man who put them there.

It was a liner to CF which was going to be a single regardless of what Beltran did ... but he was charging straight in when it was actually slightly to his right ... which still shouldn't have a problem except that it had rained briefly in the 8th and so the when the ball hit grass it skidded past him low & untouched and rolled to the wall.

Actually they're in anaheim right now but you get the idea.Certainly not a surprise.