Frayed Knot

Quickie KTE - June 3-5 Friday 7:10 -- Tom Kohler (insert sub-par education jokes here) [3-5; 4.50; 1.65] vs Syndergaard Saturday 4:10 -- Justin Nicolino (L) [2-3 in 7 starts, 4.50, 13.25] vs Colon Sunday 1:10 -- Jose Fernandez [8-2; 2.53; 1.11] vs Harvey (hope we get the good version) This will be just our 6th time ever facing Fernandez as for a while we were getting lucky and were missing him a lot. He's only 1-0 against us but with a 1.27 and .163 BAA. Oh yeah, and he's also 22-1 lifetime while pitching at home (32 starts) - Giancarlo is back after some non-DL time off (see, other teams do it too) but is hitting barely .200 and K-ing a ton (64 in 160 ABs) As a result of both him and Yelich in LF missing time (both are now active), Ichiro has been starting a lot and is hitting a lot: .323 at age 42 even if it's almost entirely singles. He's 35 away from 3,000 MLB hits and just 13 short of tying Pete Rose when his NPL hits are counted. Also rejuvenated following his off-year/demotion in 2015 is Marcel Ozuna in CF: .327/.380/.527 - Their infield hits a lot too. Bour at 1st is streaky but dangerous. Derek Dietrich is hitting better [.313/.403/.496] than the suspended Dee Gordon was, Prado at 3rd is always pesky [.313/.352/.374] and Hechavarria at SS ... is a good fielder Yet somehow with all that hitting they're just barely ahead of the Mets in run scoring: 12th at 3.93 RS/G vs 13th at 3.75

Both. The current stats are of course somewhat skewed by this just ended series, but, yeah, the Mariners are hitting these days. M's are second behind only Boston in RS/G -- miles behind Boston who are scoring a ridonculous 6 per game, but also significantly above everyone else at 5.25

bmfc1 wrote: Perhaps SD will deal after their owner's rant the other day. After a four-game series with Seattle in which the Pads gave up 9, 16, 6, and 16 runs runs (including blowing a 12-2 6th inning lead on Thursday) one would assume that SD is looking for pitching, pitching, and maybe a little pitching thrown in.

Lefty Specialist wrote: This depresses me. Escobar's a bit of a jerk if I recall. You don't want a long-term solution even if David's gone for the rest of this year, because what happens if he comes back ready to go next year.... Well, as mentioned, everyone there except for Solarte is in a walk-year so would be, at most, a 2/3 of a season commitment. Solarte would cost more to get because he's younger and under control, but his youth and switch-hitter-ness might also make him good to hang onto as a 5th infielder type down the road if/when David does come back (he's also played 2B, SS, and corner OF), a better version of Campbell/Kelly if you will.

So David is DL'd and it sounds like it won't be a short one (when they tell you going in that it's not going to be a short one, you know it's not going to be a short one). At least temporarily the 'solution' is Matt Reynolds, not to start of course but to be infielder #5/6 alongside Ty Kelly. The regular IF stands to be Loney - Walker - Cabrera - Flores on a pretty much regular basis. But neither of the corners in that set-up have hit this year (at least not in the majors) so what to do if either (or both) of Flores & Loney fail to get going? The obvious in-house option is the call-up of Dilson Herrera. The snag is that he's never played anywhere but 2B and one of the reasons the Mets cite for not calling him up now is how long it's been since Neil Walker played 3rd: 13 ML starts in total and none since 2010; he was a regular 3B in the minors (after moving from catcher) from 2007-09 From outside the org, Davidoff in the Post suggests: -- Kelly Johnson - hitting like shit with Atlanta [.210 w/1 HR in 105 AB] and numbers-wise wasn't all that great in NY last year [.250/.304 BA/OBA] except that he got a bunch of timely XBH that contributed to the run. -- Milwaukee's Aaron Hill (who we'll see next week) - 34; R/R; career .268/.323/.423 and right around there this year. In his walk year with a team that's likely to be dealing. -- Anaheim's Yunel Escobar - 33 y/o former Brave, Blue Jay, Ray & Nat, also in his walk-year and with a last place club. Had been mostly a SS but is playing 3B for the Angels this season as he had sporadically before that. Less power than you'd like in a corner but a decent offensive player otherwise: career .282/.351/.386, currently .306/.362/.415 -- Padre and one-time Yanqui Yangervis Solarte, a guy Gary had been touting a while back as a good fit for this team. A 28 y/o switch-hitter who's under club control thru 2019 which would tend to make him more expensive to trade for. Just 59 ABs this year so there must have been an injury involved (didn't play from mid-April to mid-May). Career .269/.334/.411; Yanqui fans were convinced they had the next great thing when he started his ML career hitting over .300 with 17 XBHs in his first two months in the majors (2014). By July the team decided to 'sell high' and had packaged him to SD (for Chase Headley) where he's been decent since: .274/.333/.420

... I think that this somewhat passive approach by the front office is not the correct one to have when you are in a fight-for-your-life pennant race. Duda is on the DL now, Wright is still not available. Loney is 1 for 9, and Wilmer is 1 for 10 since coming back. Ty Kelly went 0 for 5 yesterday and left 4 men on base. Even if it's just for a game, go get Herrera. OK fine, but if we're going to cite small sample sizes, then Kelly & Loney were both hitting much better than Herrera in AAA [.391 & .342 vs .280] while both Loney & Flores have more and better ML experience on their resumes. So while Dilson is certainly the better long-term solution as compared to Kelly or Loney, and maybe even Flores (jury still out on that one), it's not like promoting him w/his .211 career ML BA was going to be any more of a sure-fire/short-term remedy to the offensive woes of the last few days. Hell, Conforto hit a buck-sixty during the month of May and it's not like any of us want to send him down in favor of [find random hot minor league OF] in order to solve our scoring drought. I have no idea about the delaying FA angle. Largely because I don't really know how that works. Basically a player needs six full seasons of service time before he is eligible for FA status. A full season, for accounting purposes, is 182 days long although one does get credit for a full year with I believe it's 170 days or more on the big league roster. Dilson, through his several stints across 2014-15, has accumulated 119 days to date or about 2/3 of a full year. So the Mets would have to limit him to less than 1/3 of a season this year (and make sure they count the days right to get it exact) in order to make sure that they'd retain control of him for six years beyond this one instead of just five. In this case that means mid-late August call-up at the earliest. But even all that assumes that once up he's up for good, and that he's destined to be the type of player where that extra year (or not) is going to be of crucial importance, or that he's even going to be a Met five or six years down the road. For the Kris Bryants of the world -- guys from a major college program who come via the very top of the draft (#2 overall) and arrive as essentially fully-formed players -- this makes sense, by delaying his call up last season just until mid-April the Cubs assured themselves that he'd be just short of a full season at the end of last year and therefore just short again six years later. They'll still pay through the nose for that seventh year they gain, but at least they know he can't leave on them. Bottom line: Dilson, barely out of his teens at his ML debut, simply isn't that type of prospect and wasn't about to have that same out of the chute start to his career to where manipulating his playing time by two or three months this year makes any sense for a possible hypothetical situation early next decade.

Round 1 starts one week from today - but today's the last off-day before then so I'm starting this now. Mets pick 19th, then 31st (the Murph pick), 64th, 100th, and then every 30 picks after that. This draft is expected to be heavy on college pitchers & HS bats ... or is that HS arms and college bats? I dunno, I let you know five years from now when my near perfect hindsight kicks in. As you know the Mets trend was to go heavy on college pitchers with their 1st pick, right up until it wasn't and they started drafting HS kids almost exclusively with the odd Conforto thrown in. Some have them hot & heavy on this guy: Wake Forest 3B Will Craig I predict they'll either choose him or they'll choose someone else. Then they'll choose other guys after that.

Centerfield wrote: I understand that Campbell was originally the 25th man, and that we had an everyday lineup set, with Flores ready as a supersub. So I was fine with Herrera not going north with the team. But during the course of the last few weeks it became evident that injuries were going to open up AB's for Campbell, and Reynolds, and Kelly. 100 PA's were lost to a guy with a .492 OPS and 2 guys who were even worse. All of this while we had a better option wasting time in LV. And I think they might have called up Herrera had the injuries not occurred in a sort of serial progression with first Duda and now Wright existing for several days in a kind of diagnosis limbo, not available but also not replaced, all while Flores was due back 'any day now'. Had they known at the beginning that this sort of 'one player short' status (is that you Ambler?) was going to exist for a two to three week stretch they might have pulled the trigger back when, but I think they were operating under the assumption that each move was to be only temporary and as a backup.

He has 10 HRs to go He has 4-2/3 seasons left on his contract He hit three HRs in his most recent twelve at-bats We don't even know if he needs to be DL'd at this point much less essentially moth-balled for the remainder of his career. Yeah, I think he'll get there.

And thus we conclude this portion of schedule we pre-identified as a rough patch with a 12-14 record, starting that stretch 1.5 games out of 1st and ending 3.0 out. Not terrible I suppose especially in light of first Flores going down, then Duda, and now Wright, plus dealing for most of that time with the ghost of Matt Harvey. Most disappointing were the very beginning (losing the first two to the Padres) and then the very end, losing twice to a team that was good when I included them in this stretch but playing pretty shitty by the time we faced them. The 12-10 in between looks much better but don't most stretches when you cherry-pick the bad parts out? June looks like more of a mixed bag. On the plus side there's four at Milwaukee and [u:3kvb3lgq]seven[/u:3kvb3lgq] vs Atlanta (3H/4R). But then there's six vs Pitt, in-division three game series at both Miami and Washington, and the two-game CitiField version to complete the home-and-home tussle vs KC

Centerfield wrote: Frayed Knot wrote: We have some people here who I believe are vastly over-rating Dilson Herrera's value. Yes, it's far-fetched. This appears to be directed at me. So I'll retort. Actually it was directed at the idea being floated about that the reason Herrera was being kept down was as a way of manipulating his possible FA time-frame five or six years down the road. Teams obviously do that on occasion but almost exclusively with players right out of the box (when a simple two-week delay at the beginning of the season assures it) and on players who the team has reason to believe will be a major star. Herrera already has about 2/3 of a season under his belt and, while a decent prospect, probably would have rated no better than the back half of top-100 prospects lists this past winter had he still be eligible. He may turn out to be real good down the road, but right now he's a .211 ML hitter with strike-outs projecting to 130 or so over a full season. As for the rest of this stuff, I never saw this as a case of him vs Campbell. Campbell's role was that of the last man off the bench and if it wasn't him it was going to be someone similar (like Kelly whose resume is essentially identical to Soupy's) but they weren't going to put a promising 21 y/o in that job. That Campbell then started to get starts was obviously due to not just the injuries but the sequence of them. First it was as a sub for Duda when the jury was out on him being DL'd. By the time that became official Loney and Flores were on their way to help cover both 1st & 3rd. You may have decided that Dilson is already a better ML hitter than Wilmer but I don't know that the Mets agree. That leaves 5 IFs for four slots (only with Kelly now as Mr. 25th) except that now Wright is in DL limbo. So if it turns out that Wright needs DL'ing then I suspect Herrera's promotion becomes more likely. As to who gets more time at 2nd and who at 3rd, I don't think it makes a lot of difference.

Marlon Byrd is someone who was discussed here as a possible bench player for these '16 Mets but it ain't happenin' now as he's been popped for his second PED suspension which now means a 162 day vacation for the now 38 y/o

Zvon wrote: Was that the worst throw to the plate I've ever seen? On the slowest runner I have ever seen? Y'know, I can't remember the last Lagares throw that was even remotely near the target.

What a bucket full of suck these two games have turned out to be.

So an AL reliever without a hit in 7 years manages to do in one AB what no Met has been able to do in like 50 ABs today - get an extra base hit!

There was maybe a six-foot range out of the 90 feet gap between 3rd & 2nd base where Conforto's smack wouldn't have been a hit ... and he found it.

sharpie wrote: Verrett is still hanging around, I think. I had a feeling I was forgetting someone. And Verrett gets the call - although a lot earlier than what would be considered ideal.

So who's left and available? Blevins & Plawecki I think is all. Of course Matz & Syndergaard can PH.

And it's Robles time!! That used to be a much better thing than it is right now.

Damn, another rally-killing walk!! And this one is even worse since it moves a running into scoring position which automatically lowers the NYM batter's BA by 137 points.

Frayed Knot wrote: Let's see if they can hit into soul-crushing GiDPs too. Well, they tried but we didn't let them.

Let's see if they can hit into soul-crushing GiDPs too.

That could be A problem.

An 8-pitch inning for Familia with no game tomorrow; if this goes to the 10th I'd like to see him brought back. oe: whoops, forgot that the pitcher's slot was due up this inning

Just bring your shit bullpens to us MLB teams, we'll fix 'em up for ya'.