Frayed Knot

deGrom - 3.3 Familia - 0.8 Johnson - 1.5 d'Arnaud - 1.5 Cespedes - 1.5 Granderson - 0.4 Duda - 0.5 Conforto - 0.5

"Why not try?" - was Terry's answer as to why he put Kelly Johnson up to hit for Wilmer. He hadn't liked how Flores had looked good in his previous ABs (pop to SS, fly to CF) vs Strasburg so he essentially 'played a hunch'. Johnson said that hitting the curve was pretty much out of the question so, after Strasburg started him off 2-0, he was sitting fastball and was reasonably sure he was going to get one.

Gwreck wrote: Edgy MD wrote: When was the last time a Met saved all three games of a series? Frank Francisco. April 5, 7 and 8 (first series of the year) against the Braves. A sure sign of greatness to come!

Benjamin Grimm wrote: Strasburg was really looking incredible for the bulk of the game, but I was keeping an eye on his pitch count. It remained fairly low for a while (I can't find an inning-by-inning breakdown) but it eventually creeped up to the 100-pitch mark. I was hoping it would get to 100 before the 8th inning so that we'd see the Washington bullpen all the earlier. That didn't quite happen, but the end result was what I was looking for/hoping for. Strasburg pitches: 10, 11, 12, 17, 13, 14, 14, then 12 in his partial 8th inning. Normally pitches would like to stay at or below 15/per which, if he threw the 'max', would put him at 90 after 6 or 105 thru 7 But Strasburg last night was not only on his way to a 15-K night but was doing so at a work load that put him about an inning below that standard, only 77 after 6 / 91 after 7, making him a prime candidate for CG territory without even hitting 120. But needing 12 pitches to get just one out in the 8th I guess spooked Williams enough to go to the pen (not that this means the pitch count was the only factor).

10-13 would force the Nats to go 17-6 just to force a tie. And if we go 10-13 vs the sked we've got in front of us then we deserve to get our asses scared of needing to win a play-in game.

7 game lead. If we can maintain this and whittle the games down to say around 17 or so then I'll start to feel safe.

Two nights in a row off Storen, two nights in a row off Papeldung.

If you're Rendon and you bunt there as the tying run with just 4 outs left in this game (if not your season) you have to be prepared to steal (IMO) right afterward. And, if not, thankyouverymuch for your strategy seeing as how you're coming off a season with 66 XBHs

Good thing Espinosa's bunt was for shit.

Coincidence or otherwise, the fall of Drew Storen following the trade for Papelbon and his subsequent demotion to main set-up man is just stunning.

OXYGEN MAGNESIUM!!!!

d'Arnaud HRs this year projected to 500 ABs = 31.4

Mets � Willets Point wrote: I think the Mets batters should be given credit for making Zimmermann work so hard so that he gets pulled after 5.2 innings and they could then feast on the crappy bullpen. Absolutely. Only in one inning did Zimmermannnn have a below average (< 15) number of pitches thrown and that was the 4th when he got through it with exactly 14. I also think though that Williams got spooked by Murphy's good career numbers vs Zimm and the memory of a titanic HR hit off him in the last CitiField series all of which pushed him into over-managing a bit. With just one on and two out at the time and a two run lead, I would have let him finish the inning or at least go down trying, but he opted to go left-on-left. Murph hit it hard and they got the out, but then that made for one fewer reliever available an inning later when things started melting down.

Instead Zimmerman gets a 2nd day off (sore oblique I believe is the culprit), Michael Taylor and his Little League HR sits down, as does Yunel Escobar who had three hits last night but also the game-ending GiDP I think it's also Matt Williams' way of getting as many LHBs into the lineup as possible -- Robinson plus the SH Espinosa because they normally just have Harper.

If by 'perfect' you mean perfectly vapid, then yes.

It's sad to note that the sports world seems determined to take over from the decade-old version of VH-1 which promoted the making of lists not as the result of a discussion but as the basis for the discussion itself. Many of ESPN's programs are hip deep in this lazy thinking these days [is Peyton Manning in your Top-5 QBs ever? Will he be if he wins this year's SB? How about if he merely gets to this year's SB but doesn't win? How 'bout if he wins but isn't the MVP?]. It's also what things like the 'Franchise Four' are built around as is the pseudo journalism in that linked article. There was a great parody of this very thing in one of the closing episodes of THE NEWSROOM where the stations new 'bloggers' were essentially just making shit up about celebs (like a world where Orosco is most hated) and turning into insta-lists up on the company's website.

seawolf17 wrote: He's awesome and wonderful and I hope to think fondly on him forever and I worry very much about signing any guy after a huge-outlier career year who's on the wrong side of 30. Yours, The turd in the punch I totally agree. This has been a fantastic ride, but I'm not willing to give him a huge deal. And to add to that caution, whatever Cespedes will be in the future it will most likely not be what we've seen over the last six weeks. His 'slash' stat NYM numbers currently sit at 38, 37, and 187 points above his pre-NYM career norms as his .269/.317/.473 over 2,019 ABs have morphed into .307/.354/.660 over the most recent 153 Another way to look at that: his 1014 OPS would be (slightly) behind only Bryce Harper, Joey Votto, and Miggy Cabrera if projected out for all of 2015. His 790 pre-Mets career would put him in about 57th place with the likes of DJ LeMahieu and Shin-Soo-Choo. Nice players but not worth selling the farm for.

Couple of observations on that forum - yes, it is like the old MoFo (and maybe the present one for all I know) in that it's like a race to see who can predict the next bad thing first in an attempt to set up the ultimate internet Win-Win: if it happens you can claim you 'called it' and if it doesn't you claim you're surprised and happy. Winner - Winner!! - please don't ever let this place get to THAT level of all-purpose threads. I tend to think we overdo it here a wee bit but fortunately not to that degree. Every thread seems to be about 40 or more pages long and was probably started back in April. Now all Bryce Harper comments for the entire season go here, all 'Matt Williams Suxx' posts go in that thread, and yadda, yadda, blah, blah. I don't know if the rules there dictate that it be like that or it just became that way organically, but Yuk!!

Reed - 1.2 Clippard - 0.9 Familia - 0.8 Cespedes - 1.7 Wright - 1.7 Nieuwenhuis - 2.0 Granderson - 1.0 Flores - 0.7

Centerfield wrote: Can't believe Williams bunted Rendon on 3-1. LOLOLOL. I think this is a great strategy. Matt, bunt Rendon 4 times tomorrow. This may have been the best strategy involving Matt Williams since Buck Showalter double-switched Matt Williams out of a tie game in the 8th inning at Shea on 10/9/99 Now in fairness to Buck, Williams' spot in the batting order never did come around again and he made the swap in order to get his best reliever Matt Mantei into a tie game when the Mets had 1st & 3rd/1-out. Mantei got out of that jam and went on to get 4 more important outs ... until Todd Pratt came up. Williams [.303/.344/.536 - 35 HR/37 2Bs] hit cleanup that year right behind Luis Gonzalez and I remember the double-switch being a hot topic at the time even though it's tough to make the case that Buck got 'burned' by it. And why was Williams the one swapped out? Because he's the guy who hit the single where Mel Mora made a crazy good throw to nail Jay Bell at the plate and end the top of the 8th two batters after Bell had hit a 2R double to tie the game (we IW'd Luis Gonzalez in between). Benitez, then Franco, got the 'Backs in order in the 9th & 10th meaning that Bell - Gonzalez - then Williams' spot were due up in top 11 (against either Franco or someone from the Turk/Cook cast of characters) - but of course they never did get up as Pratt forced Luis Gonzalez to wait two more years before he could become a post-season hero.

Zvon wrote: I just saw the Cespedes boo-boo. Yoooouch. How embarrassing is that!? I still don't understand why all the runs were earned. 2 RBI's on that play but they scored 3, right? Maybe Gary said "3 base error", and not "3 run error". The plan behind determining earned vs unearned is to 're-create' the inning without the error and see how things would have turned out - and the fact that no outs would have been turned on the play anyway and that Jayson Werth doubled two batters later means that those runs would have scored even had the play been clean. Now I think you could argue that it was a bad hop that made Yoenis miss the ball meaning you can score it a hit all the way -- iow, an inside the park GS -- but that's a whole 'tother story.

TransMonk wrote: That wasn't the final nail in the coffin, but I'm willing to admit that the Nats are definitely laying in that pine box the Mets have been pounding on. That analogy has been used before. Say about 10/16/69 [fimg=400]http://i601.photobucket.com/albums/tt94/FHSart/sc01a93bcc.jpg[/fimg]

PiggiesTomatoes wrote: [fimg=550]https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CObZjKiWoAAbVwY.jpg:large[/fimg] Holy shit Piggy, that might be the post of the year!!

Rockin' Doc wrote: What a demoralizing loss for the Nationals. There announcers were talking about the Michael Taylor hit/Cespedes error being the "momentum changing play of the season". Little did they know. Cespedes giveth and Cespedes taketh away. Great come back win for the Mets. I wonder how they feel about momentum right about now. That's the thing about 'turning points', they're always assigned retroactively. Mets fans KNEW that we weren't losing that game after Endy made the catch/DP ... except we did so it's no longer the turning point. So how often do you win back to back games where you give up (effectively) a Grand Slam in each?

9-6 vs Nats this season including 5 W's (and not he curly kind) in a row.