Edgy MD

Money time here. Castellanos vs. Belisle with runners on second and third and one out. Mets down by a run, top of the eighth.

I remember when he got called up, a few were dubious, and you were brashly bullish. Something like "Lagares? Sure, why not? I think he's going to be the Rookie of the Year."

Mets trail 1�0 three innings in. Leadoff double for Red and the guy scores, advancing twice on outs. That's the only hit Harvey has allowed.

Anybody else catch M&M yet?

First game this spring with a batting pitcher, I think.

You've been studying. i regret that Grimm has a very challenging score to beat. Despite not using the extra-credits, he has scored a 77.0 with 10 points still on the board (as the last one counts double), and 35 points worth of extras.. He was within 50 on each and every other answer, so he scored points on each one. He additionally hit one right on the nose, and gets a 20% bonus on that answer.

No desire to go for the extra credits?

The idea is trying to increase your offense relative to the other team. Not universally.

In anticipation of the strong possibility that the 1000th Met could well arrive this year, I've reviewed what exactly is the order in which the first 984 Mets have been revealed. Obviously my most indispensable tool in this investigation has been the remarkable UMDB. In that spirit, I invite you guess who these illustrious Met Milestone characters are. Close counts! If you guess within 50 points, you still score! Who is Met #50? Who is Met #100? Who is Met #150? Who is Met #200? Who is Met #250? Who is Met #300? Who is Met #350? Who is Met #400? Who is Met #450? Who is Met #500? Who is Met #550? Who is Met #600? Who is Met #650? Who is Met #700? Who is Met #750? Who is Met #800? Who is Met #850? Who is Met #900? Who is Met #950? Who is Met #1000? (As this is not yet known you can score big bonus points and come from behind and win this quiz months from now!) Extra Credit: Which utterly forgettable Met debuted on the same day as these Mets legends? Matt Wise? Chuck Estrada? Tucker Ashford? Blas Minor? Gene Clines? Who was the first Met to debut in March? Who was the first Met to debut in October? Fine Print: For the purposes of outlining the order, it is necessary to sort out guys who appear simultaneously or near simultaneously. In such cases I've ranked them thusly: If the Mets are at bat, such as leading off the top of the first on the road, the debut occurs when the player comes to the plate, in the order they come to the plate. If a player in the lineup at the start of road game does not come to the plate, his debut is considered to be the next half inning. So, Met number one is considered to be Richie Ashburn, followed by Felix Mantilla and Charlie Neal. When players debut simultaneously on defense, they are considered to enter into game in order of their defensive position. So Met number four is considered to be Roger Craig, followed by Hobie Landrith, Gil Hodges, etc. Similarly, if a pitcher and a left fielder enter the game making their debut simultaneously on a double switch, the pitcher is considered to appear first. If a pinch-hitter enters the game simultaneously as a pinch runner, each making their debut (I believe my research actually uncovered such an event), the lead runner is considered to precede any the batter in his Metliness. In theory, he would precede any trailing runners as well.

batmagadanleadoff wrote: Edgy MD wrote: A big part of the thinking is to better concentrate better hitters. The leadoff hitter ... His primary job, obviously, is to get on base....\ Everybody's job is to get on base (a/k/a "do not make an out"). Yes, well, I chose the word obviously for a reason. I'm not sure when Lags graduated to become an established leadoff hitter, much less a conventional one. Seemed like a lot of folks thought him a dubious candidate a month or two ago.

Roy Lee Jackson and Claudell Washington is the second half of 1980 in a nutshell, but that September also featured the near-simultaneous debuts of Met renaissance figures Mookie, Hubie, and Wally.

They're playing for the lead in the Grapefruit Cup standings tomorrow.

A big part of the thinking is to better concentrate better hitters. The leadoff hitter is presumably a good hitter, at least relative to the lineup. But he always comes up either with an automatic out in front of him, or to leadoff because the automatic out ended the inning. His primary job, obviously, is to get on base, but he's presumably got a related secondary skill to push other guys around, and merely getting on base isn't as valuable when you're coming up with one or two out and nobody on. That's part of the thinking, anyhow.

It's hard to pick a more ephemeral Met than Ryan McGuire, a one-game Met, but was hugely consequential in the team's history. His pinch-hit grand slam the season after he was with the Mets organization, on May 31, 2001 off of Turk Wendell, turned a Mets win into a loss, delivering a terrible Marlins team in a terrible 1-18 tailspin to victory. Knowing how 2001 would end, that game could certainly have turned out to be a difference-maker. It was the fourth straight loss for a Mets team desperately trying to find wind in their pennant-defending sails. They'd find an absolute zephyr in the second half, but it was just a little bit too little, just a little bit too late, and this loss is as good a choice for the difference-maker as any. I bet Greg Harts has a story.

Certainly. I was just meaning to respond to Ceetar wrote: the order doesn't really matter too much of course, but I dislike Flores and the pitcher* getting more AB than Lagares. I miscalculated too. That 11% figure is inflated.

That's the thing. This makes more sense now than at early eras in baseball history because the eighth-place-hitting pitcher won't get more at-bats than the ninth hitter. A pitcher is generally pinch-hit for the last two times through the batting order, more or less. That'll be true batting eighth or ninth. He may get 11% more at-bats than he used to, and that's not nothing, but he won't get more at-bats than the ninth-place hitter.

Because Terry has lefty-righty-lefty fever, and the only cure is more Murphy. �It negates a lefty reliever coming in and taking out an entire inning easily,� Collins said.

Lotta outlets reporting out loud that Terry Collins is thinking seriously about the pitcher batting eighth much more frequently this season, going with a lineup something along the lines of: [*:125o1tgs]Granderson[/*:m:125o1tgs] [*:125o1tgs]Wright[/*:m:125o1tgs] [*:125o1tgs]Duda[/*:m:125o1tgs] [*:125o1tgs]Cuddyer[/*:m:125o1tgs] [*:125o1tgs]Murphy[/*:m:125o1tgs] [*:125o1tgs]d'Arnaud[/*:m:125o1tgs] [*:125o1tgs]Flores[/*:m:125o1tgs] [*:125o1tgs]Pitcher[/*:m:125o1tgs] [*:125o1tgs]Lagares[/*:m:125o1tgs][/list:o:125o1tgs] Seems modestly workable, but can Duda hack the three-hole? Or should it matter? It's like everybody goes forward a notch and poor Laggy gets knocked out of the bed and has to climb in the other side. Our 3-4-5 guys look like a perfectly viable 4-5-6.

And... GO!

Remember it? Hell, I still feel it. I think Jordanny would have went after him but he was too stunned. His English was hard to decipher in that interview before the pie-ing. Afterward, it was little more than gibberish.

Amazingly came out of nowhere and ended up as our starting second baseman as Jerry navigated the team into collapse down the stretch in 2008. Can you give me a more relevant or vivid fact about Mike Bruhert?

John Buck, going .320 / .452 / .600 // 1.052, apparently got the word from the team that he nonetheless wasn't going north, and announces his retirement. I guess one small and shameful part of me was hoping he'd catch on with Florida and give one more vicious pie-ing to Jordany Valdespin.

He violated the drug agreement as a minor leaguer the year after he was a Met and he was never heard from again! Mike Fyhrie me. How do you even pronounce that?

Now that we are discovering a new generation of Matt Wises and Chip Ambreses � ephemeral Mets but Mets nonetheless � I'm calling for a revival of One Fact and Go. A thread in which I ask for one fact about a Met who beguiles me because I know so little about him, but there is his name on the list right next to those of human colossi for whom I would gladly kill or die. It's easy. I name a guy. You respond by giving me one fact � one you know or, in a crisis of knowledge, one you have to look up. But don't give me bullshit that you think you know. And give us a modestly interesting fact if you can. "He sucked" doesn't really illuminate the darkness. Then you submit a Met of your own. One who beguiles you despite your relative lack of knowledge. Don't forget that please. I'll open with... Justin Hampson.

Yeah, four years is plenty. I'm not going to get too detached over what might happen four years from now. If he was just signed for four years, that would be seen as a lot of baseball ahead of him with the Mets. But a lot of folks are already living in the sunset with him. If anything, I'm not going to get too attached because of his consistent toolishness. The idea of turning a good team into an excellent one, and an excellent one into a consistently excellent one, is still the challenge before them, and that's not going to float or sink on one enormous contract. OE: And I guess it's more likely to sink, if the recent past is any guide.