Edgy MD

That third inning just ticked up Jason Marquis' stock a little. Hang in there, Jeremy. Hang in there, the rest of you Buffamets.

Oh man, this rain delay ended ten minutes too early.

Sandy talking process: the new porn. MLB.com has cut both the video and audio feeds during the rain delay.

And yet he slumped badly enough that the Jays lost faith and we picked him up in a salary dump.

NL Top Ten, Offensive WPA, 2012 1. Votto (CIN) 3.3 2. Wright (NYM) 3.0 3. Gonzalez (COL) 2.4 4. LaHair (CHC) 2.3 5. Beltran (STL) 2.2 6. Prado (ATL) 2.0 7. Nieuwenhuis (NYM) 1.9 (!!) 8. LaRoche (WSN) 1.9 9. Kemp (LAD) 1.9 10. Braun (MIL) 1.8

Dave Dahl. Gotta be. Great baseball name and Alabama outfielders are all through the DNA of this team: Mays, Agee, Jones, Otis, George Foster, Johnny Lewis, Terrence Long.

I'll start. April 1964, the first month with a ballpark of our own: HRPAABHR/PAHR/ABSluggers34444110.67%0.73%Christopher (1), Harkness (1), Hunt (1) Only Hunt's homer came at Big Shea.

A disabled firstbaseman would give them a well-rounded disabled roster. Wow.

The cool thing is that the logo apparently predates the photo, so it's life imitating art.

I'm starving for a few. And a greasy pile of doubles on the side, please.

It's something I've wanted to measure my whole life.

And we all feel that way about somebody, true or not. Hopefully this stat can gauge some truth in there.

Yesterday: Mets 3, Pirates 2, behind the wondermints pitching of Jon Niese. Perfect ninth for the save to Francisco. Buffalo: A night off. Binghamton 8, New Briton 1 in a drubbing, with all eyes on Zack Wheeler, who gave up two hits and a run, while striking out seven and walking two in eight innings. Three hits including a homer for this Raul Reyes character. St. Lucie 8, Daytona 7, following an heroic three-run rally in the seventh. Cory Vaughn and the suddenly good Francisco Pe�a with the homers. Savannah 5, Charleston 3, also behind a three-run, eighth-inning rally. Domingo Tapia with the win. Jared West with the two inning save. Alderlin Rodriguez with two doubles. Not to get all Cosby-and-Poitier on you, but let's do it again. Already have a homer from Matt den Dekker today.

Sheesh, I wondered how Torre survived April 1980, but they didn't open until April 10 that year, only got 16 games in, and still managed to ride those three (THREE!) homers to a 6-10 record. Mazzilli started real slow in 1980 but caught fire in July. One of the real Mets all-time months --- slugged .726 while hitting 11 of his 16 homers for the season.

Looks more like Bob Ojeda and Mike Hampton have spent too much time in the tanning booth.

It's a theory. But I'm not going to jump into it. If your're the good hitter on a bad hitting team, I would guess that you'd put up a good OPS in clutch situations, getting walked all the time, but wouldn't necessarily get the chance to win the game with a hit, therefore suppressing WPA. Just my way of looking at it. Let's take late model Barry Bonds --- quintessential good hitter on a bad hitting team. Last ten years of his career. SeasonOff WAROff WPADif19987.07.00.019994.03.1-0.920007.06.2-0.8200112.211.5-0.7200211.610.5-1.120038.48.0-0.4200411.212.91.720050.50.2-0.320063.84.81.020074.24.30.1Sum-1.4 Now, it's probably not fair to describe all those Giant teams as generally poor hitting apart from Bonds, but if your theory held, I would expect his WPA to regularly exceed his WAR, but the opposite appears to be true.

Mets currently have seven homers in the very merry month of May, which makes it remarkable that the month hasn't been even more of a disaster. That puts them a pace for 9.33. I don't know if the UMDB can help me here, but I'm going to go ahead and guess that would be one of the team's most power hungry Mays ever, if not one of their most power-hungry months. (They've probably had a few Decembers that have been more wanting.) Feeding into the to-demote/not-to-demote argument with Ike Davis is that, as hard a time as he has had, he's still the only Met who has hit as many as two this month. Davis: 2 Wright: 1 Hairston: 1 Cedeno: 1 Torres: 1 Valdespin: 1 Even there, those last four aren't exactly the guys we're supposed to be looking to clear the bases off for us.

Metsbeat takes a good look at today's pitchers. Good stuff. About scheduled Padres starter Eric Stolts: Sucked in Japan, was banished back to the decadent and decaying West. Coincidentally, Eric Stoltz sucked in early Back to the Future shooting and was banished back to the decadent and decaying Quentin Tarantino movies.

What could be under that sheet? The mind boggles.

The bloggers interview Rusty.

Starlight Night is June 18th vs. the first-place Orioles and the Mets are looking to rake in some big piles of cash for the Starlight Starbright foundation. Bid on the opportunity for your kid to throw out the first pitch.

HahnSolo wrote: batmagadanleadoff wrote: If you separated Rusty's bobble head from his bobble body, and then removed the baseball helmet from Rusty's bobble head, would you recognize Rusty's bobble head as that of Rusty? If you answered "yes", you're full of shit. If I do that and pretend there's no red hair, it looks like Jin from Lost. I kind of see a redheaded Martin Scorscese.

Ashie was discussing earlier how Clint Hurdle is older looking than he expected. Is it Clint Hurdle?

Apart from our firstbaseman, who seems to be having the worst season of them all, why are so many firstbaggers stinking up the stadium this year? You would think that the easy position to staff defensively would be the easiest to find a guy who can hit for you. And I would guess that most teams feel somewhat entitled to at least an .800 OPS from their firstbaseman. I check and see and find there are only six such guys qualifying as firstbasemen putting up such lofty a number. And even that's deceptive, as two of them --- Paul Konerko and Adam Dunn --- are sharing the job with the White Sox and also playing elsewhere. One of them, Adam LaRoche, is a surprise to me, as I've long considered him a glorified platoon player. Mark Teixiera, who sleeps on a bed of cold green cash, you've been stinking. Adrian Gonzalez, lusted after by every team in the league, you give your manager headaches. Todd Helton, you may someday be in the Hall of Fame, but now you're in the Hall of Awful. Albert Pujols, one of the five best firstbasemen of all time, you have an OPS that would get Rey Ord��ez chastised. There's certainly the notion that they're all coming off the juice at the same time. I don't really want to go there, but I might as well put the card on the table up front. There's the idea that so many of them are particularly old or particularly young, with few beauties in their prime like Joey Votto, but that doesn't hold up for me either, as some young guys should come quicker than others, and some old guys should hang in there longer than others. But they're almost all just farting away, and some of the few that aren't are headscratchers too. I mean... Adam Dunn! His entire season last year was comparable to what the Mets are getting now from Ike Davis, more or less. He was historically bad. I guess I could take that to mean there's hope for Davis yet.

I was thinking something similar last night --- that didn't involve dismemberment. The Expos Rusty seems to capture him a lot better. By better, I mean to say that at least they seem to have tried.