metsmarathon

i think i'm that "everything the mets do my little brain must be tricked into thinking is aces" guy that sal keeps on talking about. or maybe i'm just the "everything sal says must be wrong - its just gotta!!!!" guy. i keep on forgetting. i'm not sure if i have an agenda. it sure sounds like a lot more trouble than its worth to have one. it's just so much easier to say "sure, whatever, omar" actually, i probably do have an agenda. and its probably an apologist agenda. i'll admit it. i try to make sense of the moves the mets make. it seems to me a more interesting exercise than reacting instantly and loudly. players are traded or signed or released for reasons. i like to try to understand those reasons, and then think about how well the trade accomplished the desired effect, and also wether or not the reasons for the transaction make sense. rarely are transactions executed for incompetences' sake (tho maybe zambrano's being here would be one example). i often find myself in a position where i may not particularly care for a trade, but understand the reasons for the trade to the point where i have a hard time hating the trade. i'm never quite sure wether that means i should check off dislike, ambivalent/neutral, or like in the subsequent poll. f'rinstance, the benson trade. i don't particularly care for the trade, and think we should have been able to get better return (tho that doenst mean that teams were willing ot give us better return) but i understand the motivation for the trade - to deepen the bullpen and improve the club while gaining financial flexibility, by thinning a strength position. so does that understanding of the trade make me like it, even tho i don't care for it? i dunno. you tell me. is the reason behind the trade sound? i actually think it is. i think we had more of a need for bullpen depth than we do of extra rotation-bailout-options that would be ill-suited to relief duty. now, the benson trade makes me like the seo trade less, i'll admit. so there you have it. an admission of my own agenda to derive lukewarm opinions of all player/personnel transactions. so, agendae, yay. but quietly and without conviction.

have we updated wifeywatch accordingly?

prolly wouldnt be too hard with a good laser etching and rigorously controlled material processing. the thing you'd have to worry about is the grain structure, as that could easily throw off the scatter of the light. you'd then of course have to do a really good job of protecting the surface from scratching and what not.

um, cliffy.... next time just use "keys" or maybe "wallet"

pretend the above sentence is written in the future tense.

Hillbilly wrote: I was a surprised to see this deal, especially in addition to the Seo trade. But if you compare the current starting staff to last year�s staff, the pitching suddenly doesn�t look that bad. Opening Day 2004. 1. Pedro 2. Glavine 3. Benson 4. Zambrano 5. Ishii Projected for 2005. 1. Pedro 2. Glavine 3. Zambrano 4. Trachsel 5. Heilman Which is the better staff? I actually think it is very close, and if Heilman takes a(nother) step forward, this year�s staff will likely be improved. Problem is depth beyond these 5 guys. The 2006 staff will have a greatly improved bullpen. At first I thought that trading Benson would be a prelude to adding Zito or Weaver. But after some reflection I don�t think that�s the case. I think its faith (investment) in Heilman to further progress this year. the 2006 staff looks even better if i call heilmann my #3, trax my 4, and zambrano my 5, which is how i have them rated in my head. i think i'm teh apologist y'all are hating...

Elster88 wrote: ]trade may have removed an overpriced arm from our rotation and replaced him with a better one The addition of another starter has not been finalized yet. It ain't gonna be Zito. i believe heilman to be a better starter than benson. this trade freed heilman from the pen, giving him bensons slot in the rotation. there are no zito contingencies attached to my opinion.

so this trade may have removed an overpriced arm from our rotation and replaced him with a better one, replaced a very good arm in our bullpen with a talented if unproductive arm with more bullpen experience, and added a talented young starter. so i think it may have made us a better, more well-rounded team. my only source of displeasure is the notion that we traded kris benson for jorge julio, and that doesnt seem to be enough in return. but, of course, that's not the trade we made. we also got maine. and so that tempers my dislike. i may even be moving onto the less-occupied side of neutral, with a healthy hoping that julio doesnt suck.

i don't know enough about maine to really have formed a strong opinion... i think we might not have gotten enough in return for benson, but i think the trade made us a better-composed team. i'm not entirely sure how that fits into the above four polling choices...

so how are we going to measure this come end of season, anyways? wins and losses? OPS against? ERA? ERA+? cy young votes?

well, the US WBC team prolly wouldn't let bruce sutter on the roster, so its something of a silly point. and, and as far a johnny in the hall... heh, no.

well, ya said the kid's downside was the vets expected performance. i interpreted that as the kids downside for his career, not for the upcoming season. as in, "ultimately, the worst this kid can do is what the vet is giving you right now," not, "the worst this kid can do for you next year is what you'd already be getting from the vet." it makes a difference to me. sorry. i'm in the middle of spec-hell over here, and am getting myself hung up on little words and exceptions to such. sue me. also, i once heard that if the reader misunderstnads what the writer writes, the onus is not on the reader to get inside the head of the writer, rather for the writer to more clearly state his position. but i'm just being a pain in the ass on this one point. i stated my initial position, and given clearer set of information, i've revised my position. i think my reasoning is consistent given each set of information.

"Bear in mind, please, the terms of my hypothetical: your own staff (and your own self) concludes that this season Reg Rook will outhit Vic Vet by a small but not insignificant margin." see, now, you never explicitly said this. yeah, yeah, i could infer it if i wanted to, but "downside" sound more sketchy than claiming to know. if i know in my heart of hearts that the kid will outhit the vet, and my staff agrees with me, then i prolly play him. i mean, he's better right? if you're breaking even, then you consider playing the vet. if the kid will lose you games by comparison, then, of course, he sits.

kid gives me potential backup at four positions, dirt cheap, and i'm not sure i'd get much in return for mr. vet, am i? i mean, the guy's overpaid, right? how much will i get in return? do i really think it will offset the salary i pay or the young talent i give up? unless somebody is willing to blow me away on the kid, or surprise me tremendously on the vet, i'm keeping both and playing the surer vet.

play the vet, especially if im in a situation where i'd be better served with predictable performance, rather than a kid who might be ready just yet. the kid gives me good insurance incase one of my other guys goes down, and if he gets a good opportunity this season, or performs well in limited opportunities, maybe i revisit the issue next offseason, but its a long long ways away.

"play for the mets, or me and yuki'll always be here"

i dunno... there really wasn't much of bruce's involvement in the story. it was more a telling of his freakshow wife. i mean, for all i know, he's basically a bystander in his wife's insanity. at best, along for the ride. it does provide a good argument agasint becoming uber rich and having children, tho...

if he does keep the job for the full season, then, well, its not such a bad move afterall, is it?

is bret boone hispanic? i can't stop myself sometimes. we're going to need a lot of intersquad games in ST to play out all of our 2b options! matsui still looks to me to be our best option going forward, albeit not the best value.

why does a guy who thinks david wright is the only met worth a crap have clean jones as his screen name?

ah. yep. there it is. in the descriptions of the lgAVG, etc. stats. interestingly, for the last 7 years, the NL had a higher lgOPS. then 5 years of the AL. going back to 1990, the NL had a higher lgOPS 9 times, the AL 7. they both have averaged, over the same period, approximately the same OPS. so, i guess, there's nothing to it after all, just a quirk that perhaps this year, more of the better hitters were in teh NL, and other years, more of the better hitters are in the AL. i often hear (or maybe i just hink i hear) in tv and radio broadcasts how the DH has helped bring about the rise in offensive production of late, because in the past, pitcher could relax for a batter or two, but now, because of the DH, they cannot, and as a result, the pitchers become less effective. were that the case, then the non-pitchers in a league with a DH should regularly out hit those in a league without a DH. right? ah well. its really just something i noticed while trying to compute allowed OPS+'s for pitchers in the NL. that'll teach me.

so i was clicking around www.baseballreference.com, and i've started to notice something odd for 2005. the league OPS and league ERA stats look to be screwed up, and not in a small way. here's what i mean. for 2005, the mets and devil rays both have batting and pitching park factors of 99, meaning they should both slightly suppress offense. OK. the devil rays are in the AL, while the Mets are in the NL. the NL scores fewer runs per game than the AL does, primarily as a result of the DH. so we would expect the league ERA and league OPS for the mets to both be lower than the league ERA and league OPS for the devil rays. (the park factors are the same, so that should eliminate any source of difference) but they're not. not by a long shot. the league ERA against which tom glavine's ERA gets compared is 4.19, giving him an ERA+ of 118 for 2005. the league ERA against which scott kazmir's ERA gets compared is 4.32, giving him an ERA+ of 114. and i've got no problem with these numbers. the average ERA in the NL was about 4.22, compared to 4.35 in the AL. so pitchers in the AL on average have about a 0.13 higher ERA than they would in the NL. so why am i complaining...? well, the lg OPS figures are why. mike piazza's 2005 gets compared to a lgAVG of .267, an lgOBP of .338 and a lgSLG of .426, for a lgOPS of .763 in contrast, toby hall gets compared to a lgAVG of .267, a lgOBP of .330 and a lgSLG of .423, for a lgOPS of .753 the lgOPS for hte american league is some 10 points lower than the NL! granted, as i'm typing all this out, i figure that they must've taken out hte pitchers from the NL stats, and the numbers seem to show that. if i do a quick and dirty approximation, taking out the pitchers from the NL yields an average OPS of about .767, as compared to .744 with the pitchers (a 23 point impact!). the same method yeilds an average AL OPS of .756 sans pitchers, up from .754, yawn. but this leads me to the conclusion that the national league favors hitters, or at least that hitters hit better in the national league than they do in the american league. indeed the phenomenon existed the previous year as well, with the NL earning a lgOPS 5 points higher than the AL. does this hold up for a longer time period, who knows! but it does raise a few questions: 1) why doesnt baseballreference tell us that they've done this (as it really screws up anyone trying to calculate league-relative OPS allowed statistics)? 2) why do hitters appear to do better in the national league when conventional wisdom holds that the DH wears on pitchers, allowing hte rest of the lineup to perform better? 3) does this phenomenon see odd or interesting to you, or am i just that big a loser that its both odd and interesting to me?? (sorry, two questions doesnt seem like enough. but i can't think of any more.)

billy wagner, paul loduca, chad bradford

i'm just curious about the type of strange synergy that would cause near-simultaneous shortages of vidalia onions, bowling balls, and king sized beds. the best i could figure is that, in the wake of strange UFO activity at the worlds largest bowling ball factories, (which must likely exist in the midwest, where else? and what better way to strike at the heart of middle america than to attack bowling, i ask you? its a prelude to invasion!!!), the growers of vidalia onions focus their attention and efforts on a new superbreed to replace the tri-holed resin spheres, reducing their availability for food consumption. in response, wives of bowlers the nation over demand ever-larger beds, and greater distance from the ever more pungent onion-hands sleeping beside them, exceeding current production capacities.

i'm more wary of seo because i feel like i've been burned in the past. 2004 to be exact. i guess that could be why we feel more positive about heilman, who seems to have put it all together, than seo, who seems capable of putting it all together and having it all fall apart again. which is not to say that heilman cannot fall apart, only that he hasn't shown it to the extent that jae has.