metsmarathon

fangraphs pegs diaz' 2022 season as having a value of $23M. his 2021 was worth $16M. so if he falls somewhere between the two for the duration of the contract, he's worth it. and more importantly, this massively solidifies our bullpen for next year. yeah, there's a fuckton of other spots to fill out there, but it looks a hell of a lot better with not needing to also replace HIM.

i checked. chapman's was about a 17x6, so edwin got himself a record contract. i'm still ok with it. did a little happy dance when i first saw it come through.

i am absolutely ok with this, and surprised it wasn't for more. without looking too deeply into the closer salaries league-wide, i would have thought he could have gotten much more, although maybe not for as long. either way, i don't got no quibbles, and look forward to many more trumpetings.

we would still need solutions for the degrom/bassitt slots in the rotation, but if $20M saves us from having to fill three slots, it's well worth it, imo, even if it might be a slight overpay. because after you get past the options that might be suitable to replace degrom/bassitt, you really don't have many good options out there to replace walker.

i think that if walker is offered the QO, he'd take it, because i think he's the kind of player whose value would get sunk having that around his neck. and while i might be hesitant to give him, say, four years at $20M, I'd give it to him for one year in a heartbeat

i'm a big fan of brandon nimmo, and colorado sounds like a great landing spot for him. i hope they fall short, because, man, i'd really like to see him stay. I guess the only way i'd not be upset about him leaving is if judge was coming. because.... woof... the rest of the free agent of crop is sorely lacking.

wonder if they'd take a master's degree in mechanical engineering, and a graduate certificate in ordinance engineering...? it's... applicable.

it always will reward the best team at the time. there's simply no other way to think of it than that if your team has the misfortune of an ill-timed cold streak, you risk getting kicked to the curb despite the possibility that over any other 7-game stretch, that team would win every one. such is the case of the mets, who lost but a handful of serieses (sorry, it's stuck in my head now and i couldn't stop myself even if i wanted to) throughout the year, and then lost the biggest series to a team they would have beaten at most other points in the season. ditto the dodgers. the best way to solve that particular problem, i think, is to reward teams that can win in a longer series. every postseason series (save jeopardy-fraught play-in games, if they're your bag) should be seven games. oh. i'll propose an alternative that i'm sure will draw ire. four wild card teams. play-in tournament at the 1-seed's home stadium, or a nearby neutral dome. A vs B | C vs D. day-night doubleheader. winner plays the next day for the right to play the 1-seed the following day. not too much rest for the top seeds as to ice them, and plenty of jeopardy to keep winning a division important. wild card team has a 25% chance of advancing, given coin-flip odds. if they survive that, AND knock off the 1-seed, then good on them. playoffs go only one team deeper per league. there's not really any built-in incentive to the wild card team with the best record, other than maybe being the "home" team in the day game, so they don't have as quick a turnaround for their next game. and the second game is reseeded, so the best WC team always has "home" field. from there, seven game serieses all around. There's a chance somebody has already proposed this or something similar upstream. dunno. give it a thought. I'm not crazy about the neutral site idea, but i also don't want to worry about travel and three days and weather. but it could be done. maybe don't worry about the neutral site and just have the wild card teams jet all around the damned country in three days. whatever.

astros, easy. but i'll be rooting hard for wheeler and syndergaard to have great personal successes.

having trouble finding data one way or another. sabermetricians seem to study every little detail they can find, but little is done looking into byes and how they affect team performances. if byes were of benefit, or at least neutral, then one would expect to find that a team that has a bye would have a better-than-expected winning percentage against the team without. if byes were a disadvantage, we would expect to find that a team with a bye was disproportionately likely to lose against a team without a bye. see, i'm just looking here at the chances of a team with or without a bye winning a game at a given round. obviously, having the bye greatly improves your chances of making it to that round, since there's no chance you fall short. i'm looking at how well that bye-d team does once they're there. the best i could find is https://www.audacy.com/957thegame/sports/san-francisco-giants/why-bye-weeks-are-bad-for-baseball-new-mlb-playoffs-formatthis. not sure how great the source is, but it has numbers at least. In the 16 times that a team has had a five-day layoff, that team is 7-9 in the ensuing playoff series. Even more interesting however, is how these long layoffs used to be a good thing. From 1995-2005, teams with the five days of no baseball went a perfect 5-0 in the next playoff series. Since 2006 however, those teams are 2-9. ... In fact, having the longer layoff over your next opponent has proven to put teams at a slight disadvantage. In the 27 years of the wild card era prior to this October, there have been 103 postseason series played (This is NOT including the division series played from 1995-2011 as those teams had the same number of days off. It does include the 18 division series played between the top seeded team and the team that won the wild card game starting in 2012). In that time, 15 times have two teams played each other with the same number of rest days before the playoff series started. In the other 88 series, the team with MORE days off has won the ensuing playoff series only 42 times while losing to the team with less rest 46 times. And much like the instances when a team had five or more days off, prior to 2006, the more rested teams actually did better, going 14-16 in those series, with three instances of teams having the same number of days off. all i'm saying is, it's not completely crazy to think that taking a lot of time off before the playoffs might not be the best preparation. data suggests it. do you have data to suggest otherwise? I offer a solution that keeps the top teams more engaged, while also drawing in more teams, attempting to appeal to both pulls. I agree. anecdotally, it makes sense. rest your players. slather them with all the physical therapy in the world. great wonderful massages for everybody. super rest, plenty of sleep. only that may not be the best preparation when you need to keep your senses keen. you take too much time off and your body starts to think that the fight is over. and it can take a bit to get back to where you were. recent playoff performances indicate this to be true. i mean, shit, we worry when pitchers who are used to a 5 man rotation suddenly have to perform with 5 days of rest. right? or did i imagine that? do i imagine that everyone (maybe not everyone) bemoans that as being a key factor in the angels struggles despite ohtani - that american pitchers cannot adjust to a 6-man rotation and a japanese pitcher to a 5-man rotation, creatures of habit that they are, that the difference to their established routines is great enough to have noticable effect on their performances. (i think it's that the depth chart has to go one deeper, and you get less sarts out of the good guys, but what do i know - i'm a braying jackass) but back to the matter at hand. does it hold true that the benefits of rest overweigh the benefits of play? i guess we'll see, won't we. padres manager bob melvin, https://dodgerblue.com/bob-melvin-padres-benefitted-wild-card-series-pressure-on-dodgers/2022/10/16/of course, seems to think that playing in teh wild card round helped him get past the dodgers. Padres manager Bob Melvin believes his club's path leading up to the NLDS may have benefited them. “Typically the Wild Card teams are in that position anyway,” Melvin said. “It's always been that way where the teams that get in through via Wild Card are not only playing with intensity up to the end, but they're also playing well to get in. “And there's probably something to be said that when you're playing well and you have a lot of confidence, you get into the postseason, then there isn't as much expectation on you, then maybe that's a pretty good way to go about it. Yet you do have to play another round. “Obviously everybody aspires to win the division, get a little time off. But there might be a little something to that.” anyway. whatever. i'm done arguing for a playoff format i don't want, and have repeatedly stated that i don't like. y'all think rest helps teams win games. i think the evidence points differently. go mets.

I love a plurality of serieseseses. Gimme all the series of series I can handle. There is a legit argument that rest can work against baseball players who are used to playing every day. I guess I shouldn't listen to the current and former players and executives who bring it up as a possible concern. Give the top seeds two weeks off. They'll be so crazy fresh nobody could possibly beat them. Let's them take the whole next season off. Advance directly to the next years World Series. Sigh. Silly me for considering the affect on a player who is used to playing every day, for whom timing and rhythm and pattern and process is vitally important, and throwing that all right out the window when the games matter most. Silly me for also saying outright that I don't particularly care for my proposal but suggest only that it may be a way to better effect the desired outcome of Better teams advancing further. Byes. Byes for everyone. Top seeds get two rounds of byes. Maybe even three. Four perhaps. When players come back from the dl, they often need to spend time getting back into game action. But in the playoffs, make em sit as long as possible. That's what's best. When relievers don't pitch in game action for a week, we worry if they'll be ready to go. But sure. No reason at all to think that a bye might have a negative effect. Byes get your better teams that one round deeper into the playoffs. Yes. But are they actually good for those teams, aside from increasing their odds of getting only exactly that far? Does taking the week off make that team better able to play at a high level, or can it be a posssible detriment? Bray tell.

the short serieses are what really fucks things up. but long serieses AND top-seed byes fuck things up even more. ...or at least as much. Wrong wrong wrongedy wrong! We need MORE short series for the 83- and 86-win teams. Not even a series. The two (or four) lowest seeded teams play one game to see who gets into the next round. Unfair? You dont like it? Tough--win more games in the regular season. The winners of the one game WC gets to play three games at the next-seeded teams' park, and the winner there gets to play (on the road) a team that's had a BYE for the past few days. 1, 3, 5, 7 games, all on the road for the lowest seeded team. The plural of "series" btw is "series." Like "deer" and "deer." except that every time a team sweeps their own series and loses the next, there's a fuck-ton of handwringing about them going cold from too many days off. it's actually among the reasons why they changed the schedule in 7 game serieses, aside from too many rest days not looking like real baseball. it was also stated as a concern going into this off season for the top seeds to be sitting around waiting for their games. you go from playing every day to sitting on your ass for a week. you lose the edge, or so the worry goes. i actually REALLY liked the old format, where the two wildcard winners would face off in a winner-take-all one game play-in. i thought it perfectly rewarded the best teams while punishing the lower seeds with the enhanced cruelties of fate. but, that still doesn't appear to sufficiently reward the top seeds, or so says the handwringing over the NL playoff results thus far. so if having too few of the top seeds make it past the first round is indeed a problem, this is one way to fix it. that i have already stated that i hate. so there. and finally, i should think that in my, what, twenty years of posting on mets boards, that any instruction on the proper spelling of a word, or correct grammatical semantical usage, is either unnecessary or completely wasted on me. i'm either irredeeemably illiterate, or just stubbornly make awful stylistic choices because i think it makes me look cool but mostly just makes me seem illiterate but honestly i don't give a shit because i'm stubborn and too heavily invested in my style to ever change and i'm going to go cry now because i'm a terrible person who thought it would be fun to write serieses instead of series because life it too painfully dull to not write deers and meese instead of deer and moose when tapping out uncapitalized musings over baseball errata and oh my god what am i even doing here when i could be curing cancer and pressing the shift key more regularly i'm sorry i'm so so sorry.

the short serieses are what really fucks things up. but long serieses AND top-seed byes fuck things up even more. ...or at least as much.

jeez, they had the right idea, and then colossally fucked it up. who do they think they are, the mets?!

ok, hear me out, because i honestly hate what i'm about to type. maximally expanded playoffs akin to what the nba has to offer are probably the best way to ensure that the best mlb teams continue deep into the playoffs. why? because given a long enough series (and lets assume 7 games is long enough) the vastly better teams should win more often. so let's just say the playoffs are open to the top 16 teams. your NL matchups are: dodgers/giants | braves/brewers | mets/phillies | padres/cardinals your AL matchups are: astros/white sox | yankees/orioles | guardians/rays | mariners/blue jays i think those series are much more likely to end up with the top two teams in each division advancing, and maybe more likely have three of the top four. The regular season is still about seeding, and maybe you give the top two seeds in each league all home games in the first round, and give the 3-seed 6 home games, and the 4-seed 5 home games. make it worth a team's while, financially at least, to aim for the higher seeding. The second round of the playoffs is more like what we used to be used to with the division serieses, but the top seeds likely have just been tuning up against the 7-8 seeds, and the 3-6 seeds are busy brawling with each other. so there's less of the concern with a good team getting iced, waiting for its bye week to be over. but they still have a hope of resting tired players more. and go from there. if a low seed really has a run in them, well, damnit, they'll have to fucking earn it more this way, instead of just having one good week. i mean, i rather hate the overall idea here. but i think it could be the way to get the best teams deeper into the playoffs, at least without going back to a more limited postseason. i'm really on the fence here, too. because as much as i like to have the regular season be as meaningful as possible for the most amount of teams, i also greatly enjoy seeing cinderella teams go on a really hot streak and prove their mettle knocking down the juggernauts.

stroman pitched well this season, and very well at the end. if you compare ERA, FIP, and some other fancy stats with lots of letters, he did about the same as bassitt. by some measures better, others, worse. of course, he also pitched 50 fewer innings than c-bass, and was very bad and hurt (and also covid) in the first half of the season, when we would have needed him the most. with him on the roster, we would not have traded for bassitt, who really helped stabilize our rotation for most of the season. and we would not have had the $17M difference in their salaries to allocate elsewhere. i'm skeptical that bassitt will get paid appreciably more than $25M next year, as well. as much as i liked stroman, the mets were a better team this past season without him. now, you might be tempted to say, oh, but what about the postseason? well, while bassitt disappointed this year, and carries a career 4.20 era in 15 post season innings, stro has a 4.40 in 30 innings. and while the postseason is a small sample crapshoot designed to cause people to make faulty inferences, it's not like we would have had the legend of andy pettitte starting meaningful october baseball games for us. so if you want to say, "oh, marcus stroman is proof positive that we're screwed this offseason" i think you cannot reach that conclusion reliably until after the offseason. there are plenty of baseball decisions waiting to be made. but right now, you're sitting on a position of "i wish we paid a guy $25M this year for $16M of value this year, and are on the hook to pay him up to $48M the next two years, instead of having paid $8M for a guy who just produced $21M of value." which seems like an odd hill to die on, but... you do you.

Surprising not to see mcsquirrel nor Guillorme on the list…

abreu is interesting, that's for sure. his average and obp are outstanding. power is still pretty good, with 40 doubles. they're just not going over fences. i wouldn't want to invest too much in him, especially long term, but if we wanted a stable dh bat, we could do worse. fwiw, fangraphs says abreu's 2022 was worth $30M, so maybe we're undervaluing him a tad. i would be ecstatic to get close to that production from baty/vientos! that said, i would very much prefer to see the mets try to get the production out of the young'uns, and use whatever dollars abreu might command to retain a brandon nimmo. also, while i could see chicago wanting to move on from abreu, i also would expect them to extend him the QO, which would of course sour me further.

hey at least now the padres know what it's like to be one-hit in the playoffs. i'm still rooting for them though, despite 2/5 of the mets great future rotation being on the phillies roster.

we should crowdsource an expected degrom deal. see how it compares to what he actually eventually gets. me, i think he'll just opt out and take the QO.

I'm IN, and have arbitrated. i have a sneaky suspicion mohawk red flyers might not be coming back...

if he doesn't opt out, it will be because he's accepted an extension from the mets.

PETE ALONSO yes FRANCISCO ALVAREZ yes CHRIS BASSITT no BRETT BATY yes MARK CANHA yes CARLOS CARRASCO yes JACOB deGROM yes EDWIN DIAZ yes EDUARDO ESCOBAR yes MYCHAL GIVENS no LUIS GUILLORME yes FRANCISCO LINDOR yes SETH LUGO no STARLING MARTE yes TREVOR MAY no JAMES McCANN yes JEFF McNEIL yes TYLOR MEGILL yes TYLER NAQUIN no TOMAS NIDO yes BRANDON NIMMO yes ADAM OTTAVINO no DAVID PETERSON yes JOELY RODRIGUEZ no DARIN RUF no DOMINIC SMITH no DREW SMITH yes MARK VIENTOS yes DANIEL VOGELBACH yes TAIJUAN WALKER yes TREVOR WILLIAMS no

shit. yeah. i was misreading mlbtr, which i read as degrom having only one year at ~30. i would of course need to up my offer, were i to wish to keep degrom. i don't really know if he'll get better than scherzer money, guaranteed, but if anyone besides the mets were to offer it, it'll probably be the yankees. 2x90, with a closet full of vests.

the mets would be fools to NOT pick up carrasco's option. degrom is a headscratcher. i'd love to pay him what he wants, but there's so much risk. that said, i'd easily go 3x100, with vesting options on the back end. I could be talked up from there on the AAV. and then i'd start looking at cost-controlling my young players and extending mcneil and alonso ASAP. diaz is a top priority. unless the mets are actually serious about judge, nimmo has to be one too - there's nothing but tumbleweeds in the centerfield market otherwise. i'd like to hang onto taijuan walker over bassit. in the pen, i'd like to see ottavino back, and lugo. without looking at it, though, i'm sure there are other suitable options out there, but there's comfort in a reliever you know and feel like you can trust. thinking not too hard on it, i'd bring back vogelbach, keeping vientos in AAA while baty and alvarez share DH and positional rotations. at least, that's what my first draft looks like.