metsmarathon

they could just leave these two things as is, y'know. status quo ftw. i don't think the draft pick really kills all that much player salary, whereas the international draft is certainly considered by many dominican players, and from other places, as potentially ruinous. i don't know enough about it, but i could certainly see it being a death-knell to the team-run baseball academies there. why put money into players to no longer get first dibs on a guy? seems like the obvious solution would be for mlb to start running the academies, and maybe brand them for different teams for marketing purposes...? but who knows. they should be able to figure this thing out, no?

god, it's so fucking stupid. hate the shift? be a better hitter. but whatever, the smart teams will figure it out. like maybe if i'm thinking of taking my shortstop and putting him in short right-center, maybe my left fielder doesn't have a whole lot to do way over the fuck there, so i'll move my damned outfielders around instead of my infielders. go ahead, i dare you to go oppo into the outfield, instead of through the infield. but if this stupid thing is the thing in the way of getting fucking baseball back, then, yes, lets ban the shift. shitty hitters can still get hits, batting averages can go back up, and baseball can get played again. for fucks sake, just get a fucking CBA signed, you assholes.

playoff money won't be shit if the fans don't give one.

they better damned well already have someone lined up to hit 90 homeruns to save the fucking sport like last time.

ugh. just fucking get it done you hosers. or, sweet jesus, allow spring training to start while you hammer out the last few details. no reason to shut shit down.

oh hell yeah, i'd take conforto back. wouldn't mind if they got bryant instead, but yeah, man, i'm all about conforto. especially if it means him not becoming a [blech] phillie.

he's also not wrong about a certain fanbase not appreciating its players.

is he wrong, or just wrong for saying it out loud? because if eppler was still the gm of the angels, he should oughtta get fired for what happened on his watch.

what really pisses me off if the reporting that if harvey signs somewhere, he's going to get popped with a 60-day suspension. for being open and honest in a criminal trial that put to jail a dude who was responsible for killing a player. and after baring his soul to show his inner demons. like, fucking hell. embrace this man, get him the help he needs. and if anything, go to him and help him to help other players who might be in the same place that he was. don't fucking punish him three years after the fucking fact. that's bullshit. if you want this shit out of your league and out of your clubhouses, grant him immunity, and grant anyone who openly comes clean the same. and then get them help. otherwise, mlb will have failed matt harvey twice.

i always make a point of setting my lineup - especially starting pitchers - for the week, so that at least if i forget to check back in, i'm at least not leaving too many players on the bench. beyond that it's more a matter of managing who's hot, who's not, and who's hurt.

it's appalling how little framework there is in the MLB to help players when they clearly have these issues. both drugs and mental health. sweep it under the rug. be proud that you have a therapist on call, but never actually take a man who is clearly struggling, in that moment, when he most needs it, to get the help he's begging for. and instead just churn through the players like so much chaff, so you can eke whatever performance you can in that moment out of their dying soul. i mean, fuck, its a problem in society as a whole. but with as much as is invested in players, it would be fucking nice if a sports league would take a leadership role in addressing mental health. and maybe use that to set a standard for the rest of us. there's inklings of it percolating about, what with simone biles speaking out about mental health and wellness, and naomi osaka as well. but they're responded to too often with derision and scorn, saying they're weak and just can't handle the pressure, when sometimes, often times, the right way to handle pressure is to relieve it. but nope, we've gotta be tough guys and insensitive cavemen, and if it drives young stars to contemplate suicide, or seek refuge in narcotics, well, hopefully they at least have the good sense to have a low ERA and burn out for another team.

i think the biggest complaint is that all the movement by the owners is achingly incremental. $5M to close a $100M gap on the bonus pool, for instance. there's some progress and some movement, sure, but when manfred comes out and says a significant offer is on the table and they're hoping to walk away with an agreement, you expect them to maybe move closer to the middle and instead have barely moved off the starting line. but it's fine. they're destroying the sport at the time they can least afford to. it's all good. right...?

LOL! seriously, this is by far the most interesting league that i'm in. like, in regular roto, as long as you don't hose up your draft too badly, you can make a lot of hay just by having the quickest fingers on the waiver wire. snag the new rookies as they're called up before your opponents have a chance. that can't happen here. you have to play the whole game, balance your entire team. and hell, given the past few years' results, i'm not even all that good at it! (i'm REALLY bad at sticking to my pre-draft strategies, notably) but i love it, and am always trying to figure our how i can be a better manager.

it's $20 to enter, and right now it's the only league i pay for. i'd say that if you're looking for a thing you can spend a few minutes on each week, and let your team run itself while you occasionally check in on it, the league probably isn't for you. rather, if you've played your share of yahoo or espn leagues and are looking for something that rewards you for putting more time and care into it - beyond just lucking into a good draft slot - then it might be a good fit. i think that as much as the game is about getting good plyers, it's really at least as much about getting good value out of your players. the basics are, it's a 12-team league, auction-draft, with rotisserie scoring. this particular league is a SABR-roto 4x4 scoring system, where you get ranked by R, HR, OBP, SLG and SO, ERA, WHIP, HR/9. you have a 40-player roster to deal with, including stashing minor leaguers, and are allotted $400 to field your team. it's also a keeper league, where player salaries automatically increment $2 each year. on top of that, there's a wrinkle of arbitration, where at the end of the season, you get a handful of dollars to assign to plyers on other teams to make their salaries more fair. so for instance, let's say i magically had juan soto this year for $2. now that the season is over, his salary went up to $4 automatically. and since he's really low-salary, many of the other hypothetical owners assigned arbitration dollars to him, so now he's up to $23. that would be a big bump in this example. but he produces maybe $60 or $70 worth of production, so he'd still be dirt cheap in this wonderful fever dream. there are other wrinkles like, if i cut a player midseason, he still counts 50% against my salary cap until someone else picks him up. so, if ou like your fantasy baseball to stimulate your brain and force you to think it out, you'd probably enjoy it. one thing that i really do like, is that it doesn't really reward you for being fast. for instance, in most leagues, players are free agents until someone snaps them up. first come, first served. sucks if you wake up late after some rookie nobody comes in and no-hits the mets. he'd be snapped up before your alarm clock even thinks about beeping. on ottoneu, if someone wanted to add him, they would start an auction for him. and every owner would have 2 days to put in a blind bid for his services. highest bidder gets him. so its as much (perhaps more) about managing your payroll than it is knowing obscure players. its also on fangraphs, so there's plenty of resources available to dive deeper on your players. the time commitment isn't necessarily terrrible, except for the draft. the draft takes a loooong time, especially when there are new teams filling empty rosters. but the longer you stay in it, the better the values get. the initial league draft took two days. not 48 hours, but several hours over two nights. last year was maybe 3 hours, i think...? not sure. but after that, you can probably get by with a few minutes a day to set your lineups, check for injuries and starting pitchers, see how you're doing, maybe peruse the free agent list, and move along. oh yeah. one nice thing about it is that since the rate stats are so important for pitchers, and because you're on the hook for players you drop, there's really no such thing as streaming, which can get real annoying in a LOT of other leagues without transaction limits. so.. if that all sounds terrible, well, sorry! but it sounds like an interesting challenge, please, sign up. we need more mets fans!

join us! you know you want to! it's both fun AND challenging!

about the only good thing i can think of as far as the dh is that it should help our weird weird roster get more at bats for people who could use them. granted it was constructed with that intent and expectation, so.... the arguments in favor of the dh just never rang true for me, in that pitchers were bad hitters and got hurt doing hitter things. well, fucking hell, maybe those professional athletes could like, consider that part of their fucking job and prepare for it. plus, a good hitting pitcher is a joy to behold, and the mets always seemed to have good hitting pitchers. and bartolo colon. but jesus christ, if it is at all a thing that is working to prevent baseball from happening, then give me two fucking dhes, i don't care. just give me fucking baseball back.

Edgy MD wrote: Mets: "We'd like to thank Noah Syndergaard for his contributions to our franchise, and wish him luck with his new team, the Los Angeles Angels." Baseball: "They wish him luck? LOLMETS!!!" Mets: "We'd like to announce that we just signed Eduardo Escobar." Baseball: "Same old METS! They take a half-measure and they'll try to sell it as a 'big move'." Mets: "We'd like to announce that we just signed Starling Marte." Baseball: "Well, look who's serious! Too bad those idiots didn't replace Syndergaard." Mets: "We'd like to announce that we just signed Max Scherzer." Baseball: "OH, FUCK. Quick! Shut down all operations!" Fans: "Until when?" Baseball: "UNTIL WE SAY!!" Baseball: "OK, you can maybe someday perhaps have baseball again, but you have to have the DH."

interesting that mlb called in the mediator, when my understanding is that they have been the intransigent side. what, if anything, am i to read into this? is the owners' stance that their position is already giving away so much, that to move further to the players is unacceptable, and that they want the mediator to come in and show the players how good the offer really is...?

i always liked jeff innis. made me wish i could throw sidearmed.

i think that was me. i'm pondering...

you would neeed to be a _really big_ "big hall" kind of voter to vote for david, or just like voting for nice guys with good but not all-time great careers, to vote for david. i can see him getting a few votes that way. but not a lot. given the choice, i would not give him one of my votes as he falls short of nearly any criterion i could conjure up. still makes me sad. he was on the right track, until he wasn't, and its a shame. if joey bats gets more votes than david, i'll be annoyed, that's for dang sure. wright has a much better career and peak WAR, with a higher career OPS to boot. he just doesn't have the spicy home runs. as much as it pains me to say, and moreso even than it pains me to say that david is not.... chase utley should get in. easily. looking at his JAWS score, he's as good a candidate as beltran, and but a skinny whisker behind rolen and helton. (i compare JAWS to the average JAWS of hall of famers at that position). utley is basically average hall-of-fame-2b, just as beltran is average CF. ped cheat arod sits at 164%, beltre at 128%, and joe mauer at 107%. i was also playing around with fangraphs' war graphs feature. basically, if you look at the career war accumulation for them all, ventura, olerud, and hernandez all have nearly identical graphs ending at basically the same place, slight edge to keith. also, interestingly, wright and longoria are also nearly exact copies. i tried linking to those graphs, but cannot get it figured out. boo.

the only good thing about the lockout is that i have more time to ponder my keepers. (or is that a bad thing...?)

i feel like the logjam lifting should help beltran far, far more than the trash can garbage hurts him. also, there should be no vote for andruw that is not also a vote for carlos. rolen should be in already, and it's a damn shame that he isn't. i expect him to get in next year, hopefully joined by beltran, at least. its amazing to think that wright likely won't get enough votes to stay on the ballot for more than one cycle. again, though, i think that having the logjam out of the way, might boost his chances of getting the required 5%. but ti'd take some really big-hall type voters to keep him going. getting a few guys in this next year would help him in that regard. it will be _really_ interesting to see what the voting looks like next year, what with bonds and clemens out of the way. there's still some prickly votes out there in arod, vizquel, and manny, but with bonds and clemens off the table, i think it might clear up the electorate to just readily toss them aside.

i'd be ok with a clayton kershaw, depending of course on the cost. there'd be an incredible risk that we have no available starting pitchers, of course, but otherwise, i think it could work out fantastically well.

because the media blasts baseball for the same shit that football and the other 'major' sports skate on, and it drives the more casual fans to think that there's something wrong with baseball, and they turn it away or turn it off. and the die hard fans get all pissy and bitchy and turn it off too. the 94 strike was devastating to baseball. every other sport loses a season and people come clamoring back. people are out there wringing their hands over whether or not we'll induct ped guys into the hall of fame. when was the last time PEDs were even a topic of conversation in those other sports? please! football and basketball bodies are all natural, but baseball players are the only juicers? and baseball is the only sport to endure shame as a result of it, too. the only thing that has a whisper of a chance of laying a scratch on football is concussions, and while it's surely turned off some, they're doing better and better than every, while ruining kids and lives all over the damned place. it's all part of the spectacle. all the more eyeballs. but anything bad happens in baseball and it's all part of the unfortunate decay, and people walk away, or tune in less, or just stop caring.