metsmarathon

eh. i liked yesterdays game better.

fuck the yankees

butches metzger, henton, and huskey would like to have a word with you... or, well, part of one. jack aker, too.

our offensive approach should be to turn on videos of the 2015 world series and look at how we got beat. by hitters hitting the damned ball, and beating good pitching. not by swinging for home runs on every pitch that you guess might just be a strike down the middle, after the pitcher clearly demonstrated on the prior 10 pitches in the at bat that he couldn't find the strike zone if it crawled up his ass and gave him a prostate exam. Our approach has been garbage all year, longer even (decades? it's been decades sine we last drove in a runner on third with less than two outs, hasn't it?), and we keep chasing for heeeyoooj home runs instead of making contact and moving runners. even our good hitters got sucked down that rabbit hole. and pete, god love him, needs to dial it back every now and again too. just because you can mash the ball out of jellystone park on any given swing doesn't mean that you need to. sometimes you just need to hit the damned ball and move the runners along. i'm down everyone right now. but i'm irrational and totally go whichever way the winds blow. i'm also often wrong. that's why i still believe. that said, yeesh, how do you bring anybody back who isn't stroman? ok, loup - he's been good. but is also a reliever, so how much do you want to pay there? conforto? syndergaard? how can you trust either of those guys right now? granted i don't know whats out there that could be better. likely not a lot, right? familia? villar? rich hill? pass.

i believe. i believe. it's silly, but i believe....

=kcmets post_id=74029 time=1628623259 user_id=53] no one cares. No one.

yeah, there's not a lot of upgrade space out there.... scherzer aside, about the only free agent pitcher that seems like a good buy might be jon gray. if we want to just build up an immense collection of injured forearms, maybe we take on kershaw for fun and anxiety. but mostly anxiety. otherwise, gosh, there doesn't seem to be much of anything. i hope the market really isn't there for syndergaard, but it's so thin, he might be hard to hold onto. conforto is a tough one. he really seems to have fallen completely apart doesn't he? in the outfield, the top candidate is castellanos. kris bryant, too, if you play him there. are we fully sour on baez? i'd kinda like to see what an infield with him and lindor looks like, but he's not making the strongest case here.... and i wonder if we'll get to see that anytime this year. sigh. but with the kind of hitter he is, we really need better hitters around him. or we need our hitters around him to be better. one of those.

so... uh... like... other than arguing back and forth whether or not steve cohen is a terrible guy, a terrific guy, or quite possibly somewhere in the inbetween... who among the 2022 free agents do you think we should be pursuing? (whether or not steve cohen, who may or may not be better than the wilpons, may or may not open his wallet wide enough to sign anyone....) (fuck i hate this place sometimes....)

Ooh, I like those black uniforms

Woah! I think if you asked me earlier today I would've said my preference was for Bryant. But damn, it's not like I wouldn't want Baez instead. I'm a fairly happy camper about this. Wonder what's going back.

on the bright side, there's a pretty natural branding tie-in that they could do in right field... https://www.kroger.com/product/images/large/front/0001700006837> maybe with freebie giveaways for the luck fans in attendance!

boy, they could've been a little more evocative of the winged headdresses on those guardians, and maybe pull in some sort of art deco vibe on the wordmark, no? instead there's this weird cheap angular bullshit that makes no sense. and doesn't even look modern. can't wait for it to get ripped to shreds by uniwatch!

my only quibble is that i don't like the angularization of the script. it looks fairly terrible. not as bad as the winged G, but still bad. hopefully there wil be more revisions...? because, damn, it kinda looks like they just grabbed these off of an old unaffiliated N-64 baseball game. but i'm ok with the names. spiders would have been better. it was both the easy and the bold choice. but guardians is fine. is there a local connection to the name, or just random fighty-type noun?

Edgy MD wrote: I would sell my body in downtown Atlanta for a Daniel Herrera jersey. I would sell my body in downtown Atlanta for a plate of that Skyline chili from Cincy. really..?! that shit is terrible. ::shudder:: god, that was a terrible shit afterwards. also, i did not like chili either.

i ain't got no jerseys.

i love it.

=Ceetar post_id=71268 time=1626197743 user_id=102] my only complaint was they didn't track all the balls with the camera

Willets Point wrote: =metsmarathon post_id=71225 time=1626177623 user_id=83] i thought it was fantastic, and i'll wager you'd be hard pressed to find anyone on the field last night, especially any of the competitors, who was offended or otherwise bothered by his approach last night. I dunno, Jauss DID bean him for breaking the unwritten rules.

yeah, it would've been a better show if he didn't express any sense of fun, confidence, or fan engagement, and just went out there like he was turning screws in a factory. bored. apathetic. almost annoyed that he has to do this thing instead of heading down to he fishing hole with a brew in his hand. that's what we all would tune in to watch. i thought it was fantastic, and i'll wager you'd be hard pressed to find anyone on the field last night, especially any of the competitors, who was offended or otherwise bothered by his approach last night. the pause in the second round was sublime. i wish he would have run up the foul line and high-fived the fans afterwards.

A Boy Named Seo wrote: I feel pretty good. I'd try to get a dude like Jon Gray ASAP, like today. Stro and Walker are coming back down to earth from ace-level and with Carrasco's debut still a couple weeks out, we need help pretty badly. I'd like to not limp through the rest of the month as currently constructed. Lindor and Pete have heated up, Nimmo is raking and Conforto and McNeil have yet to join the party, but will. I'm not worried in the least about the 29th best offense, or whatever the hell the Mets have been up til now. #blueandorangeglasses i agree fully with the above. the offense should be fine enough, is at its floor., and trending up. we need to elevate the ceiling on pitching just to insulate against injury and bullpen overuse. and the best way to do that is to add a healthy starter. and then, if and when our other starters come back, they're gravy and depth, and we don't need to hope they can all go 7 innings.

i remember reading that too. and coming to the conclusion that if there's about 12% more foul balls per game, that's, what, 6% more pitches? meaning that games are about 6% longer due to more foul balls being hit. which, for a 2 hour game is a whopping 7 minutes. only there's a lot of non-action that happens in and around pitches. so really you might be looking at foul balls adding, what, 3 extra minutes to a game. only that extra time is because of something actually happening - pitch being thrown, and hit, and landing somewhere. and maybe there's a play on it even! or it almost goes fair and generates excitement. unlike, say, adjusting oneself, or practicing ones swing, or looking to the heavens, or reciting declarations of agnosticism, or commercial breaks. foul pitches mean more baseball. i think we want more - or at least as much - baseball in less time, not less baseball in less time.

holy shit that's awful

i mean, to me, the best overall measure of the success of a manager is, are they getting the best out of their team? are the results more or less than you should expect, based on the talent they have available to them. the mets are in first place, having run through an assortment of replacement and sub-replacement type players in stead of the cores of their offense and pitching staff. if you can't credit the manager with any of that, well then what the hell is the point of having a good manager, any way? and well then you certainly couldn't get upset an your manager if the team is underperforming, right? are there some tactical decisions that could be improved? sure. what's the WAR on those levels of decisions? what's the WPA? i think those are the parts that are easiest to see and react to, but over the course of a long season, how many games are strictly won or lost based on those choices? (this sounds like the start of an interesting study, actually.) i mean, the bottom line is, the ingredients are all there for an epic collapse for the team. injuries up and down the roster and over and over again. noteworthy player getting popped on PEDs for the season. trade of two key young players, incoming star on a massive contract. new player gets hurt before the season begins. star player with massive contract fist-fights with incumbent player; media circus ensues. another media circus comes and goes. star players struggle with meeting performance expectations. greatest pitcher in the history of sport goes up and down with minor injuries a few times. and through it all, the team has really come together and stayed together. and played well and played with resilience. they don't quit on games, innings, seasons, or at bats. the manager has to get some of that credit. not all, of course. but definitely some. he's the one responsible for keeping the pieces that he's given all moving in the right direction after all. and in the grand scheme of things, yeah, man, i'd rather have that then making sure we don't miss that one challenge in that one game that one time, or rolled the wrong middle reliever dice, or did or didn't bunt when he maybe could have or shouldn't have. yeaaah, you could say it's all degrom. but he's not pitching every game and he's not pitching every inning when he does pitch in games. the manager is making it work. even with his team's embarrassingly low vaccination rate that he literally has no control over. (you think maybe the owner and gm should take more of the blame there, perhaps... hmmm...??? why isn't jeremy hefner out there jabbing his pitchers while he's out there visiting the damn mound? why isn't he doing HIS JOB? he sucks too, amrite...!?)

management cannot force labor to undergo medical procedures. in almost all circumstances. there are likely very specific rules as to what he can and cannot talk about or even advocate for in that regard, pertaining to covid. he may not even be allowed to officially know who on his team is vaccinated right now and who is not. i say this from personal experience. i am currently in a supervisory role. i am not permitted to try to ascertain the vaccination status of my employees. but then, i'm probably a chickenshit pansy too.

=metsmarathon post_id=67860 time=1623697759 user_id=83] ex-met todd frazier is now on the best baseball team in sussex county, nj, as he's recently joined the sussex county miners to keep his body warm and ready for olympic glory. he seems like such a down-to-earth guy. out there, having fun. talking with all the minor leaguers, the umps. made time for the fans before the game, signing baseballs and baseball cards. having failed to adequately plan for the occasion, i had to run out to the gift shop, buy a ball, and run to my car to get a marker, too, but i managed to get a nice signed miners ball, and the marathon family got a picture with him too. luckily, i'm too dumb to think of anything to say. so i just smiled bigly and dumly as we stood there in the aura of a major leaguer. it was a doubleheader. he went 0-3, clearly swinging too hard in what i can imagine is a terrible no-win situation, but had a nice play at third. he finally picked up his first hit over the weekend, a double. the miners, by the way, just moved to the frontier league, which is now officially a partner league of mlb. so, big-time-adjacent!