metsmarathon

thats just bad form. the mets never wore a big M on their caps...

Mets Guy in Michigan wrote: ARod has become such a goofball, and is so hated by his own team's fans, that I almost feel sorry for him at this point. I almost want him to do well because I know it will drive MFY fans crazy. Every milestone he approaches will bring new rounds of shame and roids stories and photos of him in a Yankees uniform, tainting him and the team. This spring training is going to be a farce of gloriously spectacular measures. Spring lacks controversial story lines to begin with. So every media outlet is going to have people in Tampa following this clown show, asking whether he's spoken to the team, what do the players think, what is the fan reaction, will he or won't he be in the field. It's going to be an amazing distraction! They can talk about retiring the numbers from everybody but Steve Balboni and Brien Taylor as a diversion, and it's still not going to work. And the best part is that there's no way the team didn't know what it was getting. Maybe not with the first contract, but certainly with the ridiculous extension they gave him. We can happily take our nice quiet spring, where the only question is whether Dillon Gee is in the rotation or bullpen, and let this nightmare play out across the state. all of this. except that i absolutely want him to do well, very damned well, to magnify the existential MFY dread to the utmost extent.

march 18th, 9pm works for me

so, what are we thinking of for a draft date?

aren't we at the point with a lot of our superheroes where we don't need to do another origin story, and can just get right into the action. especially with spidey. he's a kid who gets bit by a spider and decides to go around fighting crime and stuff. if you really need to set him up, you can take 5 minutes before the title credits come on. or, better yet, TITLE MONTAGE!!!!

Lefty Specialist wrote: He was born in Michigan? Yankee fans thought he was born in a manger. Jeter is a jersey boy. in fact, he's currently the best jersey boy, in terms of career value, with 71.8 bWAR, leading our three hall of famers goose goslin (66 bWAR), billy hamilton (63 bWAR), and joe medwick (55 bWAR). mike trout, though, might have a thing or two to say about the career rankings before all is said and done, though. he's already over a third of the way there, with a mind-numbing 28.2 bWAR after only 3 full seasons. we don't have much of a pitching corps, though al leiter is at the front of the pack with 42 bWAR. other notables are kid gleason and don newcombe. rick porcello is our current standard-bearer. c'mon, new jersey, we can do better!

if not, it'll make more work for the commish, as he'll have to kick out anyone whose expired team is snapped up by some random dude, as i think happened last year.

it was a great deal for the brewers, a dissapointment for the twins, and a bad deal for the mets. the twins got about 5 wins over 3 years out of the deal. using fangraphs WAR figures, they got about 3 wins out of gomez before trading him for jj hardy, who gave them about 2 wins. they spent a little over $6M for those 5 wins, which is a good value, as free agent wins cost about $4M/WAR. the brewers traded two years of jj hardy, who produces 6.5 wins at a cost of $11M, and got back 18.7 WAR from gomez to date, at a cost of $17M so far. the mets got (fangraphs numbers here are not as favorable to santana as bbref's) 12.5 wins from santana at a cost of $127M. if we look at the net value recieved, the mets got ~$54M worth of production but paid $127M for it, giving them a net value of - $73M. they traded away $87.8M worth of production, which cost $12.7M, a surplus value of $75M. the santana trade, in the long term, based on teh contracts involved for hte period of team control of the players involved, cost the mets almost $150M. one hundred and fifty freaking million dollars. jeezus, i did not expect it to look quite THAT bad! that was one hell of an expensive no hitter.... worth noting: if i use bbref's WAR numbers, which are more favorable for santana, as approximate the value at the above stated $4M/WAR, then the mets only lost hte trade by $122M of value. so there's that...

i like and support the idea, if not the execution. i think an official digital clock is a jarring incongruity in a baseball game. an analog countdown timer, on the other hand, would be kinda cool. and would allow the teams the opportunity to inject some personality and individualism into the affair. picture if you will, a giant clock with mr met on hte face, in pitching position. his hand is hte hand of the clock, and in it, the ball. as hte timer counts down, his hand goes up. when the time is up, his hand it at the top of hte face, in hte 12:00 position, ready to release the ball. throw your pitch before mr met does, or you get a ball! way more fun than a shot clock.

as far as a desmond/murphy swap goes, [u:3igu58iw]offensively[/u:3igu58iw], they're not all too dissimilar in terms of overall production. desmond gives you a little more power and a greater number of home runs, but at a lower batting average and obp. last year, they had nearly identical OPSs, with desmond having a whopping .008 edge, albeit with more stolen bases. factor in home parks, and, well, murphy might've actually been the better offensive player. in fact, murphy had the better OPS+, 111 vs 103. according to fangraaphs, last year, desmond produced 11.2 batting runs above average, while murphy produced 10.8 runs above average. the steamer projections for both have desmond at 3.8 runs above average for 2015 and murphy at 3.4, while, interstingly, the crowdsourced "fans" projection has murphy at 10.9 runs to desmond's 10.3. the fan projections are typically less conservative, while steamer runs more to the conservative side. regardless, the point is, that desmond wouldn't be much if at all of an upgrade to our offense if we swap him out for murphy, and move flores (or whatever) to second. defensively, of course, desmond is a better fielder at short than murphy is at second. but desmond isn't really a great fieldr, i don't htink. for his career, he's slightly negative in uzr/150 at -0.8, and last year was 0.1. with an incredibly small sample size, flores was a plus defender at short, with a uzr/150 of 12.4. is that real? i have no idea. uzr thinks he's been a positive defender everywhere the past two years save 11 bad innings at 2b in 2013. lets pretend flores is an average defender for this exercise. so, what would hte net result be? we'd have basically the same offense with desmond/flores instead of flores/murphy, with the production coming in slightly different flavors. we'd be getting maybe about hte same defense at short (but possibly worse) and we'd be getting average (or maybe better) defense at second instead of relatively poor defense. does that really move the needle? a sum total of a slight upgrade at second base defense? burn down the wilpons for not getting this done NOW!!! TRADE ALL THE THINGS!!!!! meh.

smoltz is getting massively overcompensated for his three years of seemingly stellar relief work. i played a little game of what-if, and i still think he falls short of other pitchers on the ballot. namely schilling and mussina. i think that part of what hte voters are doing is looking at his missing three years of starting, thinking how great a reliever he was, based on his save totals, and extrapolating htat out to imply that he would have been an even so very much stronger starting pitcher. i mean, look at his 2003! a 1.12 ERA! and 55 saves the year before! and 45 saves hte year after! but he did it as a reliever. and i think it's really, really wishful thinking to think that he would have been the same pitcher as a starter those three years. especially in '03, he pounded hte strike zone like never before. and when he was again a starter, he still featured a somewhat reduced walk rate relative to his pre-relieving days, but not by as much as when he was a reliever. his k-rate and hr/9 also improved enough to indicate a change in pitching style, not necessarily ability. so again, i don;t htink it's fair to think that he would have had the same 1.12 ERA in his typical 250 innings as a starter, instead of the 64 relief innings he did throw in 2003. what is perhaps fair to credit him for is a career year - in line with his cy young 1996 campaign. 2.94 ERA in 253 innings. good for a 7.3 WAR, per bbref. so here's my approach. take smoltz's 2003 season, and credit him with 7.3 WAR as a starter instead of 3.3 WAR as a reliever. then, looking at his 2002 & 2004 seasons, i think of them as roughly equivalent. one has a better ERA, the other a better FIP. if i credit him with 5 WAR in each, tehy represent his 5th and 6th best seasons in his career. and based on my rough translation from starting to relieving, i think i'm being fair. this gives him a total WAR of 79.3 (i'm also considering his 2001 as about a 3 WAR season for a starter, but that might be overly generous) and the sum of his top 7 seasons as 40.8. his JAWS would then be a generous 60.05, an improvement over his current 54.2, but still less than schilling and mussina, and slightly below an average hall of fame starting pitcher. on my prior scale, he would slot in as 13th best on the '15 ballot, with a score of 97.2%. i'd probably have to make a few more stretches and happy assumptions before he overtakes either of those guys. basically, i'd have to fabricate another 3 WAR for him to catch mussina, and 4 WAR to catch schilling. WAR isn't everything, of course. and while smoltz might make up a fair amount of the distance between he and mussina in postseason performance, schilling still has the edge there, too. (11-2, 2.23 ERA and a better WHIP and K/BB in 133 innings vs 15-4, 2.67 ERA in 203 innings). by all rights, smoltz should be a hall of famer. but if we're taking turns, schilling should be ahead of him in line.

Ceetar wrote: I might be interested in TT. Hmm. i've made a tulowitzki-based offer to whet your whistle.

Nymr83 wrote: Edgy MD wrote: If acknowledging your name is a dumb because of sports associations, I'd rather be wrong. The girl's only sin is loving her father. Unless you are someone who uses it for work purposes (like a sportswriter, a publicist, etc) using your real name on twitter is not a great idea. This doesnt take away at all from how wrong anyone attacking her is, but still not smart. how would twitter be different from any social media in this regard?

if i look to JAWS as my metric of choice, i could make an argument that nomar garciaparra is a better hof candidate than carlos delgado and don mattingly, and also jeff kent, but not quite gary sheffield. lets take a look, shall we? JAWS basically averages the total WAR accumulated in a players career with his WAR accumulated during the peak 7-years of his career. we'll be using bbref's own WAR calculation here, though different WAR measures might yeild different results (because of course they do). for his career, nomar accumulated 44.2 WAR, with 43 of those coming in his peak 7 years. his JAWS score is then 43.6. the average JAWS score for a hall of fame shortstop is 54.7. so nomar's JAWS is 79.7% of the average hall of famer at his primary position. not terrible at all, though not quite worthy of induction, to my mind. but it shouldn't wipe him clean from the ballot, either, in a fair system. for comparison, carlos delgado has a career WAR of 44.3, and a WAR7 of 34.5, giving him a JAWS score of only 39.4. he's at only 72.7% of hte average hall of fame first baseman (54.2), though he does sit just ahead of don mattingly's 38.9 JAWS (71.8% of teh average HOF 1bman). donnie baseball was on 8% of ballots last year. carlos delgado should get similar consideration, no? especially with far better offensive numbers. but it won't happen, will it? moving further up the ballot, we see jeff kent. last year he was on 15% of the vote. he had a longer career than nomar, putting up bigger overall numbers, albeit with lesser rate stats. indeed, jeff kent's career WAR is 55.2, but his WAR7 is only 35.6, giving him a JAWS score of 45.4. better than nomar by a smidge. but the average hall of fame second baseman has a JAWS of 57, meaning jeff kent is only 79.6% of the average. again, not terrible. but equivalent to nomar. yet nomar might drop wholly free from the ballot, while kent might even get more votes. gary sheffield has a similarly fine career WAR of 60.2, with a smallish WAR7 of 37.9. yep, at their respective peaks, nomar was a more valuable player than sheffield. but sheff certainly has the edge in longevity, and his JAWS is at 49. compared to the average outfielder's 58.1, he's a 84.3%. better than nomar. still, perhaps a bit shy of deserving consideration. indeed, by this metric, a comparison between a player's JAWS and hte JAWS of the average hall of famer at the position, gary sheffield is 18th on the overly stuffed ballot. lets look at the names ahead of him. 1. barry bonds 220.6% 2. roger clemens 167.2% 3. randy johnson 132.7% 4. mike piazza 118.8% 5. jeff bagwell 117.9% 6. pedro martinez 115.0% 7. alan trammell 105.1% (trammel's JAWS of 57.5 is just ahead of derek jeter's 57.0. how, again, is he not in yet?) 8. curt schilling 104.4% 9. tim raines 104.3% 10. mike mussina 103.2% 11. edgar martinez 101.8% (i'm not sure what his JAWS equivalency is; perhaps all HOF batters? his JAWS is at 56, and that compares to a positional average of 55.) 12. larry walker 100.9% 13. mark mcgwire 95.8% 14. craig biggio 93.7% 15. sammy sosa 87.8% 16. john smoltz 87.7% (he's being compared here to a full-time starting pitcher. the positional average for a starting pitcher is 61.8; for a reliever, its at 34.4. if you ran a weighted average of his time spent as a starter and his time spent as a reliever, his percentage would go up by a little. for instance, if i weight his JPOS by opponent plate appearances as a starter and a reliever, it drops to 59.7, giving him a 90.7%. weighting it by IP as a starter or reliever, it drops to 59.8 giving him a 90.7%, and if i quite favorbaly weight it by years as a starter or reliever, it drops to 56.6, giving him a 95.8%. still, a below average hall of famer, but by less than would be assumed just from comparing him to a starter.) 17. tom gordon 85.2% (i know, right? relievers. whaddayagonnado? gordon had a JAWS of 29.3, and reliever average 34.4 in the hall of fame. his score would drop if i accounted for his 203 games started, but i'm not in the mood to do more math.) 18. gary aforementioned sheffield 84.3% oh what the heck, lets keep going. this is fun. 19. fred mcgriff 81.4% 20. nomar garciaparra 79.7% 21. jeff kent 79.6% 22. brian giles 75.9% (what? no way! he's really ahead of...) 23. lee smith 73.8% 24. carlos delgado 72.7% 25. don mattingly 71.8% (doesn't look so hot when you rank him this way, eh?) 26. darin erstad 53.3% well, you get the idea. from here down, it's not so impressive.

i saw two movies in theaters in 2014. they are ranked below. 1. the LEGO movie 2. planes: fire & rescue

i'm finding htat this year, more than most, i'm really struggling with deciding who to cut and who not to cut. part of it is that i see there are a lot of teams with, potentially, a ton of money to spend, and i've got some players that that money could get spent on. so my chances of redrafting a player at a reduced rate seems slim. it's worked in the past, and for some reason our league seems to have depressed salaries for the top players, but i'm not expecting htat to hold for much longer. so right now, i'm looking, i think, at a stars & scrubs lineup, and a fair number of bench slots to fill for not a lot of money in the draft. my team does look rather stacked, though. i'm happy to entertain trades for some of my more expensive players, of course, but i'm still in win-now mode, perhaps moreso now than ever. if, for instance, you think you might want to own your very own $60 clayton kershaw, and have something truly compelling to offer, i'm a-listening. the same holds true for a $39 future-met troy tulowitzki.

when is the troy tulowitzki bobblehead day?

jibbers! the very reason there's such a backlog, such a call for hte ballot to be expanded beyond 10 players, indeed a need to fill up all 10 spots on hte ballot, is because of foolish voting practices like this, and the silly, assinine notion of the first-ballot hall of famer. and for the love of chistmas, if ralph kiner (15th ballot) is the same amount of a hall of famer as lou gehrig (1st ballot), then by the same measure, would not there also be no differnce between barry larkin (lone BBWAA enshrinee in '12) and babe ruth, honus wagner, ty cobb, christy matthewson, and walter johnson (five fuckin' guys inducted at the same time!). if babe ruth is the same amount of hall of famer as barry larkin, then it doesn't matter if there's one guy or thirty guys inducted this year, if they all have merit. they're all the same damned amount of hall of famer. if alan trammel should be a hall of famer, but risks falling off due to time and rules, vote him the fuck in instead of pretending to wring your hands while patting yourself on the back for doing your job in the worst way possible. 10 players were inducted in 1945, 11 players in 1946 ("old timers" all). the podium held up just fine.

ooh, interesting... i'd say to go for it depending on how the docs felt about the shoulder.

colon, because i think we'd get hte most back for him while also not depleting the staff going forward. gee would be the easiest to part with, but i'd rather they part with colon and get something better back. gee, and to a lesser extent, niese as well, is undervalued and underappreciated. he's much more likely to be useful to us moreso than what wed get back. the opposite is true of colon.

Vic Sage wrote: in a universe with a magical "force", these sorts of questions become moot, don't they? even magic has to have consistent rules or the universe falls apart. don't you even read comics?

i thought of that, but all the thrust is at the aft end of the ship. it needs something forward of the center of gravity to keep it from just doing massive somersaults everytime it tries to lift off. and the thrusters never move to provide the vectoring, but it could be internal mechanisms instead of external. but there's have to be something noticeable pushing hte thrust around, and i just don't see it, or recall ever seeing it. the same it true for all the other ships in the starwars universe, of course. the starfighters at least there's some plausible control surfaces at play there, but the bigger ships? i guess the ships could all just be generating some invisible propulsive energy field that they can vector into whichever way they seem fit, but there's never anything visible. ah fuck it. that's probably what it is. same stuff that floats the speederbikes, and landspeeders, and what not. its just that you'd think it would lead to some sort of visible distortion when its big enough to move a freighter (or capital ship). a vectorable ion field is what i'm thinking. sure, that's what i'll call it. but i'd like to see it, damnit.

well, sure, all of our fuel is a byproduct of fusion, one way or another. but how does the millenium falcon expend it's fuel to cause itself to turn in an atmosphere, is my question.

it is high. it is far. it is gone!!! didi did it! a home run from gorgeous, gregarious, gregori...uh... the shortstop settles under it for the second out.

the contrails coming off the millenium falcon were pretty cool. probably unrealistic from an aerodynamics standpoint, but cool. i do wonder how well that thing would fly irl. its stabilizing and maneuvering thrusters must use a shitton of fuel. assuming htat's how it steers itself around terrestially, of course, as i see no control surfaces.