metsmarathon

bj upton has votes? hogwash!

sussex county, your time is now!!!

Davis 3.1 Quintanilla 2.2 Byrd 2.1 Duda 1.4 Lyon 1.2

Turner 2.1 Lyon 1.0 Carson 0.7 Ankiel 0.6 Byrd 0.5 Quintanilla 0.5

Murphy 2.0 Carson 1.5 Burke 0.5 Quintanilla 0.4

Frayed Knot wrote: But that idea [responding to marathon & Grimm] fails the same logic as [batMags] wondering why the Mets "chose" to put their team in LV. One simply can't TAKE the team out of Vegas and decide to put it somewhere else. Some guy/corp, one who presumably likes having it right where it is now, owns the team and has an ongoing franchise with the PCL. So first you'd have to convince said owner to sell, but even then once that happened it's going to be to some other guy with a site and stadium already in mind that meets the approval of the PCL. Something tells me that site is NOT going to be in northern New Jersey nor is the PCL simply going to hand one of their franchises to what is essentially their rival Int'l League. The AAA teams are where they are and there's virtually nothing the ML clubs or even league as a whole can do to change them. rules, logic, feh! i want baseball in the unused perfectly nice stadium just up the road from my house, damnit! (it's probably only suitable for A-league ball, given its size, but still. this is all about my own convenience!) 75 miles? from new york? sussex county is a world away from new york! ok, so it's 45 miles. i'm sure the yankees would be more than happy to saddle the mets with new jersey...

i think part of what hurt vlad was his ridiculous plate coverage. he was able to make a lot of bad contact, and that bad contact made for more outs. fewer strikeouts, but more balls put into play, and those balls put into play turned into outs moreso than miggy. vlad had a career babip of 0.316, which sat around 0.320-0.330 during his peak. cabrera has a career babip of 0.347 (0.347!) which tells me he's making a shit-ton of solid contact. his ld% is 22%, compared to vlad's 20%. where i think the real difference is is in the infield fly ball rate - vlad's average was at 14%, miggy is at 10%, and for the past four years it's at about 8%. vlad also had a slightly higher gb/fb ratio, 0.80 vs 0.74. vlad made a lot of bad contact in amongst all the good. all miggy seems to make is good contact.

maybe part of the solution is to take the AAA out of las vegas, and promote another city, or get another city started up. i think, personally, that northwest new jersey is a largely untapped baseball mecca, and the mets most logical location for their AAA club is sussex county's own skylands park, currently unused.

no, there was a scene in the movie where we zoomed right in from the outside, to see in from the bridge window. the camera then continued through the window and around the bridge so that we could see out. at least that's the cinematography that i remember. and that's why it struck me how truly exposed they were.

don't get me wrong. i really did like the movie. maybe it's just inherent to the function of phasers that they are inherently impossible to aim. i dunno. it just irked me - i never really noticed it before, i guess because never before was it made so readily clear that the bridge of the enterprise has a big ol freaking window to space, hey, why not just shoot there? do the shields affect the aiming? because it seems that all other manner of sentitive equipment can be targeted, but not the bridge...? its one thing to have crap aim with blasters or even torpedoes. but phasers are light-speed weapons, and at least in the final showdown, they were both at a virtual standstill in close proximity. ya gotta be able to target something. or is it just that there's some tremendous instability with harnessing such a sizeable amount of energy to make a phaser beam that aiming it is dicey and imprecise. i suppose i can go along with that. it's just never really explained in teh star trek universe, that i can recall. i'm an engineer. i work with weapon-y things. these things bother me. spock vs [harrison] was an excellent fight in a silly location.

yeah, i suppose that i should elaborate on my last statement... the fight was silly for the whole "back of a hovercar" thing, not because sock was doing a fair job of holding his own whereas kirk could do no such thing. i suppose it could have been elaborated upon that vulcans are stronger than humans, though obviously not stronger than superhumans. that was part of why spock went into the warp core way back in TWOK - that a human couldn't get close to the core. i did think it silly that kirk could just kick hte damned thing into place, and that with just the right final shove, it could self-align and maintain that position. i guess one final gripe, which would have made for a far far shorter movie, and a quibble. first the quibble. shuttlecraft sure do take the strangest flight paths, don't they? i mean, in general, they always seem to take the tourist-helicopter flight path as opposed to anything even remotely direct. though htey are really really fast, getting out to jupiter in a matter of hours? minutes? anyways, the gripe. you're locked in battle with a starship. you've got energy weapons and torpedoes. why do they never target the bridge? certainly with the vengeance firing upon the enterprise, tehy knew exactly where the bridge was, and obviously also all the critical systems. why shoot everywhere on teh ship except the bridge, when the goal afterall was to kill the crew and destroy the enterprise? why wait till your superphaser is locked and loaded. why not just properly aim your regular phasers? i mean, i get that you want to first take out the warp drive. but then, why make swiss cheese when all you really need to do is go for the killshot? makes no sense.

saw it loved it. i mean, sure, there were gaping plot holes. the biggest pair of which are really... 1. how did nobody in starfleet not notice the giant supermassive militarized deathship being built next to jupiter? 2. how did they build it so quickly in response to the actions of the first movie? did i miss something? after the destruction of vulcan, marcus decides that someone like john harrison would be the perfect kind of guy to design the weapons demanded by such grave threats being posed to the federation. so he forces harrison to work for him, builds his starship (and surely tests precurser systems and has a kick-ass systems engineering process in place), trains its (admittedly minimal but not terribly bad-ass) crew, and has it mission ready basically in the time it takes kirk to screw up his captainship once. its stated that the prospective fiv year mission that the enterprise would evntaully embarq upon is super-long, so how long could he really have been out there fucking up his permanent record? a year? and they conceived, designed, concealed, and built that uss vengeance in the same time? bullshit. i know its the future, but goddamn, its gotta take longer than that to build a whole new spaceship. everything else, i was mostly okay with, actually. quinto is a superb spock. and i personally loved the TWOK redux thing they did there. marcus was paper thin. he could have been much better with 15 minutes more runtime, i think. harrison could have exposited a smidge more, too. the last fight was silly though. remember, vulcans are stronger than humans.

i really like that '82 design.

well, i certainly don't use that as an argument, i just figured, well, its certainly possible that some of us do use level of expectation (either for position, usage or player) as a baseline against which to consider their performance, so i thought i'd throw it out there. i also think, and it's entirely based on anectodal evidence of my faulty memory, that we tend to vote aboslutely for pitchers and then relativistically for position players. ie "this performance from a pitcher is worth 5.2 points, so that leaves me with 4.8 points to divvy up between the position players." i think all players should be rated on a the relativistic scale ie these five guys made positive contributions. and that guy contributed 60% of the total, so he gets 6 points, even if that total is less than what some other guy did in some other game and only got 4 points. the frame of reference is the game, and the scale is "amount positively contributed." please place the above in my agenda advancement file. thanks kindly.

i'm really surprised no other sixes are showing up for gee. i mean, the dude k'd twelve mfy's, with four hits, no walks and only one run scored. plus, who the hell expected that out of him at this point? he didn't even have to pick up a bat to degrade his overall contribution! his game score (for whaterver weight you give such a thing) of 79 marks it as the best met start to date by someone other than matt harvey, and harvey's only had two better by that metric. i think he's getting undervoted, if just a little. the 'bot and i both had him at over six points. 6.2 for me, and 6.11 from my little automaton.

Gee 6.0 Parnell 1.2 Byrd 1.2 Rice 0.9 Duda 0.4 Buck 0.3

Hefner 4.0 Murphy 1.6 Rice 1.5 Byrd 1.3 Duda 0.9 Hawkins 0.7

tommy john

well, fuck them even harder, then. they had to pay more for their already discounted tickets. boo fucking hoo. oh, waah, they couldn't get a discount on their already discounted tickets? poor widdle baby.

i don't know how to make one of the charts, but i do know how to look at the raw numbers... there are two data sources. baseball info solutions and pitch fx. the first set of numbers is from bis. bis wrote: this year, ike davis is swinging at 26.7% of pitches out of the strike zone, making contact 48.0% of the time on those swings. last year, ike davis swung at 29.3% of pitches out of hte strike zone, making contact 60.4% of the time on those swings. in 2011, ike davis swung at 25.4% of pitches out of the zone, making contact 68.4% of hte time on those swings. this year, ike davis is swinging at 71.1% of pitches in the strike zone, making contact 70.6% of the time on those swings. last year, ike davis swung at 68.0% of pitches in the strike zone, making contact 74.7% of the time on those swings. in 2011 ike davis swung at 66.1% of pitches in the strike zone, making contact 78.4% of hte time on those swings. this year, 44.8% of pitches thrown to ike davis have been in hte strike zone, compared to 40.4% last year, and 42.5% in 2011 pitch f/x wrote: this year, ike davis is swinging at 30.2% of pitches out of the strike zone, making contact 52.3% of the time on those swings. last year, ike davis swung at 30.7% of pitches out of hte strike zone, making contact 59.8% of the time on those swings. in 2011, ike davis swung at 25.5% of pitches out of the zone, making contact 65.8% of hte time on those swings. this year, ike davis is swinging at 62.6% of pitches in the strike zone, making contact 78.7% of the time on those swings. last year, ike davis swung at 61.5% of pitches in the strike zone, making contact 83.6% of the time on those swings. in 2011 ike davis swung at 62.7% of pitches in the strike zone, making contact 84.0% of hte time on those swings. this year, 48.3% of pitches thrown to ike davis have been in hte strike zone, compared to 45% last year, and 45.5% in 2011 what does it all mean, other than that there's a difference between what bis calls a strike and what pitch f/x calls a strike? well, ike isn't really swinging at balls out of the zone more often, but when he does, he's making much less contact. and he's not taking more pitches in teh zone for strikes. in fact, the opposite is happening. he's swinging a maybe little more often, but making less contact. he's also getting thrown more strikes, because pitchers aren't afraid of him doing much of anything with the ball.

Harvey 6.0 Rice 1.6 Duda 1.1 Wright 0.9 Murphy 0.4 harvey loses zero-point-one for going over the limit.

Marcum 4.5 Duda 2.2 Parnell 1.2 Davis 1.1 Hawkins 0.7 Turner 0.3

Niese 4.2 Wright 2.3 Parnell 1.3 Murphy 0.8 Lyon 0.7 Valdespin 0.7

Hefner 4.7 Murphy 2.4 Buck 1.4 Wright 0.7 Parnell 0.4 Lagares 0.4

Burke 3.8 Carson 1.2 Tejada 1.0 Baxter 1.0 Valdespin 0.3