roger_that

I think you're too close to it or it means too much to you. "Bad luck' or "A rough stretch" is exactly what I'd call what's going on right now. When they're on a 7-game winning streak, they seem unbeatable.

The odd part is that while they do indeed suck, the top of the order is a scarily productive bunch of hitters most any team would like to have and the bottom half of the order is full of young hitters most teams would agree are bound collectively to improve in the near future and which has been pretty productive for the past few weeks. It's tough for me to look at any part of the Mets' offense and say I'd swap 'em out for a bag of balls--they're a mostly young group of good hitters who happen to be playing terribly right now. But I wouldn't bet a lot of money that they're going to suck starting this evening.

I don't even remember what he's yakking about, bringing up an irrelevant conversation we had months ago into a thread about something else entirely. But I do know that Mays gets credit for 8 All-Star games in 4 years.

Keep telling yourself that ********. You've got an audience that will lap that stuff up and beg for more. You do you. Tell me, though. If Rob Manfred decided that next season, because they're such crowd-pleasers, he'll decree eight All star games (not impossible with this bozo) then the players who get selected to play in all 8 are as legitimate as the guys who had to get elected in eight different years?

Did nothing for me. A lot of boohooing about the tough life of a would-be band member playing crummy gigs at Long Island's many crummy venues for years and years (paying doooooz!) and a lot of soap opera crap about stupid life decisions made by a not especially bright musician when he was a kid. I never got Billy Joel, so my opinion is clouded by that understanding. I watched only the first 45 minutes or so.

Collectively, this year so far they've got 24 HR, 76 RBI in 678 ABs. I think you can probably say fairly they will improve from here. That's not bad for a full season of one infielder. Last year, they (Baty and Vientos combined, no Mauricio) had 31 HRs and 87 RBI in 566 ABs. Again, not too bad. Not exactly a useless slag heap.

Yeah!!!! And depending on how it works out, you get to decide if Stearns dealt the correct redundancy!! Why not deal off all three? I'll tell you why. Because at least one of them is going to become a star and you might get very little in return for dealing off another Jeff Kent, who also sucked.

There must be records of tens of thousands of games in which the starter pitched to at least 27 batters, thousands of which were low pitch-count games and thousands of which were high pitch-count games. That's a pretty significant sample size. The problem is accessing those records. I'm going on the premise that these two types of games would show a large difference in the effectiveness of each type of game. If it does, wouldn't you agree that "third time through the order" isn't really the problem, and that "high pitch-count" is? I still think there is a “little from column B” with zoned in hitters “noticing patterns” the third time up. No matter what the evidence shows? Here's a thought: how come no one claims any improvement at all the second time through the order? After seeing a pitcher's stuff once, batters improve not at all the second time, but there's a bump after seeing the stuff twice? Why should that be?

I have an issue with this, too. These extra relievers are guys who would have been in the minor leagues in the old days. Are you contending that, somehow (magically?), these players who would have been minor leaguers are now MLB quality pitchers because--why? Because their teams need extra relievers? Because general managers are now convinced (or have been persuaded) that the last few spots on the roster are better filled by second-rate pitchers than by second-rate position players? (I.e., that third-string catchers are no longer needed, that utility players who can play multiple positions are more desirable than previously thought, that pinch-hitters are needed less often with a DH in the lineup, etc.) How does having need for fewer position players improve the quality of middle relievers? Answer: it doesn't. These are the same guys who used to play in the minor leagues. Now, what I do think (and which agrees with your notions) is that baseball has come to realize that the difference between a tiring starter and a fresh reliever isn't as great as was once believed, even with top-rated starting pitchers (e.g. your Seavers and Koosmans). Any harm done by getting Seavers out of the game too soon is mitigated by limiting the danger of blowing out said Seavers' arms, even if that is only a minuscule chance of happening. So they do it, and put Reliever X in the game instead. I'm not convinced that this is a smart move, but neither am I convinced that it's very costly in the long run. Reliever X, who would have been back in AAA three or four decades ago, probably gives up a fraction of a run more than Seaver would have given up in his inning of work, a 4.00 or 4.50 ERA as opposed to a tiring Seaver's 3.00 or 3.50. In his one inning of work, that comes to a run every four or five outings. So it's a cheap way for the manager to persuade himself that he's doing very little harm to the team while (just possibly) saving Seaver's arm. Maybe a good model for testing out this part of my theory is looking at World Series appearances, where there is less concern for saving the ace starters' arms. (That is, with the exception of overwork causing a Seaver to blow out his arm completely and destroying his career, the risk to the pitcher is just messing up his arm for his next few starts, which don't exist in the World Series. By spring training, he will recover from a little overwork.) Do ace pitchers tend to go longer in their final starts of the season? I think maybe they do.

There must be records of tens of thousands of games in which the starter pitched to at least 27 batters, thousands of which were low pitch-count games and thousands of which were high pitch-count games. That's a pretty significant sample size. The problem is accessing those records. I'm going on the premise that these two types of games would show a large difference in the effectiveness of each type of game. If it does, wouldn't you agree that "third time through the order" isn't really the problem, and that "high pitch-count" is?

Streakiest team ever? I go from thinking "They're invincible" to "I never saw a more hopeless bunch of losers" every few weeks, and then back again, and again.

I think Do You Believe in Magic?

That's a very elaborate response, but identifying the problem as "incomplete times through the order on the third attempt" doesn't correspond to the situation I'm describing. I was trying to find complete trips through the order three times, and compare pitchers with fewer than 60 pitches to those with over 80 pitches thrown to the first 18 batters. So pitchers who don't get through the order three times wouldn't qualify. I realize that the limitations I've put on such a study would make such pitchers very rare, but I also figured that I had thousands, probably tens of thousands, of pitcher/games to go through. Finding such pitchers is not as easy as I'd thought, though, so I'm just left with a theory, which makes sense to me, but it's still just a theory.

Sorry--what wasn't a problem in 1990? Did people stop repeating that cliche around then?

I don't. Here's my thinking: "third time through the order" causes problems for some pitchers (probably most of them) NOT because the batters are now familiar with their repertoires, which analysts have repeated so often it's become a cliche. It's because the pitchers have a high enough pitch count that they're beginning to wear down. The way to measure if this idea is valid, however, is giving me problems. What I tried to do to verify the notion is to compare pitchers who've gone through the batting order for the third time on fewer than 60 pitches to pitchers who've done that having thrown 80 or more pitches to the first 18 batters they've faced. If I'm right, the pitchers with fewer than 60 pitches thrown should have ERAs the third time through the order that are comparable to their ERAs in previous innings, and the pitchers with more than 80 pitches should have ERAs much higher than from the 19th batter on. But I'm having a very hard time locating that data. Even AI, which I thought would be useful here, says no such data is available. I have a hard time buying that--teams track pitch counts so carefully for the past few years that I sense this data is out there somewhere. Does anyone have any idea where I can find what I'm looking for? Oh, and the reason I didn't do it more simply with "70< pitches" vs. "70> pitches" is that I expected there to be a lot of data available, and I expected a lot of junk data from pitches right around the 70 mark, which I thought I wouldn't get from the more extreme numbers.

Hard to blame Rogers for giving them the lead. Those were barely hits, off balls out of the strike zone.

Probably true, though I don't recall seeing those plays nor has anyone pointed me to the IGT(s) here expressing that thought. But say McNeil let a ball or two drop that a glove wizard like Taylor might have made a highlight-reel catch on. Is that hit or two or three comparable to the many, many hits McNeil got that Taylor would have popped up to the shortstop on? And again, I'm not saying that picking up Mullins is a bad move--it just doesn't seem like a major move to me. McNeil was doing a decent job in CF, and he's been one of the Mets best hitters all year long, somewhat to my surprise. It's almost as if they expected him to be a defensive problem and when he wasn't, they traded for his replacement anyway. P.S. and he cracked a hit against the Giants just as I was hitting the submit button.

Perhaps surprisingly, Ken Griffey Sr. on that '76 Reds team had a very poor dWAR, -1.8, that season, and certainly surprisingly (to me) so did one of those Gold Glovers, your 8th man, Cesar Geronimo, who posted a negative dWAR as well, -0.7. Unlike Tony Perez, whose negative dWAR (-0.4) might be chalked off to a "positional adjustment", Geronimo was not penalized for playing an "easy" position to play, and Griffey's poor dWAR is too big to be all "positional adjustment." https://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/CIN/1976.shtml

I decided to look up the 1941 Dodgers' roster to see if I remembered right. I think so, though they did have two players with flaws. Also they lost the Series that year to the Yankees, so not even a World's Champion. If you're curious, here's the https://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/BRO/1941.shtml link . Mickey Owens' offense was what I remembered being cited as sub-par, but their eventual HoF shortstop Pee Wee Reese also had a weak year with the stick. I think I remembered correctly that all 8 starters were good defensively.

Thanks. Mauricio slipped my mind when I was wondering.

As true as most truisms, I suppose. I'd ask you to supply an example of a championship team that had better-than-average players, both offensively and defensively, up and down the lineup, but I don't care to make an argument out of that small point. Someone proposed once somewhere that the 1941 Dodgers came close, I think, but conceded that they did have one (out of sixteen) that was sub-par. It's certainly enough teams with a weak spot or two for me to be satisfied with "all." The 1969 Mets had an offensive disaster at 3B, for example, and the 1986 Mets had Santana's weak bat at shortstop. McCarver said a lot of **** that was on the money, but some of it was just **** that sounded good and was hard to dispute. And sure adding a decent player like Mullins helps. My point is that I'm not expecting him to be a difference maker--he's going to take innings away from some pretty good players who've helped the Mets all year. It's just my weak memory, admittedly, but I don't remember anyone bitching about McNeil's fielding that cost them a game or even a run. And we've got some world-class bitchers here.

Every championship team has a few spots, either defensively or offensively or both, that were below average. I felt I could live with McNeil overall in CF. Not that Mullins doesn't represent a shade of improvement, certainly over Acuna, whose roster spot he occupies, and I'll take improvement where I can get it. But the improvement is minor, all in all. BTW, has anyone figured out who goes in at shortstop if Lindor gets a concussion or something in the middle of a game? My guess is Baty or McNeil. Not good.

True enough. I just didn't personally witness that many balls (or any) falling between Soto and McNeil that were catchable by better centerfielders. Maybe it's just that I didn't watch the games that happened in, I don't know.

The Mullins deal will obviously take some ABs away from McNeil, and some from Baty, all of Acuna's (who wasn't getting all that many ABs anyway), and a few from Vientos and Mauricio (when Baty plays 3B and McNeil is at 2B). I'd say he isn't a much more effective hitter than the lot of them put together, maybe a hair. Mullins is a 100 OPS+ guy (between 100 and 107) four seasons in a row, his only season out of that range being five years ago, when he put up a 137 OPS+. Overall, I'd have to say that I expect a roughly 100 OPS+ from McNeil, Baty, Vientos, and Mauricio put together going forward, so offensively I'd call Mullins a wash. He will of course eat up Taylor's ABs, which is an improvement, but like Acuna, Taylor wasn't getting all that many ABs lately. He will still get some, because Mendy doesn't like sitting players on the bench permanently. So it's a minor improvement that Mullins represents in offense, which makes me ask how terrible McNeil was in center, because that's where the major gain from the deal will come, on defense. You guys like to bitch about every misstep the Mets make, so maybe someone could point me to an IGT where McNeil's fielding was costly. I don't remember reading about it here, but again, I haven't read nor remembered every IGT. I like the deal, but don't see where it improves the team very much. A little, sure.

What I'm asking is "Did you see any particularly bad fielding by him in CF?" I didn't.