roger_that

=vtmet7 post_id=110729 time=1665329759 user_id=80] is a hurt Max still better than the alternative? likely yes...as Marte said, everyone is playing with pain this time of year

Where do you come down on this question, whether Max's recent disastrous outings are due to him having some undisclosed (oblique?) injury or just bad luck cropping up at the worst possible moment? If he is hurting, but won't own up to it, for whatever reasons, what do you do if you are Buck, assuming of course that the Mets advance from the SD series? Do you pull him at an early sign that he doesn't have it? A very early sign? Or do you treat him like your sureshot HOF starter and ride him longer than you'd ride any other horse?

Edgy MD wrote: a meaningful chance that it was deGrom's last game as a Met. A damned good chance, I'd say. Curious: for comparable money, do you suspect he thinks "Get me the fuck away from these non-supporting teammates and these horrible memories" or "I like it here and the run support can only get better if I stay"?

I think all Mets relievers should zip line in from the Shea Bridge to the mound. NOW we're talking! Puts a whole new slant on, "get me the bullpen on the wire." How about parachuting into the game like that dude did in the '86 Series?

I actually came up with a system far more radical than the current playoff system, in which you fix the number of teams eligible for the playoffs in August, essentially every team above .500 or reasonably close to it, and have the bottom-most of those two teams try to eliminate its opponent in a 3-game series, the winner going on to face the next-higher ranked opponent in another 3-game elimination tournament (while the rest of the league finishes out the regular season), and so on, meaning that by the time you reach the teams that would be in the playoffs under the current setup, the wild card survivor would have won a goodly number of three-games series against pretty good teams.

Frayed Knot wrote: Hey, if you want to make the case for larger and larger playoff pools then have at it. The idea, as I see it, is to keep a larger number of teams in the chase for the post-season as long as you can, eliminating the boring outcome of many teams being totally out of the competition by late August BUT to have those lesser teams know that if they do get into the post-season they will face an almost insurmountable slog, facing in the second round well-rested division winners and in the winners' home park. It's a consolation prize, and hardly worth having but worth having because it's (barely) better than the alternative which is no playoffs at all. If the Mets advance at this point, it will be because they've overcome steep odds, beating superior competition with loads of advantages against them. If they do that, by my lights, then they'll deserve to advance, but the odds are against them, as they should be. I would much rather be the Braves at this point, and that's as it should be. The Braves won the division, played tough when they needed to, and hats off to them.

Frayed Knot wrote: So if you want the extra teams/games/dollars that expanded playoffs bring, do understand the downsides as well. I certainly didn't want these expanded playoffs and plenty of others didn't want them either. And were on record about that long ago. I thought and think they were a great idea. I love the idea of disadvantaging teams that fail to win to win their divisions outright. I believe that if you don't win your division, you should play a series (I'd favor a single game) that puts your entire season on the line, and THEN if you win that series, you have to play a well-rested division winner on the road. Make the 162-game season mean a lot, virtually give the division winners a foot-on-the-throat advantage in the post-season, because if you can't win your division, you don't really deserve to play in the post-season at all. That's what I believe. These wild card series ought to be a killer, using up your best pitchers, exhausting your tired regulars who need a BYE, putting you at a terrible advantage if you win it and have to face a strong, rested opponent, and sending you home in disgrace if you lose it. My idea of fun baseball is what LA has now, sitting back, resting up, making their intense plans for dealing with the Pets or Madres who they're watching on TV, and coming out next week feeling confident that they're playing against a beatup opponent who've used their bullpen to death and whose starting pitchers have just used up everything they've got. That's fun.

If you would kindly read this tweet and particularly these comments, you might see how common my emotions are among the NYM fanbase. No need to get personal with me, honestly. I'd bet many more Met fans are feeling like I am today, disgusted and pissed-off, than are feeling all upbeat and smiley and satisfied.

If you're enjoying this, you've got a screw loose in your head. I'm annoyed at myself for giving a damn about the Mets in the first place, and for thinking well of them. If I could get myself to root against them, then maybe I'd be having fun now. Maybe that's the ticket. Root for the Padres, and then I can enjoy tonight's creaming of deGrom and four weak Ks from Alonso.... Will that work? We'll see. The consensus seems to be that Scherzer's pitching through a badly damaged oblique, btw. If they somehow get past the Padres, and he fesses up to the oblique bothering him, do you keep pitching him until you get eliminated or do you give his starts to someone else? A moot point, I know, at this late date. I'm just wondering how many blowouts, multi-HR games do you give a future HoFer who can't get anyone out but insists he's fine to keep pitching. Can you imagine if this began a few weeks earlier and the Mets hadn't gotten a playoff spot at all? Do you think they would have kept putting him out there every five days to get lit up like this? At what point would Alonso rethink calling it "fun"? And yeah, I was here in 2007. No meltdown is ever fun.

You're mincing his words No, I'm quoting his words. It's an asshole thing to say. I know he's not enjoying this, you know he's not enjoying it, Pete knows he's not enjoying it. No part of this is fun for anybody. Maybe in the long run, decades from now, we will all look back at 2022 (if it ends as horribly as I suspect it will, sometime tonight), I can look you in the eye and say that, all in all, 2022 WAS kinda fun, despite how it ended, but right now, today, this completely blows. It's the most sickening, most disappointing, most disheartening, most miserable scenario any Met fan could imagine, given the 101 wins and the playoffs appearance. I could give Pete a pass if we'd played well last night, lost a cliffhanger, got clipped around inning 14, got a few come-from-behind runs to tie it up at some point, etc. But after playing so disgracefully last night, to say "This is fun baseball"? It's the statement of a clueless dolt who has no respect for the demoralized fan base.

There's a way to express the idea of looking forward to competition in a backs-against-the-wall situation, such as they're in now, without using terms like "fun" to describe it. Saying "This is fun baseball" is a kind of doublespeak. It isn't fun, Alonso isn't enjoying getting the shit kicked out him any more than I am watching him getting the shit kicked out of him, and this isn't a respectful way to describe the situation facing him, even with a former Cy Young winner and the current batting champion standing closest to him on the field. Challenging work, all we can do is to play our best, I believe we can still come through, etc. are all cliches he can use and not piss me off, but "fun baseball"? Fuck that noise. No one's having fun here, now, today. This is fun like Putin wants peace. Please, Pete, don't blow sunshine up my ass, ok? You're neck-deep in shit, don't make worse by denying where you are.

Pete Alonso says he is I don't know about you, but this shit offends me. I am having the least fun as a Met fan today that I can remember having ever, including the early-1960s, late 70s, mid-90s, etc. This is absolutely demoralizing, misery-inducing, infuriatingly frustrating, terrible baseball--and this asshole is having fun? At least when the team sucked, when it lost 90+ games in a season, we knew how far how we had to go to rebuild. Now we're paying guys 42 M a year to pitch like Ray Daviault. Well, maybe de Grom will toss a gem tonight, and tomorrow will be a romp, and we'll cruise into LA and sweep them, and I'll forgive Alonso for spouting this babble.

And Colbert was in the stands in St. Louis as a boy on Stan Musial's 5 HR day, supposedly.

Edgy MD wrote: one of those prospects is a difference maker in a later season, and Met fan lamentations will fill the city night. I seem to remember trading R.A. Dickey to get D'Arnaud (and Syndergaard, of course), dumping him for nothing, and having him turn into an All-Star catcher, when all we needed was a half-decent catcher, and beating our ass in. Talk about lamentations!

On a serious note, and I know there are more devoted Mets fans (ca. 2022) than I, but I've been feeling majorly down since the weekend, and my chief consolation in grim times before has been to think about baseball. This time it doesn't work. It makes it worse, in fact. It's sort of nightmarish, actually. Thinking about baseball only makes things much much worse.

Our entire lives are meaningless at this point.

Funny thing is I strongly support this playoff setup. I've been saying for years that the team with the best W-L record should get all sorts of advantages like a BYE in the first round, and getting to face the WC card team off a tough series, at home, etc. Now it's not so funny.

Yeah, we should hold a contest for "The Most Convincing Upside to Getting Swept by The Braves."

And I had SO been looking forward to this series and kicking the Braves' ass six ways from Sunday. Well, now it's Sunday, and my butt is very sore.

Chad ochoseis wrote: =roger_that post_id=109677 time=1664761549 user_id=128] Can someone remind me which genius decided that Travis d'Arnaud was a turd that must be scraped off the Mets' shoe? I'm kinda missing him behind the plate about now. The guy stunk up the joint for two full seasons and then had a batting average of .087 and OPS+ of -33 in his first 25 ABs of the third when they let him go.

=Centerfield post_id=109680 time=1664761792 user_id=65] Ok. So Wild Card. It is what it is.

Can someone remind me which genius decided that Travis d'Arnaud was a turd that must be scraped off the Mets' shoe? I'm kinda missing him behind the plate about now.

My farts are great improvements over Smoltz... I don't remember the sound of your farts. Can you post a wav file or something?

Frayed Knot wrote: I'll give ESPN this: not only have they put aside their split-screen/live-mic/let's-do-anything-but-show-the-game antics, but they've even shelved the constant crawl for the night. Usually the crawl only disappears during games they care about while sports like baseball are treated as fodder for them to advertise what else is going on, particularly if it's going to be on their network. It's like, for one night only, they elevated MLB to major league status and are therefore sparing us the WNBA scores, college football injury reports, latest Tom/Giselle marriage rumors, and all the other tripe that we specifically tuned in NOT to see. Watching a game on a full screen ... what a concept!! Coney is a great improvement over Smoltz.

=roger_that post_id=109469 time=1664674369 user_id=128] When the Mets score 19 runs in the last two innings, you will all eat your words.