roger_that

So we're entirely in agreement. The only difference is that, unlike most grateful Mets fans, I tend to view McLean's performance to date as evidence that he could have performed similarly a month or two ago, when the Mets' need for a good starting pitcher or two was already manifest. I felt the same about David Wright, Hubie Brooks, and Jose Reyes and several other Mets who did well almost immediately on reaching MLB, btw.

Well, seriously (just for a second), what we have here is an unprovable hypothesis. Unprovable either way: it could be that the Mets were brilliant and picked the exact right moment to promote McLean (unlikely as that seems to me) or it could be that he could have won 10 or 12 games by now if they'd promoted him earlier and the Mets would have a comfortable lead in their division today. We will never know. But surely (I know, you don't like it when I call you that) there must have been at least one terrific rookie in all of baseball history who could have starred if he'd been called up months before he was called up. And if you can grant me that there was that one rookie, who can say that McLean isn't the second?

Do you have any evidence at all that I haven't taken that drive already?

I know, I know, it was a wonderful move. But I always wonder when any rookie performs well immediately, if he was a great addition to the team when they promoted him Tuesday, could they have gotten the same level of performance if they'd promoted him on Monday? Ya think? Well, if they could have gotten it on Monday, how about last Friday? Or last month? Or the month before? I suspect when someone plays lights-out from the get-go that the team made a mistake in postponing his promotion as long as they did. The only logical counter-argument is that he was a great callup on Tuesday, but a horrible rush-job of a career-stunting botch on Monday--that the team called him up, in other words, at exactly the precise optimal hour. Which I find extremely unlikely. To the point of silliness. But that's the counter-argument to "The Mets took too damned long in calling up McLean." Another mitigating argument, though an incomplete one, would have been if said player's position was adequately filled at the MLB level, in which case, what harm is there in keeping the young guy at AAA a few extra weeks or months? But we know that the exact opposite situation applies to the Mets starting pitching recently. It was a horrowshow of injuries, poor pitching choices, overtaxed arms, and lousy results. My conclusion is that rather than praising the Mets for promoting him when they did, McLean's excellence is a condemnation of their wisdom in making player-personnel decisions. And you know there were people in the front office, who got overruled, suggesting that he be promoted instead of continuing to start Frankie Montas. We will probably never learn who was making that suggestion so please don't tell me that the Mets' entire organization was behind that choice, and that they do this for a living whereas I am a misinformed fan griping on my couch. I get that. I'm more talking about the nature of McLean's promotion and the timing, which we will never know about fully, and the conclusions drawn from his immediate success. Most fans tend to conclude it's a sign that they know what theyre doing, and I tend to view it as a sign that they don't.

You're not looking at the big picture. Why go with team nicknames at all? It will be the Doordash Ikeas, and the Fanduel Toyotas, and the Geico Preparation-H's. You're so 20th Century! Who the hell are the Dodgers?

Do we have a category called "Famous Last Words"? You know, like that Civil War General who died saying "They can't hit an elephant at this dis--"?

Agreed, Manfred is a car full of clown cars, the worst thing to hit baseball since Pete Browning. But even a stopped clock.... This is a great idea. I favor a far more restrictive schedule than the current one which maximizes the number of opponents to "everybody," meaning that half the time I don't know a single player on the opposing team It works be fantastic for two reasons. One, the aforementioned familiarity. And two, the chance to see away games featuring the Mets. A trip to Philly, Boston, the Bronx once in a while would be fun, and Citifield would be packed more often with Phillies, Sox etc fans

I question the underlying widely held belief that starters of yore rarely, if ever, went all out while today's starters go balls-to-the-wall the whole game from pitch 1 until their strength gives out, causing quicker hooks than earlier. I question it because in some instances, it doesn't make any sense. Pitchers on the verge of losing their jobs (sent to the minors, released, dropped from the rotation) always have had little motivation to save their strength (whatever that even means)--they're certainly motivated to exert maximum effort on every batter, and if their strength fades from the effort, then it fades. They have nothing to lose. But also there are games and situations when maximum effort is likewise required. Game 7 of the World Series is the most obvious example, but there are plenty of similar spots, in "must-win" games all season long, where pitchers were encouraged to think (or thought all by themselves) that in this particular spot, they need not to be thinking about saving their strength for a later inning that may never come. And there were pitchers who routinely went late into games who were never known to be letting up their maximum effort: does anyone remember thinking for a moment "Gee, Bob Gibson seems relaxed out there with a three-run lead but he'll start bearing down if the Mets get a few baserunners on"? No, Gibson and Seaver and a few dozen others I can recall gave every single pitch their all into the ninth inning and often beyond. And they did it without getting injured, over long careers and 275+ IP every year. So what's the difference between their pitchloads and that of their contemporary counterparts who consider a 175 IP load to be a Herculean feat? Because I'm not buying that the difference is that current pitchers are exerting themselves and exhausting themselves sooner because that's how the game is played today.

Meaning what? You don't like it? We knew that already. Yeah, you have to do this if they throw inning 1 or inning 7. It's a basic requirement of the game. "put throw? Whatever. Let's see: they throw 1 or 1 and 1/3 or 1 and 2/3rds or 2 innings every third game, so that's maybe 1 and 1/2 innings in 54 games, less the times they're injured. How is that "100 innings or more"? Do the math. I think some of the brighter relievers understand that their W/L records don't mean **** right now, especially if you pay them accordingly. Not too hard to explain to the less-bright ones with dumb agents either if you're patient and avoid big words. Enumerate, please. Probably won't happen, unless starters start getting even fewer innings than they do now, but it makes a lot of sense. Managers, though, are notoriously reluctant to think outside the box, so somebody would have to do this and have remarkable success with it before it gets adopted more generally.

Didn't I just finish writing that the more important part is that the team gets greater flexibility? I thought I was clear enough. Apparently not.

I wrote "far greater stability" not "etched in stone." You do what you can to maintain and prolong standards, and explain away whatever needs to be explained. Besides which, the records are only a part of my post. A more important part is that I think as long as you're willing to assume that almost no starter will pitch a complete game, you get greater flexibility by putting them in in inning #3 than in inning #1.

Yup, much more than Mays deserves two.

I'm all for greater stability of records. One of the strengths of MLB has been the comparability of stats across eras.

To return this discussion to where it began, it's idiotic for a variety of reasons to call Willie Mays a 24 time All Star, if only because he played only 23 seasons. I'd rather baseball reference labeled each of the 1959-1962 games as a 1/2 of an AllStar game election which would bring him down to 20 AS appearances. And I'll concede his Mets appearances have more merit, though still weak, than I gave them at first but that's common, for a beloved player to get elected to all star teams past his actual starring days.

I went looking for an example to support my indisputable case that players who were elected to the All-Star teams in 1959 through 1962 get their credentials puffed up by the fact that there were two All-Star games, not one, played in these years, and I found a pretty good one. If, like me, you find this so indisputable as to be idiotic to argue otherwise, then read no further. The ideal example I found was Milwaukee's All-Star catchers in the late fifties and early sixties, respectively Del Crandall and Joe Torre. Crandall was elected (according to his https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/c/crandde01.shtml BBref.com listing) to "11x" All-Star teams from 1953 to 1962, and Torre was elected to "9x" All-Star teams, https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/t/torrejo01.shtm beginning in 1963. So Crandall gets a slight edge over Torre in this regard, right? The problem here, as those of you with functioning arithmetic skills will have seen, is that Crandall was elected in only eight different seasons, and Torre was elected in nine different seasons, Crandall having been elected three times in years that two All-Star games were played. So the edge actually goes to Torre. Of course, "All-Star teams" is a very poor metric to use in gauging player quality, though some folks do cite it as a measure of excellence (mostly fans of Bobby Richardson) but I think it's misguided to declare players who got elected to two All-Star games in a single season as two-time All-Stars. But it takes all kinds to populate this planet, I guess.

If the Mets had won 11 out of their last 12 games, with the offense performing exactly as it has, I think we'd be hearing a different song.

Yeah, Welch in 1990. The other one's kind of a trick question, since Seaver is the first and last Met to win 25. My youngest kid was born in 1990, turning 35 this year. Long time.

Pretty damned rare. Impromptu quiz: Who was the last MLB pitcher to win 25 or more? Part 2: who was the last Met pitcher to do so?

Funny thing is, some switch hitters have splits that are just as bad, or worse, than if they'd just hit fulltime from their good side. Backman was one of those, as I recall.

I don't know any Rays fans, so sure, speculate. Getting more wins credited to my rotation isn't a goal, it's just an easy way to sell the concept to your starters: you'll pitch the same number of innings, you'll get more wins, you'll get fewer losses, you'll face more same-side batters. As to the relievers, their W/L records don't mean a thing in contract negotiations anyway. So selling it to your staff is easy.

"Hey, Pete, Scott here. The Mets want to sign to a contract that beats the hell out of what arbitration will give you by a few million for the next two years and then guarantees you three years of what you're worth on the open market right now." Pete: "That sounds like a terrible deal. I'll take my chances on getting a career-ending injury. You're fired, Scott."

I think we're sufficiently desperate for a change at this point to give it a whirl. It may not have worked thus far because most things don't work most of the time, and most things aren't sufficient in themselves to turn losing teams into winners. I can't think of a single reason it wouldn't help, and several reasons why it would.

Using Garrett as the opener the other night reminded me of a way that starting pitchers can again routinely win 20 games in a year, and some years the league leader will win 25 games or more, and that way is to adopt the 1- or 2-inning starter, to be relieved for the next five or six innings by your real starter. As things stand, starting pitchers get decisions in many fewer games because the lead changes between the time they leave the game and the time the game ends. But since managers, and especially Mendoza, seem more and more committed to hooking starting pitchers from the games after a very low pitch count, or the sixth inning, or the third time through the order, or if he looks cockeyed, why not decide in advance who your first reliever will be, and simply start the game with your most rested, or your best suited, reliever, and bring in your starter for inning #3? Or better yet, get him warmed up at the start of inning #2, and by the time he’s ready, decide if you want him, rather than the guy who started the game, to face certain batters towards the end of inning #2, particularly if inning #2 has gone on for a while and your starter might be tiring. Even better if your first two pitchers throw from opposite hands, so you can take advantage of lefty/lefty and righty/righty matchups as well. Since the 1- or 2-inning guy can’t get the win even if he leaves with a lead, that means the 5- or 6-innings guy would get the decision much more of the time if your team wins. Even better for that guy, he can get the win but often, if the first guy leaves on the losing end, he rarely will get a loss. So your rotation starter who now ends the season with an 11-11 W/L record, would end his season with a record more like 14-8. I’m surprised no team has gone to a consistent “opener” strategy yet. Another advantage would be if your opener gets roughed up, you could turn that 6-0 game into a bullpen game completely, give 5 or 6 innings to the 14th guy in the bullpen who wants to show the manager what he could do with an extended showing, and save your starter for the next game.

Here is what Joe Posnanski wrote today about the bat shard incident of a quarter-century ago: August 10, 2025 | Wait — the Bat is STILL the Ball? Roger Clemens and Joe Torre are sticking with history’s worst alibi 25 years later. On October 22, 2000, Roger Clemens threw a broken baseball bat as hard as he could at Mike Piazza during a World Series game. Even now, 25 years later, those words seem surreal. But it’s true, it happened, in front of the entire baseball world … and nothing happened to Clemens. He wasn’t tossed from the game (he pitched eight shutout innings). He wasn’t even warned. He was later fined $50,000, which he probably found sitting in an old pair of jeans and that was the end of it. Well, actually, not the end because, famously, Clemens had a justification for his actions. An amazing justification. A justification that has echoed through the years. He thought the bat was the ball. Even now, this is so galactically stupid that it’s hard to know where to begin. I mean, let’s grant that in the heat of the moment, Clemens, a grown man who had been playing baseball all his life, might have mistaken a jagged baseball bat for the ball. Let’s just give him that one. Why did he then throw the “ball” at Piazza? How does saying it’s the ball in any way change the basic issue, which is that Roger Clemens threw an object at Mike Piazza as hard as he could? I wouldn’t be writing about any of this today except for this. Clemens is apparently STILL saying it. And his manager, Joe Torre, is joining in. Saturday, Clemens pitched in the Yankees’ old-timers’ day. And when he walked in to talk to the press, Torre leaped in to clear the air before there was even a question. “There’s still a question with the broken bat, with Piazza and the whole thing in Game 2,” Torre said. “I think if Mike knew that the ball was foul, he wouldn’t have been starting to run to first base. The ball went over the first base dugout, was foul right away. He didn’t know where it was, so he started running.” WHAT THE HECK IS JOE TORRE BLATHERING ABOUT? “I didn’t know he was running, and Mike said that same thing too,” Clemens said. “He didn’t know where the baseball was. So my first instinct when I shattered that bat in about four pieces, I thought it was a baseball coming at me.” DID THIS MAKE SENSE IN CLEMENS’S HEAD BEFORE HE SAID IT OUT LOUD? IS THERE ANYTHING TRUE LEFT IN THE WORLD? Just so we can keep our sanity, here’s what happened: Roger Clemens threw a hot fastball. Piazza dribbled it into foul ground and shattered his bat. The ball rolled into the first base dugout, and the fat part of the bat hopped up on Clemens. Piazza did lose sight of the ball for an instant and did start running toward first. But, almost immediately, he saw the ball roll into the first base dugout, and he slowed to a crawl — a good thing because if he had kept running, Clemens very well might have hit him with the bat or ball or whatever it is that Clemens thought he had. Oh, by the way: Clemens was looking RIGHT AT PIAZZA when he threw the bat. Right at him. He knew exactly what he was doing. Stop gaslighting us. It’s been 25 years. Let it go, fellas. You threw a bat at Mike Piazza during the World Series and got away with it. Move on with your lives.

How close is the "d" key to the "n" key on your keyboard? It's not a typo. It's a mistake. And you're welcome.