roger_that

Most exciting baseball since Game Six.

Is closing a guarantee that he will avoid injury? Anything like a guarantee? Even a likelihood? Don't closers get injured, miss games, have their careers end?

Some late additions to this thread on the post-Mets phase of Davis's career. Someone (elsewhere) wanted to know why Davis was traded so often in the latter half of his career, and it was suggested that he basically wasnt a good MLB player anymore, though he was still perceived as such. He was still a .280 hitter, which people took to mean "He could still hit," but that was all he could do, hit singles basically, and not that far above the average major league hitter. Couldn't run. couldn't field, couldn't for power, couldn't draw walks. Basically useless. I ran his numbers from his last 9 MLB seasons i.e., after he left the Mets, which conveniently enough is the halfway point of his 18-year major league career. And it turns out to be true, pretty much. The first thing that got me was that his one year with the Mets, as measured by OPS+, was actually his third-best seasonal score, 125, and measured by Total Bases was tied for second, 254, with his second Dodgers batting title year. So 1967 measures, in several senses, his last truly good major league season. We swapped him out for parts at just the right moment, and we got some very crucial parts back in exchange for him. But after 1967, he really was mediocre at best for the next nine years. Over that period, he got over a thousand hits, bouncing around the AL (plus 379 ABs with the Cubs and Stros) and batted .284 over that period. But that was it. On a seasonal basis (162 games) he averaged 9 HRs and 31 walks, so no walks and no power, basically, and he was notoriously slow and a poor fielder. His OPS+ over those nine years was 98, meaning that apart from his fielding and running, he was slightly below MLB average. So that .284 BA was what kept him on major league rosters for nine years. He was thought to have been a veteran leader in those years as well. So the Mets squeezed the last drops of very productive juice out of Tommy D. and let him go at exactly the right time. Bring this up whenever someone says that hte Mets got nothing but "screwed" in their deals.

Edgy MD wrote: "Sure, except for the Shabbos," Huh. Guess he wanted Jay to reschedule Friday night and Saturday afternoon games for his convenience.

Who did such a thing? And when? And why? Jay's a cuddly bear.

That's a great TDA clip, but he really shouldn't get awarded first base for a HBP on that, should he?

yeah, it's really not a sports film, though they hit the highlights, and show some lovely shots of Darryl's swing and Doc's delivery--at least half of it is two addicts (no one is ever an ex-addict) meeting up in middle age in some dump of a burgers-and-fries joint in Nowhere, Queens, rambling on about how they screwed up time and time again, not really getting to the hard truths, indulging freely in cliches and blandly accepting their guilty pasts ("Yeah, well, I was lying, I would say I got my life together but I knew I was going to get high when the interview was over..." sort of thing). One moment i found interesting was Darryl denying giving Doc up after Commissioner Ueberroth warned Ray Knight that a young black superstar teammate was a cokehead, and Knight confronted Darryl. The story went that he explained to Knight "No, man, that's Doc." In the diner, Darryl assures Doc, "No, I would never! Man, how can you think I would ever put it on you?" insisting that what he told Knight was a simple denial that he was the black superstar, but Doc's name never came up. This is a very stupid story for any number of reasons: of course if it wasn't Darryl, it was Doc. What difference if he mentioned Doc's name or not? Also it's decades ago, so Darryl's going believably to remember word-for-word dialogue from 1987? And if he remembers it correctly but decides to lie to Doc today, is that so far out of character for Darryl? This is supposed to be the first time he ever misled a friend in some self-serving way? Also what would be so wrong if he HAD ratted Doc out? As a reformed addict, you'd think Doc would be grateful to any teammate who had the guts to call him out in 1987. Keith also has a few interviews where he notes his own declining to interfere: "I had my own problems" is his reasoning. A lot of blind eyes behind this story.

Did anyone else see this? Judd Apatow filmed them talking to each other in some dive of a Queens diner--oddly, it seems like they barely knew each other, which simple racism and Mets lore would argue against. But they just aren't close pals, and seemingly never were, just teammates. And for two guys who wrecked their lives in the same exact way, they struggle to connect with each other.

Wish I didn't keep getting so angry at them for what they did to me when they destroyed their own lives much more than my not enjoying baseball as much as I might have. The documentary keeps so much of their inarticulateness, which is almost an articulateness of a kind. I mean, what can you say about how you disappointed millions of people? So there's a lot of "Um, er, well, I tell ya, it's like, unh, er, ya know...."

"Doc and Darryl" doesn't focus on baseball, but rather on addiction. Watching it now. Their drug counselor says addicts are half fear, half arrogance. "I'm afraid of my own success, and nobody and nothing can ever diminish me." Sad, the whole thing--I don't know why I put myself through this.

A Boy Named Seo wrote: Shit, George Foster? No shit. I personally wanted to make "Shit" his official first name. I think Mets fans everywhere (or at least those living in my pants) were furious they didn't get value received in 1985 and 1986-- "we" were paying out the wazoo for this dude in sharp decline and we were PISSED! I certainly wasn't complacent about the fact that he was aging, and ya gotta expect a decline at some point. Of course it didn't help that he was awful from the start, either, but either way I expected him to put up something close to his peak (Reds) numbers for the length of his horsechoking contract.

Johnny Lunchbucket wrote: https://adage.com/article/podcast-marketers-brief/behind-new-york-mets-marketing-playbook-its-new-cmo/2410451https://adage.com/article/podcast-marketers-brief/behind-new-york-mets-marketing-playbook-its-new-cmo/2410451 To Continue Reading... Please create an account or log-in. See All Subscription Options Create A Free Account Already a subscriber? LOG IN >

A Boy Named Seo wrote: Marte was a free agent signing, Yes, of course. I mis-typed. But I think my point holds. I used to think that acquiring a player on a long-term contract meant something like "We expect to get an average of X value for Y years" from him, and I think that's how clubs saw it, but now I realize that's a naive way of looking it and I think clubs realized that long ago. It might be true with young players, that if you sign a 25-year-old to an eight year $160M contract, you might expect an average $20M player for that length, but with a 33-year old player like Marte, there's no way to reasonably expect a star performance by the end of his contract in 2025, when he'll be 37. The Mets can only expect a season or two of star performance, and anything beyond that is gravy. So they're really paying top dollar for 2022 and maybe 2023, and if they're smart, they're shopping around for upgrades in RF very soon. They're willing to overpay grossly for value received on the back end of his deal, paying him star wages to play part-time as the cost of acquiring him for this year and (maybe) next.

McCarver seems to get a bad rep about being a "know it all".... Also, the amount of times that he would bring up on a Mets broadcast, an outfielder playing too deep on a weak hitting player, only for that player to drop one in front of the fielder, is truly incalcuable. I seem to recall this being a constant theme with him and Strawberry in particular. Sometimes, Tim did know it all, and was willing to annoy the players by saying what he knew, which I admired no end.

No, no, a thousand times NO!!!!! I never want to see a productive position player swapped out for a back-of-the-rotation starting pitcher EVER again! Absolutely not. Wash your mouth out with Brillo just for typing that. Or your fingers, I guess.

Maybe we need more motivation than a simple pat on the butt? Very entertaining clips, thanks.

Actually, what I really don't get is why guys don't try to hit a grounder to third, as opposed to a bunt. A medium two-hopper to 3B, normally an easy 5-3, could easily turn into a double against the shift, and isn't that much harder to do than bunting a ball in that direction.

Edgy MD wrote: I'm a defender of the shift. I just celebrate the idea of combatting it with stragery instead of banning it. [media=youtube]tZEok91P5w8[/media] Oh, me too. I just despise the argument that bunting's too hard a skill to acquire, current pitching is too hard for anyone to bunt against, or that anyone who tried to bunt against the shift would end up with a .200 OBP. To me, if someone's willing to give you a single (I figure at least 40% of the time), you take it and say "Thank You!"

Edgy MD wrote: His bunt against the shift rolling unmolested into the outfield is something I'll remember until my always. Never happened. It's just too hard for MLBers to bunt vs. the shift, given the unhittable nature of current MLB pitching, and anyone who says that MLB batters can place bunts into undefended parts of the infield is just an old delusional dreamer lost in his fantasies of old-time baseball that never was in the first place. Or so I hear from defenders of The Shift.

Oddly enough, for a righty batter, seems to have a career edge batting against righty pitching, not exactly what you want in a platoon player.

Good point. Maybe this thread is premature. Although, it's not impossible. In 2019, he did it both home and away.

Alonso is now 4th on HR leaders at Citifield, 25 HRs behind Duda. Can you predict the date he will hit HR #26 this season? For tiebreakers (you'll need a schedule to do this part), which pitcher will he hit it off, and on what count?

Isn't that the psychology of trading nowdays? Get someone for what he can do for you RIGHT NOW, and if he declines, as he probably will, then accept overpaying for a bench player, pinch hitter deluxe, fifth outfielder type, or just swap him out for parts and take a beating on the back end?

Tremendous Dodger, tragic injury wrecked a HoF career, involved in two trades that were pivotal in Mets' history, first the trading-off of two Mets (Hunt and Hickman) who were respectively their first legitimate star and the last Original Met, and second the acquisition of Agee, without whom I don't think there is a 1969 Worlds Championship team, in between which he had a solid 1967 season for the Mets, a comeback player of the year-type year, though I don't think they had that award at the time. Brooklyn native, and a mensch in getting what Bouton was about on the Seattle Pilots. Very under-rated talent, coulda been one of the all-time greats.

Sea Bass? Really?