roger_that

Did come across this from Mets Memories on the UMDB, 2012: "Knight just said on a radio interview on WFAN that he was never offered $800K. He said he made $530K and they offered him another year at $535K. He said he told them that he just wanted a 2-year deal and they told him that "it's not going to happen." He said for years he's been reading that he turned down $800K" And of course "cut" is just shorthand--if he wasn't a free agent, they wouldn't have released him and still paid him. I thought that was understood. Apparently not. I'll spell it out for you next time.

I thought the Orioles offered him better. I'll check the 30-for-30 again, and Pearlman's book. That's certainly what I remember him bitching about

=roger_that post_id=84389 time=1641931379 user_id=128] I don't think their mentality was to sign up a limitless number of stars.

It's OK with me if we combine these threads. I think the key unknown here is money. The elephant in the room in the Lynn thing was raised by Frank Cashen in the article: do they want to trade all of their best young players for someone who has only one year left on his contract, to which the answer is DUH. Of course you don't. But if you can sign him to a long-term deal for superstar money as a condition of pulling the trigger, then also DUH! Of course you pull it. The 1983 pre-Straw/Mex/Doc/Kid Mets weren't going anywhere, Lynn or no Lynn. Same with Arod. Does signing him mean they're just getting started with big contracts or does it mean "OK we've spent our budget for the foreseeable future. Let's see if this one big signing solves all our problems from this point forward." Personally, I don't think their mentality was to sign up a limitless number of stars. To the contrary, I think the 1980s Mets were committed to their kids coming through, which they did--Mookie, Dykstra, Backman, Doc, Straw, Darling, Sid, Mitch, McDowell, all were cheap enough and good enough that they were able to sign a few vets to big money deals and become a winning team. Without the kids coming through huge, they would have had an impressive payroll but not much in the way of results.

On second thought, maybe not so dumb. Lynn was almost precisely (one week off) four years older than Mookie, and he became a corner outfielder at just about the time the Mets called up Lenny Dykstra and made a corner outfielder out of Mookie, In the article I linked to, the deal included Jeff Reardon OR Neil Allen, so either would have been acceptable to Herzog for Keef. Of course, that means we wouldn't have been able to deal Reardon or Allen for Ellis Valentine, which might have been a good thing in itself. Funny alternate history, Lynn in 1986 Series against the Sox.

A Boy Named Seo wrote: What cooks my noodle is would we still have gotten Keith if we didn't have Neil Allen to dump on St. Louis? I think Whitey woulda took a package of Tom Hausman and Brent Gaff just to unload Keef on the last-place Mets.

Never heard this one before: https://twitter.com/GlobeChadFinn/status/1480635463518019591/photo/1https://twitter.com/GlobeChadFinn/status/1480635463518019591/photo/1 Colossal dumbness, even to consider it. Though I don't know how much older Lynn is than Mookie. Five years maybe?

Still Yankee trash to me.

...for Jae Seo. Greatest Mets career ever ruined by a NYC taxi driver.

Not a minute too soon!

I've got it on my DVR and watch snippets every so often. It's a great pandemic isolation soother for me.

=kcmets post_id=83601 time=1640381512 user_id=53] Nothing Metly, and kinda unnecessarily twisted... no?

I just read that Greta Thunberg and Kyle Rittenhaus were born on the same day, which shows you something, I guess....

Point well taken.

Edgy MD wrote: blond white reserve infielders How many blond reserve infielders of color have you seen?

Kiss his Yankee taint.

Fuck up. Ex-Yankee Fuckup, to be specific. Bitterly disappointed. Ya spend years detesting these Yankee jerkoffs, Steinbrenner apologists, and evil Empiracists, and then the Mets gotta shove another one down my unwilling throat. I'm agin it. Fuck. Up.

I wonder if there's a list (a LOOOOONG list) of all the MLB draft picks ever available online. https://www.baseball-almanac.com/draft/baseball_draft.shtmlhttps://www.baseball-almanac.com/draft/baseball_draft.shtml http://www.thebaseballcube.com/draft/year/http://www.thebaseballcube.com/draft/year/ Thanks. This will keep me busy for the next few months. See you guys sometime in 2022!!

I wonder if there's a list (a LOOOOONG list) of all the MLB draft picks ever available online. If there is, I could go through it to see all the players the Mets have ever picked and see which ones never made to the majors with the Mets but starred for other teams. But a little Googling doesn't turn up any such list.

One of the most highly anticipated things in my life was the brand-new gigantic modern scoreboard that was promised in late 1963 for sparkling new Shea Stadium. I remember the artist's conceptions of it, and thinking "How cool! I can see actual photographs on this newfangled thing!!" though I couldn't quite imagine how that would actually work.

Johnny Lunchbucket wrote: Also, am I right that the Mets org once had Steve Rogers, the Expo? Incorrect. You may be thinking of Steve Renko, who was traded early in his Met-hood to Montreal (for Donn Clendenon).

Steve Phillips is the answer. I think I saw him play 2B that afternoon. Wish I'd paid closer attention. Wish they'da released him, in retrospect.

Johnny Lunchbucket wrote: Good guess, Rogers But incorrect. Much more important to the Mets than Al Pedrique. Much. More guesses?

Yes, the infamous "JB" re-acquisitions. The Mets are very bad at remembering how old, and how close to the edge of the cliff, most players are once they're in their late 20s, and very early 30s. I think it's cuz their fans want the front office to sign name players for major dollars to show that they're not being chintzy that the GMs are so susceptible to this misunderstanding. It's really a crapshoot to pay someone a shit-ton of money after they've played 7 or 10 years of MLB--likely as not, the dude is history. The idea that teams sometimes let valuable young players go for close to nothing is interesting, because it suggests the large part luck plays in forming teams. It's not that the Mets were dumb in failing to hang onto Figueroa or Bey, just unlucky. If you can manage to hang onto all the prospects who turn into stars, you've got a great team, and if you let all of them go, you'll get a poor team. But no one can tell you definitively which ones to hang onto and which ones to let go for cheap. By the way, I looked up that 86 Lynchburg roster to remind myself who else was on that team besides Bibby. I remembered Gregg Jeffries playing in the game, but there was an obscure middle infielder who would be even more instrumental in Mets history on that team who I didn't realize until I looked up the roster this morning. Want to guess?

Hmmm, OK, though I was thinking of players NOT like Bibby or Kazmir who were traded at a point they were the Mets' hottest #1 with a bullet prospects who everybody knew to be valuable. (And who in fact got traded for real major leaguers.) More like, "Huh? You mean we OWNED his contract and gave him away for bupkis" kind of thing.