One of the most challenging things for baseball GMS and wannabe GMs is to determine when a sample size is big enough. Justin Turner was nothing special in his years with the Mets and they cut him loose in a salary-related move. And the very next year he was outstanding for the Dodgers. But in [...]
The Mets seemingly have a new pitching coach in old friend Jeremy Hefner, who pitched parts of two seasons with the club in 2012-2013 before having his career derailed by elbow injuries. We’re so used to pitchers having TJ surgery, missing a year and then coming back as a reasonable facsimile of what they were [...]
We're in the offseason, where people believe the Mets have an unlimited budget and other teams want to bend over backwards to trade us their best player. It's George Costanza saying he's figured out a way to get Barry Bonds and Ken Griffey Jr. and it won't cost that much. Nobody wants a repeat of [...]
The list of homegrown hitting stars for the Mets is pretty thin. It starts off solid enough with David Wright, Darryl Strawberry and Jose Reyes. But if falls off sharply from there. Sure, it has fan favorites like Cleon Jones and Bud Harrelson but if we’re being honest, those guys didn’t have particularly great careers. [...]
Sam Miller of ESPN had a great column idea. The premise is that a “fan” of all 30 teams came up with a wish for their franchise and the genie with the power to grant that wish asked for something in return. In order to grant the wish, the “fan” would have to sacrifice something [...]
In the beginning of November, the Mets declined their $9.5 million option on Juan Lagares, making him a free agent and likely ending his career with the club. If you type “Lagares” into the search box at our site – at least before the publication of this piece – you’ll get 875 search results. We’ve [...]
With Juan Lagares gone, it’s possible that Brandon Nimmo is now the most polarizing player on the team. He’s below-average defensively in center field, he strikes out too often and his batting average is nothing to write home about in most years and was downright bad last season. On the flip side, he’s got great [...]
This was true in November, when it was written, and it's even more true with the news that's come out in the last 48 hours.
Anyone who’s watched the Mets this century has at one point or another lamented the money the club has had on the injured list. Sometimes, like in 2009, it’s just the sheer number and while others, like in 2019, it’s the high-dollar value. This past season, the Mets had three players who combined to produce [...]
We’ve dissected the bullpen, lamented the defense and been exasperated about the manager. But today let’s celebrate the two cornerstones of what went right in 2019. The Mets got outstanding seasons from Pete Alonso and Jacob deGrom last year. It’s odd when you can’t say who your best player is. However, fans of Alonso and [...]
Recently we discovered that Marcus Stroman's fastball usage went up significantly when he joined the Mets. Was this something the team - the assumption being that the majority of pitches are called in the dugout, not by the catcher - was doing to try to help Wilson Ramos do better throwing out runners? Let's see [...]
Relievers are fickle. For whatever reason, they were deemed at some point not to have the stuff to succeed as a starter, which certainly calls into question their ability to consistently pitch well. And then when they only pitch about one-third as much as a starter over a full season, it becomes easier to see [...]