The season is young but there are a few things you have to love about this team. Here’s my top three:

3. Edwin Diaz’s 1-2-3 9th inning saves punctuated by swinging strikeouts.
2. Pete Alonso’s moon shots to dead center.
1. Jeff McNeil can hit any pitch thrown to him or snare any grounder hit to him.

10 comments on “Thursday open thread: 4/25/19

  • Metsense

    Yes,yes and yes!!!!

  • José

    Random thoughts/questions.

    I still hear dinosaur BB announcers talk about “productive outs”. Given a modern understanding of sabermetrics, does such a thing exist? My understanding is no.

    The only possible case where I can imagine that it is ever productive is when, with 0 outs, a grounder to the right side moves a runner from 2nd to 3rd. Now even if that particular act makes it more likely that that single run scores, what does it do to the likelihood that any other run would score?

    • Chris F

      The idea of a productive out lasts because baseball is baseball. We were told speed doesnt matter from a SABR perspective, but that is clearly wrong. We are told hits dont matter, but that is similarly wrong. First to third matters. Playing baseball as a team and in all aspects matters as opposed to only BB, K, and HR – the trinity of SABR thinking.

      Its easy to forget there are countless variables with every pitch going into an outcome. No team plays like robots except for the Phillies last year, and Kapler has already moved off it. There’s room for *both* playing the game and crunching the game.

    • TexasGusCC

      Jose, productive outs do exist. Your example of a grounder to the right side with first and second has a problem: It could be a double play. However, if there was a runner on second only, a grounder to the right side gets him to third and gives your team a real good chance to get a run even with an out.

      Since logic tells us that your chances of making an out are at minimum twice as good as your chances of getting a hit, why not use those odds to make a productive out? I will always advocate fundamentals, and I have seen too many times that the Mets players lack a plan at the plate. I’m hoping Chili Davis can fix that.

  • José

    In reading Keith Law’s strong argument that Mike Mussina belongs in the HOF, I noted that Law points out that Moose spent his entire career in the ALE, the consistently strongest division in the highest run-scoring era in BB, which led to Moose having a high lifetime ERA of 3.68

    Now I realize that some modern metrics take into account ballpark effects, but do any pitching metrics take into account the consistently better teams that Moose most often pitched against?

  • José

    The modern consensus is that lineup protection doesn’t exist. In other words, it doesn’t matter much who hits behind the batter in question in terms of the quality of pitches offered.

    Is this a partial explanation for the reason Olerud, who stood fairly straight-up and 6 foot 5 (making his strike zone relatively huge), managed to walk 125 times in 1999 (the highest single season total in his career) with Piazza hitting behind him nearly always?

    • Chris F

      Would be good to redo all these numbers, because players tell you lineup protection exists. The thing is, I dont think its simple to determine. How do you measure it, and isolate that as the only variable in an experiment. Unfortunately, many of the great claims are made with terrible scientific approach and virtually no rigorous statistical analysis (or at least not widely reported).

  • José

    I observe that Canó is up to .272/.323/.435 despite his hideous start

    • Chris F

      The math of small sample sizes.

  • Brian Joura

    The latest podcast, with Charlie Hangley, is up. You can listen to it here — http://cast.rocks/hosting/13288/Charlie-Hangley-42419.mp3

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