A look back at Sandy Alderson’s first year as GM

Last October immediately after the end of the season the Mets fired general manager Omar Minaya. Before Halloween, they hired Sandy Alderson to take his place. With almost a complete baseball season under his belt, let’s take a look back and see how Alderson has done. Here are his major moves, excluding the 2011 Draft, [...]

How does Terry Collins’ batting order rate?

Lately, I’ve talked some about lineup construction and the traditional approach to filling out the batting order and an optimized lineup. Perhaps the biggest difference is that most teams bat their best hitter third while the optimized lineup would have that hitter batting second or fourth. The optimized lineup is the result of thousands of [...]

Has Terry Collins been any better than Jerry Manuel?

On Saturday the Mets rallied back from a 7-1 deficit to take a 9-7 lead, only to lose 11-9. It’s the type of loss that would have been crushing just a couple of weeks ago and now it’s just one of the many toss-up games that the Mets could have won. It’s just another loss [...]

Mets Run Their Race, Despite Missing Horses

To sound like a Madison Avenue hack flak from days gone by, it’s a whole new ballgame in Flushing. This Metsian year has taken on the all-too-familiar hue of 2009 and 2010: some early hope, a crippling wave of injuries and a total capitulation to the rest of the NL once the temperature finds itself [...]

Collins’ performance makes fans forget about Backman

We had a poll on the site earlier this week which asked: “Knowing what we know now, who do you want managing the 2011 Mets?” There were four choices – Wally Backman, Terry Collins, Davey Johnson and Other. I expected that the crowd would have a majority for Collins but I thought Backman would have [...]

How will Terry Collins deploy his catchers in 2nd half?

Last year at the All-Star break the Mets were 48-40 and in second place in the NL East. They were a game behind the Dodgers in the Wild Card race. But they started the second half of the season going 2-9 and never recovered. This year the picture at the All-Star break is not nearly [...]

The Story of 2011 (So Far) As Told By Mets360

We’ve reached the halfway point of the 2011 New York Metropolitans’ baseball season, chronologically, if not statistically. The Mets sent two players to the game, one of which will play – a commendable showing for a team which had been predicted to act as the spittoon of the NL East and began the year five [...]

Collins’ impact on team gives fans hope

I’ve decided to give New York Mets manager, Terry Collins, a special tribute for what he has been able to accomplish with this team. It was only last year when General Manager, Sandy Alderson, made the announcement that Collins would be the newest skipper in the organization. Wally Backman, the second fan favorite next to [...]

For the Mets, .500 Is Step One

Since their 3-1 start to the season, the Mets have scraped the .500 mark twice: on May 20 at Yankee Stadium, and then last night (6/15) in soggy Atlanta. That’s a couple of pretty fair ballclubs, isn’t it? It’s not like they bulldozed the Mudville Nine to get there: they did it at two of [...]