We like things that are easy. It’s why we add together OBP and SLG to get OPS, which we use as a shorthand for offensive production. In mathematical reality, you never add things with different denominators. But adding together OBP and SLG gets you very close to the “right” answer so we do it anyway. [...]
Here’s a comment of mine from February of 2020: Mets fans know firsthand the value of depth. I blame BVW for a few high-profile bad moves but he deserves credit for building the team’s 25-man roster depth to better than it’s been for a long, long time. My opinion is that the Mets are about [...]
There was an ESPN piece published today ranking every World Series. It's posted in The Garden, if you haven't seen it yet. Anyway, it's a reminder that the Mets are 2-3 in five trips to the Series. If we asked a poll question about which was the best World Series, my guess is that it [...]
Now that the World Series is over, it’s time to turn our attention to the free agent market. We don’t have a complete list yet of people who will be free agents, as players and teams can decline options and become free agents. But we’re not interested in a complete list, rather the top of [...]
Listen: Brian Joura has come unstuck in time. Yesterday the time travel was all through the 1970s up until around 1986. Who said you could never quarantine the past? There were two shelves of … stuff that had been quarantined for at least 34 years. Found some neat items, things that brought me back to [...]
The rule of thumb for BABIP is that a “normal” one is around the .300 mark. In our last full season of 2019, the MLB average BABIP was .298 or about as close to .300 as you can get. But what’s “normal” for the league is not necessarily normal for the individual. David Wright had [...]
Each year before the season starts, we put up a projection for players thought to have a big role in the upcoming campaign. Then, once the season is over, we do a review of how the projections turned out. As you might have heard, this year was a little wacky. So, instead of doing an [...]
Players have always been underpaid. In the last 30-plus years the system was set up so that the top players who were good enough to continue playing until they were eligible for free agency would end up getting paid closer to what they were worth. And frequently, those veterans got paid significantly more than they [...]
There's a whole generation of fans who never experienced the late, great "2 Guys Talking Mets Baseball." For those who missed out, it was two pals - Michael Geus and Jimmy Preller - who had a blog with daily articles where they would have a conversation about the Mets. It was like a podcast except [...]
For coaches and managers, sometimes it’s hard to separate their results from what they did to achieve those results. Take Art Howe for instance. In 2001 and 2002, Howe’s teams won 102 and 103 games, respectively. The next year he managed the Mets and that 2003 Mets squad won just 66 games. It doesn’t seem [...]
If you've been reading this blog for awhile, you know my feelings about Dusty Baker as a manager. Here's a snippet from 2019: IN PRAISE OF AN EX MANAGER – Dusty Baker is rarely thought of as one of the best managers in recent history but you’ll forgive me if that’s where he rates in [...]
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