Before the 2024 season began, I think it is safe to say starting pitching was not expected to be a team strength for the New York Mets. The headline starters from the 2023 season, Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer, had been shipped elsewhere prior to the end of last season. No big-name starters were signed [...]
A point of commonality for the two Mets championship seasons of 1969 and 1986 was that both teams possessed an excellent pitching coach, Rube Walker for the ‘69 squad and Mel Stottlemyre in ‘86. Walker was a baseball lifer, his playing career was mostly as a backup catcher, first for the Cubs, then for the [...]
This Thanksgiving, I'm thankful for a surprise article from John Fox!
A lot of teams, probably including the Mets, are going to be pursuing free-agent pitcher Yoshinobo Yamamoto, who starred in the Nippon League this season. However there is another star pitcher to consider signing who did well in Japan this year, and that would be a more controversial personality, Trevor Bauer. We’ll start off looking [...]
Actually there are more than three, and there are some like Carlos Carrasco who has probably already broken through the ice. But in this article we are not going to worry about the myriad of relievers and 4A types of position players, we will focus on three players who are established major leaguers and whose [...]
It’s the All-Star break, which seems like as good a time as any to determine mid term grades for the Mets players and management. This is a subjective process, which will factor in not only performance but also how the individual is doing compared to expectations. We’ll list batter, pitcher, and management sections, each done [...]
Long-time Mets catcher Tomas Nido now plays for the Syracuse Mets. His future is cloudy. He will probably return to the Majors at some point, possibly even to the Mets, but none of that is a given. Nido was never an elite prospect, he was an 8th round selection in the 2012 draft. He actually [...]
For many decades, it was usual for MLB teams to bat their best all-around hitter in the third spot of the batting order. Players like Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, Stan Musial and Ted Williams, among many others, usually hit third in the batting order. More recently some teams have gone to placing their best hitter [...]
I occasionally check the CBS Sports website including the MLB standings. The standings section includes hard data like won-lost, games behind, and run differential for each team, and also some projections. I began noticing, some time ago, that the projections were outrageous, in too many instances. The CBS computer, presumably powered by AI (artificial intelligence) [...]
It’s early, but the Mets’ home attendance figures are looking very good. Opening day is generally a sellout for the Mets and many other teams, as was this year’s SRO crowd of 43,590 at CitiField. The bigger surprise was another SRO crowd of 42,306 for the second game of the year. The weather was chilly, [...]
Branch Rickey was undoubtedly the greatest and most important baseball executive of all time. He turned two teams into perennial powerhouses, he invented the farm system, was a peerless judge of talent and, oh yeah, he managed to integrate MLB despite the unanimous opposition of the other owners. Rickey was once asked his thoughts on [...]
Vin Scully passed away last August at the age of 94, after a baseball broadcasting career with the Dodgers that lasted from 1950-2016. He was a man who was probably the best at his profession of anyone who ever lived. But, what’s this about his Mets legacy? It's true that Scully never was a play-by-play [...]