In the offseason the Mets showed a lot of faith in Wilmer Flores and Juan Lagares. They showed faith in Flores by not acquiring a shortstop to compete with him for the starting job. And they showed faith in Lagares by trading away Matt den Dekker, the best choice to play center field if Lagares [...]
Matt Harvey is a star, someone who should be in the rotation as long as he’s healthy. Dillon Gee is a placeholder, a competent MLB pitcher who should be in the rotation until someone better comes along. Gee has done a fine job for the Mets, making 103 starts for the club. We should salute [...]
Part of the fallout of the news of Zack Wheeler's impending Tommy John (TJ) surgery has been the commentary on the way in which the Mets managed his innings and (later reported) ailments last season. There have been plenty of Monday morning doctors, fueled by tidbits of information spun into speculation by the media, suggesting [...]
Anyone familiar with the children’s tale Henny Penny knows the moral of the story: Beware of those who predict calamity, especially with zero justification. We would be wise to remember the lessons of Henny Penny when it comes to the “calamity” of not having multiple lefty relievers on the team. Few things will have less [...]
At the conclusion of the 2011 season, General Manager Sandy Alderson was faced with what still stands as the biggest decision of his Mets tenure. David Wright and Jose Reyes were both 28 years old and set to become free agents. Alderson only had the budget to resign one of the team’s two homegrown, fan-favorite [...]
MLB.com recently released its top 100 prospect list for 2015. The good news is that there were five Mets on the list. The news that makes me do a double-take is that Dilson Herrera was not one of them. It’s a major undertaking to do a list around one team; to do one for the [...]
In Juan Lagares’ first three seasons in the Mets organization – from 2006 to 2008 – he committed 73 errors in 195 games. He was also a shortstop. In 2009, the decision was made to move Lagares to the outfield, and now he’s regarded as the best defensive centerfielder in major league baseball. Lagares’ journey [...]
There’s a school of thought that goes if you repeat a lie loud enough and often enough – it becomes truth. This is, unfortunately, not exclusive to one walk of life. Where it rears its ugly head in baseball is with the notion that you need to have multiple lefty relievers, with at least one [...]
Mets catcher Travis d'Arnaud had a rough go of it in 2014 on both sides of the ball. His early offensive struggles were well documented, as was his demotion and very strong comeback. His great second half went a long way towards putting to bed doubts about his ability to hit at the highest level. [...]
Will Wilmer Flores see polar opposites in his defensive numbers from UZR and DRS in 2015?
It’s unusual to see a player make a transformation similar to the one that lefty-swinging Curtis Granderson has undergone in his performance versus lefty pitchers. Early in his career, Granderson experienced limited success versus southpaws. But in the second half of his career he’s handled them quite well. Last year he had a .742 OPS [...]
They say that timing is everything. Last year, the Mets averaged 3.88 runs per game but not every starter received the same level of support. But what if they did? How would things look if each starter received the same run support, at the same time, for each game? Let’s examine if they did, with [...]