When teams are competing for championships, their “window” for contention is often talked about. The Texas Rangers had a short championship window, from about 2009-2012. The San Francisco Giants’ championship window opened up in the 2009 season and is still wide open. The Detroit Tigers window is preparing to slam shut as their stars continue [...]
As the New York Mets start approaching the beginning of Spring Training, players will be excited to be back, and eager to know their role in the upcoming season. Bloggers and reporters who follow the team have been writing about possible position battles that will take place in Spring Training, but there has not been [...]
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 [...]
Zack Wheeler had fairly a solid season in 2014. He's now had a year and a half of generally successful major league time, though he's still not the front-line starter that many had predicted he could become. He's still very young and has plenty of time to improve, but that doesn't mean we can't drill [...]
Next up in our projection series is Zack Wheeler. Wheeler’s first full season in the major leagues was promising as it was frustrating – with him realizing improvements in most of his underlying peripheral stats including strikeout rate, walk rate, GB%, FIP and xFIP. More importantly, Wheeler was able to toss 185.1 innings last year [...]
The long winter is almost over, so on this Saturday morning you gets bits and pieces—we are all gearing up for February and that magical moment when actual players report for actual, official, baseball activities. Pitchers and catchers report to camp on February 19th, signaling the beginning of Spring Training. You just know that Daniel [...]
Sandy Alderson’s three pennants and one World Series championship, while a first-rate achievement, may not be quite enough to justify his ranking at number twelve. But Alderson’s place in history is enhanced by two considerations: he was the first modern GM to actively introduce analytics, though rudimentary by current standards, into a team’s decision making, [...]
Baseball Prospectus recently came out with a prediction for the Mets record in 2015. They predicted that the Mets would win 82 games and lose 80. The question of course is whether this is possible or not. Potentially, this is actually a minimalist prediction. We’ll start with the concept of Pythagorean Won-Loss. This is one [...]
Now in his fifth offseason as General Manager of the Mets, Sandy Alderson has a large enough sample size of free agent signings for us fans and critics to pass judgment. Following the 2010 season, Alderson was hired as GM and brought with him a dream team of lieutenants in former Toronto Blue Jays GM [...]
Barring any Spring Training trade (ha!) or injury, the Mets’ 2015 Opening Day roster is pretty much set. There’s the usual battles for roster spots 23-25 but hopefully those are among players who have already seen time in the majors last year with the Mets. We all hope that the days of an NRI like [...]
At this point in time, it’s safe to say that most of us are Daniel Murphy fans. That being said, the cold truth is that this time next year, we won’t be doing a prediction for him because he’ll be on another team. But we’ll blow up that bridge when we get to it. In [...]
