Hmmm... there was probably a better pun to be made there. Oh well, moving on. I'm among the minority of Mets fans that, even after his 2011 season, still liked Angel Pagan. I could certainly understand why so many other Mets fans were frustrated with him. But I never understood the logic behind the non-tender [...]
1. For starters, 2009 & 2010 were better than you remember In 239 games during the 2009 & 2010 seasons, Pagan hit .296/.344/.448 (.792 OPS) over 1009 plate appearances. Playing all 3 OF positions, but mostly CF, Pagan earned a UZR of +22.7 in 1952.1 defensive innings. All told, in a year and a half's [...]
The Mets have never been known as a team that steals a lot of bases. Yet if you look at their year-by-year stolen base totals, you notice that eight of the top 10 Mets teams in stolen bases also finished above .500 for the season. On the surface that may not seem so meaningful, but [...]
Manny Acosta pitched two scoreless innings last night and struck out five of the seven batters he faced. After giving up 9 ER in his first 7.1 IP with the Mets this year, Acosta has allowed just 4 ER in his last 27.2 IP. He has a 1.30 ERA in that stretch with 7 BB [...]
The Mets are 62-68 but they have been hit with a ton of injuries again. In fact, I bet you don’t know which player has made the most starts this year for the Mets. Carlos Beltran was leading the team until he got traded. Jose Reyes was leading until he went on the DL for [...]
Eight pitchers for the Mets have thrown at least 20 innings in both 2010 and 2011. Here are their ERAs for those two seasons: Name 2011 2010 R.A. Dickey 3.77 2.84 Jonathon Niese 4.05 4.20 Mike Pelfrey 4.58 3.66 Dillon Gee 3.92 2.18 Francisco Rodriguez 3.16 2.20 Bobby Parnell 4.20 2.83 Manny Acosta 4.00 2.95 [...]
I’ve been a Met fan for as long as I can remember. I could say since 1967, but I was two-years-old and don’t really remember much. I could have been swayed to the Yankees at the time, since when people would ask me who my favorite baseball player was and I would reflexively answer “Mickey [...]
Now that a trade of Carlos Beltran seems imminent, people are coming out of the woodwork to defend him and his production in his time with the Mets. But where were these people at the beginning of the year? Mets fans pledged their allegiance to Jose Reyes and now it seems likely that the club [...]
Fans often make big deals about who bats where in the lineup but in the overall scheme of things it does not matter very much. Now, that does not mean teams should pull their lineup out of a hat or start batting their pitcher leadoff. But the standard lineup does not come out much worse [...]
Last night (7/4) was one of those games that felt really bad, then suddenly euphoric. Not in the same sense that Sunday’s ambush of the TGMR (The Great Mariano Rivera) was, the 5-2 win over the Dodgers (I will refrain from any snarky nicknames referring to their bankruptcy filing: there but for the grace of [...]
Four games, 52 runs scored, 69 hits, only three of which were home runs – all hit in a single game and two of those were grand slams. As Casey Stengel meant to tell us all those many years ago, “The Mets are amazin’.” Every cylinder of the offense is firing, the pitchers are unfettered [...]
While Mets’ fans bemoan lingering injuries to David Wright and Ike Davis, as well as Jason Bay’s free fall, lost in their angst is the fact that the Mets are actually playing some good baseball of late. The Mets are now 8-4 in their last 12 games and are just one game back of being [...]