Daily Archives: January 11, 2010

Range factor

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Howard Megdal makes an interesting point in his weekly column for SNY.tv. Check it out:

Oddly enough, the market seems to be dictating that it will cost the least to upgrade at second base, the most at catcher, with first base falling somewhere in the middle. And given that the biggest need for the Mets is second base, this should be good news.

Luis Castillo had a good season offensively for the Mets last year, so it’s easy to forget how desperate they were to get rid of him last offseason, or how desperate they probably should be to get rid of him this offseason. Here’s the thing:

Luis Castillo, as solid as he was with the bat in 2009, was a terrible defender. He ranked last  among qualifying second basemen in UZR and third to last in plus/minus. Anyone who watched the games doesn’t need the fancy stats to rate his defense, either; to the eye, his range was abysmal.

And at his age, with his knees, it’s probably only going to get worse.

If the Mets are actually considering groundball pitchers like Joel Pineiro, they’d be wise to first upgrade defensively in their infield. Especially — especially! — if the Mets are really thinking about giving Carlos Delgado and his hip woes another go of it at first base, with Jose Reyes at shortstop recovering from a leg injury and David Wright at third base coming off a pretty miserable defensive season of his own.

It would be either hilarious or depressing to see Pineiro reprise his 60-percent groundball rate in front of that infield, but be dismissed as a one-year Dave Duncan wonder because far, far more of the weakly hit grounders he yields dribble past the Mets’ infielders for hits.

But now I’m getting ahead of myself.

We are all witnesses

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Brian Bassett posted something on TheJetsBlog.com the other day that really made me wish it weren’t a Nike ad. It was this:

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

On SNY’s Jets Postgame show after the Jets win on Saturday, Adam Schein mentioned that he voted for Charles Woodson for defensive player of the year. Tom Jackson referred to Woodson as such last night on ESPN.

I don’t think awards are that important and I recognize they don’t often go to the rightful recipient, plus it sounds like a lot of voters are advocating Woodson.

And hey, he’s a great player. I haven’t seen nearly as much of Woodson this year as I have of Revis, but since Woodson’s teammate Aaron Rodgers was my fantasy’s team’s quarterback, I watched a decent portion of most Green Bay games thanks to NFL Sunday Ticket. And yeah, Woodson was impressive. It’s hard to argue with nine interceptions and three touchdowns.

But what Revis did this season was special. There’s really no other way to describe it. Revis didn’t make as many highlight-reel plays as Woodson because he was too busy shutting receivers down. Everyone’s seen the numbers at this point; they’re stunning.

I could care less if Revis gets the hardware, though it frustrates me that anyone could fail to appreciate the type of season he’s having. Jets fans are lucky to have witnessed it, and even luckier that he’s somehow still only 24 and has plenty of time to win defensive player of the year awards in the future.

UPDATE, 2:26 p.m. shamik points out that it looks like the above image is not an actual Nike ad, only Bassett’s photoshop work on top of one of Nike’s LeBron James ads. Shows how much I pay attention to stuff.

Items of note

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Patrick Flood posts a Jason Bay image that I plan on stealing and using over and over and over again. But I won’t do it yet, so go check it out. Also, RSS his blog. It’s good.

The pot calls the kettle black.

Walkoff Walk offers a nice solution for one of the hiccups with UZR.

I don’t know how I feel about the idea of the Marlins locking up Josh Johnson longterm. As a Mets fan, obviously I don’t want him pitching in the same division for the foreseeable future. But as a baseball fan, I like the idea of the Marlins being more financially competitive with their new stadium opening up, if that’s what that implies. They already have Hanley Ramirez under contract for a while.