This is, without question, the most businesslike conversation I’ve ever had with Scott and Ted, the hosts of Rockiescast and my buddies from college.
For a far less businesslike and far more unbearably lengthy conversation, check out the most recent episode of that podcast, a slaphappy 90-minute marathon recorded after all three of us had spent a bit too much time in the sun on Sunday.
OK, this isn’t a fully formed blog post but I want to publish it somewhere and I can’t quite condense it to 140 characters:
Mets fans reacting to posts like this one by saying that six games do not signify enough to justify a major overhaul are absolutely correct. Six games’ worth of evidence in a 162-game baseball season should not be used to form any worthwhile conclusions.
But that reaction implies that Mike Jacobs and Gary Matthews Jr. should have been starting for the Mets in their respective positions in the first place, and there is a whole, whole lot more than six games’ worth of evidence to show otherwise.
Beginning in spring, I have thought the Mets should be looking big picture with Mejia and not over-emphasizing April victories in exchange for stunting his growth. To gain perspective, good organizations look at their teams from 10,000 feet and not up close. The Mets are always so darned worried about today that they put tomorrow in jeopardy.
But even if the Mets want to look at their problems only in the here and now, I would ask what is their current problem?
No team should make decisions based on one week of play, but if given a choice I would rather make a decision based on one week of actual data/results than guess in spring training that my bullpen is going to be bad and put my best starting prospect into that role on a hunch. And one week into the season, what do you trust less, John Maine/Oliver Perez or the set-up crew?
If you’ve been following along at home, Sherman has been just about the only newspaper columnist frequently — and rightfully — taking the Mets to task for rushing Jenrry Mejia to the Majors and into a bullpen role, potentially stunting the top prospect’s development in the name of some marginal upgrade to a very shaky-looking 2010 team.
In the linked piece, today’s 3UP column, Sherman hammers home every argument for why the Mets would do better in the end by sending Mejia to the Minors to be stretched out as a starter than by continuing to risk his longterm growth by using him as a reliever.
It’s spot-on, and definitely worth reading.
Is o’conner actually basing an entire post – for ESPN no less – on what he santana would say when under truth serum… truth serum… are you kidding me… is this fact or fiction… if it’s fiction, ESPN should have drawn an accompanying cartoon to go with it… maybe johan riding a unicorn… that’d be cool…
A few people have pointed me toward Ian O’Connor’s truth-serum column, but I’m trying not to indulge that type of stuff these days by responding to it or linking to it. I’m sure I will again someday soon, I don’t want to spend too much time fretting about nonsense when the Mets give me plenty to worry about on their own.
I just wanted to link to Matt’s post because I like the image of Johan Santana riding a unicorn. That could easily inspire the next great work of Awesomist art, following Vin Diesel and Usher Riding Into Battle on a Chariot Pulled by White Tigers.
For the second straight April, talk is developing that the Mets can’t hit in the clutch. They’re batting .189 with runners in scoring position, after all.
It’s Monday morning and I’m only one coffee deep into my workweek, so I’m not yet prepared to go to battle over whether the abstract concept of clutchness even really exists. I’ll say it’s a hotly contested issue, to be sure, and there’s little statistical evidence to show that, given a large enough sample size, players will perform significantly better or worse in clutch situations than they would in others.
And I’ll add that practicing group psychology on professional baseball players based only on what little of their emotions they choose to disclose to us seems a bit silly — if not downright foolish — especially when we’re doing it after only six games worth of evidence.
But I will ask this of anyone who is certain the Mets can’t hit in the clutch:
Have you considered the possibility that too many of the Mets simply can’t hit?
Not all of them, for sure. David Wright and Jason Bay and, right now, Jeff Francoeur can hit. No doubt about that.
But take a closer look at the RISP numbers, beyond just the obvious fact that they’ve come in a tiny sample: The Mets actually have a respectable .347 on-base percentage in The Situation, a bit better than the Major League average.
Yesterday, with a runner on second, Livan Hernandez threw four straight balls to Francoeur, then got Gary Matthews Jr. to pop out weakly to shortstop. Why give Francoeur anything decent to swing at when you can see Matthews looming on deck?
I’d venture to guess that’s mostly what’s happening here, combined with the whims of a small sample size. The Mets’ lineup has so many gaping holes in it that pitchers can pitch around or pitch carefully to the good hitters with runners in scoring position, driving up the team’s on-base percentage in the spot, but pushing down the team’s batting average.
The only good-hitting Met that’s been disappointing with runners in scoring position is Bay, and it has come across precisely eight plate appearances. Eight. 8. 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8. That’s nothing. In his career, Bay has a lifetime .929 OPS with RISP and impressive numbers in just about every clutch situation. Give it time, give it time, give it time.
The return of Jose Reyes to the lineup should help, as it not only fills in one offensive black hole with a decent hitter, but will also likely create more opportunities with runners in scoring position for David Wright, who has only seen four so far this season.
A 2-4 start to the season isn’t easy to stomach coming off the 2009 campaign, and it certainly hasn’t been helped by the Mets’ team-wide failures to come through in big spots so far. But don’t isolate the whims of few games’ worth of stats to diagnose widespread unclutchitude when it’s way more likely that the men who actually failed to perform in the clutch were the ones compiling the roster and filling out the lineup card.
Whoa, alright. I woke up this morning and couldn’t see my bedroom floor. It was covered in my dirty laundry. I couldn’t see the surface of my desk, either, or the bottom of my sink.
This happens during baseball season, especially when the Mets are home, and especially in April when I’m still getting adjusted to a different schedule. I spent every night this week only watching baseball some place or another, and so this morning I needed to commit hours to unburying myself from the detritus of opening week: the laundry, the dirty dishes, the three-day old press notes strewn about my home office.
I don’t envy my wife, who’s trying to live and study to become a doctor amid this squalor.
The house is clean now, and so I’ve got a second to look around at what’s been happening here. And the Mets are 2-2. Here’s hoping all those WFAN callers jumping off bridges after Thursday night’s game swam safely to shore in time for Friday night’s win.
2-2. Fifty percent. Not bad, not great. Just so-so. But given the circumstances, not terrible at all.
And better yet, the Mets have outscored their opponents 22-13 in those four games. Sure, plenty of that is due to some downright miserable play by the Marlins, but a lot of it is thanks to surprisingly good play from elements of the Mets’ roster.
The bullpen, for example. Mets relievers have mustered a 1.93 ERA over their first 14 innings despite a pedestrian 8:5 K:BB ratio.
So that’s cool. Likely to continue? I hope so, but I’m a bit skeptical. Fernando Nieve, one of the most effective bullpen arms so far, has been used in all four of the Mets’ games, and Jerry Manuel seems to manage as if there’s a rule against using a reliever for more than one inning.
Last night, with the Mets up by four runs, Manuel turned to Nieve for the eighth inning, presumably because Nieve is settling in as the elusive “eighth-inning guy,” and maybe because the meat of the Nats’ lineup was coming up. But Hisanori Takahashi had only used 12 pitches to retire the side in order in the seventh. Overuse could become a problem if Manuel is not more careful with his bullpen arms.
Actually, the starting pitching hasn’t been all that terrible either, despite all the preseason hoopla. Though none of the individual performances has been exceptional, no starter has entirely crapped the bed, which is notable given their propensity for bed-crapping. Johan Santana’s start was predictably good, only John Maine’s start could reasonably be described as lousy, and Mike Pelfrey’s — even considering his four walks — might even qualify as pretty damn decent.
As for the offense, Jeff Francoeur is killing it. Killing it. So are Jason Bay and David Wright. Whoever the Mets trot out to center field has managed to get on base at a great clip. Rod Barajas has not, but he’s made up for it with his power. Mike Jacobs, Luis Castillo and Alex Cora have not been at all good.
What does this all mean? Not much. These were four games in a very long season. The good news is that the Mets managed to win two of these four games without Jose Reyes, who returns to the lineup today. So, you know, good.
Here’s me talking with Juan Alicea, the Mets’ Spanish-language radio guy. He’s also the voice you hear if you choose the SAP option on your television during SNY’s broadcast.
What’s sad? I took six years of Spanish in school, and I needed help from my co-worker Roxana to prepare a decent question that wasn’t about how to get to the library. ¡Lo siento mucho, Sra. Kahn!
I can’t imagine there’s a single TedQuarters reader who hasn’t seen this video yet, but for posterity, here’s David Wright’s silly Vitamin Water commercial with The Situation.
I’ve said my piece about both Wright and The Situation already in the past few weeks, and the video does little to change my opinion on either:
A huge hat tip to Joe Budd at Amazin’ Avenue for pointing me to this blog post from Masters of WAR, evaluating statistically The Simpsons’ Waylon Smithers’ ability to put together the best possible company softball team given a massive amount of resources at his disposal.
Smithers, the post points out, failed pretty miserably, frequently opting for players who were past their primes, who were about to regress, or who were simply overrated. It almost looks as if Montgomery Burns’ interminable yes-man put together a team built to win in the realm of public perception, more than one built to win games over Shelbyville.
It still should have been enough to easily beat Shelbyville in the episode, of course, but the players on Springfield’s club fell victim to a series of weird injuries and unforeseen circumstances, and Smithers had lined up no reasonable roster depth beyond scrubs like Lenny and Carl.
The happy ending, of course, is that even despite the misappropriation of resources in compiling the roster, despite the loss of so many star players, and despite a bizarre managerial decision based on maximizing platoon splits where none likely existed, Springfield prevailed in the end.
Homer Simpson earned the glory — when he came to, of course — but certainly Smithers ultimately earned a contract extension for his efforts, however ineffective.
The streak is over.
If Jeff Francoeur had walked tonight, it would have represented a reasonably rare baseball event. By my count, Francoeur, in his 4 1/2-year career, has unintentionally walked in three consecutive games only five times — twice in 2007 and thrice in 2008.
So it has happened a little more than once per season across his career. In the game of baseball, Jeff Francoeur walking on three straight nights happens — very roughly — about as often as no-hitters. It’s not perfect-game rare or unassisted triple play rare, but it’s rare nonetheless.
And Frenchy thought he had it tonight, too. He looked at a pitch he was sure was ball four in the fourth inning, got a big grin on his face and started trotting down to first, only to be called back to bat by the home-plate umpire.
He ultimately doubled, driving in the Mets’ only run, so it was certainly better he didn’t take his base in this case — the novelty notwithstanding.
I’ve gotten a couple of Twitter messages and an email about Francoeur’s two-game season-opening walk streak. Nearly all of the notes are in jest, but I figured I’d address them because it makes for a neat example of how small sample sizes, taken in isolation, can be deceiving.
In his career, Frenchy has unintentionally walked, on average, 27 times per every 162 games. That’s exactly 1 in 6, which is amazingly convenient, and the reason I bothered with this.
It’s not a perfect analogy because Francoeur can — and has, in some instances — walk more than once per game. Plus he has walked more in some seasons than others.
But saying, for the sake of it, Francoeur walks once every six games, then the chance of him walking in a game is the same as a certain digit coming up on a dice roll — we’ll go with 4, in honor of the occasion — on consecutive rolls. Maybe you’d snicker if you rolled two fours on the first two of 162 rolls, but you certainly wouldn’t bat an eye if consecutive fours came up somewhere in the middle.
I certainly hope Francoeur’s walks are not random, and are an indication that he has finally made good on a career’s worth of promises to improve his plate discipline –weighting the dice, so to speak. Put me down for skeptical, though, especially since one of the walks came amidst Florida’s epic bullpen meltdown on Wednesday night.
He’s hitting, though, and that’s obviously what matters most. I’m sure being more selective helps.
Tedquarters 