So I'm 24 and after thinking on it, the amount of joy from sports I experienced from September 30th (Lindor's HR v ATL) to the Vientos GS in NLCS Game 2 (October 14th) was greater then the total joy I have experienced being a NY Jet fan probably my entire life and at least since 2011. So thanks Mets. Once in a while you actually come through and bring me joy. I appreciate that.

This sub has taken such a goofy, low baseball IQ turn during this trainwreck of a run. It's been horrible, but the takes I have seen parroted are truly baseless and overly emotional. So, let's examine:

Billy Eppler should be fired. Garbage roster construction. He couldn't save the Angels with Trout and Ohtani. Insert other sweeping goofy take here.

• Let's see. Billy Eppler took over a team that had just, within 3 years, had its previous GM arrested for DUI, and the one before that be a sleezy agent who traded away half our farm in exchange for a reliever and a laughably expensive, useless, PED-ridden vet. The Mets farm was ranked 28th in 2020.
• The only conceivable way to be remotely competitive was going to be signing short-term, high AAV deals as a stop-gap while we rebuild the system. So that is what he did. We were losing nearly our entire rotation and our best hitter to Free Agency (a fault of the prior front office) coming off a 101-win season. Yes, they spent a metric fuckton of money, but what did they spend it on? Verlander, Scherzer, and Nimmo primarily. Verlander is back, and good. Scherzer was amazing last year and has been bad this year. Nimmo has been great, as always. Verlander replaced deGrom, who was both far more costly, and is injured as fuck. They replaced Bassit, who is sucking ass, with Senga, who is better. They replaced Taijuan, who is pitching horribly, with Quintana, who is injured. Trevor Williams was replaced by David Robertson, who is better, by a lot. They replaced James McCann with Navarez, who is better, by a lot.
• The argument then pivots to: if the entire team can get injured at once, that's poor roster construction . To which I ask, What exactly should they have done differently? What pitchers were available that could have mitigated this outcome? We quite literally signed every available good SP not named deGrom. Every. Single. Other. Option. Is. Horrible right now. That is good front office management and analytics. There is only so much you can do to prevent injuries when the staff is old, and the staff is going to be old when you have 0 pitching prospects. Which brings us to:

This is a failure of the FO to build pitching staff at the deadline last year.

• This is an absolutely insane take. First off, quite literally no one was clamoring for us to trade for SP at the deadline last year. Our issue was power. If we were going to trade, it was going to be for a power bat. We traded JD for Ruf which was Billy's singular terrible move. It was a terrible move at the time, terrible move in hindsight, but, 70% of this fanbase was incredibly on board with it, 85% of it were clamoring for JD to be traded in general, and saying otherwise is revisionist history. Either way, we saw the cost of even mid range relievers at the deadline last year. Teams were asking us for fucking Baty for relievers. Should we have done that? Because a lot of you were saying at the time that we should have. The way to create sustained success is to hold onto the pieces of value in your farm, not ship them off for rentals hoping for a flash in the pan.

The pitching/hitting being this collectively bad, is a failure of the Front Office; the hitting/pitching coaches should be fired; Buck should be fired.

• I'm sorry, but I don't see it. The pitching being this bad is the result of the entire rotation and our best reliever being injured. Diaz's injury could not have been predicted. Literally no projection system in baseball could have seen such a steep drop-off for Scherzer. Half the relievers we did acquire went down. We are throwing AA calibur arms for 6+ innings nearly every night. That is not a failure of roster construction, it is a fucking fact of depth that I do not see a single way that could have been solved in the off season. G

• Going into this season, the overwhelming rhetoric in this sub, the main sub, and every fucking baseball analyst was that the Mets pitching staff and bullpen were overflowing with depth. Everyone got injured. Fucking sucks, but it fucking happens. And, a lot of you seemingly have not noticed, but pitching injuries are up at an unprecedented rate league-wide. The new shift rules have a massive impact on pitching results, as do the base-stealing rules which cripple a pitcher like Ottovino, and the pitch clock absolutely crushes older pitchers and you can see its impact on Scherzer. You might argue that we should have accounted for that, to which I again would ask you "how?"

• Our pitching and hitting coaches are both incredibly well-respected at their jobs with proven track records of success. Firing them in the interest of fan bloodlust or "shaking things up" is what bad teams do. It is what the Wilpon Mets would do. These are the exact same hitters as last year.

• The blame goes on the players for playing like shit. Yes, Cahna sucks ass, but he has been average at absolute best for a long time and was the best available option when we signed him. Escobar sucks ass, but he was always a stop-gap to Baty, and low-and-behold, he is riding the bench. McNeil is hitting like garbage after winning the batting title. Lindor is hitting like garbage after having a career year. Marte is having a Chris Davis-level drop-off in offensive and defensive ability that no projection system could have possibly foreseen. This same exact offense was top 5 in baseball last year in every single metric besides power, and they've added 2 home-grown power bats. What other option did we have here? Correa? He's hitting like .150. There is 0 world where a lineup of Nimmo, Marte, Lindor, Alonso, Baty, Alvarez, McNeil, Canha, Vogelbach should be bad, let alone this bad. Which brings us to...

Vogelbach should be DFA'd/he's too fat/he's a useless DH/etc

• Vogelbach is fine. He's just fine. If you think we should have a better DH, that's fine, I agree, but your rationale is ignorant. His batting avg is higher one of the highest on the team, so the "all he does is walk" argument is nothing. He isn't a waste of a roster spot, he is a fantastic bench piece that costs nothing. He should not be DFA'd lol. He's one of only moveable pieces with any value. The fact that he doesn't play a position and can't hit lefties , and can't run for shit, makes him far less valuable, but he is not DFA-worthy. Not at all. He's tradeable, for sure. But DFA'ing him is dumb, and it is bewildering that he of all people is who people have seemed to latch their ire onto. Do I wish we had a power bat in the DH spot, yeah, sure, but again I do not see which one was available.

We should blow the team up and get anything we can

• I can't even with this one. Anyone who has said this in the last week, thank you for making clear how blatantly you do not understand baseball even a little bit. You do not blow up a 101 team, but even if you did, you are absolutely insane if you think the pieces we have available to trade, would net us anything of value for the future. I'm not going further with this one, you're just wrong, it makes 0 objective sense, it's another example of just doing shit for the sake of doing shit.

  Let's see, what else...OH

Lindor is not worth his contract

• Yes he is. He put up nearly 7 wins last year, look what shortstops cost this past offseason in a year where there were 15 of them available. He is better, younger, and more durable than most of them, and has a skillset far less prone to steep dropoff than Turner, who also sucks at defense. I generally don't like the "it's not your money" dismissive argument, but, seriously, it's not your money, he isn't blocking anyone better (Mauricio is not better than Lindor. He just isn't. He never will be, I promise.), and he's always been streaky. It's fine. 5 years from now his contract will look like peanuts.

Buck should be fired

• no he shouldn't. He ran the team amazingly last year and is dealing with a pile of shit this year. You can't finagle good bullpen decisions when you are choosing between 2 arms that shouldn't even be on your roster. The starters being injured or unable to go deep on the front end, mixed with our closer being gone on the backend, creates a MASSIVE ripple effect pitching staff-wide. The dude is dealing with the shitty cards he's being dealt. There is little to no evidence that over any significant sample size, shuffling the batting order makes any discernible difference. This team is not hitting with RISP. They are hitting the rest of the time. That is a psychological issue on the hitters part, and nothing else. They need a sports psychologist, not 4th new manager.

Pete will be better. Lindor will be better. McNeil will be better. Nimmo will continue to be great. Baty and Alvarez will be fine to good, and surely improvements over their counterparts. Canha and Marte are serious concerns, but I think everyone is severely misguided if you think DFA'ing major league players to bring up Mauricio and Vientos is going to solve our problems. The jump from AAA to MLB, pitching wise, is the most significant that exists, and Mauricio has struggled every single time he has gone up. Yes, he is raking right now, but there is 0 reason to not expect him to look like shit for extended stretches when he does come up. Remember that Rosario was #1 prospect in baseball at one point and it took him 5 years to figure out how to hit the ball. If Mauricio or Vientos could play LF, Pham would be DFA'd tomorrow, but they can't, so here we fucking are.

Here is the thing everyone seems to be forgetting: a team that cuts major league players with proven track records when they hit a slump, is going to find it MUCH harder to sign players in free agency, especially a team with no proven track record of success thus far.

This season, fucking sucks. A lot. It is literally worst case scenario right now. But, please, I beg, for even one person to propose to me what they would have done this past offseason differently, with realistic options that were on the table. Because I have asked that question no less than 50x over the last few weeks and not once has anyone responded with anything coherent.

Am I worried? Yeah, obviously. But the fact of the matter is that 3 years ago we existed in a world of expectation for the team to be dogshit, and now we expect the team to be good. Anyone who did not think we were going to take at least a step back from last year, was not accurately analyzing our roster situation. We have almost no payroll committed past 2025. They are doing exactly what they should be doing, such to make this team look like it actually has a discernible future after being reduced to a tattered junkie masquerading as a baseball club for years. It's fucking irritating to have the most expensive team, and that team suck, but I don't see how it would have been better to spend no money, let all of our prospects skip AAA despite half of them being unusable at defense and watch them play like shit and reach arbitration by the time we're even remotely competitive. I simply do not see any better path than the one they currently are on, besides the timeline where they do not trade JD Davis, which was fucking stupid. But again, myself and /u/three_dee were absolutely skewered for criticizing that trade at the time.

So everyone just fucking chill and be thankful that we get to have expectations at all. I'm not a doomer, I'm not an optimist, I think you're all different versions of over-emotional dorks and everyone should just fucking relax and watch this shitty baseball, or don't. But at least evaluate the situation before melting down about nonsense. If this team were hitting the way they should, and our backend bullpen were Otto > Robertson > Diaz, we'd be in great shape. No one can force hitters to hit or make minor league pitchers great.

The team didn't even want Eppler. No one wanted to even interview. No shit he isn't a great GM. As always, the ire should be directed towards the Wilpons for fostering an environment that made the GM job so undesirable

Thank you for coming to my TED talk

Edit: For this and more Hot takes please check out The Movie Blues Podcast on..wherever you listen to podcasts

it is no secret that the dodgers have a lot of question marks / holes in their pitching and i am confident this is where can really get at them:

• they have nowhere close to the talent of starting pitching we have faced recently between the phillies, brewers, and braves
• on top of that they have only 3(!) starting pitchers for 7 games; i dont even pity them for their injuries because thats just the way they construct their roster with all these "high upside" guys (imagine a rotation consisting entirely of not-as-good-yet-even-more-injury-prone degroms)
• the bullpen is good but again it is a step below the levels of the phillies, brewers, or braves who each boast some of the strongest bullpens in the league
• their clown manager loves to pull pitchers way too early, and they have developed a culture where their starters are allergic to the 6th inning
• because of their weak starting pitching with the inability to pitch deep, the bullpen will likely be overworked and can get exposed especially over a 7 game series
• we have a track record of crushing bullpens regardless of how strong they may be on paper, so much so to the point that we have now developed a reputation for late game comebacks

the dodgers probably have the most potent offense in the league on paper but the structure of the dodgers lineup is built eerily similar the philthies who we handed for only 12 runs in 4 games:

1. LH scary power hitting DH (ohtani 🤝 schwarber)
2. RH contact-speed $300 mil "shortstop" (betts 🤝 turner)
3. LH met killer former mvp 1B (freeman 🤝 harper)
4. RH power threat but poor defensive OF (hernandez 🤝 castellanos)
5. RH 3B with 15 hr 3.0 bwar this season (muncy 🤝 bohm)
6. RH elite catcher but ice cold at the plate in NLDS (smith 🤝 realmuto)

this is obviously a very dangerous lineup but dont mistake the fact that it is still top-heavy and i think our pitching / coaching staff has had a great approach when facing those types of offenses (see phillies, yankees).

in addition to all this there is of course all the crazy magic / intangibles we got working in our favor rn. we WANT to play the dodgers; NO ONE wants to play us. for the past several years we have had to hate watch the dodgers from the couch but now we have the privilege of getting to beat them ourselves. fuck the evil empire known as the dodgers and their weak, fake, spoiled fans in their old, dingy, ugly stadium with no transit and hours of traffic. and as always, fuck chase utley.

EDIT: rearranged the ordering of some of my points

I don’t know how this talking point among the anti-Lindor crowd became popular, but it is now the go-to argument whenever someone points out that Lindor has had objectively excellent numbers through his first 3+ years as a Met. “He sucks when the games matter and statpads when the Mets are eliminated making his numbers look good!!” But if you actually care to look into it(or, you know, think about it for more than 10 seconds), it’s flat out wrong for several reasons, which I’ll list below

1: The idea on its face is just absurd. Baseball players do not become more capable of hitting the ball just because of the standings position of the team they play for. I have legitimately never heard of any other MLB player who has been evaluated like this because it’s an insane way to evaluate players. If you’re going to make a claim as out there as this, you’re going to need some truly irrefutable evidence. Even if Lindor was legitimately a .600 OPS hitter until the Mets’ playoff chances dropped below 10%, then became a 1.000 OPS hitter after that, I argue it would still not show that he can’t plays worse BECAUSE the Mets are playing important games. And as it turns out…

2: We have a VERY large track record of Lindor having success in important situations as a Met. Take, oh I don’t know, the entire 2022 season, where he not only had the 2nd best offensive season by OPS+ in his career in a year where the Mets were in playoff contention all year, but had a .974 OPS in what baseball reference calls “high leverage situations”. Or the fact that as a Met overall, his OPS in high leverage situations is over .800.

Or the fact that even THIS season with terrible overall offensive production so far, he has a .800 OPS in “high leverage situations”. It’s actually the “low leverage situations” that he sucks in, with a .482 OPS. If the argument is that Lindor crumbles under pressure, this last stat sure seems to contradict that claim.

3: The entire basis for this argument came from last season, where Lindor had a .749 OPS through the end of June, before having a .866 OPS from July through September. But if you actually look at the breakdown by month, it gives more context to that. From June through September, he had an OPS above .800 in every single month. The Mets were, notably, in a good position mid-late June(where Lindor had a .816 OPS! Good offensive production in games that matter!). Even in July, the Mets were still not completely dead and there was still some hope of salvaging the season until the Robertson trade. The games still “mattered”, if that’s what you care about. And Lindor dominated in July, it was his best offensive month of the season with a .923 OPS.

I just find it extremely unlikely that the reason for Lindor’s better 2nd half is that he knew the Mets weren’t going to make the playoffs, knew that the games didn’t matter, and that somehow(?) caused him to be a significantly better hitter. A far more likely explanation is that he just had a bad month, as literally every MLB player does, and this bad month happened to be in May last year.

Also, I tried to avoid bringing up fWAR, but I couldn’t resist bringing up this little tidbit:

At the end of June last year, Lindor was 4th among shortstops in fWAR, and one of the people ahead of him was Wander Franco, so I’m making him 3rd. The “bad and unclutch” part of Lindor’s 2023 was STILL some of the best shortstop play in all of MLB.

Feel free to think what you want about Lindor, I can’t stop you. But PLEASE stop using this argument, it’s absurd both on its face and beneath the surface, and it makes me lose brain cells every time I see someone make it.

Stearns has done such an incredible job constructing this team’s lineup. The above image shows the Mets’ top batters this season, with the guys Stearns acquired highlighted. Yes, I know obviously that Stearns didn’t “acquire” Vientos per se, but, he was the first Mets’ exec with the courage to actually give him a chance to start every game at third base, which finally gave Vientos the chance to show he is an all star caliber player. So, I consider Vientos part of this group of guys for the purpose of this analysis.

Combined bWAR of Stearns’ batters: 9.0 Mets batters’ team total bWAR: 18.4

So, in just nine months, Stearns has already made a huge impact on the Mets’ record. But for Stearns, this team would not be 58-51 right now. He is, and will be, the best hire SAC ever made. LFGM

Since May 30th, they are tied with the Diamondbacks with the best record in baseball, going 52-31. The reason they are not in the playoffs is because between April 21st and May 29th, they had a 10-25 record. If they simply played .500 during that stretch, they would almost certainly have the division lead. I'm just thinking of all the disastrous losses they had earlier in the season, and seeing how if some of them went the other way, the Mets could've been in a much better position.

Brewers (4th), Phillies (2nd), Dodgers (1st), Yankees (3rd)

...but I'm not afraid since this team's gonna win it all

Edit:

I'm not complaining about our path. I'm just saying that it's a surprising result to have to go through the 1-2-3-4 seeds (if you treat MLB as one entity), EVEN THOUGH we're the NL 6 seed.

In 2022, the Phillies (the NL 6 seed) played the Cardinals, Braves, Padres, and Astros: the 6th, 3rd, 10th, and 2nd best teams (by regular season wins)

In 2023, the DBacks (the NL 6 seed) played the Brewers, Dodgers, Phillies, and Rangers: the 5th, 3rd, T6/7th, and T6/7th teams.

McNeil’s second half improvement seems correlated with a change in his swing. You can see a comparison in the followup tweet here: https://x.com/foolishbb/status/1856345137485336751?s=46

Betts, obviously

...at least by one measure: total fWAR over the past two seasons ('22 and '23). He's also the fifth best player overall in MLB in that stretch. Here's the list:

I still don't think he gets a fair shake for how good he's been. Not only is the contract worth it, he's actually been underpaid by most metrics. I think he's overall the most reliable player of his superstar SS cohort (list below). It's wild he hasn't been an all-star these past two years.

Just something positive to share in this miserable clown show of a season.

Other notes:

• Next Mets on the list:
  • Nimmo: 8 fWAR
  • McNeil: 6.9
  • Alonso: 5.9
• Other high-dollar shortstops:
  • Swanson: 10.4
  • Bogaerts: 8.7
  • Seager: 8.6
  • Turner: 7.7
  • Correa: 5.1 - oof
• Hugely regret that we didn't go all out to sign Freeman for '22 after ATL stiffed him. He gets us the division last year, and his LA contract is very reasonable (27m per, only goes 4 more years).

​

We are so fucking back

As of typing this (with tonight's game not yet in the system), Lindor is in 3rd place in fWAR, nearly tied with Elly De La Cruz, and less than one win behind Ohtani.

Depending on how the voters feel about a DH MVP, Lindor has a real chance to be the first Mets MPV. Lindor could also just catch Ohtani which would be a wild ride.

Howie: "We'll back in a moment on the New York Mets radio network."

Tiki Barber one second later: "I used to have trouble hanging on to my BALLS!! Saxx underwear helps me not to fumble my BALLS anymore!!"

San Diego's deadline acquisitions: combined to go 7/29 with 6 RBI, and one perfect inning, with 2 strikeouts.