I haven’t listened to all of the podcasts in their entirety, so maybe this is an issue that you’ve talked about already, but what’s up with all of this Tejada hate out there about his show up date? My understanding is that it’s been affected to some degree by a visa issue, but I had to stop after reading about 5 comments on Metsblog on the post about his projected arrival today. People are already branding him as acting entitled to the SS position and questioning his devotion and drive, simply because he will show up to spring training on time or perhaps a day late due in some part to a work visa issue.

- Evan, via electronic mail

We did briefly address this topic — Ruben Tejada’s on-time arrival to Mets camp — on the Mostly Mets podcast. Ted Berg addressed it last week as well, so I’d recommend that post.

But I do want to address the principal players, Ruben Tejada and Terry Collins, with regards to their roles in this non-story story a little bit further. (more…)

Here’s the question: If you’re the Mets and you can have just one, Dillon Gee or Jeurys Familia, which pitcher do you take?

I posed the same question on Twitter yesterday, and as expected, a majority picked Jeurys Familia. It seemed to be an obvious choice for many: Familia is a top pitching prospect, ranked in the top 100 on most prospect lists this winter. Familia throws hard, he’s young (22), exciting, and coming off an impressive season in the minor leagues. Dillon Gee, on the other hand, is going to be 26 in April, looks to be in his mid-30s, lacks a blow-away fastball, has inexplicably decided to spout awful facial hair, and is coming off an unimpressive season as a fifth starter on a poor major league team. It seems that the live-armed prospect, Familia, should be taken over the known mediocrity, Gee, and the choice should be instantaneous. And this is exactly what my gut is telling me when I think about it.

I also think my gut is wrong — or at least hungry – as it so often is, and Dillon Gee is the better pick. It’s not anything against Familia in particular, who is and remains an excellent pitching prospect. I’m just starting to suspect that baseball fans, particularly myself, have begun to overestimate the value and potential of all pitching prospects, even the excellent ones. Continue Reading

The Mets certainly appear to be rebuilding biding their time this 2012 season. So let’s concentrate on the future by keeping track of the present. Thus, the 2014 power rankings, a weekly or every-other-weekly feature where we track the rising and falling stock of the 2014 Mets in the 2012 season. The question: Who is the most important player to the 2014 Mets?

For a player to be eligible for the 2014 Mets power rankings, he must be:

• In the Mets’ organization
• Under team control through at least 2014
• . . . and that’s it

You all voted two weeks ago. Here are the initial rankings, prior to Spring Training 2012: Check out the list.

Or things I’ve read recently and want to pass along. First, Mark Simon of ESPN explains why Jon Niese may have a better year in 2012:

Something jumped out at us when we looked at that, along with some hit-location charts for all the fly balls and pop ups Niese allowed.

The average pitcher allows hits on about 10 to 12 percent of soft/normally hit fly balls and pop ups.

Niese’s rate last year? A whopping 27 percent.

That led to his batting average on balls in play (BABIP) being among the highest in the majors — .333.

- Mark Simon, “What’s Next for Jonathon Niese?”
ESPN New York

If you’re optimistic about Niese, then hang your hat on this. (Note: I don’t hang my hats anywhere. They sit on my desk.) On the other hand, as Simon also points out, Niese has always given up an enormous number of hits, even in the minor leagues. So maybe he just gives up a ton of hits. This coming season should be a tipping point for Niese, with regards to whether his high batting averages against are the result of bad luck or just a lack of skill.

Hey, let’s talk about money for a second:

Noreen Harrington, a 20-year hedge-fund executive and former Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch employee who was trying to match the returns of the Madoff funds, quit her job as chief investment officer of Wilpon-owned Sterling Stamos in protest in 2003. That came after the Wilpon-owned funds placed money with a Madoff feeder fund over her strenuous objections, the trustee suing the Wilpons for $386 million claims.

- Adam Rubin, “Filing: Wilpons Were Alerted to Returns”
ESPN-New York

At this point, most Mets fans seem to be rooting against the Wilpons retaining control of the team. So here are my three questions for Mets fans:

- Which is better for the New York Mets — the baseball team that actually plays baseball games — over the next five years: Ownership retaining control of the Mets — this is presumably a slow, messy process — or Ownership selling the team — again, a slow, messy process?

- If you are rooting against the current ownership group, why? Is it because you think that someone else owning the Mets will ultimately be better for the team, and you’d like to see that outcome? Or it is because you want ownership to lose something they seem to enjoy, because that seems fair (and it seems fair either because so many other people lost things with Madoff, serious financial things and money and the likes, and anyone who benefited should also lose something; or because you blame ownership for taking away something you enjoyed, i.e., a good Mets team or a certain star shortstop, so that they can hold on to the things they enjoy)?

- Is anyone just rooting for a knockout punch either way? Either the team is sold quickly or the financial situation clears up quickly, just so long as it’s over.

Real questions. I don’t have a solid answer for any of them, but I’d like to hear some fan voices.

So this post presents an idea for an on-going feature during the 2012 season: The 2014 Mets’ power rankings, a list of the most important players to the 2014 Mets. Not that we’re giving up on 2012 already, but . . . well, you know. The Mets certainly appear to be rebuilding biding their time this season. So let’s concentrate on the future by keeping track of the present. Thus, the 2014 power rankings, a weekly or every-other-weekly feature where we track the rising and falling stock of the 2014 Mets in the 2012 season.

For a player to be eligible for the 2014 Mets power rankings, he must be:

• In the Mets’ organization
• Under team control through at least 2014
• . . . and that’s it

These rules mean that both major and minor league players are eligible for the rankings. For example: Ike Davis and Ruben Tejada are eligible, as are Jeurys Familia and Matt Harvey; David Wright is not eligible, as his contract expires after 2013.

Which actually brings up the next point: These rankings are the 2014 power rankings, and not the 2012 or 2013 power rankings, because 2014 is when the Mets should solely be a team of Sandy Alderson’s design. As of today, they have no players under contract for 2014, and the team’s only payroll commitments are $8.5 million dollars in buyouts for Johan Santana and Jason Bay. That makes 2014 the target date in which we’re interested. If a player is on the 2014 Mets, it’s because Alderson wants him there.

Now, I have an idea for how the preliminary rankings should look, but I’m going to throw the vote out to the crowd first. There’s a poll at the bottom of this post, with the names of the 28 players. I’ve put the names in alphabetical order in an attempt to avoid swaying anyone’s votes, then added my own comments about the players in an attempt to sway your votes. But let’s see what y’all think: Read through, or don’t read through, and then vote for the five players you think will the most important for the 2014 Mets at the bottom. And please remember that pitchers get hurt: (more…)

Today is January 17, a full month before the Mets’ pitchers and catchers are to report for Spring Training. It’s still far too early for a season preview, and too soon for a spring training preview – but is it too early for a pre preseason preview view? Probably. But the Mets’ 40-man roster looks set, and barring a trade and a few inevitable minor league signing, the Mets are ready to go for Spring Training. One can even see the beginnings of the Opening Day roster. Here is a very early look at the 2012 Mets: (more…)

So this post began life awhile ago — I wanted to evaluate Terry Collins’ first season as manager of the Mets in a more objective manner, and I decided I wanted to do so by comparing Collins with other managers of the Mets.

Anyway, fast forward to now, and I still can’t make much of a case either way about whether Terry Collins managed the Mets well or not. I don’t know enough about managers and what goes on behind the scenes. So that totally failed. But I did learn a whole bunch of things about the tendencies of all the Mets’ managers, so I’ll share those nuggets here. Who bunted a lot, who didn’t, who used pinch hitters, who didn’t, all those sorts of things — and we’ll check out where Terry Collins falls in each category. Here’s what I’ve learned about the Mets’ managers: (more…)

Gee, I love baseball. I can’t wait for a thoroughly non-depressing day reading about the New York Mets. Let’s see what you’ve got, internet!

Intuition — which is often fallible — strongly suggests it isn’t just to tinker with bookkeeping, or to draw a couple of lines differently on the org chart. The nature of the Mets’ situation and the kind of business companies like CRG do both make you suspect something more is going on.

It also doesn’t help that, to be blunt, the last few years have trained me to automatically discount anything the Mets say about their own business affairs.

But the nature of that something more that might or might not be going on? You got me. And this is where I start to worry about how the world we live in has changed, and might be making us all a bit nuts.

- Jason Fry, “Stuck in the Why and Now”
Faith and Fear in Flushing

Oh. Well, uh . . . yeah, I don’t know why we wouldn’t trust what the Mets say anymore. But the real point here: There’s a downside to the instant media cycle, and sometimes we have too much information about the Mets. Or, rather, too many random pieces of information. Good stuff from FAFIF.

All the bankruptcy stuff strikes me like this: It’s like we’re slowly receiving random puzzle pieces from an extremely large jigsaw puzzle. Each time we find a new puzzle piece, we all look it over, debate what’s depicted on the piece and argue where it fits. Some people say, “Ye, I know what the puzzle looks like now,” and some other people say, “No, clearly the final puzzle looks like this, you stupid hobgoblins.” But in the end, we only have seven or eight pieces from a 500 piece puzzle, no box, and no real idea what we’re actually looking at. We’ve got enough stray pieces to know that the puzzle is, say, a beach scene and not a “Where’s Waldo” puzzle, but not enough pieces to know the fine details and how it all fits together. No one knows but the guys with the picture on the box, and they’re not telling. They’re also potentially selling off parts of the puzzle. There: The Metaphor is sufficiently mixed.

Now for some more hopeful, nonymous news . . . oh wait, no, wait . . .

Look at what happened to Mookie Wilson: He just got fired. Mookie went to the wall for the organization, but they still canned him. Look at Ken Oberkfell. Guy puts in twelve years with the organization; next thing you know, he’s been fired. No explanation. Those are the little things that tell you what direction a team is going in. People around the game hear about this stuff. They talk about it: “What’s happening to the Mets?” It depresses the hell out of me because I don’t think it’s going to improve until 2014 at the earliest. It’s going to be hard to ask the fans to sit through two brutal seasons, even though there’s some talent coming through the system.

- Anonymous Met, “The Met Who Blames Everything on the Wilpons”
New York Magazine

I find it surprisingly fun to guess the author by reading this piece aloud in the voices of current and former Mets. (Also, like everything, it’s fun to sing it in a Blonde-on-Blonde-era Bob Dylan voice.) I have my suspicions about the identity of the author: It reads like an “As Told To” kind of piece, and I believe the vocabulary provides enough hints.

Or maybe not. This may be trying to solve puzzle without enough puzzle pieces again. Man. Is it 2014 yet?