Does it count as a walk-off if you don’t know you won the game?

The answer is yes but Nyjer Morgan wasn’t sure at first why his teammates were running onto the field to mob him.

“I thought it was the bottom of the eighth,” he said with a sheepish giggle.

Instead, it was the bottom of the ninth and Morgan’s two-out, run-scoring double gave the Milwaukee Brewers a wild 7-6 victory Wednesday night over the New York Mets at Miller Park.

Uhhhh. No idea if this makes last night’s walk-off loss more painful or not. (Article via Big League Stew, which also has a video of Morgan’s post game interview. He’s a weird guy.)

Recent history corroborated that notion. The average draft, experts say, contains a finite amount of talent. Maybe half a dozen potential stars, 25 major-league regulars and 25 fringe major-leaguers. The rest wash out. . .

“Will there be some sort of core foundation or core commonality that will string through a lot of our players?” DePodesta said. “Probably. In fact, that’s likely. But I don’t think you’ll be able to draw a perfect line among all of our picks, to say ‘All of these guys do this’ or ‘All of these guys do that.’ ”

The MLB draft begins tonight and runs through Wednesday. The Mets have the 13th, 44th, and 71st picks overall, and then a whole bunch of other picks. And that’s about all the draft coverage you’ll find here. I don’t pay attention to any pre-draft stuff, the mock drafts, prospect reports, or oracle sooth-sayings. I’m not interested in any amateur baseball players until they’re actually a member of the Mets’ system (or I know them in real life, and even then I don’t care that much). But for coverage of the draft that’s more in-depth than the “I know absolutely nothing about this player” that you’ll find here, check out Mets Minor League Blog.

Through Monday, attendance through the Dodgers’ first 29 games was down a total of 207,612 -- accounting for most of baseball’s overall decline of 237,983. And that includes what the Dodgers called their biggest walk-up crowd of the season (4,200) on Memorial Day.

Attendance is down for 19 teams, but most by a marginal amount. The Dodgers are down an average of 7,159 per game (16.7%).

If you’re wondering, through their first 27 home games last season, the Mets had drawn 860,118 fans. In 27 home games this season, the Mets have drawn 744,578 fans, a drop of 115,540 fans (13.4%). As Nate Silver covered yesterday in the New York Times, this is a larger drop than expected even taking into account the team’s poor play over the past three seasons. The Mets’ and the Dodgers’ struggles to sells tickets suggests that a lack of confidence in ownership or management can contribute to poor ticket sales.

Anyway, this also means that should you ignore the Mets and Dodgers, MLB attendance is actually up this season. Baseball!

Speaking about the Mets' prospects of improving with a smaller payroll, Wilpon said, "If we're fortunate enough, [catcher Josh] Thole can be the kind of player we think he can be. [First baseman Ike] Davis keeps progressing. Whoever is at second base progresses as a young player. The shortstop [Reyes] -- I know there's a great question about whether we can keep the shortstop, so we're preparing for that if that should happen. [Third baseman] David [Wright] we hope gets on track. [Outfielder Jason] Bay is good guy and a professional. Pagan comes back and he's not a totally expensive guy. Beltran will be elsewhere. We hope [Fernando] Martinez can take that spot. Now, he's fragile but he can hit."

Well that makes it sound like next year el esta no aqui. Or whatever the future form of esta is. I don’t know any Spanish.

Assuming the information we have holds, Wright should be back in the short term, and while risky, he should be able to perform at the level he has over the last month, if not improve physically. I'm setting the ERD at just past the 15-day minimum, but it's fluid.

Will Carroll breaks down Wright’s injury in his Under the Knife column on SI.com. Carroll used to write for Baseball-Prospectus, where he was behind their paywall, but now he’s a free range writer over at SI where everyone can read him. He’s one of the few covering injuries in a meaningful way, and definitely a must read for everyone who follows baseball. 

He should not be with the big club to ride the pine for long. I don’t think anyone wants Martinez playing center field regularly, and neither Jason Bay nor Carlos Beltran appears apt to relinquish reps in a corner to the unproven outfielder. It’s fine to call Martinez up for a few days in a pinch, but if Duda’s going to be on the shelf for a while, the Mets need to make another move.

I’m not sure if I understand why Fernando Martinez is here either. If the Mets are looking for a lefty bat off the bench, Kirk Nieuwenhuis makes more sense. He’s also lefthanded and already on the 40-man roster (EDIT: He’s not. Assumed he was. They could 60 day DL Jenrry Mejia and put him on, and so on), but can handle center field (supposedly), something that would seem iffy with Martinez considering his knees and propensity to vaporize on contact. He’s also outhitting Martinez in Triple-A.

On the other hand, perhaps this is indicative that Nieuwenhuis has jumped past Martinez in the Mets’ eyes, in that they would rather have the Captain playing and learning everyday in Triple-A while Martinez sits on the big league bench. If true, this has future implications (though I suppose everything has future implications), as if Beltran is gone in 2012, Lucas Duda, Nieuwenhuis, and Martinez would seem to be the internal options for right field. I would guess that Martinez is the favorite, but maybe Nieuwenhuis is sneaking ahead of him.

On the other hand, maybe big daddy Sandy just thinks Martinez is more big league ready than Nieuwenhuis. More baseless speculation!

Busy day (and week) for me, so things may be quiet around here. Astros preview sometime tonight/tomorrow, then back to normal over the weekend.

Certainly the goal from our perspective isn't to get them there quick. It's when they get there to have them never come back. In order to do that, we want to make sure that they're not just ready to survive, but they're ready to be successful.

ESPN-New York’s Adam Rubin talked with Paul DePodesta, Mets VP of Player Development, about the system’s young pitching prospects and their possible promotions to the big leagues. Good stuff, and generally refreshing considering the way such things were handled around here before. You can read the whole thing here.

At the top we want everything. We want tools, skills, guys who can run and hit for power and defend. We want to be greedy. We want it all. The reality is those guys come off the board awfully quickly. And, at that point, you really have to start weighing the different factors. There’s no player out there that’s perfect. So you start looking at, ‘What can this player do to help our organization, and hopefully help our major league team?’

ESPN’s Adam Rubin talks with Paul DePodesta about the Mets’ strategy for the upcoming draft. The Mets have the 13th overall pick. Lots of good stuff, check it out.

Blah blah blah blah rain blah blah blah Niese blah blah Astros blah blah Mets got spanked. Blah blah, 6-1. We really don't know what else to tell you about this one. But we will try:

Martino’s piece is generating a lot of noise on the Internet today (Craig Calcaterra’s reaction here, Deadspin’s here), so I figured it was worth posting a link. It’s certainly different. You can read the whole piece here.

And Mike Pelfrey is indeed a certain type of pitcher. Among National League pitchers with enough innings to qualify for the ERA title, Pelfrey is fifth from the bottom in strikeouts per nine innings pitched. He’s somewhere in the middle of the pack in terms of walks, but he’s also the sixth best at preventing home runs. So he doesn’t strikeout, walk, or allow many batters to hit home runs. In other words, he leaves a lot to the gloves of the defense, the park, and all sorts of other things that aren’t him.

If you look at pitchers like Mike Pelfrey — that is, not nefarious hand lickers, but ground ball pitchers who don’t walk or strikeout many batters — you’ll see that most are susceptible to the same sort of ups and downs that have marked Pelfrey’s young career.

I wrote about Mike Pelfrey’s struggles last September, and in lieu of simply rewriting the exact same post, I’ll just link back to myself. It’s more or less still what I think.