Chavez would have been the guy if Floyd didn't get injured. Franco and Hernandez are pretty useless at this point. Did Mark Kiger play again tonight? That's amazing that he made his major league debut in a postseason game.
I realize there's not really anything to be done about it but it seems weird to be that in the sport with by far the longest regular season your position in the playoffs is essentially meaningless. 1 extra home game in a 7 game series is a joke.
Chavez is the closest thing we have... my point though is that this game is still winnable as is this series... The Mets need a heart and soul guy to turn the tide here but it just doesn't seem like anybody is going to step it up. Sad.
I don't like it either. I also have not been a fan of the wild card. I liked baseball a lot more from 1984-1993.
It would be more fun being a Yankees fan since the regular season would mean more, but it makes the season a lot more interesting for a lot more teams. You can't have 30 teams play, and only 4 make the playoffs. I think the biggest joke is that there are 5 game series for the first team. Probably the best thing to do is make the series longer. A 9 game series would reward the better team, especially once the season is shortened, maybe back to 154, maybe to even less games.
I agree 3rdand15, they start playing when its still freezing out, they dont end until its starting to freeze again, and then if you have a bad weekend youre out.retarded
First off, I just looked at my Yahoo college picks. We had to predict a score for two games. The first tiebreaker is the Florida-Auburn score. I correctly predicted a 27-17 Auburn win! I liked the two-divisions-in-each-league setup. I liked when the NL had two divisions of six teams. When you have a 162 game season there should be a low number of teams in the playoffs. The cream rises after 162 games. If you cannot win a division after that many games, I don't think you belong in the postseason. I understand why the wild card is working. More teams are alive in September and therefore it helps attendance. I just don't think a 162 game season and 4 teams in each league making the playoffs mixes properly. I would like the wild card more if the regular season was only 140 something games. It would also be nice to play the postseason in September. It is ridiculous to have to move up a playoff game by a few hours due to the threat of snow.
Let's talk about something else. Some of you might recall that I was working on a paper looking at momentum in baseball games based on play-by-play data. By momentum I mean that given the current state (outs, men on what bases), the quality of the pitcher and hitter, how many pitches the pitcher has thrown, etc., does knowing what came before have an effect on the result of a play? The evidence for momentum in a game is weak, but what there is, is consistent with what is happening here - the pattern of outs following outs. If you're getting the feeling that the hitters "aren't trying," that's consistent with this pattern. This is precisely what the Yankee fans were complaining about last week, of course. There does seem to be the effect that batters "lose heart" in an inning when the previous batter makes out. This is a far weaker effect than the other sorts of things, however. I'll let you in on the other two things we learned. You know how people like Keith Hernandez will say "It's amazing how often a leadoff walk comes around to score"? It's nonsense. The average number of runs scored after a leadoff walk is slightly lower than the average number after a leadoff single, and the pattern continues even if you take other factors like pitcher and hitter quality into account. The next time a hitter works out a walk to lead off an inning, don't fall into the trap of thinking that it's any different from if he had singled instead. The strongest "momentum" effect is the rally killing nature of the double play. Of course double plays are bad, but they're even worse than you'd think, in the sense that fewer runs are scored after a double play than would be expected in the same situation (two outs and man on third, say) if the previous play had not been a double play. Alright, back to this awful game.
This is interesting, although I think alot of the gnashing of the teeth when it comes to leadoff walks(especially to poor hitters) is the feeling that the guy didn't "earn it". Also as an observer the leadoff walk tends to stick in your mind, so when they come around to score you point to it and say "see, it happened again!" but mostly forget about it when they don't score. I'd be interested if the same sort of phenomenon applies when an error is made in an inning. It seems like whenever a team is "given an extra out" they tend to make the offending team pay but I wonder how much of a difference it actually makes. I imagine this would be tough to do though as every error wouldn't have resulted in an out, and there are many plays that are not scored errors but are defensive blunders nonetheless.
My night really couldnt be any worse, mets get shut out, gators lose cause our punter sucks and they call a pass a fumble, awesome
My comments quickly, because I don't want to think about it anymore: This team fucking disgusting me tonight. I mean, come on, you weren't facing fucking Cy Young. chasing bad pitches, not being patient at the plate. Traschel's early collapse doesn't even bother me as much as the fact that I don't think the Mets ever even had 2 men on base at the same time. FUCKING PATHETIC! Trash was terrible yes, but you had 8 innings after that to make it a game. And what do you do? EVERYONE OF YOU SWUNG FOR THE GOD DAMNED FENCES! It was amazing. It seemed like everyone just wanted to pop one out, with the exception of valentin and endy. Next Met I see swinging for the fences when you can't get shit started is going to get a letter bomb in the mail. Another thing--Shawn Green, if you're not 100% sure you're going to make the catch, DON'T FUCKING DIVE. Not only do you look like an ass taking balls off the chin, but you cost this team one run tonight doing so. Finally, if the Mets don't get some fucking walks tomorrow, I'm going to go ballistic and go take a shit in the middle of shea stadium, because that's exactly what this team is. Reyes averages more than 3.5 walks per nine and a WHIP of 1.4. GET ON BASE FOR GOD'S SAKES. (See previous point about swinging for the fences) And here I'd get into my hatred of the 2-3-2 format(the lower ranked team should NEVER have played more home games than the "favorite"), but I've done enough for tonight.
A small attempt to bring some positivity to this thread: for all we've heard about the Mets struggles against LHP the Cards team OPS against lefties is actually worse on the season.
Yeah, and that'd mean something if we had a lefty tomorrow suitable for anything better than the fast pitch at the county fair. Oliver Perez couldn't find the strike zone if it was the size of fucking Times Square.
I believe you're right on both points. When a pitcher throws four balls way out of the strike zone to start an inning, it's legitimate to say the batter didn't earn it, but we all know that it usually takes skill to work out a walk, and this is a skill that is sadly undervalued (hello OBP versus batting average). As a result, when a person who singles scores they credit the hitter for getting on base, but when a person who walks scores, they blame the pitcher. There's also no question that people remember things like that, which is one of the biggest reasons why people have such poor concepts of relative risk (argument by anecdote is always a bad idea). This was something I always suspected, so I knew I wanted to look at it when we got the play-by-play data. I was gratified to see such strong evidence of nothing at all - basically, any way you look at it, what happens after a leadoff walk, hit, or hit by pitch is indistinguishable from each other. This is based on 2 full years of data (2003-2004, both leagues), validated on one full year (2005) of data, so I'm very confident that it's true. This would be tougher to get at. The retrosheet data (www.retrosheet.org) does record if a play is an error, but gives no details on what the error actually was. To be honest, I suspect that once again, a baserunner is a baserunner. In other words, for a given situation (two outs, man on second, hitter with .350 OBP and .500 SLG, pitcher with 1.25 WHIP who has thrown 70 pitches, say), the average number of runs scored from that point on will be exactly the same, whether he got there because of an error or because of a double. Extra outs are bad because they're extra outs, but I suspect that they're not worse than that. That, anyway, is consistent with my work, and other things that I've seen.
