CrewFanBrewMan69

Rock thinks the Mets have solid defense, lol. They have below average defenders at every spot except 3B and SS

That isn’t an awful play call in theory in that situation, but just had the wrong guy(s) on the bases to pull that off.

That seems like a break

The base running on this team......

Knebel was just a good to great arm in the pen until he was the closer, wasn’t he? I get what your saying but I think there’s multiple guys in the bullpen or minors who could be a fine closer some day and get 30-40+ saves. I’m more in the it’s just 3 outs it doesn’tatter camp.

And the Cubs just came back from a 10-2 deficit

Yeah Cubs seems to be doing what they did to start last year. Hopefully some of it is sustainable but it doesn’t seem like any of their pitchers are hurt or whatever (their velo and stuff is in line with career norms) but Rizzo is banged up and hopefully the pitchers “never get going.” I still don’t see much to see that not happening but you never know. Also Lester, Darvish and Quintana’s only good starts have been vs us so far so yeah.

Cain has made a bunch of stupid mistakes this year by my count. That play, he’s over thrown cut off men a few times allowing guys to advance, played balls off the wall bad. Man I thought he was a smarter player.

Whatever little bit better than the bat he is than Arcia, it’s not worth giving up defense for.

Yeah I know we all hope for more but that’s roughly what the numbers are screaming to me along with the eye test

47% this year vs 45.5% last year on GBs

Davies doesn’t seem to be fooling them

If you step off the rubber you can fake a throw anywhere, if you make “a pickoff move” you have to throw to first or else it’s a balk.

It will take a lot more than the first two weeks of the season to believe that the Pirates are for real FWIW. I think it was highly tongue in cheek. I know it’s tongue in cheek but they are about as real as we were last year, imo. That’s not a compliment, just their ceiling is going to be low-mid 80s wins with this start and probably not a playoff team. They don’t have the talent to get to that high 80s/low 90s wins it will take to make the playoffs

The Mets have as many OF as us. Also Matz is exactly why pitching prospects can be so frustrating, shown glimpses of being good but also a lot of injuries. They’re fickle creatures.

There should be a rule all new stadiums or major renovations (like Wrigley, Fenway and Dodger stadium the last decade) need to have plans for a roof of some kind, fixed or retractable, and there should be a rule all stadiums need a roof within the next 15 years except maybe the California stadiums.

That’s basically what the Dodgers did last year except they used the 10-day DL instead of the minor league options

Hurdle and the Pirates trying to one up the Cardinals in their gate keeping of the rules in this one, my god. The short of the story, Javy flipped his bat up in anger of popping a ball up last night and Hurdle took offense that he wasn’t respectful and the Pirates “have their way of teaching their young guys the right way.” Then Contreras argued a ball/strike as a hitter and Hirdle took offense. Today Hurdle took a mound visit 2 batters in the game to argue a ball/strike call with the HP ump with the pitcher and catcher coming in to argue as well. They also hit Bryant in the 8th inning.

Drake and Barnes are fine, especially as 2 of the last 3 arms in the pen. Ideally you don’t have to use them in crazy leverage spots but the Knebel injury and rotation generally sucking has us where we are. Hopefully with the off day tomorrow things can get back in to order and the rotation gets its stuff together.

Remember earlier in the winter when I said I hated the way we've rebuilt. I didn't mention it then because I was too busy coming up with the other arguments but you bringing it up reminded me of it. This is another downside of collecting all of these average players, trying to compete, getting a little lucky and having an unexpected good season. You have a guy like Hader, who would be much more valuable if he turned into a 200 inning (or even a 160 inning) 3-3.5 ERA type of starter. The problem with getting all of the Shaws and Andersons of the world is you're kind of on the fringes of contention and you go out and get reinforcements like Walker and Swarzak to improve your record even more. Then the expectations of the ownership and fan base start to pick up again and you've basically cornered yourself into "go for it" mode. Now you have a guy like Hader, who should be tried as a starter with the bullpen being the fallback option if he fails but you can't really put him out there because there's a chance he's going to have several games where he goes 4 innings and walks 6 and gives up several runs and taxes your bullpen and he's too valuable to take out of your actual bullpen while you're trying to contend so you're never going to find out if he can be that poor man's Chris Sale. It's great that Stearns can find the Shaws and the Andersons but to me he found them too early. Wait until you have an established core of young talent producing in the big leagues and then supplement that talent with guys like Shaw and Anderson. You may not get the actual Shaw or Anderson but there are always players out there that a club is down on or a mechanical tweak to a delivery somebody in your front office sees that can improve a pitcher. I don't see any way Hader gets a shot at being a starter going along the path we've chosen. He's too valuable in the bullpen and they're not going to have the time to build his arm back up for 150 or more innings in a year. It's a shame, he should have gotten a shot to be a starter but I think that ship has already sailed. Agree entirely, last years unexpected jump may have hurt us more than helped. Never truly bottomed out and added those top 10 picks or able to sell guys at the deadline, didn't have the ability to let a guy like Hader try and be a starter because the goal was to win and now we have chosen to go for it with only one real star player in Yelich and potentially holding back value on Hader. I do wonder if we're only something like 5 games under .500 around the deadline and say 7ish games back of a WC that Sterns will do a mini sell off to try and make up for never truly bottoming out to get the high picks.

With the off day Thursday should just make Guerra go 7 or 8 innings tomorrow no matter what to try and get the bullpen back in order. The extra innings games don’t help but the starters haven’t done the bullpen any help this year.

Same reason you mess with anything, to make the team better. The bullpen is extremely deep now, and even deeper when Suter goes back there. Then there's still Miley, Ramirez, and others waiting in the wings. There's lots of options there to cover Hader's innings with similar results. There are not a lot of options to start and give you 5 good innings. Hader's job as a reliever is to throw gas and strike people out. As a starter, he would need to modify his game a bit. We don't know if he could be an effective or even dominant starter, and how long it would take. The way I look at it, sooner we find out, the better. Look at Hader’s stats in the minors and you’ll see he was a dominant starter who frequently went deep into games before he reached Colorado Springs which is a pitcher’s nightmare (whose idea was that to make them our AAA?)). His changeup seems like a decently serviceable third pitch and he just needs to get more comfortable using it. The way I see it is, would you rather have Hader pitch 3-4 innings every 5 games as he is now or would you rather have him pitch ~6 innings every 5 games as a starter? Starters are more valuable than relievers and they could much more easily spend money on relievers to replace him than they could spending money on starters. There was probably many people who thought Chris Sale should remain a reliever, but then look what happened once they realized he should be a starter. Burnes and Peralta should be looked at as starters too. Yup, just look last year there were only 3 relievers who had more than 3 WAR (Fangraphs). There were 7 starters who recorded over 3 WAR last year that had a 4 ERA or higher. He doesn't even need to be "that" good as a starter to be worth more WAR than the most elite relief pitchers.

I don't like depending on pitching prospects as our hope to be contenders within the next 4 years, but it is what it is and I certainly get the strategy and being small market it's going to take luck and health with them anyways since we just can't spend but it's certainly risky. Go back 5-7 years and look at all the top 50 or so prospects that were pitchers and most fail to hit anything close to their ceilings if they even make the big leagues. Still would prefer to trade some for an established younger starter whenever the decision comes that it's time to push the chips in. The Mets are the closest thing we've seen in a while of young pitching coming together and that happened only once for them in the last 4 years and it's been injuries and poor performance every other year. Just gotta hope the sequencing of them coming up falls our way that we at least get a 1 year window where they all stay healthy at the same time.

Not even trying Hader as a starter so we can lock down the 6/7/8 innings the next few years is awful use of him and resources in general. It’s much harder and more expensive to fill the rotation than build a bullpen. Even just 160-175 innings of ~4 ERA out of Hader in the rotation is more valuable than whatever he does in his ~60 or so innings out of the bullpen. Plus we already know what he can do out of the pen and we aren’t winning a WS this year, might as well try him as a starter. He can always go back to the pen if he’s a disaster.

Seriously, this If you paid attention to the radar gun during that outing, by his last inning as he hit around 30-35 pitches, Hadar's fastball was down to 91-92mph. Maybe if he was stretched as a starter he could keep his velocity up, but i recall this happened another time or two last year once Hadar got into that 35ish pitch range and his velocity was already declining. What makes Sale special is that he can remain a high velocity pitcher deep into games, something i'm not so sure Hadar can. While that’s something to consider a lefty at 91-93 can be perfectly effective and I don’t expect him to be Sale, that’s silly. But I think he’s one of the 3 best options on the team right now for the rotation.