Beyond The Boxscore has an interesting post today on “The Verducci Effect”. The Verducci Effect is best described as follows according to their site: “It’s like training for a marathon. You need to build stamina incrementally. The unofficial industry standard is that no young pitcher should throw more than 30 more innings than he did the previous season. It’s a general rule of thumb, and one I’ve been tracking for about a decade. When teams [...]

This previous Wednesday we bid farewell to 2008 with the usual revelry and fanfare. Safe to say, most Mets fans are happy to see 2008 placed in the ‘last year’ category. We all welcomed the New Year with the usual resolutions: Getting out of debt, quitting smoking, losing weight, etc…However, I would like to propose all Mets fans band together and share the same simple resolution: No booing. I realize this is not a new [...]

I was just checking out some Mets historical stats from the 2008 season at Fan Graphs. I’ve only recently discovered this great site, but now I’m hooked. They have this interesting way of measuring how clutch a player is. Here is their definition… Clutch: A measurement of how much better or worse a player does in high leverage situations than he would have done in a context neutral environment. Here are the top five Mets [...]

The Mexico League, Venezuela League, PR League and the DR League all have playoffs going on right now which mean there are plenty of Mets, former Mets and minor League Mets that remain in action and several Mets had big nights last night. The first one is Fmart, who had an excellent Regular Winter Season this year in the DR continued to hit his stride with the Venenzuela League (for Caracas). Last night he went [...]

While here in the states we are gearing up for the NFL playoffs which start later today, the Winter League Playoffs are under way and the Venezuela League started their playoffs yesterday. The four teams are facing off with La Guaira against Caracas and Aragua against Lara. La Guaira won 4-3 in a close game and Aragua won out 8-4. There are only a few batting and pitching lines that would mean something to Mets [...]

We’ve all heard the pros and cons of signing 12-time All Star, Manny Ramirez. Despite all of his hardware and all of his dramatic homeruns, Manny makes a lot of Mets fans nervous. They say he is too temperamental and could cause chaos in a clubhouse. Both of those characterizations are way overblown, but I won’t argue those points because they have been beaten to death already. Instead, let me give you three other reasons [...]

Last week, J.J. Putz had some interesting things to say about his new role with the New York Mets. Obviously, his first choice would have been to close, but he has completely embraced his future role as the setup man for the Mets. “It wasn’t the ideal situation. I really loved closing. But I’m just going to take it an inning earlier, so it’s not going to be that big of an adjustment. I’m fine [...]