May 7, 2003
The King is Dead!
I know it is early to talk about season awards, but one award has seen a change in the leader. For the last four seasons, Randy Johnson has dominated the NL and the NL Cy Young voting, and rightfully so.
His run has come to an end.
Johnson started the season terrible, getting roughed up in three starts, going 0-2 with an 8.31 ERA. Then he went on the disabled list, missing two (or three) starts. He came off the DL to beat the Mets and strike out 12, just to spite me, and now is back on the DL, having had arthroscopic surgery on his knee. Johnson is only going to start about 20-28 games this season and he has to make up for a lot of stink. There’s almost no chance he can win the CYA this season. So where does that lead us?
Pitchers leading the hunt so far (through May 5):
|
Rank |
Pitcher |
Team |
IP |
K |
W |
L |
ERA |
|
1 |
M. Prior |
ChC |
43.0 |
45 |
4 |
1 |
1.67 |
|
2 |
W.Williams |
StL |
41.0 |
26 |
4 |
0 |
1.76 |
|
3 |
J. Schmidt |
SF |
35.2 |
40 |
3 |
0 |
1.77 |
|
4 |
Z. Day |
Mon |
41.2 |
22 |
3 |
1 |
1.94 |
|
5 |
J. Suppan |
Pit |
39.1 |
22 |
4 |
2 |
2.06 |
|
6 |
B. Myers |
Phi |
38.2 |
34 |
2 |
2 |
2.09 |
|
7 |
D. Moss |
SF |
36.2 |
21 |
4 |
0 |
2.21 |
|
8 |
S. Chacon |
Col |
39.2 |
28 |
4 |
1 |
2.27 |
|
9 |
M. Morris |
StL |
51.2 |
40 |
3 |
2 |
2.44 |
Those are the top ERA guys. Prior could be the man this season. It’s tough to handicap, but it won’t be Johnson – so his reign as Cy Young Winner is over.
Speed Balls
No, John Belushi and River Phoenix aren’t part of this – it’s Kevin Brown and Jeff D’Amico. Sunday afternoon at Dodger Stadium, these two huffed through 9 innings in an hour and fifty-five minutes. Brown threw 84 pitches in 8 innings and, per protocol, Eric Gagne was brought in to save the game. Gagne hadn’t given up a run - until this game. That slowed the game considerably. That just out-paced two AL games on Friday, May 2. Joe Kennedy threw a one-hitter at the Tigers and Gary Knotts in 2:09 and Cory Lidle threw a three-hitter at the Angels and John Lackey in 2:07.
Game Chats
Personally, I love the game chats. I’m always sitting at home, screwing around on the computer while watching, and pathetically, scoring at home. Having a few others commenting on the game as it happened makes it a little more enjoyable. If the Mets weren’t so bad, it’d be more enjoyable, but at least I don’t suffer alone.
As the Brewers-Cubs game ended on 5/5/03, Dan Contilli remarked, "Sosa has 21 Ks and one homer since getting hit in the head. It's starting to worry me." I hadn’t noticed that, so I went and looked up Sosa’s game logs, and sure enough, he has struck out 22 times (sorry, Dan) with just the one home run on 5/1/03. Is there a problem? I looked at Sosa’s general K rate, and when a man averages a strikeout a game for a decade, he will go 13-game stretches where he strikes out twice a game and only homer once. At least Sosa is in a good slump; he’s hitting 0.250/0.304/0.404 for this stretch. Is the plunk to the noggin affecting him? Sosa strikes me as an extremely proud man, and I suspect he may not think he’s affected. And maybe he isn’t. Having been brained a few times myself, I was surprised Sosa didn’t take a few days off – he had to be concussed. Of course, it’s been two weeks now, and these things do heal, so Sosa could be clear-headed tomorrow and we’ll never know if it was just a slump. Let’s hope it isn’t anything more.
I have been jinxing pitchers left and right on my game lead-ins. If you have a particular player you’d like to have a bad game, let me know!
The Mets
Mo Vaughn went on the DL with knee problems. I was surprised a man as overweight as Mo has knees left to have problems - Lord knows he can’t bend down to field ground balls. All over baseball, columnists are sounding the death knell for the Mets when they are just a handful of games back, and not nearly as putrid as a couple of other teams. The defense has been ugly, but Howe is making adjustments. Cedeno is out of centerfield for starters.
How do the Mets improve? First, play Cliff Floyd at first rather than in the outfield. Floyd’s legs are just about done. He needs to run as rarely as possible, and sadly, seems to have made this decision already in the field. Floyd can’t run down routine fly balls, and as long as Howe puts him in left, the Mets will have trouble getting routine innings.
Through the April 27 doubleheader loss to the Diamondbacks, Rey Sanchez had an OPS of .280. That’s some sort of dirty joke. All in all, it isn’t close to over.
Chris Dial
Posted: May 06, 2003 at 01:00 AM |
19 comment(s)
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As for the Mets, the most striking thing to me is that the Diamond Mind simulations produced ZERO post-season appearances for them. Nada. To me, that is a very, very telling thing. I would imagine that the Mets have more resources for jumbling things around and getting a competitive team on the field this season than just about any team, but this is a very, very tall order, and I think this is a situation where they need to come up with long term solutions to the mistakes they made assembling this team.
David - yes, I am not really trying to handicap the race exactly, but Prior has about 50 things going for him - high profile team with a good chance at 20 wins and the post-season and he is popular with ESPN. I don't mind DMB not having the Mets win. How did they do with the Angels last season? Piazza *can* still catch. Floyd can't play in the OF. SBs aren't nearly as costly as routine fly balls to left field. 1B is also Floyd's eventual home - and probably sooner than Piazza's.
2. Trade or let walk Benitez, Alomar & Burnitz at the end of year.
3. Spend that $30 million on Vlad and one of either Troy Glaus or Eric Chavez. Move Wiggington back to 2B.
4. 3-way platoon Piazza/Floyd/Wilson @ C/1B, with Wilson getting the fewest ABs.
2004 Mets:
Timo Perez CF
Troy Glaus 3B
Vladdy RF
Piazza/Wilson C (obviously Wilson would bat lower)
Floyd/Piazza 1B/LF
Floyd/R. Gonzalez LF
Wiggington 2B
Reyes SS
Reyes could move up to leadoff if or when he mastered ML OBP.
It's not really that he's lost his strike zone judgment, because he's not swinging at bad pitches. He's just taking everything. IANAD, but I would guess that there's something wrong.
The Nymets are my favorite squadron.
The Mets' problems don't come from buying free agents "rotisserie style", but from buying BAD free agents (and trading for OLD players) rotisserie style. A $12-15 million/year investment in Vlad is a *lot* different than $11 million/year sunk into Jeromy Burnitz. $10 mil/year for Chavez/Glaus is a lot more useful than $8 mil/year in Robbie Alomar (as a 35 year old.)
Yes, the Mets could wait on Wright and Reyes to develop and pin the rebuild on either or both becoming real MLB stars, but that's an iffy proposition itself. A post-Piazza era offensive anchor like Vlad ameliorates the need for two or three prospects to pan out all at the same time. The only reason not to go after Vlad or the 3B free agents would be to save money, essentially the thinking the Mets took when ARod was all but begging to be a Met, and that's not a good reason for a NY team to pass on premiere free agents IMHO.
Again, the problem isn't *spending* money, it's spending money *intelligently.* The Mets have some $130 million to spend on talent with a little over $30 freeing up after this season. There's no reason whatsoever to sit on that money, other than ownership not wanting to spend. And next winter is one of the few where there's real talent out there to be bought.
DMB had the Angels winning 2 division titles and 1 WC last year, with an 82-80 record.
Take it from me, a Cubs fan. I know a hopeless situation when I see it.
(To be fair, DMB simulated no post-seasons for the Cubs in 1998, the year they won the WC, but with an 82-80 record. The Mets are projected at 74-88 this year)
Could the Mets turn it around? Sure. I could also run a successful campaign for governor. Neither is particularly likely.
Sam - I can't be in denial. The Mets aren't eliminated. If it weren't for four Benitez implosions (and surely you don't consider him to be old), the Mets would be 18-14. Assuming he blows a save 1 out of 10 times, the Mets would be 17-15. Those are facts. The Mets have had some bad luck. It'll get a lot better with MVS out ofthe lineup, as he hasn't lost any weight (that I can tell) and his defense is even worse, due to his bad knees. Oh, and Alomar is playing below expectations - everyone's expectations but yours. And Rey Sanchez is a .280 OPS guy. That's expected. It *is* a mediocre team playing below expectations.
Not that he's going to do that, mind you.
As for Benitez, yeah, you're four blown saves away from not-that-bad. But those saves were, in fact, blown. And snowballs tend grow when they start rolling down hill.
These are the figures including the games of Tuesday May 6. I believe Mussina and Loaiza both had good games tonight in the AL as did Moss and Milwood in the NL.
NL
1 Shawn Chacon 1.60
2 Mark Prior 1.41
3 Woody Williams 1.29
4 Zach Day 1.24
5 Jeff Suppan 1.11
6 Jason Schmidt 1.01
7 Damian Moss 0.98
8 Brett Myers 0.95
9 Javier Vazquez 0.92
10 Matt Morris 0.90
11 Kevin Millwood 0.86
12 Kevin Brown 0.82
13 Miguel Batista 0.81
14 Tim Redding 0.80
15 Tony Armas 0.74
16 Kerry Wood 0.73
17 Al Leiter 0.61
18 Tom Glavine 0.61
19 Brian Lawrence 0.58
20 Mike Hampton 0.57
AL
1 Mike Mussina 1.88
2 Runelvys Hernandez 1.71
3 Esteban Loaiza 1.55
4 Pedro Martinez 1.51
5 Mark Mulder 1.39
6 Barry Zito 1.24
7 Nate Cornejo 0.95
8 David Wells 0.94
9 Gil Meche 0.93
10 Tim Hudson 0.84
11 Chris George 0.82
12 Roger Clemens 0.80
13 Jason Johnson 0.75
14 C.C. Sabathia 0.70
15 Ted Lilly 0.55
16 Jake Westbrook 0.53
17 Jarrod Washburn 0.46
18 Ryan Franklin 0.46
19 Freddy Garcia 0.45
20 Ricardo Rodriguez 0.42
Alomar(8), Astacio(7), Benitez(6.8), Burnitz(12), Clark(.6), Cone(.6), Franco(3.8), Russ Johnson(.8), Lloyd(.7) and Sanchez(1.3). That's ~$42M, quite a bit more than the $30M figure mentioned earlier.
The year after they'll drop ~$20M more.
Having those kinds of funds available would make a total rebuilding process unnecessary. If the Mets go about things intelligently, signing guys like Vlad and Kazuo Matsui (say $20M/yr and $7M/yr contracts), then they'll have improved themselves short AND long term.
Well, to be fair, Chris, you can't just cherry-pick Benitez's bad contributions and ignore all of the other factors of luck that the Mets have experienced, good and bad.
Their Pythagorean W/L is 12-21.
I'm not. Pythags at this stage aren't completely accurate due to the lack of time for things to even out. Blowouts skew Pythags a lot at this point in hte season, and they aren't "luck" in run distribution. After 500 runs are scored, the Mets should have blown out a team or two to even those out. At this point in the season, that hasn't occured. So, no, I'm not ignoring luck, regardless of their Pythags. And besides, I'm not talking about a starter's bad game to remove - I'm talking about games where the win probabilities were over 95%. That's in the bag. As I said, Benitez is going to blow 1 of 12 chances anyway, so the Mets don't "get credit" for all four, but three were piss-poor performance by Benitez.
The binomial probability of at least four 5% likely events happening in 32 tries is not that small (about 7%), and it's 21% for at least three times and nearly 50/50 for happening two or more times, so this is unlucky but hardly freakish, and you should give the Mets only two of those wins at most. Maybe there are two 5% lucky games you could find on the Mets' win side of the balance sheet that would even it out....or maybe not. It's a mind game I try to resist playing.
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