Free Pedro

My brother called me out today. “Worst team in baseball, huh?” He had other things to say too. That wasn’t the worst of it.

I guess that’s the kind of criticism you take when you start putting your thoughts onto the internet for everyone to read. If you had asked me a week ago what the chances were that the Mets would put together five straight wins at any point for the rest of the season, I wouldn’t have given them any better than one chance in ten.

Well, that’s why they play the games.

Jason could probably run a graph telling us the odds of any given team winning a certain number of games for the rest of the year.  But for the next day’s games, what would it matter? It’s only a prediction. Underdogs win every day.

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Jonathan, how much does a top three of Cole Hamels, Cliff Lee, and J.A. Happ scare you?

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It’s officially Trade Week, and because I know how we fans of the big-market teams spend this time of year fretting over the decision whether to sell the farm for a perennial all-star, I’ve put together this analysis to help us undertand just what’s at stake. Once I’ve covered trading the prospects, I’ve included some graphs of the signings our favorite teams (and my least favorite) have made over the past few years, in order to show how they value age in their decision process. Read the rest of this entry →

What a week for Mets fans. If the slow bleed from months of losses on the field doesn’t get you, then blunt trauma from management’s incompetence will.

Just think about this for a minute. The Mets VP of Player Development, Tony Bernazard, was fired this week because he launched into vicious tirades in the Citi Field stands during Mets games and then challenged the whole AA Binghamton Mets team to a shirtless brawl. And that wasn’t even the story of the week.
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When we look back on David Wright’s career fifteen years from now, we will regard his 2009 season either as an unfortunate speed bump just before his glorious prime, or as the year when great expectations for Wright and the Mets came crashing down onto unsold corporate seats at Citi Field. Read the rest of this entry →

Back in 2003, Scott Hatteberg was the best hitter in baseball–OK, maybe not the best but apparently most mispriced–and the arbitrageur Billy Beane was eating free lunches almost daily. OPS was what mattered. Of course, then OPS became overpriced, and Billy started buying based on other statistics, ones that I don’t know of because he smartened up and didn’t let Michael Lewis put his new ones in a book. Intuitively, I still like OPS, but I think I have improved it. Read the rest of this entry →

It became official in just two hours and five minutes on Wednesday night in Washington.

The New York Mets are the worst team in Major League Baseball.

I know what you’re thinking. It just isn’t possible. No way a team that comprises Johan Santana, Fransisco Rodriguez, and David Wright can be the worst team in baseball. The Mets are only six games under .500, right? They are only eight games out of the Wild Card! And then of course there’s always the Nats. The Nats are 38 games below .500. They’ve already fired their manager this season and they’ve gone 2-5 since. They’ve only got one legitimate pitcher and their best player is Christian Guzman. They can’t be better than the Mets. Read the rest of this entry →