The season is now more than one-tenth of the way done. If this were football, that would mean we’d played two games. But it’s baseball, so we’ve played seventeen. It’s obviously way too early to draw conclusions about how our Mets will fare by season’s end, but it’s not too early to evaluate how things are going so far.

Before the season started, TangoTiger offered fans the chance to project the season’s statistics for players on their teams. I hesitate to call my picks projections, as they were nothing more than my best guesses, but I did make my picks. Baseball Prospectus, of course, did extensive research to create their projections. So I thought it would be fun to compare my projections to theirs periodically throughout the season, and analyze how our guys were doing in the process.

I only projected OPS (on-base-percentage plus slugging percentage) for hitters, and ERA for pitchers. Let’s look at our eight regulars.

Paul Lo Duca. Current OPS: .637, Baseball Prospectus projection: .726, my pick: .695.
Ironically, a BP writer’s column mentioning Lo Duca’s age (35) and the tendency for catchers to wear down is what caused me to pick a low OPS for Paul this year. (He posted a .783 OPS last season.) On BP’s advice, I went lower than even BP did. Unfortunately, Paul has struggled so far, with just two extra-base hits in 53 at-bats. Even if I accept that part of Lo Duca’s job is to hit behind Reyes and help him along the base paths–let’s face it, Reyes doesn’t need much help. Castro has been much more effective than Lo Duca so far. We’ll see if that continues going forward.

Carlos Delgado: Current: .546, BP: .876, me: .930.
Wow, is Delgado in a funk. He posted a .909 OPS last season, and has a career OPS of .943. Still, all is not lost. According to BP, Delgado has a higher line drive percentage than even Moises Alou. I’m not sure those stats are perfect, but clearly Delgado has hit into some bad luck. I think it’s safe to say Delgado is not himself right now, and that he will certainly start hitting for power at some point, and probably some point soon.

Jose “Stash” Valentin: Current: .762, BP: .776, me: .750
Stash has been right in line with the projections so far. No one expects him to duplicate the .820 OPS he posted last year, especially not the .490 slugging percentage part of it. Valentin remains a solid contributor at second base though–especially on the defensive side. He is becoming one of my favorite Mets, but just so I don’t jinx him, I’ll add that the man is still 37 years old.

Jose “Jose Jose Jose” Reyes: Current: 1.096 (!!!), BP: .766, me: .890
This is one where I’m quite confident I’m going to beat the staff of Baseball Prospectus, who saw a decline in both OBP and slugging percentage for Jose this year. Come on. What is there to be said about Jose’s performance so far? It’s been fantastic, phenomenal, otherworldly, just pick whatever superlative you like. Let’s just hope he can stay somewhere near this pace for 162 games.

David Wright: Current: .717, BP: .925, me: .910
Everyone knows David is in a little slump. But his OBP is still a very respectable .368. That’s pretty good for somebody in a slump (see Carlos Delgado, OBP .278). David is not going to hit the 29 home runs that BP projected. If you go back to an earlier post I wrote, I said David would not hit more than 22 home runs this year. I stand by that. I’ll also say now that he’ll give us plenty of extra-base hits and a great OPS before the season’s end.

Moises Alou: Current: .926, BP: .839, me: n/a
I didn’t pick this one, because what do I know about Moises Alou? The idea behind fans making projections was to get the input from people who watch these guys every day, and see how their predictions compare to the expert stats guys. Well, I certainly didn’t feel qualified to say anything about what Alou would do this year, and so I didn’t make a pick. Clearly, Alou has been great so far.
He never seems to have a bad at-bat. If he can stay healthy, he may prove to be the best signing of the offseason.

Carlos Beltran: Current: 1.091, BP: .906, me: .940
Beltran has picked up right where he left off. He gave us a .982 OPS last year, and he doesn’t appear to be letting up. He’s still only thirty. By the time he’s done, he may be the most productive outfielder the Mets have ever had.

Shawn Green: Current: .980, BP: .760, me: .740
Green has been the most pleasant surprise of the season. But let’s not go crazy. According to BP, he has by far the lowest line drive percentage among our regulars. Again, I take those numbers with a grain of salt, because it seems like a fairly difficult thing to track. There’s no doubt, however, that Green has been lucky in this first tenth of the season. I sure hope he keeps it up, but I expect his OBP and slugging percentage to drop off in the coming weeks.

It’s really too early to say much about the pitchers’ performances, but really quickly, here are the numbers:
Current/BP/Me
Glavine 3.07/4.05/3.88
El Duque 3.24/4.18/4.42
Maine 1.93(!!)/4.33/4.00
Perez 3.31/4.46/4.00
Pelfrey 5.06/4.38/3.85
Wagner 0.00/2.32/2.41
Heilman 3.18/3.81/2.45
Feliciano 0.00/3.90/2.98
Schoeneweis 2.70/4.30/3.67 (I don’t know why I made a pick on this one. Also, it’s worth noting that BP didn’t know he’d be pitching at Shea when they made their projections.)

Even though it doesn’t mean anything, I’d like to enjoy this moment where my picks are beating BP’s for 10 players. They’re beating me for 6 players.

And finally, here’s the best player who neither BP nor myself projected.

Joe Smith: 9 1/3 IP, 6 H, 4 BB, 10 K, 0 R

Welcome to the bigs, kid.

Let’s go Mets for the other ninety percent!

I’ll spare you the details of how I got the tickets. Suffice
to say, I had several friends enter the ticket lottery, one of them won, and
the end result of my battle with mets.com’s whimsy was two opening day tickets
in Upper Deck Section 7, Row
U. For those who don’t
know, Row U is the second-to-last row in the Upper Deck (how I laughed at those
poor suckers in Row V!). I had thought about buying better seats on EBay or
stubhub and offsetting the cost by selling my Row U tickets, but the going rate
for good seats was a lot higher than the going rate for Row U seats. And
besides, there’s a certain honor that comes with sitting where Uecker sat,
where my head really did feel lighter, and where I could see the shadow of
airplanes pass over the buildings and highways of Queens.

So Row U it was. My brother and I arrived on time to see
Keith throw the first pitch to HoJo. (Guess his on-air claim that either Lo
Duca or Castro would be his catcher proved to be inaccurate.) Boy is Keith a ham.

First inning, both pitchers look sharp. It’s going to be a
pitchers’ duel. Second inning, Maine
doesn’t look so sharp after all, though Hamels still does. Third inning, Maine
is about as far from sharp as he can get, though he somehow escapes a bases loaded
no-out jam with Chase Utley, Ryan Howard, and Pat Burrell due up, only allowing one run. (By the way, how in the
world does Maine
throw to third on that Victorino bunt? It was abundantly clear from Row U that Maine had no play at all
on the lead runner. Come on Paul, yell louder and more correctly next time.)

Fifth inning, Willie pulls Maine. “Already?” the guy next to me says.
“When you gotta go, you gotta go,” the woman in front of me says. She checks
her scorecard. “Six walks.” Yikes. And now we’re bringing in…Ambiorix Burgos? Double yikes. But he
gets Nunez easily to end the threat.

Bottom five, Jose pops up a ball a thousand feet in the air
and no one comes down with it. Lo Duca tries to bunt him over, before settling
for a weak grounder to second to merely move him over. I seethe. Are we really
playing for a single run in the fifth inning, against the Phillies lineup? I
hate sacrifice bunts.

“Still pitching for the New York Mets, Ambiorix Burgos,” I
say to my brother. “Did you think they’d take him out after one hitter?” he
says. “No, but I’m still scared,” I say. Burgos
is wild against Cole Hamels, but
eventually retires him on a grounder. He’s even more wild to Rollins, and hits
him with a pitch that seemed to bounce ten feet in front of the plate. It’s not
looking good. It’s especially not looking good when Victorino singles and
steals second, and the Phils have second and third with one out, with Utley and
Howard coming to bat. Chase Utley
and Burgos
proceed to have the best one-on-one battle of the young season. Utley fouls off
six pitches with two strikes—fastballs, sliders, didn’t matter—before finally
striking out on pitch twelve. Wow, great job Burgos. But now you have to be coming out in
favor of Feliciano, right? Or at least walking Howard to get to Burrell? There
is a conference on the mound, and when it’s over, Burgos still stands there, and Lo Duca does
not signal for a walk. “They’re out of their minds,” my brother says. But after
throwing ball one, Burgos
gets two quick strikes on Howard, and the crowd comes to its feet. Howard fouls
off a couple pitches. The next time he swings, I say “five-three” while the
ball has barely even left the infield. It’s a no-doubter. The dude in the next
row shakes his head. “Nobody in the stadium wanted to see him pitch to that
guy.” I had to agree.

How could this happen? How could we blow our second lead in
two days? The park remains perplexed for what seems like hours, wondering how
Howard could’ve been allowed to hit. This all comes to a halt when Geoff Geary, after hitting for himself
(!! as my brother said, “who does he think he is, Guillermo Mota?”), walks Julio
Franco to load the bases for Jose
Reyes. We haven’t technically taken the lead yet, but everyone knows. The
Jimmy Rollins error and ensuing chant is icing on the cake. You didn’t actually
think we were going to lose this game, did you?

They’ve moved the turnstiles for the subway. They used to be
in that gazebo-like structure underneath the pedestrian bridge. Now they’re
right next to the train tracks. As a result, the traffic moves a little faster,
but over a much greater area. Basically, we get to sing “Jose, Jose Jose Jose”
not just on the down ramps in the stadium, but also while climbing the up ramps
to reach the subway platform. I can’t help but wonder how the subway will file
into the new stadium—whose pillars (and the beginning of bleacher seats,
perhaps?) were clearly visible throughout the day from Row U.

I have Upper Deck Row L seats for the first game of the Yankee series.
I guess that will be high enough.

Time
moves differently in November, in December, and in those next few months that
follow. We go about our lives, days turn into nights and into days again, but
something doesn’t feel right. It’s as if we’re all frozen somewhere. It’s as if
we’ve lost a reason to be interested in the world, and we can’t always explain
why. Occasionally we actually do see that final, painful image—Kenny Rogers
throwing ball four, Mike Piazza’s fly to deep center, Carlos Beltran taking
strike three—but on most days, the uneasiness is buried deep in our subconscious.
Something that is supposed to happen every day has ceased happening. We are, in
some profound way, empty.

Three
words wake us from our slumber: pitchers and catchers. Suddenly we remember
what it was like, to watch the game each night. We remember Jose rounding
second before any fielder had laid a hand on the ball. We remember Beltran
ripping it over the rightfield fence. We remember Mr. Wright leaving Mariano
Rivera out on the mound, staring, helpless. We remember we had 172 of these
things last year, and we can’t remember regretting the time we spent on a
single one. And then we realize why the winter has been so slow—to us, that
last out happened only a few minutes before.

Once
awakened, all that remains is the waiting. We wait for spring training
games to start. We wait for the pitchers to go four, five, six innings. And then
we just wait. It turns out the awakening isn’t nearly enough to make us whole
again. We need the games—the real games. We need an opposite-field double from
David. We need to learn Spanish with the professor. We need a catch from Endy.
We need “it’s outta here!” We need Delgado and his notebook. We even need
“Enter Sandman.”

Tonight,
our discontent does end. It’s not just the “Play Ball.” Nor is it
simply the magic of the first game of the season. It’s the peacefulness that
comes from knowing that tomorrow (or at worst, the day after), there will be
another game. And then another. And another. No more uneasy nights with visions
of Octobers past. There is now a calmness. There are now always plenty of games
left to go—plenty of Pelfrey starts, and Joe Smith sinkers, and Beltran homers,
and Reyes triples yet to happen.

Now,
glorious summer begins.

Let’s
go Mets!

The Mets experienced some losses this winter. They lost Chad
Bradford, he of the 1.16 WHIP, and the one home run allowed (one!) in 70
innings of work, to a three-year $10.5 million contract with the O’s. They lost
veterans Cliff Floyd and Steve Trachsel, allowing them to walk away. Although it’s
hard to argue with Mets management on these moves, I’ll miss reading Cliff’s
quotes, and I find it somewhat distressing that Tom Glavine has been a Met
longer than anyone else on the roster. (Pedro Feliciano was with the team in
2002, a year before Glavine arrived, but Feliciano spent 2005 in Japan
before re-joining us last year). Another loss occurred on the coaching staff,
when Manny Acta departed to manage the Washington Nationals. I normally don’t
spend a lot of time worrying about coaching changes, and at first this one was
no different. But then I read this article in the Washington Times. Compare
this quote from Acta: “We will run selectively. I think one of the things that
doomed this club last year is that they were first in caught stealing.” to this
one from Willie Randolph: “[Beltran] could steal 40-to-50 bases easy.”

Now I’m not knocking Willie, here. Carlos Beltran has
historically been one of the most effective base stealers in the game, with a
career stolen base percentage of 87.6%. That’s an astounding number, and if
Beltran can steal bases at that kind of clip it will be an enormous boon to our
offense. That said, Acta has the correct philosophy. The stolen base is only a
good play with an excellent basestealer. For example, assuming typical hitters
behind him and typical pitchers on the mound, a leadoff man on first base in
the home first inning needs about a 71% success rate to justify an attempted
steal of second. Half the teams in the National League had SB percentages lower
than 71% last season. In two years under Randolph,
the Mets have stolen bases at a truly remarkable 79.9% clip, second in the
majors (the Phillies were successful 80.0% of the time).

Part of me worries that Acta has been the one preaching
selective base stealing, and that Acta is the reason the Mets have done so well
in choosing the right times to run. Another, more rational part of me thinks
that Willie understands who should run and when, and that since the only real
base stealers we have are Jose Reyes and Beltran (and, to some extent, David Wright), we
should be fine. I just can’t help being paranoid when so many teams go so wrong
on the basepaths—so wrong that maybe they shouldn’t be attempting stolen bases
at all.

Ramblings:

-I don’t know if we’ll see a lot of doomsday predictions on
Oliver Perez following his 2 IP, 4ER outing today, but any such predictions are
not justified, in my opinion. First, his velocity clearly isn’t there yet, as
it typically is not there for any pitcher this early in the spring. Ollie
topped out in the high eighties today. We all know he has a mid-nineties
fastball when he’s full-strength, and that his fastball is one of his best
weapons. Second, Perez for the most part got hurt in the strike zone today. His
location wasn’t always perfect, but it was far from terrible. He threw more
than twice as many strikes as balls. For his first outing of the spring, I
think that’s a pretty good sign. In short, I wouldn’t read anything at all into
today’s start by Ollie. I still think he’s a big favorite to begin the season
in the rotation.

-It was the first game for everyone today, and that certainly
includes new third-base coach Sandy Alomar, Sr. On Julio Franco’s two-run
single in the eighth, Alomar stood still as a stone while Lastings Milledge approached
third base, even though it was immediately clear that Milledge had to be sent.
Not knowing what else to do, Milledge slowed down, and then decided on his own
to keep chugging along. Only after Milledge had rounded third and taken several
steps towards home did Alomar give a half-hearted “Go” signal. (Milledge ended
up scoring anyway.) The announcers, meanwhile, assigned almost all the blame on
Milledge, accusing him of not picking up the third-base coach. They never
realized there was nothing to pick up. Keith Hernandez finally did say that
hey, there was a new third-base coach out there and maybe that had something to
do with it. Also, it seemed to me that Gary Cohen et al were far too
results-oriented in analyzing Perez’s start. Every hard-hit ball he gave up was
“up in the zone” or a “hanger,” but his strikeout pitch, which clearly looked
like a hanger to me, was “down.” Ron Darling described a pitch that Curtis
Granderson ripped as “middle-middle.” I actually thought Perez got good
location on the inside corner on that pitch and that Granderson, a
good major league hitter, just turned on it. I love Cohen, Darling, and Hernandez in the
booth, but they’re definitely in preseason form right now.

-I found it an odd coincidence that two members of our last
World Series team were just traded for each other in the Atlantic League. Best
of luck to Edgardo Alfonzo and Pat Mahomes (but especially Fonzie) as they try
to work their way back to the bigs.

-Can someone explain to me how getting a major league
prospect to run around the bases qualifies as a practical joke? “Hey, this guy
is really good at this thing, so wouldn’t it be so funny if we get him to do
that thing he’s really good at? Then we’ll all have a hearty laugh!” When I
heard that Randolph
had played a practical joke on Carlos Gomez, I was thinking shaving cream, or some bubble gum, or at least a fat frog had to be involved somehow. I guess I’ll just never
understand jock culture.

Oh Hi, Everybody!

I’m Matt, and I’m a Mets fan. That’s all you really need to know.
I’m new here at Hot Foot–thanks to Anthony for taking me on–but this is my 24^th
season as a die-hard follower of the orange and blue. (My God, can that be right?) I was
there in 1984 when Doc won Rookie of the Year, I was there in 1986 when we won
it all, I was there when we all thought Bill Pulsipher would be the next coming
of Sandy Koufax, I was there, at Shea Stadium, when Robin hit the Grand Single,
and I was certainly there for all of 2006.

And I know it’s painful to look back, but I can’t start
writing about this year without a brief nod to last year’s team. I understand,
it didn’t turn out the way we all wanted, but last year was one of the best
years I’ve had as a fan. 1986 and 2000 have to come first and second because of
the World Series appearances, but 2006 goes right behind them. I was fortunate
enough to attend all the home playoff games last year, and beyond fortunate
enough to catch a foul ball off the bat of Jose Valentin in Game Six of the
NLCS (I think it was his hardest hit ball of the postseason). I can’t ever
remember a team as simultaneously likeable and talented as the one we had last
year, and which, by and large, we still have now.

How did it happen? Who was most responsible for those 103
wins? Ah, this is where my sentimental side disappears and my analytical side
takes over. The good people at FanGraphs tell us, to no one’s surprise, that
based on Win Probability Added (WPA), Carlos Beltran and David Wright were our two
biggest contributors. It may surprise some people to learn that Billy Wagner
rated our third biggest contributor. Really, Billy Wagner? Ahead of Jose Reyes,
Carlos Delgado, and Tom Glavine? WPA is supposed to directly assign credit for
wins and blame for losses. It’s somewhat results-oriented, as a guy who hits
four homers after his team has already taken a ten-run lead will get less
credit than the guy who gets hit by a pitch to drive-in the winning run, but I
still find WPA to be a fascinating statistic. I followed our players’ WPA
throughout the season last year, and became more and more puzzled as Wagner’s
number grew. Wasn’t he the same guy who blew a 4-0 lead to the Yankees? And
wasn’t he terrible in the playoffs? Yes and yes, but the Yankee game was just
one out of 70 he appeared in, a fact the stats can accept far better than I
can, and the WPA numbers are for the regular season only. (Wagner’s playoff WPA
was -.221.) Still, those regular season numbers had to be inflated somehow,
right?

I’m no expert; I’m just a guy. But I wanted to find out what was going on with these numbers, and I hope some of you reading this find the explanation as interesting as I did.

As I’m sure many
astute readers know, the WPA stats at FanGraphs are based on the calculations done
in The Book. The important word there
is “calculations.” For any given situation, The
Book has determined the theoretical percentage
of the time a team of average major leaguers would win against another batch of
average major leaguers, with no consideration for home-field advantage. For
example, take Game 1 of our NLDS. Wagner entered the game in the ninth
inning with the Mets up by two. According to The Book, the Dodgers still had an 8.2 percent chance of winning
the game. (And yes, I bought The Book
mostly just to look up numbers such as this one.) But we have data from actual
major league games over the past twenty-five years, and we can see that the
visiting team, in this case the Dodgers, actually wins only about 5.6 percent
of the time. What accounts for this difference?

Actually, it’s fairly straightforward. If average pitchers
faced average hitters at a neutral site, the team down by two heading into the
ninth inning would expect to win 8.2 percent of the time. But in real baseball,
you don’t get an average pitcher in the ninth inning—you get the closer. We
damn well expect the closer to do better than an average pitcher, or else a lot
of teams have wasted a lot of money. In addition, ninth-inning lineups do not
typically feature average hitters. They can’t, as the best players on the team
usually start the game, and some of them are often removed by the time last licks
rolls around. The ninth inning features an above-average pitcher against
below-average hitters. We won’t punish Wagner for being an above-average pitcher, but we can punish him, statistically speaking, for facing weaker opposition than the gentlemen who start games.

So that’s part of the Wagner explanation. The other part is that
his WPA is largely a product of the situations he’s placed in. That fact may be
obvious to some of you, but I for one was pretty taken aback at just how
drastic the difference is between getting three outs in the ninth and getting
three outs at some earlier point in the game. Say you’re Pedro Feliciano, and
you enter the game in the top of the sixth, up by two, and you retire the side
in order. You get a WPA of .036. If you’re Billy Wagner in game one of the NLDS,
you can come on in the top of the ninth up by two, give up two hits and an
earned run, and still get credit for a WPA of .082. In the ninth inning, all
sins are forgiven as long as you close out the game. When you also consider
that the ninth inning is worth a lot more to begin with, you see what I finally
realized: WPA is not the best statistic for determining a closer’s value to his
team. It might, however, be a perfect statistic for comparing values of closers
against other closers.

Value Over Replacement Player (VORP), every sabermetrician’s favorite
statistic, provides a better answer to the question, “which Met contributed the
most in 2006?” VORP for pitchers is merely “the number of runs a pitcher
surrenders below what a replacement level pitcher would have given up in the
same number of innings.” In other words, there is no inherent advantage to
being the closer in VORP-land. Using VORP, Wagner was only the seventh-best Met
in 2006, falling behind not only Reyes, Delgado, and Glavine, but even Paul Lo
Duca.

Not to be lost in all this, however, is that Billy Wagner
was excellent for us last year. Wagner was fifth in VORP in 2006 among all NL
relievers. His 94/21 k/bb ratio was fantastic, and his .308 BABIP means he was
very unlucky. While PECOTA sees a decline in Wagner’s strikeouts in 2007, it
remains clear that Billy Wagner is not one of the guys Mets fans need to worry
about.

OK, that’s it–no more looking back at 2006. This year is
now. First preseason game is a week away, and from this point forward I will
only write about 2007. Let’s go Mets!