Before we call it quits here for the night, just a few more blogs from todays Round the Metsblogs.  Same topic, different voices.

To start, Mets Today, where they say what Mota did was wrong, but we should support him in his bid to play well while clean, since his success is our success. From their blog:

A nice point. Booing didn't make Beltran hit that first season here.  Booing didn't turn A-rod clutch. Booing didn't help Mackey Sasser throw back to the pitcher. But many players do thrive from crowd support.  Reyes for example, has said in interviews the “Jose” chant energizes him.  While he doesn't deserve Reyes level support, maybe at least a middle ground support given to some of the other various interchangable middle releivers is probably better than booing. They also go a bit into the Bonds issue as well, who they support your booing.

Lou over at Never Forget puts the blame on all of baseball, for their willingness to look the other way when this whole mess started.

Though Lou doesn't say it, if we are going to blame baseball, perhaps we should blame ourselves as well.  We the fans accepted the mysterious homerun rise of the late 90s just as much as the front offices.

And to wrap it up for the night, Melissa over at Blue Skies and Baseball reminds us to respect the game.  Don't boo Barry, or anyone else for that matter, but cheer for your team.Words of wisdom from her  post tonight:

I generally try to avoid things dealing with that team over in the Bronx, but I'll make an exception today.  Over at baseball blog Ump Bump, Nick takes a very special look at Derek Jeter. In poem form.

While doing your best to keep try and stay amused during the “rain delay”, lets see what our fellow bloggers in blue and orange are talking about:

Metrsadamus wasn't a big fan of that loss, and will tell you about it, in a post that includes jokes about the Chinese space program and a reference to Major League.  Now that, is how to blog.

Dan over at Lonestar Mets looks at the future of the Mets outfield, or Mets Outfield V1.5 as he calls it.

Lou over at Never Forget 69 takes a look at the upcoming Mets vs Yankees, but more so at the general idea of Mets vs Yankees in the eyes and hearts of NY.

And Mr Glass over at Y2K: Promote the Curse takes a look at Lastings journey into a secondary career in music.

As I posted yesterday, I am representing Hot Foot over at Awful Announcing's NFL Mock draft. The guys over at The Big Lead and I split the first two rounds for the Atlanta Falcons, with TBL taking the first round and giving the second round to me. In the first round, TBL selected LSU S Laron Landry with the 8th overall pick. I had the 39th and 44th overall picks. The results are below:

Hot Foot trades the 39th overall pick to Digital Headbutt in exchange for the 45th overall pick, an MP3 of “We Get Live” By Fabulous and an entry at his blog that must include this.

The Extrapolator trades his rights to the 44th overall pick to Hot Foot in exchange for a Ron Mexico jersey and a prescription for Valtrex.

With the 44th pick in the 2007 NFL Draft, the Atlanta Falcons select…..

With the 45th pick in the 2007 NFL Draft, the Atlanta Falcons select……

This pick was between Harris
and Anthony Spencer, the DE out of Purdue, but I'm much more
comfortable with Chauncey Davis starting then I am Jordan Beck.

This week I will be representing Hot Foot in Awful Announcing's NFL mock draft. Many other blogs such as Deadspin, The Big Lead, Sports Show on Mute and Ladies….. will be participating as well. The Big Lead and I will be drafting for the Atlanta Falcons. Being one of the three Falcons fans in the Tri-State area (Sal LaCotta of WFAN and former WFAN caller Erik from the Bronx being the other two), we hope to make other Falcon fans proud. I'll report back at the end of the draft with the results.

Its that time of the year, the Blogger's Choice Awards. Now, far be it for me, as a blogger, to tell you who to vote for.  But there are a few Mets blogs up there in the Sportsblogger category, including the Foot, Metsblog, and Shea Faithfull.  In a perfect world, there would be a three way tie, and somewhere in the far below of last place, would be a Yankees blog. But we don't live in such a place, but as Mets fans, we can at least try to make sure a Mets blog wins.

At the moment, Metsblog is in second, behind Bronx Bloggers (boo).

Go here to vote.

The guys over at TrueSport are back from Florida where they got to spend some time with the Mets. Their first post about it is up, and check back with them later in the week as they promise to talk about meeting John Maine. But if you head over today (right now!) you can learn what they saw seeing Maine, Lastings, and Green all play live.

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!

Can't Stop The Bleeding submits their list of candidates for baseball commissioner, which Bud Selig revealed he will be retiring from in three years.

The Great Metstradamus takes a moment from rocking back and forth in the shower while still dressed in the crash position to tell us how he's sick of agents running the show when it comes to talking to free agents.

Around this past trade deadline, I heard rumblings from the worldwide leader and Ken Rosenthal that the Devil Rays are looking to trade Carl Crawford for some young pitching. This got me thinking. What if we traded Lastings Milledge and Phil Humber to the Devil Rays for Crawford? It would be a perfect trade for both teams. The Mets get a proven player who also happens to be a Jose Reyes clone to fill the void in left field and possibly anchor the top of the lineup with Reyes, giving the Mets, without a doubt, the best 1-2 punch at the top of the order in baseball. As for the Devil Rays, they get a great young outfielder they can replace Crawford with in Milledge and let him develop in their system along with Delmon Young, Elijah Dukes and the rest of Tampa’s young stud position players. Humber not only fills the Rays’ request for a young pitcher, but a quality one who can establish himself as one of the better pitchers in the American League.

Then again, the Mets did trade the Rays Scott Kazmir for Victor Zambrano, so maybe they owe them a Crawford for Brian Bannister trade?

Thoughts?

Here's what some of our favorite bloggers are talking about today…

Archie Bunkers Army does his own version of Bill Simmon's in game commentary.

Can't Stop The Bleeding apologizes to Tom Glavine, and has some You Tube video from his seat at the game.

Jessica @ Chicks Dig The Pitchers Duel is happy to announce the Mets are ready for prime time and has some video of her own to share.

Jason @ Faith and Fear In Flushing has me now thinking i'm the only Mets blogger unlucky enough not to be at last nights game. He relates some very funny stories from his ride on the 7 train, his seats in the uppers, and his encounter with a female Yankee fan with her Mets fan boyfriend in an elevator.

I can relate to Lone Star Mets saying he's terrified watching these games. I know I cannot enjoy them one bit, i'm a nervous wreck but I guess thats just how it is with postseason baseball.

The Metropolitans has pictures of Greg Maddux's porn star baseball card along with the countless other goodness the Metro's are known to provide on a regular basis.

I'm a little late on this but you might enjoy Eric and Alex discussing game one on Mets Geek.

Metstradamus has the line of the day for all the non believers in the mainstream press. “Memo to Planet Earth: the Mets are good.”

Vinny @ Metsville lets us in on some parking secrets at Shea. Good to see Vinny blogging again, i'm a long time fan of Metsville.

Mets Walkoffs, as always, digs deep and brings us game one little known facts.

Mike's Mets recaps game two.

Zoe @ Pick Me Up Some Mets brings us her game two experience, with pictures! I really am the only Mets blogger in the universe who has yet to score postseason tickets. Someone help me out here!!!

…and finally Toasted Joe invites the Dodgers to the Flushing Clinic, and doubles down on the playoffs.

Cliff Floyd is now blogging along with his buddy David Wright. Zoe Rice of Pick Me Up Some Mets has passed along the info to the Hot Foot that her favorite Met, Mr. Cornelius Clifford Floyd, is now one of us, and we look forward to him sharing with us his postseason experiences.

Here are what some of our favorite bloggers are talking about today…

Our buddy Matt Cerrone @ Metsblog has some tasty morsels to pass along to us this morning, such as Bob Sike's account of the 1986 divisional clinching celebration over on New York Sports Day, and Matt also reminds us how far we have come since the Art Howe era, citing an article in today's New York Times.

Amazing Avenue is headed to Pittsburg!

Can't Stop The Bleeding introduces us to “The Undoing Of David Wright“

Adam Rubin's Bloggin The Mets gives us a rundown of the end of season Mets minor league leaders.

Jessica @ Chicks Dig The Pitchers Duel takes a trip to Camden Yards.

The triumphant conclusion of Magic Number Countdown @ Faith and Fear In Flushing.

One is the lonliest number for Xavier Nady, the Great and All Knowing Mestradamus admits with guilt.

Mike @ Mike's Mets has a cool little logo in honor of tonight.

Zoe might be coming down to celebrate with us @ Mc Faddens. Hope to see you there!

Toasted Joe has a delicious Mr. Burns reference in regards to how our plan to celebrate on the field has fell into place so nicely. Joe, if you happen to make it down to the party, first beer is on me! Ok, its an open bar, but hey buddy, who loves ya!