Wright extended

As Veronica Mars once said "the one who stays is the one who cares" and it's nice to know that David Wright cares so much about the NY Mets. Wright's deal is a very reasonable eight years, 138 million dollars. 138 mil is a perfect valuation for Wright. Sandy is known for being a savvy, smart GM who doesn't make bad deals and this is just further evidence. I may not always agree with Sandy but I know I can count on him not to make overpay, hype signings. That being said I would have been a little happier with less years. This contract carries Wright through his age 37 season which will likely include a bad year or two. That being said it could have been much worse and we aren't carrying 5+ years of expected declining play like some other contracts.

A few people have said Wright's on field play has not been worth the roughly 17.25 mil he will be making a year. Let's take a look using the WAR to dollars formula. Popular consensus says that a player is worth about 5 million dollars per win he adds to the team. So a player with a WAR of 2 should get paid ten million bucks. Let's take a look at Wright's history.

Year	WAR	Dollar Value (in millions)
2004	2.5	12.25
2005	6.2	30
2006	5.2	25
2007	8.8	45
2008	7.1	35
2009	3.5	17.25
2010	4	20
2011	1.9	10
2012	7.8	40

According to these numbers Wright has earned a salary greater than 17.25 mil in all but two seasons, one of which was his rookie year. I am not always bullish on Wright. He tends to strike out a lot and go on long slumps and regress as the season goes on but at the end of the day I am a numbers guy and Wright's number are elite. For those worried about how Wright may look in future seasons I suggest you read my projection article from last month, good things should be in Wright's future.

Mets v. Buster Posey

Is everyone aware that Buster's real name is Gerald Dempsey Poser III? I am not quite sure why he goes by Buster, I think it would be way cooler to announced every game with the same name as a yacht club chairman. His initials even spell GDP which I am sure his friends at the Union League would get a good guffaw over.

Personally, I would have voted for Braun for MVP, I thought they had very similar offensive numbers and both play great defense so I would give the edge to the guy with twenty more homers. Unfortunately the BBWAA tends to give the award to guys who hit arbitrary milestones like a batting title (or a triple crown). Anyway let's see how Gerald did against the Mets.

Player	AVG	OBP	SLG	HR	SO
Posey	.429	.538	.857	2	3

We played the Giants to a 4-4 tie this year but during those eight games Posey really shellacked us. He posted an incredibly .857 slugging percentage due to the 2 home runs and 3 doubles he managed to hit off Mets pitchers in only 21 AB's. Posey was particularly good against the NL east posting three of his highest averages against the Braves and Mets, he also hit better against the Phillies than any other team.

Mets v. David Price

David Price won the AL Cy Young award last night, while he may have been the second best pitcher in baseball (after Dickey) the Mets absolutely owned him in his appearance against us this year. Below was his line against the Mets on June 13.

IP	ERA	H	BB	K
5	12.60	9	3	8

This was probably my favorite Mets game of the year. This was the first of Dickey's back to back one hitters and probably the gem of his dominant June campaign. The first four innings went scoreless and it looked like we were in a for a pitchers duel but the Mets broke it open to score nine runs that night. Price had a regular season ERA of 2.56 and was generally dominant, this was one of his worst starts. He still notched a few K's and walked few but this was June when the Mets were just on fire, every batted ball dropped for a hit and two out rallies were the norm, sadly it would not last. But we can hang two feathers in our Cy Young caps this year, our beloved Dickey won and the Mets rocked Price.

I was wrong

R.A. Dickey won the Cy Young about two minutes ago and I am freaking out, this feels so great. R.A. Dickey is my favorite Met of all time and this just absolute validation of how great he is. Last year I wrote the Dickey report and have written about R.A. on this blog more than any other topic. I kept saying that he was a top 25 pitcher in baseball, turns out I was wrong. He is #1.

Nonsense ball

Since August the Marlins have traded away Heath Bell, Hanley Ramirez, Jose Reyes, John Buck, Anibal Sanchez, Mark Buehrle, Emilio Bonifacio and Josh Johnson. Rumors indicate they are close to trading SP Ricky Nolasco which will make part time utility player Greg Dobbs the highest paid player on the Marlins with a whopping 1.5 million dollars due in 2013. The Marlins have officially gone through the looking glass.

Yesterday's trade is one that truly baffles me. It shows almost a complete lack of forethought and long term planning on the part of the Marlins ownership. They built a new, expensive (and bizarrely decorated) stadium then went out and put together a dream team which they promptly dismantled after one dismal season. I have to wonder what they expected to happen in 2012. Sold out games every night? A World Series championship maybe? A baseball team has to have some time to develop and a fan base has to have some time to warm up to a squad. Despite their abysmal record the 2012 Marlins were a good team. They had some injuries and some bad luck but overall the talent existed. With a few additions this team could have been a regular playoff contender in a year or two. Sadly we will never know because the Marlins management didn't give them a chance to do it.

Baseball is often a confusing game. Teams overpay for name players when lesser known but equally talented players are available, teams sign players to long term contracts knowing they will basically be useless in their later years and teams regularly play bad players just because they paid a lot for them. This is just an example of bad business. The Marlins clearly didn't have a long term plan for this team and most certainly hadn't planned for a year that didn't include massive, immediate success. 

The Mets v. Bryce Harper

Each year Metsrospectus takes a look at how each major award winners fared against the Mets. First up lets take a look at NL Rookie of the Year, Bryce Harper:

Player	AB	HR	AVG	OBP	SLG
Harper	61	3	.295	.358	.541

These are clown numbers bro. Harper was pretty good against the Mets this year putting up numbers that far outpace his overall average. He slugged 64 points higher than average and batted 25 points higher overall. The Nationals beat the Mets more than any other team in baseball (we went 4-14 against them) and Harper clearly had a lot to do with that.  I actually feel kind of bad for Harper this year because he became the victim of the sports media being forced to make at least one ROY race interesting. Mike Trout was a foregone conclusion for AL rookie of the year and Harper should have been also. However with one race already decided the sportswriters had to write about something so we were forced to read about how Todd Frazier and Wade Miley were totally viable options. NL rook was just as tied up as as AL from the begining. Todd Frazier and Wade Miley were pretty much the best rookies on the their teams and that's about it

David Wright v. Chase Headley

Today is the one year anniversary of Metsrospectus. A year ago today I wrote this article about Reyes losing  the Silver Slugger to Tulo, one year later here we are talking about another Met not winning awards.

In the past week the Padres 3b Chase Headley Lamar won both the NL Gold Glove and Silver Slugger both awards I feel belonged to David Wright. One of the most frequent reasons I hear cited is how well Headley did on such a poor team. The Padres were actually a better team than the Mets this year finishing with two more regular season wins and finishing in the same place in their division. Let's take a quick look at the pertinent stats of the two men.

Player	WAR	AVG	OPB	SLG	HR	K%	UZR
Wright	7.8	.306	.381	.492	21	16.7	16.8
Headley	7.5	.286	.351	.498	31	22.5%	6

Defensively I think Wright was the better player. Traditional defensive metrics have them with basically identical years. When we move to the more advanced metrics Wright clearly had a better year putting up a UZR significantly higher than Headley. I am fairly certain that the managers who voted did not factor UZR into their decision making process but ten additional runs saved is fairly significant.

On the offensive side I think it is close but I would have to give the edge to Wright. Wright led Headley in BA and OBP by decent margins and effectively tied him in SLG. The one area where Chase did soundly beat wright is homers. An additional ten home runs is a fairly decent margin and doubly impressive since he plays in a pitchers park. Another downside to Chase is his high strike out rate. Headley whiffs in about a quarter of his at bats which is fairly significant. I think if forced to choose a starting 3B for their team any rational fan would choose Wright over Headley. It is a shame that with the phenomenal year Wright had he will not be honored in any way, be it with a Silver Slugger, Gold Glove or spot as an All Star starter.

Dickey awarded BBA top pitcher award.

R.A. Dickey was the recipient of the Baseball Bloggers Alliance "Walter Johnson" Award, given to the top pitcher in each league. Read about it here.

Goodbye Jason Bay

Jason Bay is gone and I have to say I am pretty pleased. Obviously it hurts that we are just throwing away 21 million dollars but at this point it was the most logical move and shows some real maturity on the part of the front office. Baseball logic often dictates that a team must start a player who they paid a lot of money too just to get the value of their purchase, even if that player is actively hurting the team. This appears to be what the Mets were doing with Bay over the last few years. A player owed 400k putting up Bay's numbers would have lasted about two weeks before being sent to Buffalo.

2010 and 2011 represented serious down years from Bay. He went from being a 30 homerun guy to hitting six and then twelve. 2012 was just downright awful. Bay was one of the worst players in baseball and posted a -.8 WAR, actually costing the Mets about a game through his poor play. Simply not having Jason on the team makes the Mets better.

In the next few days we are going to hear a lot about Bay and the way he was treated as a Met. People always say that fans are too harsh and that Jason was a great clubhouse presence and a hard worker. No one denies this. I am sure that on a personal level Bay is a very good guy but that does not separate the fact that he is an awful baseball player right now. I think we all need to understand that when we talk about ball players we are always talking about them in the context of baseball. Albert Belle is probably a nice guy, he was just mean on the field. Chipper Jones is not a bad person, I just hate him for beating the Mets. So keep in mind as we bash Bay in the next few days that we are bashing a poor performance  in relation to an amount of money paid for services and an expectation of what he would produce. Jason Bay does not suck as a person, just at baseball.

I'm worried.

With each day that passes I am getting more and more worried that the Mets aren't going to resign Dickey. At this point my theory is that they are waiting for Dickey to win the Cy Young when his trade value will be at it's absolute highest then move him to another team. Most reports seem to indicate that the Mets will seek 1-2 near major ready prospects for the Dickster.

Frankly this just dosen't make sense to me. I am a big believer that we can never bet on something happening we haven't seen happen before. As a full time knuckeballer R.A. has had three stellar seasons, all well above the typical age in which pitchers regress. Now after his best season yet people are starting to say that 38 is too old and he will now start to regress. The evidence just isn't here to support this. 38 is old for a baseball player but not really all that different than 36 or 37. Knuckleballers typically pitch into their 40's and their is no reason to believe that Dickey wont have 5-6 more productive years and even that his best years may be ahead of him.

I also have to say that at this point I am not all that interested in prospects. Dickey is a major league ace right now and will be for a few more years. The odds we trade him for anyone that will ever put up numbers similar to his is incredibly low.

I just don't know what I will do if the Mets ditch Dickey. He is without a doubt my favorite Met of all time and seeing him another team would be brutal. Let's keep up hope he will be a Met for years to come.