MoBettle wrote:Baseball playoffs are bullshit. Mets were shit outside of the NL East but they make the world series because their muppet second baseman got hot for a week.

Mets rotation is pretty awesome

How's the Mets rotation?

Pretty awesome

Pretty awesome

Since the wild cards were introduced 20 years ago, the team with the best record has won the World Series four times

Grotewold wrote:They probably added two years to the trough we all knew was coming. But it looks like they may have then recouped a year off of the rebuild.

agree with both you and smitty. the 2009-2011 buildup to the 4 ace thing was a fun game with a high upside, and the pence option to overpaying werth and the plan for brown to take over quickly from ibanez were ok decisions. however, with polanco's career clearly ended by injuries and utley clearly in decline, once the poor gamble with howard turned into a worst-case scenario at the end of 2011 , it was time to start being more careful. instead...

signing papelbon too early, for too much and too long was exactly the wrong move and the first of the ones that locked in the 2013-15 disasters. the next was selling unnecessarily fast and low on pence, victorino, and blanton. the next were the delay in accepting the demise of halladay and all failures to trade the older and bigger name aging stars in 2012 and 2013 once it became screamingly obvious doc's doom was real and had wiped out the foundation for any realistic hope of avoiding a rebuild. ruiz and rollins and lee and utley all could have brought back return somewhere between what we ended up getting for rollins and hamels last year. getting lee permanently damaged trying to rush him back in time for the trade deadline in 2014 was the last great mistake, maybe right behind the howard and papelbon contracts.

however, managing to get decent-to-excellent return for rollins, papelbon, utley, and hamels over the past year was pretty darn amazing. perhaps implausible that those moves really were being made by the same person, but if it really was ruben, he deserves credit for cleaning up a sizable fraction of his own mess.

I'd note they almost snuck into the playoffs in 2012, despite a rash of injuries. Getting nothing for Pence and hanging on to Lee the following July were the killers, imo, on top of Doc's disintegration and Brown not developing. Staying on top is really hard, but on the other hand they clearly didn't have a coherent plan

Grotewold wrote:I'd note they almost snuck into the playoffs in 2012, despite a rash of injuries. Getting nothing for Pence and hanging on to Lee the following July were the killers, imo, on top of Doc's disintegration and Brown not developing. Staying on top is really hard, but on the other hand they clearly didn't have a coherent plan

Yeah it's easy to forget that they were only 3GB of the 2nd Wild Card slot with 11 to play. They fell out by going 4-7 over those last 11 games. At the same time, they would've had to win out to catch the Cards, who went 8-3 over those last 11.

What really killed them that year though was the 1-11 stretch in late June/early July and going 6-12 against the damn Barves (including an 0-6 stretch in July).

702 wrote:How's the Mets rotation?

phone posts duplicate often.

Looking forward to seeing these hot young Phillies strut their stuff in April.

holy shi-ite... the haul the pads just got for kimbrel sure raises the bar for what will satisfy me as return for giles.

Working in trading for Hellickson apparently. Hmmm.

CalvinBall wrote:Working in trading for Hellickson apparently. Hmmm.

Tweeted by Steaks.

Not thrilled about this.

Any deal involving Dave Stewart can only be good on our end.

It's Sam McWilliams, who seems like a legitimate lottery ticket, which makes this puzzling

Eem wrote:It's Sam McWilliams, who seems like a legitimate lottery ticket, which makes this puzzling

I've never heard of him. Winkleman also seems to be a tad loony here on this.
Also we get a lottery ticket in return. One who has shown he can pitch in the bigs.

Jeremy Hellickson stinks, right?