honestly

do you expect

delgado to be better or worse?
church to be better or worse?
murphy to be better or worse?
tatis to be better or worse
even pagan to be better or worse?

castillo might be better
wright/beltran/reyes prob the same

but after that, who knows?

I agree with Jordan. I don't understand how anyone can think the offense on this team is going to be "meh". Sure a couple of the older players like Delgado will decline some. But Beltran is in his prime. Wright and Reyes probably haven't hit their peak yet. PECOTA projected this team to score more runs then they did last year for whatever that is worth to you.

If Church can stay somewhat healthy and provide us 450+ at bats with an OPS of .800+ (which is about what he's averaged over his career anyway) that will be adequate production from him.

Murphy/Tatis is surely a question mark. But hey, PECOTA has them projecting better than Church. Even if they don't reach their PECOTA projections that would still be more than adequate offense from LF especially with Beltran, Wright and Reyes all batting in front of these guys in the lineup.

And give me a break about Castillo. Yeah he was terrible last year. But guess what? Damion Easley sucked just as bad, if not worse. No one noticed because everyone was just glad to have Slappy out of there. There will be no "loss" of offense at second base even if Castillo plays like he did last year.

So, outside of 3 of the top position players in the National League, two of which are still on the right side of age 27, you have a lot of question marks on the offense. Seriously most NL teams would love to have this situation. Last year those 3 had a higher VORP than 8 teams in the National League's ENTIRE OFFENSE did. Those 3 guys, complemented entirely by quadruple A hitters, would have given the Mets an offense that was league median last year.

And in 07 all 3 of those guys were in the top 20 in the NL in VORP.

I expect roughly the same out of Delgado. I don't think it was a fluke. Willie left and a switch flipped. I find it more than coincidental.

Better. He missed half a season.

About the same, maybe slightly better now that he has some experience under his belt.

Worse.

Worse, Angel Pagan is irrelevant.

Hard to be anything but. (But if there's one guy who can prove me wrong, I'm guessing it's Luis Castillo)

Agreed. We know what to expect out of these guys year in and year out now.

Nobody knows, but we have a barometer of this offense from last year. Some guys will outperform what they did last year, some will underperform; net net, we should still be in an ok place offensively. There's always the possibility of acquiring another bat as well -- have heard reports that given the economic situation, teams may not be sitting around until July 31 to unload expensive players if their teams are struggling early.

look i already said i wasnt overly worried

i would have liked to see them get jose guillen or some other sure thing right handed hitting outfielder

as long as we have wiggle room and can actually get an outfielder at the deadline if we need one, then im happy with this team

everyone expects murphy to be better

when murphy hit better in the majors than he did in the minors

under a small sample size

i hope i am proven wrong ... i do love the kids swing .... but still dont think he has corner outfielder power

Murphy will be 'worse' but he will have 3x as many PA so will provide more value. Castillo will likely be slightly better for 2 main reasons ('regression to the mean'/his career norms after a drastic fall off, and he's not an overweight slap hitter coming off knee surgery this season). Most likely the 3 remaining positions will provide slightly less production than last year. This leaves the Mets with...one of the top offenses in the league.

Do people really think that Murphy will do better than .397/.473 for his rate stats this year?

Mets release Duaner

Kind of an unfortunate story. What could have been if he hadn't headed out for "food" at 2 AM...

Yea, sanchez has had some bad luck, who knows if he would have been a solid reliever.

As for the offense, I think a lot of us are getting clouded here by the offense's inconsistency in big spots and think that's why it's perceived as a question mark. It should be fine, more than adequate for the NL. Delgado had some hand issues for a decent amount of the last couple of years before it seemingly got better last year. For whatever reason, his ridiculous consistency indicates to me he won't fall off completely, but yea, there could be a decline. Don't think it will kill the team at all.

Castillo will get better, he doesn't suck as bad as he did last year. Wright will get rebound a bit, reyes will continue to improve at the plate and his defense should be spotless this year. Tron is tron. Yea, schneider is not so good, but whatever. Church will get more PA obviously and Murphy might very well build on last year; he has good plate discipline, good eye, could mold into a good OPS guy.

Question mark for me is starting pitching as I'm cautiously optimistic about the pen (very cautiously). If maine figured out an out pitch to keep his pitch count low, if ollie doesn't implode with a new deal, the backend of our rotation, etc, that worries me.

There's always the deadline to make moves as well, regardless of minaya's issues at dealing.

That's really too bad. I hope he catches on with another team (outside the NL East ldo) and does well. I wonder if Omar plans to use that freed up salary to sign a LOOGY?

A lot of Metsblog comments were talking about Ohman.

Yeah. I guess he'd be an upgrade over Schoeneweis but he wouldn't be that big of an upgrade, would he? I could see them just giving this roster spot to the winner of the Villone/De Los Santos competition.

Or maybe they'll just slide Redding to the pen and use this money towards signing Pedro on a Smoltz like deal assuming he pitches well during the rest of the WBC. Livan & Garcia have looked pretty bad so far apparently.

*sigh* I guess it was necessary. I watched the spring training game on MLBN yesterday and he looked terrible. My dad mentioned it to me that he could have pitched himself out of NY and I was in denial. Best of luck Dirty. Here is one for the road.



the Dirty

Tatis had a fluke year.

Church was playing at an all star level before he went down with injuries. So I do expect him to be worse (or at least along his career numbers).

Daniel Murphy is a toss up in my mind. They are putting a ton of faith in him, he is really going to be a key in the lineup.

I don't expect Delgdao to be horrific like the first half of last year, but hes not going to be as Godly as he was after the all star break.

It is hard for Castillo to get worse, but when your game is about stealing bases, beating out infield hits and bunt singles, a 35 year old middle infielder with bad knees just dosn't seem like a good fit for that type of game.

This also puts a ton of pressure on the big three. The type of pressure Manny could have relieved. Or even Abreu/Hudson could have relieved.

The thing about Murphy and Church is that we're not expecting Murphy to do what he did in his 130 ABs last year. And we're not expecting Church to do what he did pre-concussion over the course of a whole season.

But what we are expecting from them offensively is a whole lot more than what the team got out of the revolving corner outfield door they had last year of Endy, Anderson, Easley, Nixon, etc. Image what would happen if a lot of the 400 ABs Endy & Anderson had from LF/RF last year go to Church and Murphy/Tatis instead.

This is right on; the Mets offense last year was OUTSTANDING objectively no matter how one subjectively feels about it (2nd in the NL in runs while playing in a solid pitcher's park) despite getting utter garbage production from basically an entire corner outfield spot. Murphy/Church/Tatis 2009 don't need to be better than or even as good as Murphy/Church/Tatis 2008 for your offense to be stellar again because the 2009 version of them is not replacing the 2008 version.

The Mets offense scored a lot of first inning runs, however in the later innings they could not buy a big hit.

The pitching staff appears to be in disarray right now. Maine got rocked again, Big Pelf has a hurt calf, and Ollie got shelled in the WBL.

I hope this team has a good season.

Towards the end of the season I remember they kept showing some stat how the mets were first in baseball in run differential in the 1st-3rd innings but last from the 6th inning on lol.

Yep, ESPN had a similar stat a few weeks ago that we had the best record in baseball after 6 innings last year.

Mets haters ITT

...and the reason we lost those games was certainly not a function of having a poor offense.

Hey Guys,

For those interested, Johan takes the mound tonight against the Marlins in a televised game on SNY at 7:00 pm.

Its starting to feel like baseball season is upon us.

i can't watch a spring training game when half of my teams players are in that joke of an exhibition called the world baseball classic.

Hamels getting his elbow checked out. Sounds like what Johan was experiencing. Smart organizations go and get it checked out.

http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?...=.jsp&c_id=mlb