Mack’s Apples – Jay Bruce, Vision Tests, Jay Ballard, Mets Drones, Dioner Navarro

Good morning.

The Mets Make a Familiar, Boring Signing in  Jay Bruce -

Bruce, who will be 31 in April, is coming off a season split between the Mets and the Indians, whom he joined via a waiver trade in early August. 

Straddling the AL and the NL, he posted a 115 OPS+ and hit 36 home runs in 2017, a new career high (although one that loses some impact given that virtually every player set a personal best in that mark last year thanks to the juiced ball). Power from the left side is Bruce’s game—he’s bopped fewer than 25 home runs in a season just once in the last seven years—but it’s just about the only thing keeping his offense afloat. His 2017 on-base percentage of .324 was in the bottom 20 of all qualified outfielders, and yet that still represented his best showing in that stat in four seasons. His 22.5% strikeout rate, meanwhile, was also among the league’s worst.

The Mets are not the Dodgers. They don’t have a trillion dollars in their special checking account with the permission to spend all of it.

Some people say the Mets diminish their defense. That’s not true, since it was Bruce that played there last season. In this case, they broke even.

What this gets the Mets is three solid starters out there and two quality reserves, through 2020. Three seasons in baseball is like three thousand seasons.

It’s a good deal.

Game-like  vision tests could predict baseball’s best batters –

In a study of 252 baseball professionals, researchers found players with higher scores on a series of vision and motor tasks completed on large touch-screen machines called Nike Sensory Stations, had better on-base percentages, more walks, and fewer strikeouts—collectively referred to as plate discipline—compared to their peers.

“There has been a data revolution in the game of baseball over the past decade with the introduction of technologies that track the speed and movement of every pitch, the location of players in the field, and other tools that can quantify player performance like never before,” says lead author Kyle Burris, a statistician and PhD candidate at Duke University.

Big Leaguer Recovers 'Priceless' Baseball  25 Years Later –

Jeff Ballard has had it all. He earned a degree in geophysics from Stanford University. He was an outstanding college pitcher who was later inducted into the school’s Athletic Hall of Fame. Upon graduation, the star athlete turned pro, notching 41 career wins for the Pirates and Orioles. In 1989, his best year, he won 18 games. Despite injuries that cut his career short at age 30, in 2004 Orioles fans voted him one of the 50 most popular Orioles of all time.

New York Mets Deploy Technology To Protect Citi Field From  Drones -         

  

The New York Mets have been working with Dedrone, a company that looks to protect venues from malicious drones and is providing technology to secure the airspace at Citi Field.

“That happens to be one mile from a major airport, which is LaGuardia Airport in New York,” Dedrone VP of marketing Pablo Estrada noted on a webinar last month. “And actually (the Mets’) challenge is aerial security of the stadium not only during baseball events, but they have high-profile events there such as music concerts and similar events. And they deployed the Dedrone solution not only with RF sensors, but also video cameras. And they do cooperate very closely with their local police department. And thus, each drone intrusion is recorded and handed off to the local police department for further investigation — or at least ones that they deem that are worthy for follow-up. They’ve actually been running the solution for some time now and have had pretty good success protecting their airspace at Citi Field.”

            Be kind now with the comments about ‘Mets drones’…

Former MLB All-Star says he stepped away from baseball to take care of  ailing wife -           

Dioner Navarro last played in the majors with the 2016 Toronto Blue Jays. He didn't so much as sign a contract with anyone last year. There's apparently a good reason for that.

Although the obvious answer would be that the 33-year-old Navarro decided to hang up his cleats, the actual one is that he stepped away from the game to take care of his ailing wife Sherley, whom he married when both were teenagers.