1/30/21

John From Albany – Mets Breakfast Links 1/30/2021

 



Good Morning.  Happy Birthday Davey Johnson and Nick Evans.  Daniel Murphy retires, Nolan Arenado traded to the Cardinals, and Steve Cohen deactivates his twitter account.

Section Links: Mets Links, MLB Links, Winter Baseball, and This Day in Mets History.

Mets Links: 

NY Post: Mets owner Steve Cohen deletes Twitter account amid GameStop backlash.

NY Post: Boomer Esiason unloads on Steve Cohen over GameStop madness: ‘Keep your mouth shut’.


SNY.TV: Daniel Murphy, Mets postseason icon, is retiring from baseball. 




NY Post: Steven Matz’s Mets tenure done in by fastball tweak. “I got a little carried away last year,” Matz said on a Blue Jays Zoom call. “I was starting to throw a little harder, stuff like that, instead of really going back to what I did coming up through the minor leagues all the way to my big-league career. (I’ve) just (been) working on that fastball command.”

Brian Joura Mets360: Sandy Alderson and breaking the trend of bad bullpens. Brian says his "opinion of Sandy Alderson is higher than a lot of the people reading this" but also notes this: "On the flip side, during his previous Mets tenure, he was too often passive when it came to making moves to improve the roster, relegated defense to a back-burner issue and generally assembled rotten bullpens." (Subscription required).

Mike's Mets: Not on the Trevor Train.  Mike does a great job covering all this bases on Trevor Bauer including this "Much of Bauer's recent success is based on increasing spin rate...if MLB really started cracking down on pitchers using sticky stuff to achieve higher spin rates, will we see his own spin rate come back down?" 




SportSpyder Mets Links: 

MLB and SportSpyder NL East and MLB Links:





MLB.com:

MLB Trade Rumors:

Yahoo Sports:

ESPN:

FOX Sports:

CBS Sports:

The NL East from SportsSpyder:

Winter Baseball:

In Australia, Game 1, Canberra Cavalry 8 Blue Sox 4 (Box Score).  Carlos Cortes 2B, 2 for 4, with a double, 4 RBIs, 1 K; Manny Rodriquez SS 1 for 3; Adam Oller started and went 2.2 innings giving up 5 runs, all earned, 5 hits, 3 walks, 1 K – 21.21 era in 2 games.


Game 2, Sydney Blue Sox 7 Canberra Cavalry 2 (Box Score).  Carlos Cortes 1B/LF, 1 for 4, run scored, RBI, 2 Ks - .345 average; Manny Rodriquez SS 1 for 2 with a run scored, RBI - .231 average;  Andrew Mitchell 1.1 innings, no runs, 2 Ks.


In Mexico, Tomateros de Culiacan 6 Naranjeros de Hermosillo 2 (Box Score). Sebastian Elizalde, 0 for 3 with a walk, run scored, and 3 Ks; Ex-Met Carlos Torres 2/3 inning, no runs, 1 hit, 1 K.  The best of 7 series is now tied as 3 games each.  The winner will head to the Caribbean serieswhich starts Sunday, January 31 and goes to February 6.

For the complete Winter League Stats for the current Mets, Mets minor leaguers, and Ex-Mets, click here.

Today in Mets History Per Ultimatemets.com: 

Born on this date:

Transactions:

New York Mets signed free agent Joe Ginsberg on January 30, 1962.

New York Mets released Dave Kingman on January 30, 1984.

New York Mets signed free agent John Valentin on January 30, 2002.

Toronto Blue Jays signed Victor Zambrano of the New York Mets as a free agent on January 30, 2007.

New York Mets signed free agent Robinson Cancel on January 30, 2007.

New York Mets signed free agent Shaun Marcum of the Milwaukee Brewers on January 30, 2013.

National Pastime.com:

2009

The Mets avoid salary arbitration with John Maine (10-8, 4.18) when both sides agree to a $2.6 million, one-year deal. The 25 year-old right-handed starter, who missed the last five weeks of the season due to an injury to his pitching shoulder, is expected to play a significant role this year in the team's pitching rotation.


Baseball Reference.com:

1962 - The New York Mets sign Gil Hodges for $33,000. The veteran first baseman had been languishing on the Dodgers' bench for the past two seasons. 

1984 - After failing to trade him, the New York Mets give veteran slugger Dave Kingman his release. Kingman hit .198 with 13 home runs last year, but will find a new home as designated hitter with the Oakland Athletics, hitting 35 home runs this year, ranking second behind American League leader Tony Armas, who will finish with 43.


Want more?  Check out https://sportspyder.com/mlb/new-york-mets/news. 

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8 comments:

Tom Brennan said...

If we had kept Daniel Murphy, 2016 onward would have been a lot different. The way the Mets are now dealing, the current management would have signed Murph for 1B and traded Duda.

Detroit has FIVE top 25 prospects? Have the Mets ever had that?

Twitter is overrated?

Bryant or Bauer? Seems we are interested in certain B players.

Cards, a pretty good franchise, decided Arenado was a worthwhile get.

January 30, 2021 at 7:35 AM
Tom Brennan said...

Mets gave it a good run in 1984. But let Kingman go pre-season. Kingman hit 35 HR, knocked in 118 runs, and hit .268 in 1984. Would keeping him have allowed the Mets to win in 1984? He hit 100 HRs in his last 3 career seasons with Oakland.

January 30, 2021 at 7:38 AM
John From Albany said...

Kingman became a part time player as soon as Keith showed up in 1983. With Foster in LF, no other place for him. As he 1983 numbers show, not productive as a bench player.

January 30, 2021 at 7:58 AM
Tom Brennan said...

True - that Kingman thing was pure hindsight. His bad 1983 would logically have led to a divorce. I wonder why he was just a .219 career Mets hitter, when he hit so much better with the Cubs and As?

January 30, 2021 at 8:11 AM
Tom Brennan said...

Two memorable Kingman at bats: in the first one, he hit a pop up that got stuck in the Metrodome roof for a ground rule double. In the second was his 500+ footer that cleared Wrigley and hit a porch 3 houses down.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-ZRwLX5AJo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vFMwBESelg

January 30, 2021 at 8:19 AM
John From Albany said...

Great links Tom. Thanks.

Mets tried for years to get Kingman to go the other way when teams would shift against him. He actually did that the first year with the Cubs. But Kingman being Kingman wore out his welcome there as well.

January 30, 2021 at 9:16 AM
Tom Brennan said...

Kingman certainly did it his way.

My favorite Kingman story, which I tried to google but could never find, was Goose Gossage one spring training telling Kingman he was coming down the middle with his best heat, to see if Kingman could tape measure one. Kingman was all for it, and hit one perfectly - as I recall, it was a night game and the ball rocketed past the outfield lights. Gossage said, that ball must have gone 700 feet. I don't recall if I saw that one, assuming it was televised.

Not fundamentals - but it sure was fun.

January 30, 2021 at 11:35 AM
Tom Brennan said...

Yay - I found this one - Rusty Staub thought Kingman hit one that went perhaps 680 feet.

Baseball Folklore Gets Mileage From Tales of Long Home Runs By MARTY NOBLE

And then there was the ball Kingman hit against Catfish Hunter over the center-field wall at Fort Lauderdale Stadium in 1975. Wind-aided as it was, it left the playing field in a millisecond, according to eyewitness Rusty Staub. “It had to go 680 feet; it had to double the distance to the fence,” he said. “That was as hard as David could hit a ball.”

“Anybody who saw McCovey or Kingman or Stargell play more than a couple of games has to have a Longball story,” says Shannon, a National League lifer. “Those guys didn’t hit many cheapies.”

Bill Virdon, the former Pittsburgh Pirates, Houston Astros and New York Yankees manager, was playing center field at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh during the 1960 World Series when Mantle hit a ball over the right-center-field wall, which stood 457 feet from home plate.

“It must have been 50 to 70 feet over the fence,” Virdon recalled. “I don’t mean beyond the fence. I mean over it. It was 70 feet higher than the fence when it went over and it hadn’t started to come down yet. I can’t even guess how far it went.”

Once it passed over the wall, it entered our imagination. And that’s worth at least 100 feet, not that Mantle needed additional distance.

Dave Kingman might have hit them higher. Henry Aaron, Babe Ruth and five others might have hit more of them. But no one since World War II consistently hit them farther than Mantle. Left-handed, right-handed, even one-handed, he brought Longball to postwar baseball.
Mantle consistently reached areas few had even thought could be reached.

Seven times on or over the roof in Detroit. Three on the roof at old Comiskey. One over the stands just to the left of center at Fenway--while batting left-handed. Two in one game over the hitter’s backdrop in center at the old Yankee Stadium and untold dozens to other areas in that storied arena. Mantle couldn’t pronounce facade--he called it the “fa-kaid"--but he could reach it.

The baseball world knows that in 1953, Mantle hit the ball against Chuck Stobbs in Washington that prompted Yankees publicist Red Patterson to invent the adjective “tape measure.” (The “Yankees Power Hitters” Topps card from 1957 claimed the home run Patterson estimated as having traveled 565 feet “is still rolling.”)

And any real Yankee fan knows Mantle twice came within a few feet of accomplishing a still-unprecedented feat, hitting a fair ball out of Yankee Stadium, against Pedro Ramos on May 30, 1956, and Bill Fischer on May 23, 1963. (An enlarged photograph, with arrows depicting the path of the latter home run, still hangs in the manager’s office at Yankee Stadium.)

And who can forget The Goose smiling after Kingman took him onto the back field in Fort Lauderdale in ’82? Gossage had watched Kingman swing in batting practice and mused, “We could get together on a long one, couldn’t we?”

They did. But no one bothered to determine just how long, even though the ball clearly had landed just beyond shortstop on the other field. What was the point? It was enough that Kingman had added an additional 160 yards or so to his resume.

January 30, 2021 at 11:51 AM

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