I stuck around to watch the end of last night's painful, painful game, and spent the final innings growing angrier and angrier at Willie Randolph's inexplicable managerial decision in the 7th inning.

For those of you just tuning in, we started the night with a "short bench" due to the double-header - Pelfrey had been called up to pitch the second game, and Beltran was hurt but not on the DL. Paul LoDuca was injured running the bases in the 7th and left the game (El Duque pinch-ran). The pitcher's spot was due up in the lineup, but rather than bat Ramon Castro - who was going to have to come into the game in the top of the next inning to replace LoDuca - Willie went with Marlon Anderson. In so doing, Randolph ensured that we'd have no more batters on our bench, which forced him to send Tom Glavine to the plate in the bottom of the 9th.

Gary Cohen said that the only reason he could think of for this move was because Willie liked the pitching matchup better with Anderson versus Castro. But both Cohen and Mex agreed that, despite this reasoning, it was a pretty absurd move to make. Needless to say, I - and just about everyone in Mets fandom - seemed to concur as well, particularly when Glavine made out in the 9th.

Poll

Did Willie Randolph Make the Right Move Last Night?

0%

Yes

0 votes

4%

No

1 votes

95%

Hell, no!

21 votes

22 votes | Poll has closed

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Hallelujah! The MTA is finally making the obvious, smart move that fans have long clamored for:

All aboard the Mets express!

Fans can zip home on the No. 7 line starting Thursday after the Amazins take on the Cincinnati Reds. New York City Transit is beginning long lusted-after express service weeknights from Willets Point/Shea Stadium to Midtown.

...

And after much complaining from the oft-downtrodden Mets fans, MTA and New York City Transit listened. Express trains will arrive on the middle track every six minutes shortly after the game ends and will continue to run for about an hour.

Transit is also ramping up local service. More local and eight express trains will arrive every six minutes.

Transit officials expect that the increased service will shave off six minutes of both trains' service. A trip from Shea to Times Square will now take 25 minutes instead of 31, and riders heading to Queensboro Plaza will get there in 13 minutes, not 19.

Six minutes might not seem like a lot, but check this observation out:

Research has shown that consumers routinely perceive the wait to be far longer than it actually is.

"We have good clocks in our heads for roughly three minutes," said Paco Underhill, founder of Envirosell, a retail consulting firm.

"Once we get beyond that, time expands wildly," he said. "If somebody is there for 4.5 minutes and you ask them how long they waited, they will say 15 minutes."

The article in question was talking about supermarket checkout aisles, but I'm sure the findings apply to waits of all kinds. So six minutes is going to make a big difference. Just think about how much faster it feels to take the express out to the games rather than the local. I know I'm always happy to let a local or two pass by at Grand Central in order to get on an express.

Anyhow, with parking more difficult at Shea due to the construction of CitiField, the new service comes at a great time. And with the city focusing heavily on sustainability, getting more people to ride the subways is clearly a good move. Unfortunately, express service won't be added for weekend games (right now it doesn't exist in either direction), but I won't look a gift horse in the mouth. Though who knows - maybe one day it will!

The New York Press recently launched its annual whinier-than-thou slugfest known as the "50 Most Loathesome New Yorkers". Mike Piazza is ranked all the way at #13, but the NY Press doesn't seem to have a good understanding of how baseball works:

Mike came to New York with such promise in 1998. He fulfilled most of that promise. He turned the Mets into a playoff winner in 1999 and led them into the World Series in 2000. Those were good years, and when the Mets went sour Mike Piazza tried to pull the team up. It didn't work.

But he tried and New York loved him for that. So much so that we were willing to play him into 2005. Hell, for his lousy 2005 year, New York gave him $16 million dollars. But even by 2003 it was clear that Piazza was a terrible catcher.

The joke in gay bars in New York was, what do a lot of gay men and Mike Piazza have in common? They both can't throw a man out going for second base. (At least he deflected the "gay rumors" with good humor and a Seinfeldian "Not that there's anything with that.")

Mike, we stuck by you anyway. New York always had your back. So how did you repay us? You ran away when the going got tough--not for the team, but for you. And Mike, that makes you a selfish baby. Now we're glad, glad, glad to see you go. We hope the door didn't hit you on the way out of Gotham. New York is bigger than any one athlete. We swallow them whole. So when we like you, behave or we will destroy you. Just ask Ed Whitson, Calvin Scharadi, Chuck Knobloch, Charles Smith, Neil O'Donnell and Tim Berra. We will eat you and your young. Piazza knew his contract would end in 2005. He could have gracefully retired. We in New York would have hailed him. Given him a job with a Minor League team or in the front office--and maybe one day he could manage the Mets.

But Mike's ego got the best of him. We even would have let him stay if he learned first base and signed as a part time player for the Mets as a back-up at catcher and first. But no, Mike will not accept aging gracefully. The American League--where he would be a natural as a designated hitter--passed on him and he fled to San Diego to be a "star" again. Mikey, your time has come and gone. You should have retired in 2005 and let us given you the big sendoff. But you are going south to a baseball wasteland and will disappear like Ed Whitson.

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You've probably already seen this bit of news:

Twins top pitching prospect Francisco Liriano was arrested by the Cape Coral Police Department early Thursday morning and charged with driving under the influence.

The 22-year-old pitcher was pulled over on Cape Coral Parkway around 1:58 a.m. ET after leaving a bar in Cape Coral, Fla. Liriano was issued three sobriety tests at the scene and failed all of them. He was given a breathalyzer test at the police precinct where his blood alcohol level registered at .133. The Florida legal limit is .08.

Despite this, according to MLB.com, team management is sticking with Liriano:

Twins general manager Terry Ryan, manager Ron Gardenhire, and Liriano met with the media on Friday morning to talk about the incident. Ryan said that Liriano's status on the team will not be affected and there are no plans to fine or suspend the pitcher, but rather to let the law take its course.

Poll

When will the Twins trade Kyle Lohse?

14%

Never

9 votes

12%

June

8 votes

15%

July

10 votes

21%

Right at the trading deadline

14 votes

0%

April

0 votes

28%

Not this season, but eventually

18 votes

7%

May

5 votes

64 votes | Poll has closed

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(moved from diaries. --Eric)

If you've been following the latest statistical research, the answer, as you might expect is "No", or at most, "Not really." The NYT has a good article today on the subject, vis-a-vis where David Wright should hit in the batting order:

Mark Pankin, a financial adviser based in Lincoln, Va., has developed one of the most advanced computer models of lineup behavior, a method that simulates all the interactions among hitters and their tendencies to hit doubles, draw walks and more.

Using last year's statistics, Pankin turned it loose on the Mets and a half-dozen plausible batting orders.

Whether Lo Duca, Wright or Beltran batted anywhere from second to sixth, each order scored at rates of 4.82, 4.83 or 4.84 runs a game -- which over a 162-game season would be a difference of merely three total runs.

"No matter how you look at it, switching hitters around only makes a difference in the second decimal place," Pankin said. "It basically doesn't matter." (Emphasis added.)

What's even more interesting is that Pankin uncovered something rather counter-intuitive about batting orders that does matter:

Strangely enough, Pankin found that the most efficient lineup (assuming Reyes led off, an inevitability) featured Lo Duca second, then Delgado, Wright, Cliff Floyd and then Beltran; the worst had Wright batting second and Beltran third. (Even allowing Beltran to improve from last year's disappointing New York debut did not change matters much.) The reason, it appears, comes in how managers gear their lineups toward first-inning potency, at the expense of later innings.

A Reyes-Wright-Delgado start did enjoy the best first inning -- but carried with it a 59.3 chance that the Nos. 4 or 5 hitters (Floyd and Beltran) led off the second inning, costing that frame more than the first inning had benefited. With Reyes-Lo Duca-Delgado-Wright-Floyd-Beltran, the best hitters (Delgado and Wright) usually came up with either runners on base in the first or led off the next.

"You weaken the first inning a bit, but you strengthen the second," Pankin said.

It appears as if Pankin is on to something. According to Stats LLC, over the past five seasons, more runs were scored in the first (1.16) than second (0.97) innings. But the average of those two (1.06) was still lower than any inning until the seventh -- when relievers start taking over -- suggesting that managers are indeed overplaying their first-inning hands. (Emphasis added.)

So it seems that a smart manager would actually try to balance his 1-2-3 with his 4-5-6. Which means we can be sure that Willie Randolph won't do that.

I'm sorry. I just hate bringing politics into baseball. But sometimes, you just get forced into it. We all know about Anna Benson's rantings, her monster ego, her snarling at Carlos Delgado's principled stance against the war in Iraq. But Tom Watson points us to some stuff Anna's puked out that makes her previous remarks on the record look positively tame in comparison:

I honestly have to tell you...I hate your fucking guts. Forget about how un-American you are, how politically retarded you are, or how fat you look while slobbering your political garbage all over everyone, mainly, I despise you for the fact that you make money off of influencing the young minds of America to be Bush-haters.

Anna, who makes even Michelle Malkin look brilliant by comparison, continues:

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Michael Lewis, whom everyone knows as the justly celebrated author of the seminal "Moneyball," is back with a new story in this week's NYT Magazine. Alright, I realize it's not about baseball, but I figured the piece would be of interest to Moneyball fans because it describes a college coach (Texas Tech's Mike Leach) who, like Billy Beane, has emphatically thrown out the rule book and started anew.

Does stuff like this sound familiar?

Schwartz had an N.F.L. coach's perspective on talent, and from his point of view, the players Leach was using to rack up points and yards were no talent at all. None of them had been identified by N.F.L. scouts or even college recruiters as first-rate material. Coming out of high school, most of them had only one or two offers from midrange schools. Sonny Cumbie hadn't even been offered a scholarship; he was just invited to show up for football practice at Texas Tech. Either the market for quarterbacks was screwy - that is, the schools with the recruiting edge, and N.F.L. scouts, were missing big talent - or (much more likely, in Schwartz's view) Leach was finding new and better ways to extract value from his players. "They weren't scoring all these touchdowns because they had the best players," Schwartz told me recently. "They were doing it because they were smarter. Leach had found a way to make it work."

Chad Bradford's ears are burning. Like Beane & baseball, Leach re-assessed what's actually valuable in a football game, and found otherwise ignored players who could give him precisely that value. More on the flip.

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Everyone always praises Leo Mazzone's alleged pitching genius to the skies - he's the baseball equivalent of Lee Strassberg, the longtime acting instructor whose best-known role was Hyman Roth in Godfather II. But how clever is he, really? From today's NYT:

For a guy who makes the postseason every year, Leo Mazzone can become a little annoyed watching the games. Mazzone, the Braves' renowned pitching coach, can handle the bloated time for commercials, the countless glove-tugs and pensive resin-bag bounces. But when it comes to all the times a relief pitcher trots in to face just one hitter before leaving for yet another, he, like many onlookers, gets a little fidgety.

"I think all that matchup stuff is overrated," said Mazzone, a plain-spoken West Virginian. "Just go ahead and pitch."

Contra Mazzone, however, the rest of the article goes on to make it clear that using one-batter pitchers has a big impact. In a thousand such at bats this year, hitters have only hit .170 and slugged .282. (In 2004, it was even better: .131/.209.) These kinds of numbers don't lie - and what's more, they even include the screwups who get yanked by Joe Torre after one disastrous at bat.

Pronouncements like these make me wonder about these supposed baseball gurus. Mazzone's remark sounds no different to me that Minaya's anti-intellectual remarks about on-base percentage. I suppose Mazzone is not making the ultimate decisions on when to use pitchers, but I'm sure Bobby Cox listens to him intently.

Mazzone has an unmatched track record - but who knows? Maybe it would be even better if he paid more attention to the stats.

In a column in tomorrow's NYT, Murray Chass makes the following claim:

With the Mets, a good performance seems to bring punishment, not reward. It must be a tough-love form of motivation.

He backs it up by offering the following evidence:

They waited far too long to yank Kazuhisa Ishii from the rotation, tolerating his wildness (48 walks in 89 1/3 innings, nearly 5 a game) and his hefty earned run average (5.04). They watched Aaron Heilman pitch a one-hitter in April and 10 days later allow two hits in seven innings, then they banished him to the bullpen. They saw Jae Seo give up one hit in seven innings and exiled him to the minors.

Do you think his assessment of Heilman and Seo is fair? If so, the treatment of Heilman, Seo and Trachsel after their impressive performances is either psychotic or idiotic. (And yes, I realize that Minaya might be playing some clever deep game by making Zambrano look more tradeable by keeping him in the rotation instead of Trachsel - but come on, Steve Phillips is no longer the general manager of any team in baseball, which means that there aren't any suckers big enough to fall for that ruse.)