(Note: this is adapted from a blog post I just wrote. I thought it would be okay to share here)

When the Nationals moved to Washington, David Brooks wrote a column suggesting that he would abandon the Mets for the Nationals. Brooks is back, and now says he just can't quit the Mets.

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I apologize for the awfully simplistic sounding title, but sometimes it's just better to state the plain truth.  No doubt this doesn't come as a revelation to most of you.  Yet I think as Giants fan we get spoiled by how fortunate we are and fail to appreciate how set we are at two of the most critical jobs in the sport.

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Note: I know this is not strictly Mets related, but this seemed like a neat bit of trivia as we begin the post-season.

Tonight the MLB playoffs begin, and for the second year in a row the Tampa Bay Rays will be taking on the Texas Rangers in the American League Division Series.   This marks the 33rd time in baseball history that teams have played each other in back-to-back post-seasons.  So how have those previous series gone?  Of those 32 repeat meetings, the prior year's winner won again 20 times, and the loser struck back 12 times.  So, history would seem to favor the Rangers.

Below is a listing of those 32 repeat matchups.  This includes three occasions where teams met three post-seasons in a row.  The Yankees and Giants faced each other in three World Series from 1921-1923, with the Giants taking the first two and the Yanks the third.  The Red Sox and Angels had a similar experience recently.  They met in three consecutive American League Division Series from 2007-2009, with the Red Sox taking the first two and the Angels finally beating the Sox in 2009.  The only time a team has beaten another in three consecutive post-seasons occurred when the Yankees beat the Kansas City Royals in the 1976-1978 American League Championship Series.  As another footnote, the Yankees have been involved in 17 of these repeat matchups, and they have won the follow-up on 15 of those occasions, and they went 82 years between those losses.  Yet another reason to hate the Yankees.

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This is a bit of a random subject to be thrown on here, what with the trade deadline approaching, but it's the trade season that made me think of this topic.

No doubt Mets fans don't look too fondly upon Steve Phillips.  But I wonder how much of our contempt for Steve has to do with the way he went out, as well as his idiotic statements, commentary and actions since departing the team.  Because when you look back at Steve Phillips' tenure, he wasn't that bad.  In fact I'd argue he was the best GM the franchise had since Cashen, present gurus excepted.  Granted that's a lot like being the best Falco song after "Rock Me Amadeus," but it's hard to argue that any post-Cashen GM had a better track record.

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(Bumped from FanPosts. --Eric)

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Having digested a fair number of discussions about baseball over the years, it seems that a consensus has emerged among some fans about how to determine if a player is nothing more than a choking dog.  A player might put up great regular season numbers, and in many cases even great post-season numbers, but if he fails in a single, notable instance he is clearly a choking dog and deserves to be labeled as such in all conversations about that player's career.

So I set out to find the superstar players, both current and historical, who meet the high standards of some our more enlightened baseball brethren.  Could I find one noble-hearted lion who managed to succeed in all his endeavors?  Would there be a player or perhaps even players who managed to land a big hit every time he stepped up to the plate in a "clutch" situation?  Could I manage to find the clutchiest superstar in baseball history?

Below are the results of my experiment.

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There are times when I am embarrassed to be a Mets fans, and its because of other Mets fans.  I don't know how may times in the past 24 hours I've run into variations of the "but he's right" when it comes to Wilpon's statements about Wright, Reyes, and Beltran.  Just now I had this encounter with a friend of a friend on Facebook (big mistake going there) where the guy accused Wright and Reyes of choking the 2007 and 2008 seasons away.  When I countered with facts about Wright's stat line down the stretch of both seasons, I'll give you one guess as to his response.

That's right - he struck out with Daniel Murphy standing on third base and nobody out.  Let's ignore every damn thing the guy did that season to even get the Mets into a position to be in the playoff hunt, and instead let's obsess about one at bat.  Then the guy continued saying that "you can't deny that Reyes and Wright are big chokers."  Actually I just did, and you chose to ignore my evidence, retreating into your typical WFAN cocoon mentality.

Yes yes, I know this is a bit brief and not analytical for a fanpost, but I just had to get this off my chest.  I'm just sick of the ignorant attitude of a large portion of this fanbase who can't appreciate how blessed we were to enjoy this trio in their respective primes.

(Bumped from FanPosts. --Eric)

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"It's as though we were made for each other. Beauty and the beast. Of course, if anyone else calls you a beast, I'll rip their lungs out." - The Joker

"I stands what I can stand, and I can't stands no more." - Popeye

I'm not sure at what point I looked at the 2011 edition of the Mets and thought to myself, "Self, this could be a halfway decent team." There was a part of me that almost felt ashamed at such moderately optimistic sentiments. After all, this is an organization that has caused me no small amount of heartburn over the years, and especially the last two. Had I lost my senses? The Mets not sucking? I would have to withdraw from the AA community for such senselessness. 

And then, in dribs and drabs, I noticed people making similarly semi-optimistic predictions for the forthcoming year.  I wasn't alone! I could come out of the closet and proclaim my convictions that the Mets were not completely awful  What joy!

But then there's that entity know as the mainstream sports media.

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Note: I wrote this for another blog and thought I'd share it, if for no other reason than to spark discussion about our respective prognostications.  I didn't write this for a sports blog, so I didn't wade as deeply into details saber analysis as I would otherwise.

The American League East deservedly has the reputation of being the best division in all of baseball, but the NL East might be a close second.  Other than the Washington Nationals, every team in the NL East should finish at .500 or better, and two teams have legitimate World Series aspirations.  Of course one team received most of the national attention when it signed a prized free agent pitcher and thus assembled one of the best starting rotations that the game has ever seen.  With such a loaded staff, there's really not going to be much of a contest, right?  We might as well crown the division champions before the season even starts.  I mean is there any doubt as to who will come out on top in the National League East?

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The Mets head into the season with Jose Reyes and Carlos Beltran in the final years of their respective contracts.  There has been talk of trading either or both in the middle of the season for prospects, and this discussion spurred me to take a look at the relative success of prospects traded in exchange for established players.  It seems like it's a 50/50 proposition at best that the players you receive come anywhere near matching the quality of the player traded.  For every Jeff Bagwell there is an Alex Ochoa.  But I wanted to verify that by looking through all of the player-prospect deals done over the past 10-20 years to see how often the team selling off its established stars received an adequate return on investment.

Then I quickly sobered up and realized that would take a really long time and involve a lot more research than I have time for.  So another way to gauge whether prospects traded for stars ever make it is to see how many of the top players in the game are guys that were dealt in deadline deals or the like for established players.  So I looked at Fangraphs top 70 players by WAR and top 70 pitchers by WAR for 2010.  Why 70?  Because that's how many returns you get on 2 pages.  That also averages out to approximately 5 players for team, so that's a decent sampling.  The bottom WAR range for everyday players is 3.1, and for pitchers 2.2.  I acknowledge that there are methodological problems with this approach, but I figured this should provide a deep enough list of  the best players in the game to get some kind of idea how stars are acquired. 

After looking through each players' transaction history, I also wound up compiling a list of categories of how each player was acquired, so the scope of my research ultimately went beyond determining how many of these guys were once prospects for another team.    So how do things shake out?

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In light of the  . . . happening on Sunday, I've seen more than a few comments around here that suggests the Giants are a particularly snake-bitten franchise.  While they have had their share of painful losses, I think it's worth keeping in mind that they've also been one of the most successful sports franchises over the past quarter of a century.

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At first when I heard this story I thought it had to be an Onion parody.  Oh no.  It seems Fox is intent on adding a soundtrack to their games:

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I recognize this is a little light for a fanpost, but I also felt it a bit too long for a fanshot, so here it is.

Anyway, I've had a hard time getting excited about this post-season.  In fact, I've basically tuned out of all baseball stuff for the past couple of months.  But now that the bell has rung, I have of course begun getting back into baseball mode, and much to my wife's chagrin, I'm sure I'm going to watch as much of the post-season as I can.  With that said, I began wondering which teams I'll be rooting for, and so I've ranked the teams in order of which ones I'd most like to win, starting with the team that would cause me the least amount of agida should they emerge victorious.

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