Trivia question: When new Mets reliever Adam Ottavino makes his season debut, the Brooklynite reliever will become only the second player to appear for the Mets, Yankees, Red Sox and… Colorado Rockies. Which well-traveled major leaguer, but short-time Met, was the first?
Predictions pool… prize: pizza party
Have you entered the Willets Pen 2022 Picks Contest? Probably not. Odds are, this is the first you’re hearing of it. It’s free. You make some predictions about the 2022 season (specifically over/under team win totals) in a Google Form, then forget about it for several months until the results start coming in and you celebrate what a genius you were in April. Prizes include a pizza party in your honor, Willets Pen merchandise, and more — if more folks enter. So, enter now!
Meet the Mets
By Colleen Sullivan
I’ll give this to Steve Cohen: dude isn’t afraid to spend money. The Mets are rolling into 2022 with the second-highest payroll in baseball, at $230.7M — only about $4M behind the Dodgers. I’m starting to suspect if Uncle Steve could find something to spend some extra money on, he would, just to get to the top of that list.
Billionaires are weird like that.
Hold in your groans, friends, I’m not going to do some sort of goofy payroll assessment, or luxury tax accounting, or whatever it is people who are obsessed with those sorts of things do. I’m just illustrating a point that Steve’s throwing dollars in the air. But I digress.
The Mets have made some interesting transactions going into 2022. They added Starling Marte and Mark Canha in November to four-year and two-year contracts, respectively. Max Scherzer, three-time Cy Young winner, was signed December 1 to a three-year contract, ostensibly to fill the hole left by Thor going to Anaheim (for sunny weather, I have to assume, because the Angels are terrible). Next up were the additions of Chris Bassitt, Adam Ottavino, and a reliever-swap with the Yankees that brought Joely Rodriguez to Queens and sent Miguel Castro to the Bronx.
Starling Marte will be patrolling center field for a good chunk of his time. His 2021 slash of .305/.405/.451 gives me a desperate hope that energy will be injected into the Mets’ woeful outfield production. The man eats fastballs for breakfast. 2021 was a career season for him, ending with a fWAR of 5.5 for both the Marlins and Astros. He’s a good defensive player in center, using his experience to make up for the fact that at this point in his career, Marte is not the wall-climber as some of the other players out there (Billy Hamilton comes to mind). Given that he’s 33 years old, maybe we don’t want to risk Marte’s health by doing an impression of Spider-Man anyway.
Mark Canha has spent a whole lot of time at Oakland (he and Marte were teammates during the back half of the 2021 season), and comfortable in the outfield as well as at first base when Pete Alonso needs a breather. Canha started his big league career in 2015 with the A’s, having been a Rule 5 draft by the Rockies from the Marlins, and immediately traded to Oakland, where he stuck. There was a bit of an issue with his hip in 2021 and he definitely doesn’t come with name recognition for anyone outside of Athletics fans, but overall, his stats are solid in a “decent player” level, not “good player because I’m on a crappy team” level (looking at you, Alcides Escobar). Canha is also a big league foodie. No, really. That’s his Instagram.
Do I really need to tell you about Max Scherzer? I think we can all collectively say “no.”
Chris Bassitt is unfortunately best known for last August, when he was hit in the face by a line drive off the bat of White Sox outfielder Brian Goodwin, an absolutely horrifying moment that he was, somehow, able to return after a month to finish a season in which he righty posted a 3.15 ERA. What makes Bassitt stand out is he’s very deceptive, with a lot of rise or break on each of his pitches. He throws a four-seam fastball, two-seam fastball, slider, and curveball. He’ll be a solid starter in the middle of rotation and Mets fans can expect to not be stressed during his outings (no more than usual, anyway).
Adam Ottavino was added to the bullpen in March, becoming this year’s version of Rich Hill — which is to say, he joins the Mets after previously having played for the Yankees and Red Sox (and no, Hill is not the answer to the trivia question, sorry!). He spent 2021 in Boston, ending the season with a 4.21 ERA in 69 games (so close to the double). Were it not for that, and his 2020 ERA being a whopping 5.89 (oof), he’d have a career ERA lower than 3.60. Maybe it makes him cheaper. For those who care about lefty/righty (not me), the bullpen is heavy on right-handed pitchers so some may tell them to add a lefty. Well, good news…
Joely Rodriguez came over in a spring training swap with the Yankees to help balance a bullpen whose only other lefty is Chasen Shreve. Rodriguez spent time with the Rangers prior to being traded to the Yankees where he fared much better than Texas. He went 1-0 with a 2.84 ERA (as opposed to the 4.66 ERA in 52 appearances he posted for the Rangers). It’s notable that there have only been 15 trades between the Yankees and Mets over the years.
And thus: the new crop of Mets has joined the club. Don’t disappoint us, boys.
TRANSIT FACT: The Mets open the season in Washington, where the WMATA Metro serves the stadium via the Navy Yard-Ballpark station. Did you know that the Metro opened in 1967, making it a rarity in America as a mass transit system constructed entirely after the proliferation of the automobile?
Opening Day is magical but opening day is a trap
By Thornton McEnery
The thing about being a Mets fan is that you’re always aware of yourself as a Mets fan, and Opening Day is the day you’re most aware of.
What I mean to say is that the clarity of your emotional frailty always lies just below the surface, and you’re always prepared for it to grab you at the moment when you dare to forget that it’s there… just lurking.
I have attended perhaps a dozen Mets home openers in my life, and almost all of them — at least in hindsight — have been a trap that made me become unaware of my awareness…
It’s a pattern.
The presentation of the squad is always the moment you start to forget.
“Oh, yeah, we picked up that guy. He had some good years in Cincinnati/Houston/Pittsburgh, so who’s to say he won’t do that here?”
“All right, here’s the guy ready to hit his stride and lead the rotation for the next decade…”
“That’s a glove we can really use to close out games, no way he picks up a small knock in April and somehow doesn’t get back til late August before blowing a knee…”
Then the team goes out there as Mr. Met dances delightfully on the roof of the dugout as the familiar music plays, and the fans forget for a moment that it’s objectively too cold for baseball with the wind whipping in off Flushing Bay, and the season commences.
This is where it almost always gets so Mets-y.
The bats struggle but the pitcher does enough — like the criminally under-appreciated John Maine in 2007, giving up only a run to the Phillies before his bats finally broke out in the fourth and ended up demolishing the Phils 11-5.
Or the pitching just sucks, and there’s nothing the offense can really do to overcome it — like Tom Glavine’s clusterfuck Mets debut in 2003, when he imploded on a freezing afternoon, and not even a top of the lineup that went Roger Cedeno - Roberto Alomar Jr. - Cliff Floyd - Mike Piazza could bail him out against Kerry Wood, as the Cubs trounced the Mets 15-2.
That day is cemented in my memory, as I can still hear the woman behind me in the upper deck of right field at Shea loudly whining, “They should have started Leit-AH!” over and over and over for the first four innings as I pondered the long-term effects of frostbite.
What neither that opinionated fan or I took into account is that Al Leiter also had a bad Opening Day on his return to the Mets in 1999 and that I was a 23-year-old who should have worried less about the cold than the fact I was so free to daydrink at Shea at 1 p.m. … on a Monday. And also that none of it mattered, because we were both not being aware of our awareness… because it was Opening Day.
See, the Mets are 39-21 on Opening Day, a win percentage of .650, the best in the majors.
On Opening Day, the Mets can make magic, they can harness spring, they can make us believe in Amazin’.
But Opening Day is a trap.
All-time, that win percentage drops “a little,” to .480.
Opening Day is…a lie.
Which brings us to this Opening Day.
Both of our Hall of Fame ace pitchers are already hurt. There is clear need for another bat. But this is a much better ballclub that slumped into oblivion in 2021, so this Opening Day is going to need to do some very interesting things to trap us this year.
And maybe it will, but it will also have to contend with the fact that we’re now in the Steve Cohen era, a new reality in which there is money, and care, and a competitive fire that we haven’t had in decades with this franchise. If there are cracks that appear after this opener, they will be mended with billionaire finesse and those bats will appear, and arms/knees/psyches will heal…
Oh.
That’s the trap this year.
I’m aware again.
Happy Opening Day, MetsLand.
King of Queens Clips
It would be really cool for this video feature if that were the name of the barber shop near the 36th Avenue N/W train station that was in our head when we thought of it, but it’s just King of Queens Barber Shop.
Anyway, this is a pretty simple feature that perhaps we can trot out as a nice break between written items. Two videos, and you pick the one you prefer, for whatever reason you prefer it, on our Discord server, in the “newsletter” channel.
Today’s entrants…
“Meet the Mets”
vs.
“Let’s Go Mets!”
Behind Enemy (Base)Lines: Washington Nationals
By Colleen Sullivan
We finally made it to the 2022 baseball season. I’m not lying when I say I never thought we’d get here, mostly because Rob Manfred is a weenie who hates baseball. We’re here now and that’s what really matters… until the next CBA comes around.
That takes care of the nostalgia, so let’s get to the real action.
2021 Nationals: 65-97-0, 5th place in NL East
Calling the Nationals abysmal doesn’t really seem to cover it. When you have a team with Juan Soto, Trea Turner, Josh Bell, Max Scherzer (lol), and Ryan Zimmerman, you’d think they would have done a little better than fifth place. Also, didn’t they just win the World Series not that long ago?
They were so good last season that when they hit the trade deadline eight games back from first place, Mike Rizzo jettisoned Scherzer and Turner to the Dodgers. Disassembling the rest of the starters in exchange for prospects, it was like Rizzo was running a Ponzi scheme and needed the returns. Alcides Escobar is used to being successful on terrible teams, having been a cornerstone for the Royals, and ended up surviving the trade deadline to turn in a pretty good season. Albeit a pretty good season on a pretty bad team. Tale as old as time for Escobar.
Kind of funny when you consider that they were attached to some of the big-name trade targets like Kris Bryant, Eugenio Suárez, and D.J. LeMahieu.
The Nationals led the NL in batting average somehow at .258. They also led the league in double plays grounded into (158), but don’t sweat it because that wasn’t the record (a dubious honor held by the 2011 St. Louis Cardinals).
Dave Martinez may want to start updating his LinkedIn profile if this season trends the same way.
2022 Nationals: They still suck
The 2022 Nationals are relying heavily on the other teams in the NL East being awful or getting hurt.
Notably, Soto turned down a reported 13-year, $350 million offer before the CBA and I can’t say I blame him. Rizzo needs to enrich that contract a little more to convince Soto to stay on a losing team. Don’t forget that the Nationals won their first World Series two years ago. They’ve been around since 1969 and used to be located in Canada. Maybe he’d like to make money playing for a good team for once.
The Nationals added Nelson Cruz in the off-season and this writer is very familiar with how his DH bat torments fans of opposing teams — she just wishes he’d gone to a team that either she roots for or doesn’t play her teams on a regular basis. The Nats also lost Zimmerman to retirement ,and they’re still awaiting the return of Stephen Strasburg to the rotation post-surgery. With Mad Max tearing things up on the Mets, they fell from having a pretty decent pitching staff to a wreckage that D.C. hasn’t seen since the Nixon administration.
Sean Doolittle is back this season and there is nothing bad to say about him because he is a national treasure and should be protected at all costs.
There are plenty of prospects floating around the Nationals’ farm system and with a low balance of superstars there may be a debut or two to look out for, but we’ll get to that later in the summer.
Opening Day: Mets vs. Nationals
We are all familiar with the Mets’ current pitching woes as of late (cross your fingers for both Jacob deGrom and Scherzer, friends) and with Max hoping to go Friday, the opening day plan is up in the air as the team heads north. On the other side of the field we have Patrick Corbin starting things off.
Corbin finished 2021 with a 9-16 record and a whopping 5.82 ERA, leading the National League in losses and homers allowed (37!). Three of those dongs last year were by Pete Alonso, and J.D. Davis has four homers in 29 career at-bats against Corbin.
He doesn’t even have the 2020 short season to blame things on — last year was a full 162! It was the worst season of his career by far. With a career ERA of 4.09, that’s saying something. Statcast says he has six pitches: Slider (38.2%) Sinker (28.5%) 4-Seam Fastball (27.9%) Changeup (4.2%) Curveball (0.9%) Cutter (0.3%).
Buck Showalter has some interesting choices to make for his first opening day lineup as Mets skipper, with the additions of Starling Marte, Mark Canha, and Eduardo Escobar but we’ve also got the big three coming back: Francisco Lindor, Alonso, and… Tomás Nido?
Nido came out of spring training on fire with a .417 average in 24 at-bats so if there was ever a time to push James McCann, it’s now... Robinson Canó, PED/DH, still has some fire in his bat, posting a .360/.407/.440 line in the Grapefruit League.
The season is fresh, Mets fans. Let’s enjoy the ride.
Trivia answer: Darren Bragg played only 18 games for the Mets, and 5 for the Yankees, back in 2001, but he definitely did play for both, after having previously been with the Red Sox (1997-98) and Rockies (2000). Bragg’s other stops included Seattle, St. Louis, Atlanta, San Diego, and Cincinnati. Aside from being a rare member of the Armando Benitez Club of same-season Mets and Yanks, Bragg is notable as the player the Mariners traded to the Red Sox in 1996 to get a 33-year-old junkballer named Jamie Moyer, who then only lasted another 16 years in the majors.