Mets Walk-Offs And Minutiae

Fistbump to Bobby Parnell since he doesn't get credit for anything else from a seven-inning gem. * Mets Walk-up Win (bottom of the 8th) #172 was the Mets fourth of the season, their first since August 1, when Angel Pagan hit a walk-up grand slam to beat the Diamondbacks. * The four walk-up wins matches their total from the 2008 season. * It was the Mets first walk-up win over the Cubs in 15 years. Their last was April 14, 1994, when Jeff Kent hit a two-run eighth-inning homer to beat the Cubs, 10-9. * It was the third time the Mets got a walk-up win by a 6-2 score, the first since beating the Dodgers on July 19, 1991. * It was the second time this season that Fernando Tatis had the game-winning walk-up RBI. He also had the walk-up grand slam against the Rockies on July 27. * Cory Sullivan became the 346th different player in Mets history to hit a home run. It was regular season home run #5,994. * The Mets have won their last 17 games in which their starting pitcher has pitched at l

Writing about the current state of the Mets is a bummer. Instead, I'll tell you a funny story. I don't think I'm embellishing any details, but it's been awhile, so I apologize if I inadvertently fictionalize anywhere. Flash back about 15 years ago to my college days. As a sophomore, I won an award (third-place) from the New Jersey Press Association for a feature I wrote about our athletic director's eclectic tastes in literature (he liked Chaucer) and music (Gregorian chants). The problem was that the awards ceremony coincided with the one day a week in which I guested on our radio station's sports talk program, and did the sports report for the 5:30 news. If you knew me in college then, you knew that, at the time a) I hated being on the school newspaper and b) I lived for doing the sports talk show and the sports reports more than anything else. Something happened the night before the ceremony and I got into a nasty argument with my roommate (it was over someth

I'm very excited to announce a new project that I've put together. With the Mets on the verge of reaching 6,000 regular season home runs, I've put together a Mets home run encyclopedia of sorts. Thanks to the research tools at Baseball-Reference.com, I was able to assemble data for every Mets regular season and postseason home run in one place. I haven't yet fully figured out how to make the best use of this data, but you'll surely see it sprinkled into my work in the future. I'm currently working on a series of pieces in which I will rank the most notable (I suppose you can call it greatest) Mets home runs of all-time. That will probably debut in the next week or so. For now, I leave you with some minutiae to show off the extent of what I can do... * The Mets have hit 6,055 home runs, if you combine regular season and postseason. They've hit 5,992 in the regular season and 63 in the postseason. The first was hit by Gil Hodges on April 11, 1962. The most rec

* The Mets are 10-5 against teams currently holding the wild card spot (5-3 vs Giants, 3-1 vs Rockies, 2-1 vs Red Sox). * Luis Castillo, hitting .312, ranks second in the major leagues in highest batting average by a player with 0 or 1 home runs (Juan Pierre: .322) * The Mets lead the NL in stolen bases, and rank second in the league in triples. * Carlos Beltran's batting average (.336) is 16 points better than Albert Pujols. David Wright's also 4 points up on Pujols at .324 * Nelson Figueroa's .333 batting average is the best for any pitcher this season with a minimum of 10 plate appearances. * Omir Santos has a commanding lead in every possible category in the race for most "anything" by an Omir. * Darren O'Day (3 IP) and Billy Wagner (2 IP) will tie the Mets record for best ERA in a single season with their 0.00 efforts. * Among those pitchers who have started a game for the Mets this season, none has a record worse than two games below .500. * Pedro Felici

A little busy today...Put Nelson Figueroa in with this group http://www.metswalkoffs.com/2008/05/best-games-i-know-bad-pitcher-good-game.html