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Showing posts from April 19, 2020

Mets Top 100 Home Runs: From No. 11 (Willie Mays) to No. 15 (Howard Johnson)

In 2009, I did a project for my website, Mets Walk-Offs and Other Minutiae, celebrating the best home runs in Mets history. I selected the top 60 regular season home runs and the top 15 postseason home runs. The reason I picked 60 was because it represented the top 1% of home runs in Mets history (and 15 just felt right for postseason). This was fun to do, but it was imperfect. I had one egregious omission. I tended to favor oddities. It’s time to give that project an update. And why not do it as a top 100? The Mets have hit 7,671 regular season home runs. The top 80 represent about the top 1%. And the top 20 postseason home runs get us to an even 100 to celebrate. Come along for the ride. Hopefully you’ll enjoy the reminiscing. Hopefully you’ll find it Amazin’.  The rest of the list can be found  here . 15. Howard Johnson owns Todd Worrell and the Cardinals (April 24, 1986) The 1986 Mets clinched the NL East on September 17. But in reality, the

The Best Seasons I Know: Splitting Things Up (Pitchers)

Part 2 of a series – if you want to read about the best hitting splits by a Met, click here . If you’re reading this, you probably know that I like the esoterica of Mets history, that I get just as much enjoyment out of trying to find the best sacrifice flies as I do looking at the club’s 100 greatest home runs. I was thinking about this the other day - what if we looked at best seasons by players in Mets history in a different way? What if we split them up into pieces and looked at the best Met for each split? It’s kind of a “Yes and …” improve-based approach to the “best season” question. Thankfully, Baseball-Reference allows us to do that. So if you wanted to know things like who was the best Mets pitcher in extra innings or in 2-strike situations, you came to the right place. I promise you’ll learn something new here. I should note that these are my picks from eyeballing the numbers. I used sOPS+ as a guide, meaning how a pitcher’s OPS compared to the league

The Best Seasons I Know: Splitting Things Up (hitters)

If you’re reading this, you probably know that I like the esoterica of Mets history, that I get just as much enjoyment out of trying to find the best sacrifice flies as I do looking at the club’s 100 greatest home runs. I was thinking about this the other day - what if we looked at best seasons by players in Mets history in a different way?  What if we split them up into pieces and looked at the best Met for each split? It’s kind of a “Yes and …” improv approach to the “best season” question, if that makes sense. Thankfully, Baseball-Reference allows us to do that. So if you wanted to know things like who was the best Mets hitter in extra innings or in 2-strike situations, you came to the right place. I promise you’ll learn something new here. I should note that these are my picks from eyeballing the numbers. I used sOPS+ as a guide, meaning how a hitter’s OPS compared to the league OPS in that particular split, but did not strictly use that. We’ll start wit