Flawed Farm Applesauce - Mets have poorly ranked system, Viola to Brooklyn, Hu introduced

I thought that he was named manager. Anywho, this sounds like a good move.

I thought the point Berg was making was that “we stuck with slot players to help us get an ASG” sounded a little too conspiracy-theory-ish to be believable. Maybe I misunderstood, though.

That’s GANGSTA!

“You kill Oliver Perez, I give you $10,000.”

When he got drafted. Glad he’s going to continue to work for the Rays

Joe Pos isn’t jumping the shark at any point in time. I can guarantee that.

Its far worse than most people would think.

poor draft choices due to the adherence to slot. The Mets would rather take a guy who they can pay slot but likely isn’t going to be as good, instead of taking the overslot player with more potential.

In terms of players they actually took and didn’t sign…look at their wasted picks in the 5th and 6th round of the 2009 draft. The 5th rounder Magnifico wasn’t a very good pick anyway so that’s a combination of poor drafting and not spending money but Buchanon was well regarded but the Mets didn’t want to pay the extra 100k or whatever it was going to take to get a deal done. You can certainly point to the fact that poor drafting was a factor in the system’s struggles but at the same time, they certainly have not spent adequate money…you can see it compared to other teams. And forget big market teams…they’re being way outspent by the small market teams these days. When your draft budget is so low, you can’t afford to make mistakes in the early rounds since you can’t make up for them by going overslot in the later rounds. With the draft budget they’ve had, it’s a small miracle that they’ve put out potential big leaguers like Murphy, Parnell, Niese, Davis and Thole over the past 2 years.

The point of Megdals article is simply to say that back acne is an incredibly common occurrence, even more so in people who are active, and even more still in people who are active while wearing heavy clothing or padding. Piazza would be the perfect storm for back acne even without steroids, so Megdal is saying it’s stupid to automatically attribute it to steroids when it can easily be attributed to a product of his normal daily activities. He backed this up with a few doctors who say a) it’s a common condition in non steroid users, b) it doesn’t even occur in many steroid users, and c) that piazza was in an ideal situation to develop the condition anyway. I’ll agree the article is more to shut murray Chass up than to make any conclusive statement, and we should probably employ the “ignore Chass and maybe he’ll go away” approach, but Megdal does at lest shine some light on the fact that the back acne isn’t something that automatically signifies any kind of steroid use, and backs it up with real medical opinions, which is more than Chass does.