Or do the mets have a legitimate chance of being a solid ball-club this year? Say what you want about the division, but that's not what I am talking about. I am talking about the mets and the squad they will be running out there in the coming months. I could be overly optimistic but I gotta feelin' (blackeye pea's music drops).

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With 32% of the vote Kirk Nieuwenhuis is elected the #5 prospect.

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Full disclosure: Yes, I also posted this on one of my sites. No, you don't need to know or care where that is. This is just a fluff piece to fill space before Spring Training.

It's common to see someone identify as a "lifelong Mets fan," but what does that really mean? Were you born wearing orange and blue face paint? Were your first words "Let's go Mets?" Did you learn to walk just so you could participate in a "kids run the bases" event at Shea? I could see this being true in Boston, where indoctrination begins in the womb, but New York has too many sports options for that to be practical. My blessing and my curse is being able to remember what and how I thought as a child, which means I can never call myself a "lifelong" anything (genetics aside). When it comes to the Mets, I can remember a time before I had developed an opinion. I can remember when I chose to be a Mets fan. And I can remember the first team I chose to be a fan of - the New York Yankees.

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With 46% of the vote Brandon Nimmo is elected the #4 prospect.

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One of the more interesting developments in the study of baseball over the last few years — whether you're interested in sabermetrics or not — has been the public release of pitch-tracking data, or PITCHf/x. This data, available for free on the MLB website (hidden within files at gd2.mlb.com), allows anyone to look at every individual pitch thrown by their favorite pitchers (or not-so-favorite pitchers) to discover what pitches these pitchers throw, how often they throw them, how these pitches move, and of course, how effective those pitches are.

Originally, this information was really only useful to those who were willing to trawl through the individual data (think large large excel spreadsheets) and knew how to manipulate it. Over the last few years, however, a bunch of websites have culled the useful data (movement, effectiveness of each pitch, etc.) and presented it in human-readable form. These sites included Texasleaguers.com and JoeLefkowitz.com, which provided a series of graphs and charts using the data. Even Fangraphs had a PITCHf/x page for every pitcher in the database.

In other words, if you ever wanted to become an expert on the pitches of your favorite pitcher, your most-hated pitcher, or just a pitcher you find interesting, now you could!

But there was a problem for most people who wanted to use these sites to learn about various pitchers. The graphs/charts/data on these sites would be presented like this:

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The goddamn thing sat there, and it annoyed me immensely.

The numbers were of minimal consequence to me and every effort to comprehend them just seemed a Sisyphean task, so I haphazardly wedged the book into my shelf and went about my life.

What is this bastard book of which I speak? Is it a John Nash game theory book? A Stephen Hawking treatise on the origins of life? No, it was something far more insidious to my 11-year old brain: a copy of the 1982 Bill James Baseball Abstract.

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With 74% of the vote Juerys Familia gets the runaway, early nod for #3 prospect.

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I originally wrote this in an ESPN comments section. I was reading the Rubin post about Sandy coming onto Twitter, knew to click the comments to see Mets fans complaining about the team. I found those, and this was my response. It was wayyyyy too long for anyone to notice in a comments section, so here we are. Stream of consciousness, like if you agree, tell me why you dont....

I think this is pretty funny, and it's actually sort of refreshing to know that the front office isnt ignoring that the team is a joke, and constantly toeing a company line. Hopefully the guys in the clubhouse will FINALLY have had enough of being a joke after 5 years (or for many young guys, their entire careers) and rally around shutting people up. I know this is the Mets; but i'll more quickly stop watching the team or baseball all together, than be angry or complain about the team.

I don't like the ownership, but i still like rooting for the team. The only people who see doom and gloom are yankees fans, and Mets fans that believe them (read: are jealous).

Ike Davis, Lucas Duda, Daniel Murphy, David Wright, and maybe, just maybe, Jason Bay are getting me very excited for this season. I expect nothing from santana, and think the SP, unless niese breaks out, can be dreadful. BP was improved, so what happens can be judged as a reflection of the front office. But as sad as it sounds, bringing in the walls, and the effect it will have on some of these guys abilities to hit it out, will be the most important thing the team does. Once the fellas start hitting them out where they used to bounce off the wall, the hitting styles get more aggressive, and we go from there. HR hitting is where this team needs to start...it's the elephant in the room.

The funny thing is, The team is in a better position than ever....at least if we lose, nobody will tell us we should have won. The pressure that this team clearly cant handle, if the last few years are indication, will not be there, and only surprised looks and "hmph' will welcome a winning streak. I can't imagine its hard to run with that, and I hope these kids can make everybody look like fools.....

but probably not! Lets Go Mets!

Matt Harvey is voted prospect #1 with 61% of the vote. However, because Zack Wheeler received 34% of the vote (over 30 higher then his nearest competition) I'm going to go ahead and name him prospect #2 because I can and it's pretty obvious he's a top-2 prospect in the system.

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Amazin' Avenue did a community prospect list last year and I thought it was really fun. I guess whoever ran it either doesn't have the time or the interest so I thought I'd step up and start it.

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