Nick Evans strained his right quad playing winter ball in Puerto Rico and has been sent home for rehab. Reports indicate that Evans was a sad little puppy without his best bud Dan Murphy by his side, so the injury comes as something of a mixed blessing for him.

Mets Tailgate likes Bob Howry, now more than ever in light of the Cubs declining to offer him arbitration last night.

The Mets are pretty interested in Brian Fuentes, and reportedly plan to meet with him in Las Vegas next week. Signing Fuentes would cost the Mets their first round pick next June, which should certainly give them some pause.

At MetsGeek, Mike Newman looks at some hypothetical trades and James Kannengieser makes a case for some former Mets who will appear on this year's Hall of Fame ballot.

Bob Klapisch doesn't think the Mets got their money's worth out of Pedro Martinez, arguing that the $53 million they gave him over four years included considerable time on the disabled list, a disappointing 2008, and nothing closer to a World Championship than falling in seven games to the Cardinals in the 2006 NLCS.

At RotoGraphs, Peter Bendix looks at Johan Santana from a fantasy point-of-view, and concludes that he is good, but not that good.

At FanGraphs Eric Seidman evaluates Carlos Beltran and figures that the Mets could reasonably pay him $10 million more per season and still get their money's worth.

Also at FanGraphs, Dave Cameron analyzes Aaron Heilman's candidacy for the starting rotation.

Speaking of FanGraphs, they're now carrying wOBA for every player/year in history. Awesome.

At Beyond the Boxscore, R.J. Anderson crunches some SQL in comparing Barry Bonds's and Ted Williams's astonishing offensive accomplishments.

Ted Rogers, telecom magnate and Blue Jays principal owner, died last night of congestive heart failure.

In Arizona:

• Jason Vargas allowed one run on four hits in 2.0 innings.
• Tobi Stoner allowed three runs on three hits and a walk in 1.2 innings.
• Daniel Murphy was still nowhere to be found.

In the Dominican Republic:

• Fernando Tatis went 0-for-3 with a walk.

In Puerto Rico:

• Nick Evans went 0-for-5 with two strikeouts.
• Eddie Camacho struck out one in a perfect inning of relief.
• Jesus Feliciano went 2-for-4 with a double, a walk and two runs scored.

At MetsGeek, Mike Newman wonders if Mets prospects are especially overhyped, and, if so, how they come to be overhyped.

At RotoGraphs, Brian Joura talks about David Wright and how high he should go in your typical fantasy draft. The bottom line: If you pick third overall, Wright shouldn't be around by the time you make your first-round selection.

At FanGraphs, Eric Seidman talks about Pedro Martinez and his future in the big leagues. His Marcel projection isn't too hot, though the Bill James projection is very optimistic.

Buried in his most recent chat, Rob Neyer mentions that his ESPN.com blog will be coming out from behind the Insider pay wall. His latest entry should be available to all. The URL still points to Insider, but I was able to read it without being logged into my friend's Insider account, so, yay!

Phillies blog The700Level wades through some of professional sports' biggest locales to find the biggest city rival to Philadelphia. It doesn't take them long to call off the search.

In Arizona:

• Josh Thole went 0-for-3 with a walk.
• Bobby Parnell started and tossed four scoreless innings, striking out three and allowing just a hit and a walk.

In the Dominican Republic:

• Fernando Martinez went 3-for-4 with a solo homerun and two runs scored (.394/.438/.652).
• Fernando Tatis went 2-for-4.

At MetsGeek, James Kannengieser breaks down the top ten Mets batter seasons.

Despite the fact that our economy is in the crapper and our financial institutions are largely responsible for flushing the toilet, the Mets have assured everyone that their landmark twenty-year, $400 million sponsorship deal with Citigroup is not in jeopardy. When reached for comment, the 53,000 employees whom Citi is laying off said, "Really? Really."

Marty Noble has a new mailbag up, where the questions are actually quite stupider than the answers.

Pedro Martinez will definitely pitch next season, for the Mets or somebody else.

Tom Tango's 2009 Marcel the Monkey projections are available, and FanGraphs already has 'em, both sortable-wise as well as within the individual player pages.

Also at FanGraphs, Eric Seidman looks at Joe Beimel, one of the more interesting names on the free agent relief market.

At Beyond the Boxscore, Peter Bendix has the first part of his series on the history of the National and American Leagues. It's a long read but a good one.

At Baseball Digest Daily, John Brattain compares the tenures of Bud Selig and former commissioner Peter Ueberroth.

The Kobe 9 Cruise of a new independent Japanese professional baseball league has drafted a 16-year-old girl, Eri Yoshida, who throws a sidearm knuckleball.

MLBAM has reached an agreement with Adobe to use Flash for all of MLB.com's embedded and streaming video. They were previously under contract with Microsoft to use Silverlight for video streaming. Uber-nerds can compare Flash and Silverlight.

In Arizona:

• Daniel Murphy went 1-for-5 with a double, a run scored and an RBI. He also made a fielding error at second.
• Tobi Stoner allowed a run on two hits in two innings of relief.
• Jason Vargas got ruff'd up for five runs on four hits in two innings.

In the Dominican Republic:

• Argenis Reyes went 2-for-5 with a double, an RBI and a run scored.
• Fernando Tatis went 2-for-4 with a double.

At MetsGeek, James Kannengieser takes a look at the plate discipline of the 2008 Mets.

At Beyond the Boxscore, R.J. Anderson has a nice piece on Pedro Martinez, looking at the dominance of his past and the uncertainty of his future.

Also at BtB, Sky Kalkman has completed his positional valuation for 2008 and has distilled it down to the top fifty players at any position. The Mets land two players in the top ten and three in the top twenty.

Nice profile of Nate Silver in the New York Times for his work at FiveThirtyEight.com.

Athletics Nation reacts to the Matt Holliday deal. Purple Row does likewise.

FishStripes reacts to the Scott Olsen/Josh Willingham trade. Fire Jim Bowden does likewise.

Trevor Hoffman is looking less and less likely to return to San Diego next season. I'll say it again: If the Mets are reluctant to hand out a multi-year deal to any of the closers on the free agent market or to pony up the necessary players to trade for one, they could do far worse than signing Hoffman to a one-year deal.

Yesterday we looked at The Bill James Handbook Mets hitter projections for next year, so go check 'em out if you missed it. Today we'll take a look at the pitcher projections.

If we took yesterday's hitter projections with the proverbial grain of salt, we'll have to take the pitcher projections with a heaping spoonful of same because pitcher projections are simply spottier than hitter projections. Pitchers tend to be a more volatile breed than hitters for a couple of big reasons I can think of. First, even the most workhorse-like of starting pitchers play far less than regular position players (by a factor of around five). This means that a crummy day for a pitcher is a lot more harmful to his overall season performance than a bad day for a hitter. It also means that if something isn't working right, a pitcher has to wait four days to give it another go in a real game. If a hitter's swing is off he can get right out there the next day and try to swing his way out of it.

Two of these starting pitchers are at least even money to be playing elsewhere in 2009, and any or all of the relievers could be gone, too. That's not to say that the entire relief corps will be replaced, just that there isn't a single name on this list that I'd be surprised to find pitching for someone other than the Mets next season.

• Take a long hard look at Luis Ayala's projection, because most of the other relievers are pretty similar. High-threes ERA, WHIP in the 1.25 range. Ayala's strikeout rate is not encouraging, though he's probably effective enough to pitch in the middle innings. He's not a closer, and he's not even really an eighth-inning guy.
• Pedro Feliciano is a LOOGY, so that ERA could be quite a bit lower than 3.90 if he is used fairly strictly against lefties.
• If Nelson Figueroa is on this team in April then Omar Minaya did another crappy job of bullpen assembly.
• I still like Aaron Heilman, even if nobody else does. He could very well have been injured this year, and if he can get the walks down he'll be very successful again. Trading him at his low water mark in value would be a huge mistake.
• I'll take those numbers from John Maine. Why is everyone clamoring for him to be a closer?
• Biggest surprise here: Pedro Martinez's arguably overoptimistic projection for 2009. 3.36 ERA and a 4:1 K:BB ratio? Even for just 120 innings I'll take those numbers.
• Mike Pelfrey's strikeouts seem high, here, as does the ERA. There'll be plenty of pressure on him this year because now we know he's actually a good pitcher. He flew under the radar a bit in the past because we only *thought* he was good.
• Oliver Perez can take those 109 walks to Milwaukee or St. Louis.
• Duaner Sanchez had some control issues this year and I think he ran out of gas a bit towards the end of the season. Given some time off this winter and the post-surgery season under his belt, he could definitely contribute to this bullpen next year.
• Johan Santana. There are no words. Except those. And those. And these.
• Scott Schoeneweis is still useful as a LOOGY, but the Mets already have one of those. No need to carry both of them again, is there?
• Joe Smith needs to keep the walks down and he'll be fine.
• BJH is not optimistic about Brian Stokes. I'll take the under on this one. I liked what I saw out of him this year and I think he can definitely be part of the solution in 2009.

I love stats. I acknowledge their flaws, and I certainly don't believe they tell you everything there is to know about baseball (does anyone actually?), but they really are just a lot of fun to pore over. Thanks to countless intrepid folks who have contributed the ways and means for distributing and disseminating baseball statistics, we have the tools available to learn far more about the game and its players than we ever have before.

One ridiculously useful site for baseball statistics (among other things) is FanGraphs, which is where all of the stats for this article (as well as the WPA graphs in my daily recaps) were extracted from. I wanted to take some time to look at the Mets' pitchers, their pitch velocities and pitch selection from 2008, so let's do just that.

Fastballs

The fastball is almost every pitcher's bread-and-butter. Better than 85% of pitchers threw fastballs at least half the time. Almost 11% threw their heater three-quarters of the time or more. Three guys threw 90% fastballs, though only one -- Tampa Bay's Grant Balfour (91.3%) did so over a significant number of innings. Eddie Kunz threw a higher percentage of fastballs than anyone else in baseball (92.3%), but he only threw a total of 55 pitches.

So folks throw a lot of fastballs. But how fast do they throw 'em? Here are the average fastball speeds for Mets pitchers this season.

It shouldn't be surprising that relievers dominate the top of this list. They come into a game for an inning at a time -- if that -- and can really air it out because they know they've only got 20 or so pitches before they hit the showers. Whereas starting pitchers have to pace themselves, relievers don't have to show such restraint. Anyone watching Mets games the last two months of the season has seen that Brian Stokes throws gas, and this chart corroborates that observation.

Mike Pelfrey had the fastest average heater among Mets starting pitchers at 92.7 MPH; Pedro Martinez had the slowest at 87.7. If that looks a little low, consider that his average fastball in limited action in 2007 was 86.2 MPH, so 87.7 is a clear improvement.

Of some concern is Johan Santana's average heater speed of 91.2. He was at 91.7 in 2007 with the Twins, and while a half-mile per hour doesn't seem like much now, it's definitely something worth keeping an eye on as he adds years to his ledger and mileage to his arm. His slider speed dropped (84.9 to 83.5) as did his changeup (81.9 to 80.0). The good news is that the disparity in speed between his fastball and changeup actually increased, though the velocity dip across the board is hardly encouraging. Whether that had anything to do with the deterioration in his strikeout rate (9.66 to 7.91 per nine innings) is not yet clear.

For those curious types, the fastest average fastball belonged to Joel Zumaya at 97.5 MPH. The slowest belonged to Tim Wakefield (72.9), though the slowest non-knuckleballer was Chad Bradford at 79.6. The slowest non-knuckler, non-sidearmer was Jamie Moyer for the fiftieth consecutive season at 81.2 MPH. The average big league fastball was thrown at 90.5 MPH.

Pitch Types

Let's move on from pitch speed and on to pitch selection. Here is the breakdown of pitch type for all Mets pitchers this season, sorted by highest fastball frequency.

(FB=fastball, SL=slider, CB=curveball, CH=changeup, CT=cutter)

One thing that jumps out immediately is that the Mets have a lot of pitchers who all sport basically the same arsenal: Fastball, slider, changeup. Jon Niese, Brian Stokes and Pedro Martinez preferred the curveball to the slider, and Niese and Martinez threw some cutters, but otherwise everyone threw the same three types of pitch. I'm a little surprised that the Mets lacked a single pitcher who throws a split-fingered fastball. Approximately one in eight (11.7%) big league pitchers threw at least 1% splitters in 2008; none threw them for the Mets. The splitter can wreak havoc on a pitcher's elbow, and who's to say that Rick Peterson didn't have a hand in steering the Mets away from that sort of injury risk. We know he was a mechanics freak, so it's not outside the realm of possibility that he advised the Mets to avoid pitchers who featured a splitter.

Quick Hits

• Jose Contreras led all qualified starters with splitters accounting for 24.6% of his pitches.
• Taylor Buchholz threw more curveballs than anyone else (34.9%).
• Tom Glavine threw 43.2% changeups, more than anyone else.
• The Cubs' Mike Wuertz threw 60.8% sliders, again, more than anyone else.
• Four pitchers were regular knuckleballers: Wakefield, Charlie Zink (Red Sox), Charlie Haeger (Padres) and R.A. Dickey (Rangers).
• Two others threw at least one knuckleball: Josh Banks (Padres) and Ryan Franklin (Cardinals), though the latter threw them so infrequently (.4%) that they were probably changeups or curveballs that were simply mis-categorized.
• The Angels' Darren O'Day threw 2.5% of his 671 pitches for pitch-outs.
• C.C. Sabathia threw more pitches overall than any other big leaguer: 3,814. NL Cy Young candidate Tim Lincecum was second at 3,682, and Sabathia's fellow free agent-to-be A.J. Burnett threw 3,650. Johan Santana was fifth with 3,598 pitches tossed.

If you want to know how a team with a $138 million payroll can miss the playoffs, take a gander at the lineup. Not that one. I mean the one in queue outside the trainer's room. Injuries are a part of the game, and some players certainly carry higher risks of injury than others. Older players and players with prior health problems are obvious candidates for a trip or two to the disabled list. Especially high-risk individuals are those injury double-threats: Aging players who have a laundry list of past ailments and afflictions (see: Alou, Moises).

Every team suffers its share of games lost to the disabled list. The Yankees had Jorge Posada, Chien-Ming Wang and Joba Chamberlain all spend time on the shelf; the Red Sox missed David Ortiz, Josh Beckett and Curt Schilling for varying lengths of time; the Braves missed Chipper Jones, Tim Hudson, John Smoltz and Tom Glavine at one point or another, so the Mets clearly aren't on an island with respect to busted goods.

I wanted to know exactly how many man-games the Mets lost due to injury this season. So, armed with their transaction ledger, salary data, schedule and my trusty spreadsheet, I had a look-see at how many games individual Mets players missed while on the disabled list. A few caveats:

• I only counted time on the disabled list; missed games while injured but on the active roster were not counted.
• I guesstimated slightly with respect to the day a player went on/came off the disabled list. As a rule, and to be conservative, I counted both days as days on the active roster (i.e. *not* disabled list days).
• For the sake of simplicity, I counted pitcher missed days the same as hitter missed days. I figured it wasn't worth the added complexity of figuring out missed starts, etc., so all team games were treated equally.
• I didn't include Tony Armas's or Trot Nixon's missed days because #$%^ 'em, that's why.

Having said that, here are the results:

Nine-hundred and sixteen missed games at an average cost-per-game of $26,229.35 for a grand total of $25,961,163.30 of lost wages due to injury. That's almost $26 million, which will pay for C.C. Sabathia's 2009 salary, among other things. For poops and pickles, if the Mets had that money back their 2008 payroll would have been more like $112 million, not $138 million. To be honest, I have no idea how much the Mets team attrition compares to other clubs, but 916 games is a ton of missed time.

Keep in mind that I only included players whom the Mets could have reasonably expected to be on their 25-man roster for the whole season. Here's the positional breakdown:

• Starting pitching: 250 games, $11,032,228.11
• Relief pitching: 207 games, $4,322,530.86
• Infield: 65 games, $2,507,716.05
• Outfield: 195 games, $6,435,185.19
• Bench: 199 games, $972,145.06

Even with all of these injuries the Mets still had a great chance to make the playoffs this season. I'd be making excuses if I blamed their having fallen short on bad health, though it'd be equally naive to suggest that their physical breakdowns didn't play any role in their ultimate demise. To have four players from your would-be active roster miss at least 125 games apiece and not have your record suffer to some degree is unrealistic. Plenty of blame still falls on Omar Minaya for not having reasonable contingency plans for some of these guys, most notably Alou and Hernandez, who were safe bets to miss significant time in any given year. Still, a little more luck in the health department and we might not be grinding our teeth bitterly as we watch other teams take their hacks at baseball history.

Brewers? Blown out. Phillies? Smacked down in Miami. Mets? Opened a can of whoop-tooshie in Atlanta. Things looked pretty bleak a few days ago, and things could certainly look bleak again a few days hence, but in once night the Mets vaulted into first place in the NL East, a half-game ahead of the Phillies (a game up in the loss column), and 2.5 games in front of the Brewers in the would-be Wild Card race.

Good results aside, this wasn't exactly a meticulously played game on the Mets' part. Three errors, four pitchers in the seventh inning, but hey, a win, and the Irish Hammer picked up the GWRBI without even starting. Nick Evans hit a monstrous homerun and added a walk. Remember these guys? They were a pretty solid platoon a few weeks ago before Fernando Tatis began starting every day. Tatis is gone for the regular season, at least, and it's great to see the kids go out there and make things happen.

Jose Reyes: September swoon? Maybe not. Kid went 3-for-4 with a leadoff homerun, a walk and a steal. All of the Mets' regulars picked up at least one hit; David Wright and Carlos Delgado picked up two each.

Oliver Perez was ehh: Six hits, three walks and four runs in six innings. The length was solid, and I guess he gets some bonus points for keeping the Mets in the game, but the Braves have a skeleton crew out there so let's not get too excited about that.

The Mets turn to Pedro Martinez to hopefully pull his ass out of the Queens gutter tomorrow night against Jorge Campillo.

Big winners: Daniel Murphy, +30.3% WPA, Jose Reyes, +22.4% WPA
Big losers: Nelson Figueroa,-32.7% WPA, Ryan Church, -12.3% WPA
Teh aw3s0mest play: Murphy two-run double in 8th, +30.3% WPA
Teh sux0rest play: Prado singlein 7th, -18.2% WPA
Total pitcher WPA: -16.0%
Total batter WPA: +63.9%
GWRBI: Daniel Murphy

Game Thread Roll Call

Nice job by LOUtheMETSfan; his effort in the game thread embiggens us all.

Rawr! Cat fight between Pedro Martinez and Jorge Posada! Jorge says Pedro has no class. Pedro says Jorge spoke shabbily of his (Pedro's) mom. Caliente!

The only thing interesting about this nothing piece about John Maine becoming a closer is that he's already picked out his entrance theme: "Posse On Broadway" by Sir Mix-A-Lot.

Bobby Parnell could be a factor in the final two weeks of the season, which is really just a nice way of saying he hasn't screwed the pooch yet.

Aaron Heilman, who has screwed said pooch countless times this season, just wants to help. I still count myself among Heilman's supporters, though this season isn't one he wants on his resume.

At Beyond the Boxscore, R.J. Anderson breaks down the NL Cy Young race using a just-for-fun Bill James formula for predicting that award's recipient. Santana comes in tied for fourth, though it should really be third because Anderson included C.C. Sabathia's AL stats in his calculations (their consideration is irrelevant with respect to an NL award).

Four days ago the Mets held a 3.5 game lead in the NL East over the Phillies. With tonight's heinous loss in Washington, that lead has been whittled to a can't-be-any-smaller-while-still-maintaining-the-properties-of-a-lead advantage of just a half-game. They also have a theoretical half-game lead for the Wild Card, which means there may be a consolation prize awaiting them if they blow this thing again.

The Mets don't deserve all of the blame for this loss. John Lannan was very good tonight; the Mets didn't get many good swings against him. Pedro Martinez was not good, again. He wasn't awful, but the Nationals are among the worst teams in baseball in almost every offensive category, so if you can't hold them in check you're going to have a tough go of it against the better teams in the league.

And the bullpen is back to full-on meltdown mode. Duaner Sanchez shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a pitcher's mound unless he has a rake and a bag of dirt. What will tomorrow bring? Only Kreskin knows for sure. Bad things are afoot at the Circle Shea.

Big winners: Luis Castillo, +4.7% WPA, Ryan Church, +1.6% WPA
Big losers: Pedro Martinez, -12.9% WPA, David Wright, -12.2% WPA
Teh aw3s0mest play: Schneider leadoff double in third, +6.8% WPA
Teh sux0rest play: IPOR two-run single, -15.4% WPA
Total pitcher WPA: -17.9%
Total batter WPA: -32.1%
GWRBI: Anderson Hernandez

Game Thread Roll Call

Nice job by Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright; his effort in the game thread embiggens us all.