• Add Sports Illustrated to the list of long-time print media staples who are making their entire printed catalog available on the internets for all to enjoy. As of tomorrow, SI's 53-year history of sports writing and photography will be accessible -- for free -- to visitors of their website. In addition to simply expanding their online offerings, which will subsequently drive more eyes to SI.com and allow the company -- a subsidiary of Time Warner -- to charge more for advertising, the additional content will help SI flood web portal (e.g. Google) search results with their own content.

  "The real hidden value of this is what it does for search," said John Squires, executive vice president of Time Inc., the Time Warner subsidiary that publishes Sports Illustrated. The move quadruples the site's volume, he said. "We'll have to work our way up the search algorithms over time, but eventually, someone searches Johnny Unitas, and SI.com is going to pop up."

  In September, the New York Times unlocked the doors to their online archives, an area that was previously reserved for subscribers of their printed product (or online subscribers). Newsweek has likewise made their archives -- currently dating back to 1990 -- available to the public gratis, and they will be expanding the archive in the coming months to cover every issue of the magazine dating back to its 1933 inception.

  One would imagine that other print media stalwarts will fall in line over the next few years as they embrace the power of information accessibility as a tool for building an online presence, and as their printed products become increasingly irrelevant in the face of web content that constantly being updated in real time.

• Need some Tuesday reading? Check out this brilliant feature on Lenny Dykstra in The New Yorker. The article clocks in at almost 5,500 words, but it's a fantastic read. Dykstra has transformed himself from a dumb jock to entrepreneur (he owned a lucrative chain of car washes) to a fantastically successful day trader, and is now pioneering a new magazine, called The Players Club, targeting other dumb jocks so as to encourage them to invest their money wisely so they have what to live on when their playing days wind down.

  How well is Nails doing? Well, he bought Wayne Gretzky's house last year for $18.5 million. Click the link for pictures; the place is ungodly.

• Fancy yourself a baller? Marc Normandin reviews MLB 08: The Show for PS3 over at MetsGeek today.
• Fantasy baseball tip: got too many leagues to keep track of? Try mixing it up a bit. This year, instead of doing a standard (or modified) 5x5 roto league at my office, we decided to just do a homerun derby, which is surprisingly easy to setup using Yahoo's fantasy baseball leagues. Here are the settings we used:

  - Five utility hitters
  - Five bench spots
  - No DL spots
  - No pitchers
  - One stat category: homeruns

  If you're anything like me, you end up joining more leagues than you care to keep updated, and by June or July it's a miracle if you are regularly updating half of them. The homerun derby is a nice twist because there is very little maintenance and the draft is easy and fast. There's no need to pay attention to positional strengths or concerning yourself if a closer run is about to kick off, leaving you out in the cold because you just grabbed your two picks at one end of the serpentine.

• Finally, if you just can't get enough of me here, I'll be participating in a blogger roundtable chat at The Happy Recap tonight (Tuesday) at 8pm. You have to sign up for an account in order to participate, which I assume means read or comment. You can get into the chat by clicking on the "Live Chat" button beneath David Wright's likeness in the top banner. See you there!

• Mike Hampton pitched a simulated game for the Braves. It isn't clear if he simulated getting injured and missing the rest of the season. That would make it the most realistic simulation on earth.
• On Monday at MetsGeek, Aaron Dorman had a nice interview with Bryan Hoch, currently a beat writer for Yankees.com but originally the creator of Mets-Online.net, the first Mets website I had ever seen. Hoch was a god to me back then, as Mets Online was one of the only places you could go to get all of the daily news and rumors in one place. I can't say for sure that Amazin' Avenue or MetsGeek wouldn't be around now without Hoch's work, but it certainly planted the seeds -- in my mind, at least -- that would eventually lead me to begin writing on the internets. Whether or not that's a good thing is certainly open for debate.
• As they do every year, Baseball Analysts is conducting season preview "two-on-two" chats, which feature Rich and Sully from BA and two internet personalities -- usually bloggers -- specific to each division. The guest writers for their AL Central preview are Joe Posnanski and Rob Neyer, two first ballot hall-of-famers in the world of online journalism.

  The roundtable is a lengthy one, clocking in at more than 6,500 words. It's a very good read, but will take a solid chunk out of your Thursday if you decide to brave its murky depths.

• Speaking of Joe Posnanski and lengthy posts, he had another brilliant entry up on Monday, this one about why old school baseball folks are opposed to the new stats, why it's mostly amusing, why many of the old-timey stats are a little bit ridiculous, et cetera. He conjures up an imaginary dialog were batting average to be invented today by some random blogger:

  Blogger: I have come up with a new statistic. It involves balls put in play. I call it batting average.
  Establishment: Great! How's it work?
  B: See, what we'll do is, we'll take the number of hits that the batter has and divide it by the number of at-bats that he has in order to determine how often he gets a hit.
  E: That sounds like on-base percentage. What's the difference?
  B: Well, it's all in what you call "at-bats" For one thing, we don't count walks.
  E: What do you mean you don't count walks?
  B: They don't count. We take plate appearances and subtract walks. They never happened.
  E: How can a walk never happen?
  B: It just doesn't.
  E: Aren't walks good things? Like in Little League, we always say "Walk's as good as a hit."
  B: I hate walks. They're gone.
  ...

• As team health is a big topic in Mets camp, it's a good time to point out that Will Carroll has posted his Mets Team Health Report over at Baseball Prospectus. It's also a good time to point out that the sidebar to the column features a question that I submitted to Will especially for this project.

  Q: After suffering through leg injuries in his first two pro seasons, Jose Reyes has been mostly injury-free since 2005. What, if anything, can we credit for the change in health?

  A: As much as I'd like to give a simple answer here, like "Vern Gambetta's workouts" or "hanging out with Rickey Henderson," I'm not sure there's any one thing that helped. Instead, I think it was all of the above. The Mets really threw the kitchen sink at the problem, but the key was that Reyes really bought in. A commitment to change appears to work, so along with good tools, good personnel, and a little luck, the Mets ended up with one of the best three shortstops in the game. Now, just as some teams do with certain skills, I wonder if the Mets feel confident in their ability to do it again. Rocco Baldelli would be a lot better in right fielder than Ryan Church would be.

  I'm sending some follow-up questions to Will about the results of the THR and hope to have those ready to run here next week. In the meantime, go check out the report; it's not as bad as it could be.
• Remember when the Mariners traded Rafael Soriano to the Braves for middling southpaw Horacio Ramirez? And how it looked like another terrible deal for Seattle GM Bill Bavasi? And how it looked even worse after Soriano posted a 70-to-15 strikeout-to-walk ratio in 72 innings last year while Ramirez notched a 7.16 ERA in 98 innings? Well, the M's released Ramirez yesterday.

• I only keep a handful of non-Mets baseball sites in my RSS reader. I've got Fire Joe Morgan. I've got Dan Agonistes. And I've got Joe Posnanski. There are plenty of other great baseball sites out there, but on top of all of the Mets blogs and newspapers, Keith Law's non-baseball blog and lifehacker, plus, you know, doing actual work and writing for this site, a man has only so much free time.

  Posnanski, an award-winning columnist for the Kansas City Star is somewhat reknown for writing exceptionally verbose blog entries that manage to be both interesting and utterly readable in all of their 3,000-plus-word glory. Recently, Posnanski has been running poetry-based previews for all of baseball's divisions. Yesterday he wrote up the American League West using limericks.

• Can't find the MLB Gameday applet for spring training games? Liam Moran has the hookup, posting all of the week's gameday links for cactus and grapefruit league action. A godsend if the game isn't televised, you don't have MLB.tv or a Slingbox.
• Over at Baseball Prospectus (subscription required), Marc Normandin runs down the top ten fantasy ballers at each infield position. The Mets have nary a representative at catcher, first or second, but Normandin ranks Jose Reyes and David Wright the first at their respective left-side spots. The rankings are largely based on PECOTA VORP projections, but also includes a bit of touch-and-feel from Normandin's gut. I was a little surprised to see Wright slotted ahead of Alex Rodriguez, but PECOTA actually projects a higher VORP for our third-baseman -- 69.3 to 63.3 to be exact.
• Pedro Martinez was scheduled to make his spring training debut last night against the Nationals, but the rainout means that his first start will be pushed back. Instead, he will throw two innings of a simulated game on Friday.
• Anthony DiComo has a nice profile of Robert Parnell at Mets.com. Parnell is competing with about a hundred other pitchers for a spot in the Mets' bullpen this season.
• Jonathan Papelbon pissed and moaned his way to a $775,000 contract in his third year, his last contract before he becomes eligible for arbitration next offseason. So many 1-3 year service time players have been bitching to the media about how their below-market contracts are insulting, while Johnny Maine just goes about his business. If you don't like the way the CBA works, bring it up at your next union meeting. The players have had it so good for so long, and the indentured servitude of a player's first three seasons are the only weapon that fiscally conservative general managers have left in their arsenal. Don't look for it to go away any time soon.

• If you haven't been paying attention, Lastings Milledge has been running his mouth a bit about his treatment by the Mets' veterans the past two seasons.

  "I can't go through anything worse than I went through in New York. It only gets better from here," Milledge said. "A lot of veterans didn't like the way I play the game. They thought I didn't respect it."

  Milledge added: "The vets here (on the Nationals) have no problem with me. They know I respect (the game). They know I work hard."

  Billy Wagner chimed in with his take.

  "Everyone in the organization babied the heck out of him," Wagner said. "We couldn't get on him too much because we were told to lay off of him. It could have been a whole lot worse for him and all we did was try to help him to help us."

  But David Wright was the most outspoken about Milledge's criticisms directed at his former team.

  "Enough is enough," David Wright said yesterday. "You're a Washington National now. Don't worry about what happened last year or the year before that. Just go out there and try to help the Nationals win.

  "It makes no sense to bash your former team. He just needs to turn the page and worry about helping the Washington Nationals. Forget about what we're doing over here. Forget about the New York Mets."

  *snip*

  "The veterans were never mean to him or singled him out," Wright said. "They always tried to teach him. Some of that comes through tough love. I went through it, Jose went through it. All the young guys in the game go through that tough love period. Some handle it better than others.

  "Personally, I like Lastings. There were times when he messed up and he knew it and he learned from it. I don't see where this is coming from. I don't know if it's just trying to play that bitter traded guy role. I don't know what he's trying to accomplish by the things that he's saying."

  It's unusual to hear Wright speak critically about someone other than himself, and for that alone I tend to side with the Mets on this one. This doesn't excuse the trade by any stretch, but it's entirely possible that there was more going on behind the scenes than we knew about.
• The Mets are going to do their best this season to keep Moises Alou on the field. At 41, Alou is the seventh-oldest player in baseball currently on a 25-man roster, and the oldest position player overall. This doesn't include guys like Julio Franco and Barry Bonds, who may very well wind up on somebody's ballclub this season. Willie Randolph will try to give Alou plenty of days off, subbing in Endy Chavez, Brady Clark, or whomever else, in an effort to keep Alou healthy throughout the season. We know the guy can hit, but health problems have plagued him throughout his career and last year was certainly no exception.
• In today's New York Observer, friend of the site Howard Megdal looks at some of the questions the Mets are trying to answer over the next four weeks of spring training.

  Duaner Sanchez, whose brilliant first half in 2006 has led to nearly two years of pining by the Mets as he recovered from injuries sustained in an automobile accident, looks healthy, and even pitched in Monday's intrasquad game. But don't look at just ERA--see if his velocity is consistently at 92-94, as it was before the injury, and look at his control. He walked the bases loaded in his intrasquad outing, and some rust is to be expected. How quickly he sheds that rust will determine if he is ready to assume a late-inning role, or merely inspire Mota nostalgia.

• At MetsGeek, John Peterson takes a crack at the Mets chapter in the latest edition of Baseball Prospectus.

  BP's analysis turns on the age of the Mets, which had the oldest pitching and the third-oldest hitting in the National League last year. They write that "having an old team doesn't necessarily mean having a bad one," but "older teams run an increased risk of injury or sudden erosion of skill, and that risk compounds with each additional elder added to the ranks."

  I'm nodding along in agreement--after all, this is the point of criticism I push over and over again--until I realize that such an epic, compound failure is unlikely at this point. It's true that the Mets' long-term strategy is inadequate, even seriously harmful, but in 2008 they are still good enough to win the division easily, even without Santana. BP is "deadly accurate" and remarkably poignant as always, but here it almost seems that they are trying to fit 2008 into last year's thesis: "The Mets have finally gotten out from under the Braves only to find they've already peaked."

• Yesterday at the Geek, Chris McCown ponders the future of Oliver Perez and whether there is any place for him in Queens beyond 2008.

  It's way too early to write anything in stone, but should Perez perform well enough in 2008 to get a big contract, the Mets would be wise to give it to him. Not only have the starting pitcher free agent markets been weak the last few years, but the cost to acquire a similar or weaker replacement starter through other means would probably be just as prohibitive. Trading for another starter, with the Mets system as depleted as it is from acquiring Santana, would prove difficult.

• Johan Santana makes his spring debut for the Mets. The game will be broadcast on SNY and gameday video and audio are available at Mets.com if you are a subscriber.

Hooray, quasi-real game and boxscore! The Mets sent Ryan Church, Mike Pelfrey, and little else in the way of established talent (note that I'm using the phrase "established talent" loosely here to begin with) to Lakeland yesterday to take on the Tigers, their first non-collegiate opponent of the spring. The Tigers featured their likely opening day lineup sans Gary Sheffield, who we can only assume is busy talking shit about former agent Scott Boras. Sheff was replaced by ex-Met Timo Perez, co-hero of the 2000 NLCS and co-goat of Game 1 of the 2000 World Series.

Pelfrey started the game for the Mets and faced the minimum over two innings of work, allowing one hit -- a single to Magglio Ordonez -- and striking out one. He was said to have stayed ahead of the hitters, falling behind just one of the six batters he faced. With Orlando Hernandez's status for opening day still uncertain due to a laundry list of medical concerns, each solid outing by Pelfrey brings him that much closer to making the team when the regular season opens on March 31.

The Mets are said to be leaning towards carrying twelve pitchers to start the season, given the uncertainty of Pedro Martinez, Hernandez, et cetera, being ready and able to pitch deep into games. If the pitching staff does tally an even dozen, Pelfrey could catch on even if he doesn't land a spot in the starting rotation. I think that he will ultimately find success in the big leagues as a starting pitcher, but it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world for him to get his feet wet and build some confidence in the bullpen. Johan Santana, among others, got things rolling as a reliever, so there's plenty of precedent for Pelfrey to do the same.

Matt Wise, Brian Stokes, Pedro Feliciano and Jorge Sosa came on in relief of Pelfrey to pitch a scoreless frame apiece, allowing nary a hit and just three walks over those four innings. Willie Collazo, competing with about fifty other pitchers for a spot in the bullpen, allowed all four Tiger runs on five hits in an inning of work, watching his already slim hopes segue effortlessly into the smothering abyss of unlikelihood. Adam Bostick allowed two walks and a hit in a scoreless eighth inning.

At the plate, the Mets got on the board early by pushing a run across in the first. They led off with singles by Angel Pagan and Brady Clark and Ryan Church followed with a one-out walk, his second free pass in two games. Ramon Castro knocked in the run with a sacrifice fly and the Mets took the early lead. They scored their second run an inning later when Anderson Machado tripled in Michel Abreu from first. The Mets held onto that 2-0 lead until Collazo's aforementioned meltdown in the seventh that gave Detroit a 4-2 lead that they would carry to the finish line.

The Mets will face the Cardinals in Jupiter tomorrow. John Maine and Duaner Sanchez are scheduled to appear.

Thursday morning bullet list.

• At SI.com, Tom Verducci looks at the ten biggest spring training lies.

  Joba Chamberlain is only 22 years old and has thrown just 24 innings in his major league career. Javy Lopez is 37 and has caught 1,351 major league games. What might these two players possibly have in common, considering the tremendous gap in age and workload? Both of them are in the best shape of their lives. Don't believe it? Just ask them, not to mention just about every other player in any camp this season who gladly helps a desperate beat writer knock another non-news day off the spring training calendar.

• At Baseball Prospectus, Marc Normandin's latest "BP Fantasy Beat" column rank the big league outfielders by position. He chose Grady Sizemore over Carlos Beltran in center, a decision that will haunt him since I will be IM-ing him relentlessly to tell him how wrong he is.
• Kind of boring and hackneyed article by Tom Van Riper at Forbes.com, that bastion of baseball intellectualism. Riper trots out the old semi-canard about expensive players crippling their respective teams from a financial standpoint, pegging Johan Santana as a non-savior for the Mets.
• Congress is considering legislating performance enhancing drugs in all professional sports. It begs the question: if pr0nography is considered a professional sport, will Congress try to regulate *their* performance enhancers?
• Scott Kazmir will miss a couple of weeks with what is being considered a non-serious injury to his pitching arm. He may not be ready in time to make his opening day start for the Rays.
• Vanderbilt third-baseman Pedro Alvarez broke a bone in his hand in his very first at-bat of the season. Alvarez was considered by many to be one of the top picks -- if not *the* top pick -- in this coming June's amateur draft. He is expected to miss upwards of two months or more.
• This just in: Ken Rosenthal believes that Pedro Martinez's essence could lead the Mets to victory this season. In fairness to Rosenthal, he never actually uses the word "essence" in his article, so it could just be a rogue copy editor run amok.

  One step, one start at a time. A healthy, effective Martinez would benefit the Mets not only competitively, but also psychologically. Left-hander Oliver Perez leans so heavily on Martinez, he asked him to call pitches during a postseason game in '06. Martinez also could push a position player such as shortstop Jose Reyes, a fellow Dominican whose late-season funk contributed to the Mets' collapse.

  It's the old "makes players around him play better" intangible argument, which is unmeasurable (as opposed to immeasurable, as some would have you believe) and is almost certainly overblown by baseball folks and media types. On the scale of baseball intangible awesomeness it falls well below clutchitude and hustlocity.
• TBS will feature marquee Sunday matchups throughout April and May, which means more high-definition goodness for you, me and En-dy.
• Scott Spiezio and his stupid goatee are wanted by the Orange County district attorney's office "after being charged in a six-count complaint involving drunken driving and assault in a December car crash." The Cardinals released him.
• Billy Wagner almost had to drill a kid on Michigan's baseball team on Tuesday after centerfielder Kevin Cislo bunted a ball into foul territory with a runner on second and one out.

  "If he got that bunt down, I would have drilled the next guy," Wagner said. "Play to win against Villanova."

I'm an idiot. It's quite possible that I am addicted to Resident Evil 4 on Wii. I was up until 3am playing last night, mostly because I'm an idiot with no self-control who refuses to recognize that he needs eight solid hours of sleep to avoid being a cranky little girl in the morning. The big losers here are you guys because my late night means you get a Mets hodgepodge this morning. Sorry!

• The Associated Press (by way of Newsday) checks in on the youngsters the Twins netted in the Johan Santana deal.
• The increasingly impressive Ken Davidoff of Newsday talks to Carlos Delgado about his down year in 2007 and what he hopes to be a big bounceback year in 2008. The Mets hold a $16 million option for 2009, but for all intents and purposes, this will be treated as a walk season for the big man. Davidoff even went to far as to check the research within Baseball Prospectus's Baseball Between the Numbers for this nugget:

  "Players (1) perform better in their walk years, (2) do so at an age that doesn't lend itself to peaking, and (3) perform better in their walk years than they do in their pre- or post-walk seasons."

  I actually sent Davidoff an e-mail letting him know how excited I was to see him utilizing the research of "smart people" (his words). More Davidoffs and fewer John Mazors.
• Also at Newsday, Neil Best talks with Wayne Hagin, Howie Rose's new play-by-play partner on WFAN. Hagin mentions being pleasantly surprised when the Mets and WFAN indicated that they didn't want a "homer" in the radio booth.
• In the Post, Mike Vaccaro breaks down Duaner Sanchez's lost season and the work Sanchez has done to get back into playing shape so he can help the Mets in 2008 and beyond.
• In the New York Times, Murray Chass has a surprisingly even-handed look back at the Moneyball draft of 2002, now that Jeremy Brown has announced his retirement.

Friday odds and ends in bullet-list form:

• Steve Popper of the Bergen Record has a video report from Spring Training, with footage of Johan Santana and Pedro Martinez throwing a bit and an interview reel with Martinez as well. If you're jonesing for anything that might signal the forthcoming arrival of actual baseball games, this is probably as close as you're going to get.
• Speaking of Popper, he and the rest of the tireless beat writers for the Mets and Yankees are in Florida following our favorites teams around. It's a largely thankless job, but it's hard work that is especially appreciated during these cold days of winter. Here are links to the various Mets beat writer blogs so you can keep an eye on what's happening down in Port St. Lucie.

  - Amazin' Stories (Steve Popper, Bergen Record)
  - Ledger on Mets (Jeremy Cothran, Star Ledger)
  - On the Mets Beat (David Lennon, Newsday)
  - Surfing the Mets (Adam Rubin, Daily News)
  - LoHud Mets Blog (John Delcos, Journal News)
  - Bats (Ben Shpigel, New York Times)
  

• Ben Johnson is back, so the Mets still have something to show for the utterly short-sighted and regrettable Heath Bell deal from an offseason ago. Johnson has been inked to a minor league deal and has been invited to spring training. He did basically nothing for the Mets last year, and spent most of the season at triple-a in New Orleans.
• Lots of good stuff at MetsGeek this week:

  - Interview: Joe Coburn and Kathy Foronjy by Aaron Dorman is a chat with the creators of Mathematically Alive, a documentary on Mets fans through the prism of the 2006 season.

  - Market Shifts by Dan Scotto continues his look at some of the economic swings that have taken place in Major League Baseball of late, specifically as it pertains to the Johan Santana trade-and-sign.

  - The Best Pitchers to Wear a Mets Uniform by Marc Normandin uses JAWS to come up with a list of the best pitchers the Mets have ever had. This doesn't necessarily mean they were great pitchers for the Mets (or in the case of Santana, have ever even pitched for the Mets).

  - Know Your NRIs by Chris McCown looks at the non-roster invitee pitchers the Mets will have in training camp this time around.

  - Spring Training Competition That Should Exist by John Peterson breaks down some positional and rotational battles that may only exist in our minds because the Mets have already made up theirs.

• Don't look now, but the Mets' string of fifteen consecutive arbitration-less offseasons may be coming to an end. The Mets and Oliver Perez are almost two million dollars apart on their respective salary proposals, and Perez has an arbitration hearing set for next Thursday unless a deal can be struck beforehand. It's beginning to look more and more like Perez will flee into the waiting arms of the highest bidder after the 2008 season closes. If he has a very strong walk year performance this season he will be in prime position to get paid. If he puts up another ERA in the 3.50 ERA with close to a strikeout an inning does anyone doubt he'll be getting offers in the 5/$70 million range next year? If Gil Meche got 5/$55 last year is it ridiculous to assume that Perez, who is younger, more talented and more accomplished than Meche was at the time, could get the same years and a few more dollars?

  I'd like to think that the fact the Mets basically turned Perez's career around when they rescued him from baseball purgatory (read: Pittsburgh) two years ago would mean something to him, but he is represented by Scott Boras after all.

Bullet list, Super Bowl Edition.

• The Giants are the mother!@#$ing Super Bowl Champions! Ticker-tape Tuesday, followed by a Giants Stadium celebration, Jersey style. I could spend days and days watching the videos at NFL.com and still not get tired of it. This is going to feel really good for a really long time.
• At Baseball Prospectus, Joe Sheehan previews the AL West.
• At MetsGeek, Jeff takes a quick look at what might've been with graph-laden analysis of Kyle Lohse.
• Chris Jaffe has an interview with Bill James at The Hardball Times
• At Catfish Stew, Ken Arneson deftly describes the best method for winning an argument (or at least surviving same) against a sabermetrician (or someone masquerading as one).
• Rented Underdog from the local redbox. It was a cute family movie that dragged a bit in the latter portions. The film is a live-action remake of the 1960's cartoon series featuring scientologist Jason Lee as the voice of the titular character, some kid played by some other kid, and James Belushi as said kid's father. The CGI was mostly very well done, and I'd say that if you're looking for a decent flick to watch with your kids (or with your wife, in my case), you could definitely do worse.

Bullet list, countdown to 5pm edition.

• Ken Rosenthal checks in with an update on the Santana negotiations. Nothing really new or enlightening, but it sounds like progress is being made.
• Keith Law released his Top 100 Prospects list yesterday. He's got Fernando Martinez at #10, and he chatted about the list yesterday afternoon.
• At Baseball Prospectus, Kevin Goldstein published his list, ranking Martinez at #51. He also had a chat.
• MILB.com also published their list, slotting Martinez at #17.
• At The Post, Joel Sherman thinks that Johan Santana's arrival in Queens will eventually end their no-hitter drought.
• The Yankees signed Morgan Ensberg to a minor league deal. He will compete for a spot at first base. Nice signing. I thought the Phillies would have been much better off grabbing Ensberg instead of Pedro Feliz, as Ensberg draws plenty of walks and can hit 20-30 homeruns if he's in one of his "on" years.
• At Dan Agonistes, Dan Fox talks a bit about Brian Bannister and then continues the pile-on of Marty Noble's Luddism towards statistical analysis.

Been a few bullet-less days, so here's some roughage for your Tuesday morn.

• Fire Joe Morgan tears Mets.com beat writer Marty Noble a new one, pointing out the absurdity of Noble's favorite toy, RBI per 100 at-bats, a flimsy, context-less number that is only slightly more revelatory than RBI itself. Take it away, Mr. Tremendous (Noble in bold):

  Runs and RBI totals provide insufficient information because neither tells us how many opportunities a player has had to produce. And in the case of catchers, who are unlikely to play every day, the number of opportunities helps us understand how they produce.

  What's amazing is that he acknowledges a problem with RBI here. He even goes so far as to say that the problem is that RBI as a raw stat doesn't work because it ignores RBI as a percentage of RBI opportunities. Then explains his method of using RBI, which does little or nothing to fix the problem. It's like saying, "Throwing money into your toilet is bad, because if you throw money in your toilet, you won't be able to use it to buy food, or furniture. Instead, you should set it on fire, and toss the ashes into the toilet. That way, the toilet won't clog."

  You can read Noble's original article at Mets.com. I don't have a problem with Noble using RBI/100AB as a measure of run production. It's stupid and it is greatly skewed towards batters who hit with many men on base, have good hitters in front of them, play on good offensive teams, et cetera. Noble does a fine job reporting the facts and the feelings from within the Mets' clubhouse. Beat reporting is a very hard gig from what I can imagine, and reporters like Noble hardly get the credit they deserve for slogging through the sweaty trenches amidst the throng of half-naked, athletically-supported man-beasts.

  That said, statistical analysis isn't Noble's strength and he should probably avoid expounding on the topic in the future. I know surprisingly little about cold fusion, and as a result you won't find much about it in the archives here.

• Tim Marchman has three offseason questions for the Mets. The most poignant comment:

  This Mets team isn't faced this year with their last chance to win; the men who run them, though, may be. This is a potentially toxic dynamic.

  Problematic, indeed. The Mets have enough outstanding young talent and the financial wherewithal to make a sustained run at the postseason for a number of years, but if they outspend everyone in the National League next year and still fall shy of the playoffs, Omar Minaya and Willie Randolph may not be around to see 2009. The result is a dangerous conflict of interests: the short-term interests of Minaya et al and the long-term ones of the franchise. Fear of his own ousting could lead the Mets' GM to rob from the Mets' future to pay down his present-day debt, and that plan would surely end badly for everyone involved.
• Paul Lo Duca allegedly hurt his knee "training" and will now require arthroscopic surgery that could set him back six weeks or more. Capitol Punishment intercepted some correspondence between Lo Duca and some of his associates in the wake of his recent announcement. Cue: hilarity.
• In a special to SI.com, Cliff Corcoran ponders the seven likeliest destinations for Barry Bonds in 2008. Corcoran ranks the Mets as the sixth-most-fitting residence for Bonds and his humongous gourd, but the Mets have neither the balls nor the media-immunity to attempt such a move. Bottom line: don't hold your breath waiting for this one to happen (if you even want it to happen in the first place).
• Rich Lederer continues his public debate with Buster Olney over the merits of Jim Rice's HoF candidacy. As always, Lederer is respectful and on-point, refuting the inappropriate deification of Rice the hitter by many members of the BBWAA's panel of voters, among others.
• Erik Bedard was traded to the Mariners for Adam Jones and others. Or maybe not.
• The Phillies signed Pedro Feliz for two years and $8.5 million. Feliz may be the best fielding third baseman in the National League, but he's basically an out machine with little plate discipline. He has a bit of power, and that should come in handy at the CBP, but it's hard to imagine this being an upgrade over Wes Helms when all is said and done.