Amazin’ Avenue’s 2018 year in review

With the end of the year upon us, it’s time to look back at some of our favorite things that ran on this site over the last twelve months. Simply put, we’re all thrilled that we get to this for an active, engaged, and intelligent audience of Mets fans, and we hope that 2019 brings even better things for this site—but especially the Mets.

#analysis

• Allison McCague’s look at launch angle, Kevin Plawecki, and Juan Lagares was one of the best analytical pieces on the site this year.
• It was fun diving into what Zack Wheeler was doing differently as he put together a phenomenal second half.
• Timothy Finnegan looked back at Matt Harvey at his best with a thorough analysis of just how good he had been and how he did it.
• We also tried our best to explain why Harvey had struggled over the past two years.
• Linda Surovich’s series on Jacob deGrom’s starts throughout the year was a great way to stay dialed in to his Cy Young case, which only got stronger and stronger as the year went on. Here’s #32, but you can find the rest in the analysis group.
• Allison looked at the parallels between the handling of Yoenis Cespedes’s injury and Carlos Beltran’s injury back when Beltran was a Met.

Goodbye, David Wright

• Back when Wright was playing the final game of his career, Alex Nelson dusted off his keyboard and wrote an excellent retrospective on Wright’s time as a prospect coming up through the Mets’ system.
• There may never been another David Wright, wrote Kory Powell.
• Long before the details of Wright’s final game were finalized, Jenna Jacobs dropped in for a guest piece saying Wright deserves only the best.
• Linda wrote a great thank you to Wright.
• David Capobianco’s use of MLB: The Show to field an all-David Wright team resulted in a fun, fantastic piece.

The takes

• The Mets don’t know how to handle their players, wrote Richard Staff and Allison.
• The Jose Reyes situation was an embarrassment, David wrote back in July.
• Yoenis Cespedes should be celebrated for who he is, wrote Rich.

And everything else

• Linda wrote a great goodbye to Wilmer Flores, who was non-tendered earlier this month after spending his entire professional baseball career with the Mets.
• Nathan Gismot wrote a really nice farewell to Sandy Alderson, whose tenure as GM came to an end as he dealt with his own health in the middle of the season.
• The fact that the Mets’ young position player corps was coming into its own more and more as the season went on is a reason to be optimistic about the future.

And there was so much more. Have a favorite piece that we didn’t include here? Mention it in the comments!