Well said

SamT, in response to Jon Heyman's article about "Mets officials" despairing after the first two weeks of the season:

You know those Mets fans who post irrationally [on] forums, calling for Beltran's trade everytime he makes an error? Yea, turns out those people run the Mets.

The bit at the end about how they're all torn up about not signing David Eckstein is especially eye-popping.

Mets sign Al Reyes to minor league deal

Omar signed Al Reyes. That's good news.

"Released by the Rays" used to been a pretty good indication that a guy is totally useless but with them leading the AL East I guess that's no longer necessarily true. In fact, I'm not sure what the Rays were thinking when they cut him. He was a pretty decent closer for them back in... 2007. In any case they did and Omar signed him to a minor league deal, getting a chance to let him pitch for the Zephyrs a little bit before probably getting a September callup.

He's injury prone and gives up more than the occasional home run, but for a freely available arm his record is pretty sweet. I don't trust the current reliever corps as far as I can throw them, so any sort of backup would be worth getting, but I can definitely see Reyes making a real contribution down the stretch (say a 3.50 ERA and a 3.00 K/BB).

And speaking of relievers that Omar recently scrounged up, Luis Ayala looks like a pretty good move as well. When I first heard about the acquisition I was unmoved, but he's just had an uncharacteristically bad 2008. His career ERA is 3.22.

It's not that Heilman, Sanchez or Smith are that bad, but for a playoff team's three best right-handed relievers, they're not good either. Both Reyes and Ayala could conceivably do a better job than any of them, so it makes all sorts of sense to get them in the mix.

Johan Santana still feels like a disappointment, but shouldn't

The bad news:

Year   K/9 K:BB
2005: 9.25 5.29
2006: 9.44 5.21
2007: 9.66 4.52
2008: 7.53 3.22

As you can see, the strikeout rate fell off a cliff this year, but the K:BB has been in continued decline since its peak in 2005, when he was 26 years old. Of course, even though he still came into this year on the good side of 30 he'd thrown over five normal-starter-seasons worth of innings in his last four years, so it wasn't unreasonable to expect (as a lot of people did) a falloff this year.

And fall off he did, but how badly?

Year    ERA  OPS  GB:FB
2005   2.88 .594   0.91
2006   2.77 .616   1.06
2007   3.33 .678   0.92
2008   2.75 .652   1.14

Those metrics paint a much prettier picture of Santana's Mets debut. The groundball improvement isn't massive, and he's still miles from Webb/Lowe territory, but it's enough to suggest that more of the lost strikeouts turned into weak dribblers than warning track flies.

A translated ERA metric would be helpful in dealing with the differences in home park and league/opponent quality, and it's probably safe to assume that both factors would make the comparison to the Minnesota years slightly less favorable, but BP only runs those figures annually so I don't know how much.

They do, however, keep VORP updated daily, and that metric (which measures how many fewer runs a team surrendered while a given pitcher was on the mound than they would have if those innings had been pitched by a minimum salary scrub) is adjusted for park/league effects.

So we can look at this list of the top 10 most run-preventing pitchers in the majors and conclude that, even though Omar failed to swoop in on Cliff Lee this spring when the Indians barely wanted him to show up to camp, he didn't exactly screw up when he ponied up for Santana:

59.4 Cliff Lee
56.4 Roy Halladay
53.9 Tim Lincecum
49.1 Johan Santana
48.6 Brandon Webb
47.3 Dan Haren
44.6 Ryan Dempster [!]
44.2 Jake Peavy
44.1 Ben Sheets
42.9 John Danks

Mets hire Wayne Krivsky as a "special assistant"

Former/sacked Cincinnati general manager Wayne Krivsky has been hired by the Mets to act as a special assistant to Omar Minaya.

When Krivsky was fired back in late April after a 9-12 start, I emailed my Reds fan uncle to inquire as to why. His response:

I think you can explain the Krivsky firing with one word - Mike Stanton. There has been speculation that the owner, Castellini, was really peeved that they had to eat his millions before the season started. And overpaying Patterson, even though he is a Baker guy, probably did not set too well either.

I've got nothing good to say about giving Mike Stanton serious money or (over)paying Corey Patterson, and it was actually made worse by the fact that he's a Baker guy, but the reason Patterson's presence in center was so galling was because of Jay Bruce, and Krivsky was the guy who drafted Bruce. He also knew that current league ERA and strikeout leader Edinson Volquez was someone worth acquiring, even though the purchase price (Josh Hamilton) turned out to be much higher than expected.

Whatever his talents as a baseball executive, it does seem strange that at a time when the Mets seem to be in housecleaning mode, they've brought a guy who was very recently a major league GM into the front office to "assist" Minaya.