Best Mets Seasons at Each Position
Two of the best Mets blogs, MetsBlog and Hotfoot, have recently been making all-time Mets lists. Great idea for hot stove! Much better than making lists of still-available free-agent pitchers with losing records and E.R.A.s above 4.50! Here’s my list for the best Mets seasons ever at each position. What do you think? Am I shortchanging anyone?
Best Mets Seasons Ever at Each Position:
1B –Olerud, 1998
2B – Alfonzo, 2000
SS - Reyes, 2006
3B – Wright, 2006
LF – Jones, 1969
CF – Beltran, 2006
RF – Strawberry, 1987
C – Piazza, 2000
RHP – Gooden, 1985
LHP – Koosman, 1976
RH reliever – Lockwood, 1976
LH reliever – Orosco, 1983
January 12th, 2007 at 6:01 am
I’m not up on the statistics, but I’m sure you researched it thoroughly and it seems logical to me. I am surprised Seaver wasn’t in there, but I guess Gooden had the better ERA.
January 12th, 2007 at 2:31 pm
Vicki,
Seaver was undoubtedly the best Mets pitcher ever, but he never had an individual season as good as Gooden’s season in 1985.
January 14th, 2007 at 2:29 pm
It’s interesting to see how many on your list are from 2006. Bodes well for this season I hope. I was surprised at the relievers. I would have thought McGraw, McDowell, Franco or one of last year’s group would have made it. But I don’t know the stats either. I’m not sure I even remember Lockwood.
January 15th, 2007 at 5:36 pm
Its hard to evaluate this without knowing what metrics you are using. Offensive or defensive stats? How are you evaluating pitchers? Modern baseball theory seems to posit that WHIP is more illuminating than ERA (and, as per this Sunday’s NY TIMES “ERA plus” is also more robust than ERA alone) and W-L is pretty useless. Are you using the Bill James “Wins Shares” algorithim which I still haven’t figured out? Do you worship at the altar of OBP over BA or SLG, or do you believe that OPS with RISP is the key metric in evaluating clutch hitting (and thus proving that Tejada is a God.)
Its an interesting list but absent knowing the methodology its very hard to comment or critique or even discuss.
January 15th, 2007 at 7:39 pm
JD, I did the list off the top of my head and then checked the stats to see if I wanted to stick with my original hunches or change them (I was actually going to go with one of McGraw’s season until I looked again with what Orosco did in ‘83 and I’m still not really sure that Wright in 2006 deserves to be there instead of Hojo in either 87, 89, or 91. I’ll stand by Cleon in 1969 because I think people have forgotten what it meant to hit .340 in 1969, but statistically you should probably give left field to Bernard Gilkey’s 1996 season). I was inspired by similarly subjective lists that Hotfoot and Metsblog had just thrown off about the best Mets at each position, as a self-conscious effort to relieve severe offseason boredom. Their lists provoked questions similar to the ones you’ve asked though the best Mets at each position is even more complex because sometimes you have to compare people who spent a year or two at a position with people who spent six or seven seasons there.
I am a great admirer of Bill James but as even he has acknowledged, the math, even the new and improved math, won’t tell us everything. And the question of how many runs get produced or prevented does not necessarily tell you who can be given the most credit for his offensive production (I still think that a single is a greater accomplishment than a walk even if they can be close to equal in their importance in a game). And then there’s the problem of the fact that there is no objective way to compare defensive accomplishments. The statistics don’t tell us nearly enough.
So please understand that this is a casual list for people to think about, as we all wait for real news about our Mets.
January 16th, 2007 at 2:31 am
Dana:
I agree - and other than enjoying Moneyball and skimming James’ abstract, that is about the limits of my SABRE knowledge other than what I pick up in passing. But other than important but unmeasurable things like “leadership” and “guts” there ain’t much else out there to go on in evaluating this stuff. (And even James admits this - he says the 2004 Red Sox won due to “veteran leadership”. Sacrilege to the stathead community! I nearly keeled over.)