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Josh Thole’s Mental Toughness

Josh Thole deleted his Twitter account yesterday.  Big deal.   He tried it out, starting just before Spring Training, and a couple of months in he identified it as having little to no value for him.  He received a lot of negative and hateful messages from classless ‘fans’, and ultimately decided any benefit of interfacing with fans and answering questions and sharing was offset by the raging avalanche of hate directed his way. 

The truth is Thole’s presense on Twitter was minimal at best, and there wasn’t a lot there.  More beneficial is interacting and following other Mets fans and bloggers and discussion the team as fans.  Two such people, Kelly Lake and Ted Berg, both wrote nice posts about Thole and Twitter, and they’re worth a read and a follow..as long as you’re not going to spew hate at them.  Can’t we all get along?

Btw, you can follow me on Twitter too.

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More Pressure For a Quick Start

ike davisIt’s not just Jerry Manuel and Omar Minaya that have to worry about fast starts to the season or their jobs being in jeopardy.  The same case could be made for Jeff Francoeur,perez Daniel Murphy, and Rod Barajas.  The way Ike Davis, Fernando Martinez, and Josh Thole have been playing in a way this spring that makes you suspect they’ll be knocking at the door to Citi Field sooner rather than later.

With Reyes possibly being out some, or all, of April the pressure on the starting pitching has just doubled.  The most recent report on April suggests that he may be back closer to mid April, but that’s still a rough estimate.

We’ve known for a while that the season was going to hinge on the starting pitching.  The offense was projected to be one of the top in the league, and surely would’ve won some games on it’s own even when the pitching struggled.  With Reyes and Beltran out, they may not have that cushion for a while, but this doesn’t mean the Mets are doomed to a 9-13 type record to start the season.

The fast start is more important than ever, and if Maine, Perez, and Pelfrey can have a good month of April the Mets will still win games.  We all know they’re each capable of pitching good games.  It was expected before the season that they could definitely pitch competitively and keep us in games, but now they may be pressured to actually win the games.  Instead of quality start performances and limiting the opponents to three runs over six innings, stepping up and going seven innings and occasionally limiting the other teams to merely one or two runs becomes important to the Mets early success.

This isn’t to say the Mets lineup is useless, and that they won’t occasionally put up a crooked number, but Jose Reyes and Carlos Beltran are two of the most irreplaceable players in the game today.  The season is never won and lost in April, but if the pitching can step up and win more games than they lose, not only will it minimize the damage caused by losing Reyes and Beltran, it will set them up nicely once they return.

This post, and vibrant discussion about it, also featured on The Real Dirty Mets Blog.

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Excited for Spring, Rooting for The Mets

From Mets

20 Days until Pitchers and Catchers and Injured Players report to Port St. Lucie.   I’m excited.  To me, it’s hard not to be. It’s still Mets baseball, and no matter how you feel about the Wilpons, the front office, or the team, there are still fun games to be played this season, and fun players to watch.

Johan Santana’s due to make 33 or so starts, and every one of those games is worth watching.

Jose Reyes is reportedly healthy and is always a joy to watch play the game. He’s due to be out there on the field at least 155 games or so.

David Wright, Jeff Francoeur, and Daniel Murphy may have varied amounts of upside or talent, but all three of them play their hearts out.  You can’t ask for more out of a baseball player.  You can truly believe that these guys want to win at least as much as you want them to.

From Mets

Exciting rookies like Josh Thole, Jonathan Niese, Fernando Martinez, and maybe even Ike Davis are candidates to make appearances this year.  It’s always fun to watch homegrown guys try to break out and become major leaguers.

You may be down on Mike Pelfrey a little, but he’s going to work out to do better this year.  He’s still a young, talented, homegrown pitcher who will hopefully have a bounceback type season, and there is a good chance we see Niese come up and pitch this year.

The 2010 season won’t be won in January, it won’t be won on paper, and when April 5th comes and the Mets take the field, they’ll do so tied for first place.  This is small consolation right now, but anything can happen.  There is still time for a trade to happen for another pitcher.  It’s entirely possible that one of the Mets starters has an excellent season and pitches great to compliment Santana.  The offense isn’t bad, and it’s entirely possibly Beltran is back and healthy by May and Francoeur continues his resurgence and everyone plays well.  If some of these things happen, the Mets will be extremely competitive and rather than berate the players I think will fail I’m going to focus on rooting for them to succeed.  Isn’t that the point of being a fan?