{"id":398,"date":"2009-05-20T14:23:48","date_gmt":"2009-05-20T19:23:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ceetar.com\/optimisticmetsfan\/?p=398"},"modified":"2009-05-20T14:23:48","modified_gmt":"2009-05-20T19:23:48","slug":"they-are-that-good","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.ceetar.com\/optimisticmetsfan\/2009\/05\/20\/they-are-that-good\/","title":{"rendered":"They Are That Good"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Just because we&#8217;re losing, or have lost, doesn&#8217;t mean that we aren&#8217;t that good.<\/p>\n<p>When you encounter someone that tells you the Mets aren&#8217;t that good, give them a pat on the back.  Their response is a defense mechanism against the hurt they&#8217;re feeling with the way this team is managed and playing.  <\/p>\n<p>No matter how you look at it, this team is pretty good and should win the division.<\/p>\n<p>They&#8217;re better than last year.  The bullpen has gone from bottom five to top five.  That&#8217;s a huge improvement.  The starters seem at least as good as last year.  Both corner outfield spots look to be better than last year, as does second base.  <\/p>\n<p>The Phillies are worse.  Being that they had a ton of pitchers have career years last year, it was obvious they wouldn&#8217;t repeat that performance.  They weren&#8217;t even the best team last year, except as far as ultimate results go.  They have been getting by on their offense so far, but their offense, while good, can&#8217;t carry them all year. Offense slumps, and that could lead to disastrous stretches of games if their pitchers continue to be mediocre.  They certainly didn&#8217;t look like a great team in any of the four games they played the Mets.  <\/p>\n<p>Even if you go position by position, the Mets are a good team.  They&#8217;re getting top of the line performance out of 3B and CF.  The corner outfielders are around league average or better, and under-performing.  Catcher is right around average, while SS and 2B are above it.  Pelfrey and Maine are both above league average, which means that we have a favorable pitching match up more times than not. <\/p>\n<p>I know it&#8217;s tough sometimes, when they find ways to lose; the manager throws the game away, the 1B of the inning throws the game away, someone makes a key error, or a reliever doesn&#8217;t have it.  It&#8217;s not cause to give up.  (Of course, if you&#8217;ve truly given up I don&#8217;t know what you&#8217;re doing watching games or reading blogs) It&#8217;s not often teams run away with the division in May. Even great teams.  Even championship teams.  There is a lot of good, and fun baseball coming.  Don&#8217;t let a couple of bad games get you down.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The New York Mets _are_ that good.  Mets fans that say they&#8217;re not are using it as a defense mechanism against getting hurt.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[575,19,3],"tags":[2968,747,746,14,190,749,338,748,2970],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ceetar.com\/optimisticmetsfan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ceetar.com\/optimisticmetsfan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ceetar.com\/optimisticmetsfan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ceetar.com\/optimisticmetsfan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ceetar.com\/optimisticmetsfan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=398"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.ceetar.com\/optimisticmetsfan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":399,"href":"http:\/\/www.ceetar.com\/optimisticmetsfan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398\/revisions\/399"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ceetar.com\/optimisticmetsfan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ceetar.com\/optimisticmetsfan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ceetar.com\/optimisticmetsfan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}