Mets Last Night
I half-watched the Mets game last night as I drafted my third and final fantasy baseball team and liked, for the most part, what I saw. D'Amico threw 99 pitches in 6 innings and started to look tired toward the end, but with the new-and-improved Mets bullpen, we can afford to carry a supremely talented short-starter. Keep those pitch counts down and keep him in the rotation all year.
Instead of talking about the record-setting ninth inning, which I didn't even see (I left immediately after McEwing struck out), I'm going to talk about the events of the top of the sixth. Piazza led off with a walk, and Fonzie moved him over to second with a single to center. Glavine then walked Burnitz to load the bases for Payton, who hit a ball hard, but directly at Vinny Castilla. The situation, then, was bases loaded, one out...and Rey Ordonez stepped to the plate.
What followed was predictable: GIDP. I flew off the handle (which is odd, because it happens often enough) and was posed this question by a fellow Mets fan in the draft: Rey Ordonez is considered less of an all-around player than Ozzie Smith, but his batting statistics at this point in his career are better than Smith's. I took it at face value at the time, and passed it off by saying something like "Well, Ordonez is playing in a high-offense era." I got to thinking about it this morning, though, and checked it out. Here are the career stats for both players (courtesy of the excellent Baseball Reference.
Avg OBP SLG OPS Rey Ordonez .243 .290 .300 590 Ozzie Smith .262 .337 .328 665
Similar, but not at all close. What I'd really like to see are Davenport Translations and perhaps EqAs for the two careers, but I suspect (based, again on the offensive era in which we're living) that it would only skew the argument in favor of Smith. So, I'm going to continue to knock on Ordonez until he pulls his head out of his ass and figures out how to take a walk. What I'm really looking forward to is 18 months from now, October 2003, when Ordonez' contract expires and he takes the final walk of his career.
April 07, 2002 - 12:02 PM