Casual Diehard

Yesterday, Pete Alonso had the 186th game in Mets history with a home run and a caught stealing. It was the first time that Alonso has done this in his career, which makes him the 91st Met to post such a performance. No Met had homered and been caught stealing in a game since last July 4, when Brandon Nimmo did it in Cincinnati. Nimmo has had three of these games, and the Mets have won nine of the...

Hail to the CBA and the Yakima Sun Kings forever. And also hail to the corner of the record book where David Peterson now finds himself: the first pitcher in major league history, according to Stathead , to post a line with at least six walks, five strikeouts, a hit batter, and a home run allowed — with the homer accounting for the only run against him — in fewer than five innings. Or four innings...

Francisco Lindor joined the 20-20 club for the third time in his career last night, becoming the first Met to do so since Carlos Beltrán in 2008, and a moment he took pride in . There are more footsteps that Lindor can follow from Beltrán, an elite group that he’ll have the chance to join in the next few seasons. Beltrán hit 435 home runs in his career and stole 312 bases, making him the only swit...

For all the maps of the conferences discussed during this episode, including the draft picks, please see the original post… having a glitch in the space-time-podcast continuum on an episode that was “about college football 300 years from now” is too funny. We had such a blast doing the episode, and we’ll just laugh about it taking an extra day to come out with the right audio! We’ve not only fixed...

Editor’s Note: Apologies for the unscheduled break. Between illness and a computer that suddenly borked, it made sense to just skip last week. Now we’re back with fresh We Can Pod It Out as well as the new Willets Pod that dropped this morning, our college football “preview” with the Sickos Committee . Hey, Tim Locastro is back healthy after hurting his thumb in April. Just in time for the Mets’ s...

Editor’s Note: Oops! Keelin is 22 minutes in the future on this episode. We will be posting a new one, so you can actually hear the episode and not feel like you’re having a stroke, but a time traveling kind of goof… kind of fits? Three hundred years have passed since the El Assico point-shaving scandal, an incident which started a series of revelations that Iowa-Iowa State may not have been disas...

He hasn’t homered as a Met yet, and Jonathan Araúz went 0-for-3 yesterday to fall from .333 to .167 ( DJ Stewart now has a .259-.256 lead on Brandon Nimmo for active roster batting average, regardless of plate appearance totals), but let’s go ahead and head into the weekend with Araúz’s home run chain. * Jonathan Araúz hit his first home run off Josh Tomlin , 9/27/20 * Josh Tomlin gave up his firs...

Jonathan Araúz went 1-for-3 in his Mets debut last night, so he’s at .333 for a batting average, which puts him ahead of D.J. Stewart (.261, 6-for-23) with the highest batting average among active Mets. Michael Perez is 4-for-7 (.571) but in the minors now, while Tommy Pham (.268) got traded. Among qualified hitters, defending National League batting champion Jeff McNeil is tied with Brandon Nimmo...

Who knows how long Josh Walker will have to sit on being the last pitcher to commit a walk-off balk? Before last night, it had only been since July 8 of last year, when Rays pitcher Matt Wisler balked with not-yet-a-Met Tyler Naquin at the plate in the 10th inning in Cincinnati, but before that, it had been nearly four years since Dylan Floro , then with the Dodgers, balked with the bases loaded i...

It was 32 years ago yesterday that the Mets traded Ron Darling to the Expos for Tim Burke , who himself was then traded to the Yankees for Lee Guetterman while Darling went from Montreal to Oakland after just three starts for the ‘Spos, and wound up pitching Game 3 of the 1992 ALCS for the A’s. That was after David Cone , traded from the Mets to the Blue Jays in that 1992 season, pitched Game 2 fo...

We just went over this when the Mets traded 38-year-old David Robertson . So, we know that Max Scherzer joins Gil Hodges and Frank Tanana as players the Mets traded after they turned 39. Seems likely that Scherzer plays more than the three more combined games in his career that Hodges and Tanana did. We’ll see how it goes, and what happens with any further Mets trades before Tuesday’s 6 p.m. deadl...

If the concept of character alignment charts is new to you, here’s a little introduction , and congratulations on whatever you’ve done with the copious hours of your life not spent on role playing games? Honestly, there was gonna be a lot more content here to go with this podcast, but life got in the way, and now it’s next week already, so… really, you’re just gonna enjoy this episode on its own....

The Mets traded David Robertson to the Marlins last night for a pair of teenagers, infielder Marco Vargas and catcher Ronald Hernandez . Both have joined the Mets’ team in the Florida Complex League, and if we ever see them in the majors, fantastic. Vargas, the younger of the prospects acquired for the 38-year-old Robertson, was born on May 14, 2005. That day, the Alabama Crimson Tide played the A...

Editor’s note: Apologies for this week’s off-kilter posting, the editor has been sick. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit willetspen.substack.com

You may notice that the cover art for this episode is a picture of Jesse and Chrystal at the Mets-White Sox game, while the podcast is from the Yankees-Royals game. Simple explanation for that: one person, who regularly hosts this show, messed up the recording at the Mets game, and so joined Chrystal as she wrapped up her New York visit in the Bronx. It was fun. There were Nestor Cortes Jr. bobble...

Last night, Pete Alonso hit a pair of home runs to lift the Mets to a 9-3 win in the Bronx, the seventh time this season that a Met has gone deep twice. The Mets lost the first four of those games (including Alonso’s two-homer game in Milwaukee in April), but have won the last three. The last time a Met had multiple homers in a Subway Series game was Francisco Lindor’s three-homer game in 2021… wh...

Christ, you know it ain’t easy… how did they know then about the 2023 Mets? It’s not a good sign when you turn on SNY at 7:00, then WPIX, then realize the Subway Series doesn’t start Monday, but Tuesday… and it’s a sigh of relief that there isn’t a game on. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit willetspen.substack....

The silver lining of the Mets’ season-killing weekend in Boston is that Mark Vientos returned to the majors and collected three hits. Now to see when he’ll smack his first homer since his season debut on May 17. There’s no reason not to play the kids now, is there? * Mark Vientos hit his first home run off Ken Waldichuk , 9/24/22 * Ken Waldichuk gave up his first home run to Vaughn Grissom , 9/7/2...

In this episode, Jesse goes across the Brooklynverse to find a spot that works to podcast about baseball and F1 and all the other stuff… anyway, here’s Kota Yazawa, who is 22 and has pitched two scoreless innings with three strikeouts this season. Yazawa is blood type A, according to his Hokkaido-Nippon Ham Fighters bio , and his favorite game is grilled meat. It’s possible that Google Chrome’s tr...

We welcome Joey Langdon, one of the folks responsible for the 2Fast2Sickos account on Twitter, and of course part of the Sickos Committee, our fellow travelers on the journey to joy in all corners of the sports world. The cover art background here, by the way, is a Photoshop-blotched version of an old Astoria picture of an El Camino, previously described (accurately) on Willets Pod as the mullet o...

The weird thing about the Mets getting one-hit by the Dodgers on Friday night, as we recorded this podcast, was that it really didn’t feel like they were having a one-hitter thrown against them. After all, Brandon Nimmo had led off the game with a home run… except, it was a double… and then there just wasn’t another hit. That the game was scoreless when we started talking is unusual for this year’...

A correction from Jesse: The rainout in Baltimore was on September 29, 1999, bumping Mike Mussina’s last start of that season, not his final start as an Oriole, which would be the following year. Mussina and Scott Kamieniecki combined to shut out the Yankees in the opener of the following day’s doubleheader . Everything else in this episode is, of course, completely factual and based in reality, i...

First of all, the air conditioner commercial: And now, the Starling Marte home run chain as he and the Mets both embark on what hopefully will be a happier second half of the season… * Starling Marte hit his first home run off Dallas Keuchel , 7/26/12 * Dallas Keuchel gave up his first home run to Asdrúbal Cabrera , 6/23/12 * Asdrúbal Cabrera hit his first home run off Jason Hammel , 8/18/07 Hamme...

We haven’t done the Jeff McNeil home run chain yet. Jeff went golfing and posted some video to Instagram over the All-Star break, so here’s that… …and here’s his home run chain. * Jeff McNeil hit his first home run off Tanner Roark , 7/31/18 * Tanner Roark gave up his first home run to Carlos Beltrán , 9/23/13 * Carlos Beltrán hit his first home run off Jaime Navarro , 4/10/99 * Jaime Navarro gave...

The National League won the All-Star game thanks to Rockies catcher Elias Díaz blasting a two-run homer off Félix Bautista of the Orioles, who had only given up three homers all season. So, let’s do the home run chain for Díaz today… it started six years ago in New York! * Elias Díaz hit his first home run off Paul Sewald , 6/2/17 And… Díaz is a chain-starter! That was the first home run that Paul...