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DeGrom revives Mets’ playoff run

Jacob DeGrom may have pitched the Mets back into the playoff hunt.

The right-hander gave up one hit over nine innings on Sunday to lead the Mets to a 5-0 shutout and series win over Philadelphia. The victory left the Mets (49-42) six games behind the Nationals, who lost to Pittsburgh.

“It was a lot of fun,” DeGrom told reporters afterward.

The Amazins started the game amid calls to reinforce their injury-plagued starting rotation.

DeGrom, who struck out seven hitters, became the first Met pitcher to record a shutout since Bartolo Colon last September. Phillies pitcher Zach Elfin recorded the one hit that DeGrom yielded.

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Curtis Granderson had a solo home run in the third inning. Asdrubal Cabrera added a two-run shot in the eighth. Juan Lagares tripled to drive  in a run in the first. Four innings later, a double by Jose Reyes scored DeGrom.

On Monday, the Mets will play the first of three games against the Cubs in Chicago.

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Mets fall seven games behind Nationals

When James Loney singled with two out in the Mets half of the eighth on Saturday night, it seemed as if the Amazins, who trailed by one, might erase the deficit.

The rally ended and then a comeback did, too. Carlos Ruiz singled to lead off Philadelphia’s half of the inning, then advanced to third on an out by Freddy Galvis. Ruiz later scored on a wild pitch by Erik Goeddel. That put the Phillies up by two and the win out of reach for the Mets.

The Mets (48-42) fell seven games behind the Nationals, who blanked the Pirates. That’s the most the Mets have trailed Washington this season. The Marlins also lost, which left the Mets tied for the second wild card.

“We are not driving in runs when we need to,” Manager Terry Collins told reporters after the game.

The Mets need pitching, too. Which has led to rumors the team might make a deal for the return of Jonathon Niese, a left-hander whom the Mets traded to Pittsburgh in December for Neil Walker. Niese has struggled in Pittsburgh, where he leads the league in wild pitches. Pirates general manager Neil Huntington told a Pittsburgh radio program on Thursday that the Pirates might have been better off had they traded for “two fringe prospects.”

The Mets reportedly aren’t ruling out a reunion.

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The Mets look to October

Sirius will appear in the night sky over New York City between now and Wednesday, which means the dog days have arrived. But we know that already from the Mets, who have emerged from the All-Star break in a scramble to win the World Series.

The Amazins started the season’s second half with a win over Philadelphia that featured homers by Juan Lagares and Neil Walker and a performance by Bartolo Colon that held the Phillies to four hits over five and two-thirds innings.

“We feel we are a playoff team,” Walker told reporters afterward.

The win leaves the Mets with 48 wins, six games behind Washington and in possession of the third of three spots for a wild-card berth. That’s one more win than the Mets had at this spot last season, when they finished as runner-up to the Royals.

And again this season, the odds of the Mets playing in October seem likely to to depend on the health of their lineup. At last year’s midpoint, injuries had sidelined David Wright (a narrowing of the spine), Steven Matz (torn back muscle) and Travis d’Arnaud (elbow sprain).

A year later, both David Wright (recovering from surgery to repair a herniated disk in his neck) and Matt Harvey (slated for season-ending surgery to correct a compression of blood vessels between his collarbone and first rib) are out for the season. Yoenis Cespedes is nursing a strained quadriceps.

Noah Syndergaard, whose E.R.A. of 2.56 ranks him eighth in the majors, is monitoring a bone spur in his throwing elbow. Lucas Duda, who has been on the disabled list since May with a stress fracture in his lower back, is slated to resume activity next week.

In the meantime, the Mets will look to a mix of players to propel them into playoff contention. “We still think we are going to have a big second half, but we have to have some different people step up,” manager Terry Collins told the Post. “We don’t have Harv, so somebody else has to step up. We don’t have David, and Duda is out, we’ve got to have other people step up.”

So for the Mets, the second half of summer may be a story of stepping up. If that happens, they may be in contention come the harvest moon.

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LeBron James says he needs to ‘do more’

On Oct. 30, 2014, the Cleveland Cavaliers staged a pregame ceremony to mark a homecoming for LeBron James, who had left four years earlier to play for Miami.

About a minute into the observance, before an arena packed with fans who waved sabers that glowed red, a video of James appeared on the so-called humongotron that hangs from the ceiling of the arena.

“If there’s one thing we all know,” intoned an announcer, before the video cut to James. “There’s no place like home,” James finished, before tossing chalk into the air as tends to be his pre-game ritual. The fans, who seemed to embody the chalk’s trajectory, leaped from their seats.

Fast forward to Friday, when we awoke to news that the Nets had upset the Cavs the night before in Brooklyn.

The Nets entered the matchup with 20 wins in 71 tries and ranked 14 of 15 in the NBA’s Eastern Conference. The Cavs started the game atop the conference and, seemingly, poised to compete for an NBA championship after losing to Golden State in the finals last year.

The loss to the Nets capped a week that featured a series of questions about James’ ability to lead the Cavs back to the finals and his commitment to the team after this season.

Five days earlier, the Cavs lost in Miami after James spent halftime chatting with his friend and former teammate, Heat guard Dwayne Wade, rather than warming up with the Cavs, who trailed by 21 points at the half.

That earned James a talking-to from coach Tyronn Lue, who said James apologized for his behavior. “I just told him we can’t have that, being down like we were and him being the leader,” Lue told cleveland.com.

On Monday, a tweet appeared that suggested James had unfollowed the Cavs’ Twitter feed.  (James declined to discuss it.)

Then on Wednesday, James received another talk, this time from Cavs general manager David Griffin. The prompt: a story by Howard Beck in the Bleacher Report that quoted James as saying he hoped to team someday with his besties Wade, Chris Paul and Carmelo Anthony.

The talks seemed to have their effect. “I just need to do more,” James told reporters after the loss in Brooklyn.

James will have his chance on Saturday night in New York, where the Cavs will take on the Knicks. “I feel like we’re ready to make a championship run,” James told reporters on Saturday morning before Cleveland’s shootaround.

In a gift of scheduling, the game at the Garden will feature a matchup between James and Anthony.

Of course, the Cavs all need to do more if they hope to return to the finals. “These handpicked Cavs, with Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love, should never have to be a one-man team, and they’re doomed if they are,” Barry Petchesky noted on Deadspin.

Though James, 31, has said he plans to end his career in Cleveland, he also has signed a series of one-year deals that enable him to become a free agent again this summer.

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New York set to ban smokeless tobacco from ballparks

It may be time for the Mets and Yankees to buy more Bazooka.

The New York City Council this week is expected to vote on a bill that would ban smokeless tobacco from sports arenas throughout the five boros. The bill, which would take effect upon being signed into law by Mayor de Blasio, would make both Citi Field and Yankee Stadium tobacco-free.

The measure also would make New York the fifth major league city to prohibit use of smokeless tobacco at ballparks. In the past year, Chicago, San Franciso, Los Angeles and Boston have enacted similar bans, which are backed by Major League Baseball, as well as by both the Yankees and Mets.

The main sponsor of the measure says distinguishing tobacco based on how players consume it reflects stereotypes about snuff that no longer hold sway.

“I couldn’t imagine us being OK as a city or society as a whole with a baseball player standing in left field smoking a cigarette while the game was going on, on national television,” Councilman Corey Johnson, a Manhattan Democrat who chair’s the council’s health committee, told the Daily News in February. “But… just because of culturally what has existed for a long time, it’s OK for professional athletes to stand in left field or in the dugout and chew wads of smokeless tobacco.”

Though the sight of players dipping has marked baseball for decades, the habit takes a toll. Two years ago, Tony Gwynn, a Hall of Fame outfielder, died from cancer of the salivary glands that he attributed to chewing tobacco.

Curt Schilling, the retired pitcher for the Red Sox, blames smokeless tobacco that he chewed for three decades for cancer of the mouth that he has battled since 2014.

“You will develop sores, you will lose your sense of taste and smell,” Schilling wrote last year in a letter to his younger self that was published in The Players’ Tribune. “You will develop lesions. You will lose your gums — they will rot. You will have problems with your teeth for the rest of your life.”

Smokeless tobacco contains nitrosamines, which form during the curing of tobacco and can cause cancer and heart disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As many as one-third of major leaguers use smokeless tobacco despite the dangers.

Efforts to ban smokeless tobacco have met with pushback from the players’ union, which asserts that baseball cannot ban snuff so long as it remains legal. As the union sees it, smokeless tobacco presents no danger to others from second-hand smoke.

Still, the union supports efforts to persuade players to quit the habit. “It’s definitely an addiction and it’s a tough addiction to get away from, because you’re always around it and there’s certain triggers,” an unnamed player for the Mets told the New York Post. “But I think if they apply a rule, we should abide by it.”

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Goose Gossage rails against ‘nerds’ who run baseball

At a reunion on Friday of three of the four inventors of Moneyball, Michael Lewis, who wrote the book, discussed the innovation that Bill James, who pioneered statistical analysis of baseball, brought to the game.

As James saw it, the baseball diamond “was a field of ignorance,” Lewis told an audience at MIT’s Sloan Sports conference in Boston. James, who self-published his analyses starting in 1977. (He also pioneered blogging, you might say.)

James’ work formed a foundation for the use of statistical methods by Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta after Beane became general manager of the Oakland A’s in 1997. Since then, front offices throughout sports have adopted (and refined) statistical tools to inform everything from scouting to strategy.

So it was with amusement that we greeted comments by Goose Gossage, the former Yankees pitcher, who on Thursday unleashed a diatribe against teams’ reliance on math.

“The game is becoming a freaking joke because of the nerds who are running it,” Gossage told ESPN. “I’ll tell you what has happened, these guys played Rotisserie baseball at Harvard or wherever the f— they went and they thought they figured the f—ing game out.

“They don’t know s—,” he added.

Whatever you think of the state of baseball, Gossage has impeccable timing. This weekend marked the 10th anniversary of the MIT event, which opened with the aforementioned reunion of Lewis, James (who did not attend Harvard) and DePodesta (who did).

Grousing by the Goose aside, it helps to appreciate how baseball operated before James, now a senior adviser to the Red Sox, began studying the game. In 2002, the average draft, which lasted 50 rounds back then, produced one everyday major league player, according to DePodesta, who now serves as chief strategy officer of the Cleveland Browns.

“We aimed to be wrong 48 out of 50 times, instead of 49 out of 50,” DePodesta recalled.

Gossage, it seems, goes with his gut, though even he acknowledges there is a role for statistical analysis, according to Andrew Marchand, who covers the Yankees for ESPN.

Still, it makes you wonder what Gossage might think of “Tracking pitcher performance with instantaneous component ERA and moving averages” or “zWins, an alternative calculation of wins above replacement in baseball,” to cite two of the papers presented at the gathering in Boston.

The tirade, in which Gossage also blasted Jose Bautista as a “f—ing disgrace to the game” for flipping his bat upon hitting a home run in the playoffs last October, earned Gossage, who is at Yankees’ training camp this spring as an instructor, a talking-to from General Manager Brian Cashman and Manager Joe Girardi.

In the end the nerd had his revenge. “That’s what’s changed since 2002,” said James. “You used to have to pay attention to those guys [like Gossage]. Now you can just ignore them.”

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Jacob DeGrom declines to sign

The Mets made Jacob deGrom an offer: take it or take it.

The right-hander will earn $607,000 this season because that’s what the team offered to pay him. DeGrom, who is entering his third season in the majors, has yet to amass enough time in the big leagues to be eligible for arbitration.

DeGrom is unable to negotiate his pay, per the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) that governs the terms and conditions of employment for major league players. To be eligible to bargain over pay, a player must either qualify as a free agent (defined as at least six years of Major League service and no contract for the coming season) or have between three and six years of service.

DeGrom can claim neither, which led the Mets to offer him a raise of $50,125 for the coming season. DeGrom, who had 14 wins last year and helped pitch the team to the World Series, responded by declining to sign his contract, as is his prerogative.

“Like the Mets, he is simply exercising his rights under the [collective bargaining agreement],” Brodie van Wagenen, deGrom’s agent, told ESPN. “But given Jacob’s standing as one of the top pitchers in Major League Baseball and his 2015 performance, his worth cannot be properly valued by a formula.”

The drama, which unfolded in Port St. Lucie four days before deGrom faced the Yankees in his first outing of training camp, reveals as much about the uniqueness of deGrom’s career as it does about the vagaries of the CBA.

DeGrom, whose birthday falls on June 19, will pitch most of his third season at age 28, or a year older than Matt Harvey, and five years senior to Noah Syndergaard.

In short, deGrom happens to be older for a third-year pitcher, if by older you mean between one and five years older than the other main members of the Mets’ starting rotation. Harvey will be eligible for free agency in 2019. deGrom won’t be a free agent until 2021.

Thus, the Mets have deGrom pitching for them, relatively inexpensively, in the prime of his career.  Sandy Alderson, the Mets’ general manager, defended the offer as the product of the team’s “straightforward approach to determining salaries.”

“Yes, it is based on a formula, predicated on performance,” Alderson told reporters.

That sounded to some like the Mets might be letting the exercise of their rights under the CBA cloud their judgment, especially when the player in question happened to be among the best in the big leagues and one whom the Mets are counting on to pitch them back to the postseason.

Given deGrom’s “unusual circumstances — an outlier on the developmental scale but an instant and charismatic star — would a few extra hundred-thousand dollars have bankrupted the Wilpon family,” asked Harvey Araton in the Times, referring to the Mets’ owners.

Still, you needn’t worry about deGrom, who is poised to earn more money that most people will in their lifetimes. After this season he likely will qualify as a so-called Super Two, which affords arbitration to players with at least two but less than three years of service if the player has accumulated at least 86 days of service during the immediately preceding season and he ranks in the top 22% of service in the group of players who have between two and three years of service, all as agreed to in the CBA.

Provided deGrom stays healthy and continues to win, the Mets likely will offer him a series of million-dollar seasons in the hope of coming to terms before an arbitrator imposes an award. And that’s just for arbitration. Free agency holds the prospect of millions more.

During the latest offseason, the Diamondbacks signed Zach Greinke to a deal that reportedly will pay the pitcher $206.5 million over six years. Greinke will turn 33 this October.

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Mets’ Herrera hits inside-the-park home run

Dilson Herrera may give Mets fans a reason to care less that Daniel Murphy moved on.

Herrera, in his sophomore year with the club, hit an inside-the-park home run on Friday to tie an exhibition in the bottom of the ninth against the Marlins.

As it happens, Herrera is the top prospect to replace Murphy, who in January signed with the Nationals. Murphy walked and grounded into a double play in two trips to the plate on Thursday as the Nationals topped the Mets in the spring opener for both teams.

Herrera, who turned 22 on Thursday, hit .211 with three home runs in 90 at-bats for the Mets last season after starting the season with the team’s triple-A affiliate in Las Vegas. Last May, in his first game in the majors, Herrera turned a double play with a backhand flip to the shortstop.

The Mets have “a viable alternative from within the organization” to succeed Murphy at second base, general manager Sandy Alderson told reporters last fall, referring to Herrera.

Herrera’s homer on Friday bounced off the left field wall and rolled to the foul line. He churned around the bases and dove head first across home plate.

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Mets starters by (some of) the numbers

Depending on whom you ask, the Mets have either the best or second-best starting rotation in baseball.

That prompted us to take a snapshot of the National League champions’ starters. The table below looks at three stats that together provide one glimpse of pitching prowess.

Fielding independent pitching (FIP), which measures a pitcher’s talent by isolating results a pitcher controls directly: strikeouts, walks, hit by pitches and home runs.

Strikeouts per nine innings (K/9), which counts how many strikeouts a pitcher averages over nine innings

Earned run average (ERA), which measures the number of earned runs a pitcher allows, averaged over nine innings.

pitchersAs the numbers suggest, deGrom, Harvey and Syndergaard, the heart of the Mets’ rotation, all have the potential to be Cy Young award winners in 2016.

Wheeler, who was out last season while recovering from elbow surgery, is expected to rejoin the rotation in July. Matz, a left-hander who missed two months last season (his rookie year) after tearing a muscle near the armpit on his left side, will be trying to regain the form he showed in the first half of 2015.

Colon is expected to hold down the fifth spot in the rotation until Wheeler returns. The right-hander, who is entering his 20th season in the majors, reportedly turned down more money to remain with the Mets.

“All these guys are my family,” Colon told reporters on Wednesday.

Perhaps the best stat of all for Mets fans: Barring injury or a trade, the core of the rotation will be together for at least the next three seasons.

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The Mets start springtime

As Terry Collins made his way from one field to another on Friday at the Mets’ training facility, a refrain rose from the fans who followed him.

“We’re gonna win it all this year, Terry,” rippled from the crowd. The prediction sounded occasionally like a question but more often than not like a command, the Daily News noted.

That’s how the spring starts when you skipper the World Series runner-up. That’s also how it goes in February, on the day that pitchers and catchers report, with the date for the rest of the squad to report still a week away.

Collins, 66, happens to be the oldest manager in the majors. And that feels, right, too, especially now that the Mets seem wise for re-signing outfielder Yoenis Cespedes.

Being a senior also happens to give Collins something in common with many of those who will fill grandstands across Florida and Arizona between now and the start of the regular season.

Big-league baseball in Florida, “is a spring sport played by the young for the divertissement of the elderly – a sun-warmed, sleepy exhibition celebrating the juvenescence of the year and the senescence of the fans,” Roger Angell observed in The New Yorker, 54 years ago this spring.

Manager and retirees aside, the Mets this spring are all about youth, particularly the arms that propelled the team to a pennant. Jacob deGrom, Matt Harvey, Noah Syndergaard, Steven Matz, Bartolo Colon and Zack Wheeler are the best rotation in baseball, according to ESPN’s Buster Olney.

Both deGrom and Harvey told reporters this winter they would consider playing their entire careers in Queens if the money were right. Of course, that’s what players who are returning to a team coming off a league championship say during the off-season.

Still, the prospect of the right-hander with the shoulder-length locks and the Dark Knight remaining Mets for several seasons feels right, right now, and affirms the possibility that they and their teammates may approach the splendor of 2015.

“I love expectations,” Collins told reporters on Thursday at his first official news conference of the season. “I think they’re great. I tell my players all the time: We create our own expectations.”

“Let the show begin,” he added