In Arizona:

• Jason Vargas allowed one run on four hits in 2.0 innings.
• Tobi Stoner allowed three runs on three hits and a walk in 1.2 innings.
• Daniel Murphy was still nowhere to be found.

In the Dominican Republic:

• Fernando Tatis went 0-for-3 with a walk.

In Puerto Rico:

• Nick Evans went 0-for-5 with two strikeouts.
• Eddie Camacho struck out one in a perfect inning of relief.
• Jesus Feliciano went 2-for-4 with a double, a walk and two runs scored.

At MetsGeek, Mike Newman wonders if Mets prospects are especially overhyped, and, if so, how they come to be overhyped.

At RotoGraphs, Brian Joura talks about David Wright and how high he should go in your typical fantasy draft. The bottom line: If you pick third overall, Wright shouldn't be around by the time you make your first-round selection.

At FanGraphs, Eric Seidman talks about Pedro Martinez and his future in the big leagues. His Marcel projection isn't too hot, though the Bill James projection is very optimistic.

Buried in his most recent chat, Rob Neyer mentions that his ESPN.com blog will be coming out from behind the Insider pay wall. His latest entry should be available to all. The URL still points to Insider, but I was able to read it without being logged into my friend's Insider account, so, yay!

Phillies blog The700Level wades through some of professional sports' biggest locales to find the biggest city rival to Philadelphia. It doesn't take them long to call off the search.

In Arizona:

• Josh Thole went 0-for-3 with a walk.
• Bobby Parnell started and tossed four scoreless innings, striking out three and allowing just a hit and a walk.

In the Dominican Republic:

• Fernando Martinez went 3-for-4 with a solo homerun and two runs scored (.394/.438/.652).
• Fernando Tatis went 2-for-4.

At MetsGeek, James Kannengieser breaks down the top ten Mets batter seasons.

Despite the fact that our economy is in the crapper and our financial institutions are largely responsible for flushing the toilet, the Mets have assured everyone that their landmark twenty-year, $400 million sponsorship deal with Citigroup is not in jeopardy. When reached for comment, the 53,000 employees whom Citi is laying off said, "Really? Really."

Marty Noble has a new mailbag up, where the questions are actually quite stupider than the answers.

Pedro Martinez will definitely pitch next season, for the Mets or somebody else.

Tom Tango's 2009 Marcel the Monkey projections are available, and FanGraphs already has 'em, both sortable-wise as well as within the individual player pages.

Also at FanGraphs, Eric Seidman looks at Joe Beimel, one of the more interesting names on the free agent relief market.

At Beyond the Boxscore, Peter Bendix has the first part of his series on the history of the National and American Leagues. It's a long read but a good one.

At Baseball Digest Daily, John Brattain compares the tenures of Bud Selig and former commissioner Peter Ueberroth.

The Kobe 9 Cruise of a new independent Japanese professional baseball league has drafted a 16-year-old girl, Eri Yoshida, who throws a sidearm knuckleball.

MLBAM has reached an agreement with Adobe to use Flash for all of MLB.com's embedded and streaming video. They were previously under contract with Microsoft to use Silverlight for video streaming. Uber-nerds can compare Flash and Silverlight.

In 1967, the Mets went 61-101, clearing the century mark in losses for the fifth time in six seasons (the outlier, 1966, saw them lose only 95 games). Looking to shore up their defense and get a bit younger in the process, on December 15, 1967, the Mets completed a long-discussed trade that sent left-fielder Tommy Davis, pitcher Jack Fisher, and two others to the Chicago White Sox in exchange for utility infielder -- and Long Island native -- Al Weis and young centerfielder Tommie Agee. Agee had won the rookie of the year and finished eighth in MVP voting in 1966, but a tough sophomore campaign enabled the Mets to pry him loose.

Agee's Met career got off to a suboptimal start. He was nailed in the back of the head by a Bob Gibson fastball in his very first spring training plate appearance, returning six days later, none the worse for wear. Once the regular season finally rolled around, Agee hit just .109/.144/.152 over his first 28 games, spanning 98 plate appearances. He wasn't a whole lot better the rest of the way, hitting .254/.292/.359 in his last 104 games to close the season with a putrid .217/.255/.307 line.

The end result was cringe-worthy, but Agee did pick his game up as the season wore on. He was hitting just .177/.220/.264 after the Mets drubbed the Giants 8-0 at Shea, but over his final 85 plate appearances -- 29 games' worth -- he hit .363/.386/.463, enough of a surge for manager Gil Hodges to all-but-guarantee Agee's place in centerfield for the following season.

Hoping to continue his hot swinging, Agee spent part of the winter with the Mets' instructional league team in St. Petersburg, Florida. It worked. Well, sort of. Agee collected five hits -- two of them homeruns -- and knocked in six runs in the first three games of the 1969 season, but picked up just three hits in his next 28 at-bats as his batting average dropped to .195 and he quickly found himself riding the bench in Hodges's doghouse.

Agee appeared sporadically over the subsequent three weeks, picking up just ten plate appearances over the Mets' next 17 games. Perhaps illustrating the fickle nature of batting average and small sample sizes, Agee raised his average to .265 in those ten times to the plate. He returned to the lineup for good on May 10 against the Astros, and smacked three homeruns in a double-header the next day. He would appear in 131 of the team's final 135 games -- making 129 starts along the way -- and finished with a .271/.342/.464 line, trailing only teammate and fellow Alabamian Cleon Jones for the team lead in OPS among starters.

Thanks in no small part to Agee's terrific season, the Mets shocked the baseball world by capturing the NL East title and stormed into the playoffs to face the Braves in the NLCS. Agee was brilliant against Atlanta, hitting .357/.438/.857 with two homeruns and four RsBI as the Mets swept in three games to move on to the franchise's first World Series appearance. Agee didn't fare quite so well against Baltimore in the Fall Classic, hitting just .167/.250/.333 in the five-game series, but his efforts in the Series' third game made up for any shortcomings otherwise.

With the Series tied at a game apiece and Shea hosting its first World Series game, Agee led off the bottom of the first with a clout to centerfield that put the Mets ahead, 1-0. The rest of his Game 3 heorics came with the glove, with which he made two incredible catches, including this one that robbed Paul Blair of an extra-base hit with the bases loaded and two outs in the top of the seventh. The Mets went on to win that game -- and the next two -- to capture their first World Series title against the heavily-favored Orioles (here is a photo montage the New York Times ran on 8/15/1969).

Fresh off his World Series celebration, Agee finished sixth in the NL MVP voting and was awarded a $40,000 contract for 1970. Continuing a pattern he established in his first two seasons with the Mets, Agee got off to a slow start again, hitting just .227/.310/.333 after the team's first 20 games and his first 84 plate appearances. Also like his first two seasons, Agee just took a little while to get going, as he hit .294/.349/.487 over his final 135 games. He also walloped eleven homeruns in June, setting a club mark for longballs in a month, had a 19-game hitting streak at one point, and won a game in tenth inning on a walk-off steal of home. He also picked up his second Gold Glove award for his play in centerfield. The Mets were tied for first place as late as September 14, but lost eight of their last eleven games to finish at 83-79, in third place in the NL East and six games behind the first-place Pirates.

Agee actually got off to a solid start in 1971, but was derailed by a right knee injury that cost him 20 games in June. He hit .287/.373/.439 for the 62 games that followed his return, but his season was halted again on September 4 when he "had 70 cubic centimeters of blood drained from his right knee" (New York Times, 9/5/1971). He missed fifteen more games recuperating, and the Mets finished the season tied for third, this time fourteen games in back of the Pirates.

Agee was reportedly healthy after an offseason of rest and light exercise, and the Mets signed him for the 1972 season for around $55,000, the same figure he earned in 1971. Agee's performance belied his assertion, as he struggled with the bat for much of the season. He missed a week with a groin strain at the beginning of July, came back for two games, then suffered a strained intercostal and missed the next three weeks. Agee muddled along -- much like the Mets -- for the remainder of the season, and finished with a disappointing .227/.317/.374 line.

Weary of Agee's growing list of injuries, the Mets dealt him to the Astros that offseason for Rich Chiles and Buddy Harris, who went on to do little and nothing for the Mets, respectively. Agee hit a collective .222/.281/.398 with the Astros and Cardinals in 1973, but by that time injuries had sapped almost all of the speed and power from his once-athletic body. He was cut by the Dodgers during spring training of 1974 and that was it for Agee, who, at just 30 years old, was officially out of baseball.

Tommie Agee went on to sell title insurance after his playing career ended, and he died following a heart attack on January 22, 2001 at the age of 58.

Though it took him some time to get rolling, Tommie Agee turned in three excellent seasons for the Mets from 1969 thru 1971. He was terrific in the 1969 NLCS and owned Game 3 of the World Series, his miraculous diving catch in the latter having left an indelible imprint on a generation of Mets fans. The rigors of the game wore him down far too soon, and though his life was cut tragically short, the images and vivid memories of his time spent in Queens live on.

The awesome gets awesomer, as FanGraphs introduces some new stats including pitcher discipline metrics (basically, the same swing/zone/contact stats they already had for hitters but this time for pitchers). Using these new stats, we can see that Johan Santana had his worst season, at least since 2005 (the discipline stats only go back that far), in a lot of these areas.

Santana's first strike % (F-Strike%) was worse than it ever has been. Ditto his swing rate at balls outside the strike zone (O-Swing%). And his swings within the strike zone (Z-Swing%). It follows, then, that his overall swing rate (Swing%), the aggregate of those last two, is also the worst since 2005.

The most dramatic point of information here is Santana's contact rate outside the strike zone (O-Contact%), which increased from 51.8% in 2007 to 59.8% in 2008. This means that Santana got far fewer swing-and-misses in 2008 than he ever had before. His overall contact rate (Contact%) jumped from 73.2% to 77.0%, which would doubtless explain his alarming drop in strikeout rate this past season (9.66 to 7.91).

I don't have enough information right now to know if the increased contact rate is an obvious sign of onset regression, or if it's something that fluctuates to some degree from year to year (as Jake Peavy's has), and that maybe with a little better luck Santana's strikeout rate will more closely resemble his career mark in 2009.

It's something to keep an eye on, for sure.

EDIT: As Larry points out via email, a decrease in Z-Swing% is probably a *good* thing, since contact rate within the strike zone is generally very high.

In the Dominican Republic:

• Argenis Reyes went 0-for-4 with a walk.
• Fernando Martinez went 1-for-4 with a walk and an RBI.
• Fernando Tatis went 2-for-7 with an RBI.

In Puerto Rico:

• After picking up his first two hits of the fall on Saturday, Nick Evans went 0-for-2 with a walk on Sunday.
• Brahiam Maldonado went 1-for-2.

At MetsGeek, Chris McCown lays out his offseason manifesto.

In Newsday, Ken Davidoff talks about how the Mets are concerned with Francisco Rodriguez's drop in velocity, but maybe aren't so concerned about Bobby Jenks's precipitous drop in strikeouts. I'd be concerned about both, frankly, and if the White Sox are really looking for a "high-level prospect" for Jenks (say, Fernando Martinez), the Mets had better be doing their shopping elsewhere.

The Yankees have sold the rights to Darrell Rasner to a team in Japan, which perhaps gives Rasner a chance to make a better living for himself than he would have as a farmhand with the Yanks. Tyler Kepner has more.

Speaking of the Yankees, are they overbidding for C.C. Sabathia? Possibly. Some Red Sox fans are hoping the Yankees do sign him (scroll down to reason #947, via Ken Davidoff's baseball insider).

The Hardball Times Annual sounds awesome. Go pre-order it from ACTA Sports.

Seven of ESPN's "experts" picked Ryan Howard for NL MVP. One of them picked Manny Ramirez, and another picked C.C. Sabathia. Rob Neyer picked Lance Berkman which, while hardly a bad pick, is just Neyer trying to be different, I think. Bob Klapisch was one of the seven to pick Howard, so he is officially dead to me.

Rich Lederer has the first part of his twelve-part review of the Bill James Handbook. I should have part one of my one-part review up sometime this week.

The Pirates' Nate McLouth won a Gold Glove, but John Dewan's +/- system rated him at -40, the worst of any centerfielder in baseball. How do we reconcile the two? John Dewan himself takes a crack at it (via WHYGAVS?).

The baseball world officially met Francisco Rodriguez in October 2002 when, thanks to a loophole in MLB's postseason roster rules, Rodriguez was added to the Angels' ledger for their ALDS series against the Yankees. A few weeks later the Angels had won their first World Series title and the legend of K-Rod was born.

Rodriguez is a free agent now and has some kind of reputation as a big game pitcher -- at least, I've read that a few times lately -- but I don't know whether that's really true. It is true that he was almost unhittable in 2002, but he hasn't been especially dominant in five playoff series since then.

Neither set of data is a particularly large sample, but there's hardly conclusive evidence that Rodriguez is any sort of big game pitcher, and it might be easier to make an argument to the contrary. I won't suggest that he should be judged by his last thirteen postseason innings, but he certainly shouldn't get any bonus points for being a playoff star since reality doesn't seem to support that particular assertion.

In Arizona:

• Josh Thole went 1-for-4 with a walk and two runs batted in.
• Jason Vargas allowed a hit and a walk while striking out two in three innings of relief.
• Tobi Stoner allowed a hit and struck out two in two innings.

In Hawaii:

• Ruben Tejada went 1-for-5 and was caught stealing.
• Roy Merritt struck out two in two innings for his second save of the fall.

In the Dominican Republic:

• Fernando Tatis went 2-for-3 with a double, two walks and a run scored.
• Argenis Reyes went 0-for-4 with a walk.
• Fernando Martinez went 2-for-4 with a double and a run batted in.

In Puerto Rico:

• Nick Evans went 0-for-3 with a walk and a run scored. He is 0-for-14 with seven strikeouts overall.

Who was the more valuable player in 2008: Orlando Hudson or Adam Kennedy? Not so fast.

The Yankees have reportedly extended a contract offer to C.C. Sabathia on the order of six years, $140 million, which would trump the contract extension the Mets gave to Johan Santana after acquiring him last winter. Of course, this is only the Yankees' opening offer, so is there any reason to believe that eight years, $200 million is completely out of the question? River Ave. Blues has more.

The Twins have apparently sent the framework for a deal to the agent for Casey Blake, which seems a tad formal for a player whom Keith Law ranked #31 on this offseason's free agent list and whom he said was "not suitable for a starting third-base job unless a club needs a one-year placeholder". Blake will also be playing his age 35 season in 2009, making him even less attractive.

The A's have already traded for Matt Holliday this offseason, but there are rumblings that they are also interested in signing free agent shortstop Rafael Furcal. Athletics Nation supports the plan.

Fascinating article by Michael Lewis at Portfolio.com that should serve as something of an epilogue for Liar's Poker. It's a long read but a good one.

Lee Mazzilli won't be back with SNY this season. I nothing-ed him, so this doesn't really strike me one way or the other. SNY has reportedly reached out to Bobby Ojeda as a possible replacement.

At RotoGraphs, David Golebiewski looks at Jon Niese as a possible back of the rotation guy. RotoGraphs is a fantasy-centric sub-page of FanGraphs, so while the content is somewhat geared towards fantasy league play, most of what I've read so far could very easily double as non-fantasy content.

At Beyond the Boxscore, Peter Bendix breaks down the Nick Swisher-to-the-Yankees deal, and concludes -- as everyone else has -- that the Yankees bought low and likely made out like bandits on this one.

Further reaction on the trade can be found at South Side Sox and Pinstripe Alley.

Keith Law has posted his free agent rankings over at ESPN.com. Baseball Digest Daily has posted their rankings, too.

At Bleed Cubbie Blue, Al Yellon reflects on the end of the Kerry Wood era in Chicago.

AZ Snakepit discusses the likely impending departure of Randy Johnson from Arizona. Rob Neyer thinks he could be a bargain (subscription required).

Off-topic economy-in-turmoil post of the day, Peter Schiff will have has now had his revenge on Wall Street.

And finally, even Donald Fagen has to convince his friends that Steely Dan is teh r0xor.