I’m going to All Points West in Liberty State Park, NJ tonight.  The Big draw for me initially was Vampire Weekend/Yeah Yeah Yeahs/ with the Beastie Boys headlining.  Now the Beasties have been replaced by Jay-Z.  That will work.

Rumors are that two of the three Beasties will still make it and will hang out with Jay.

Any chance he plays this? It would make my night.

According to Mike Silva at NYbaseballdigest.com, by way of Joe Demayo, the Mets will acquire Adam LaRoche from Boston now that the Sox have picked up Victor Martinez from Cleveland.

Concurrently, Jon Heyman, tweeted: SI_JonHeyman

#redsox now shopping adma laroche to make room for v-mart. #braves are interested.

LaRoche has hit .248/.326/.446 this year with 27 2B and 13 HR in 343 AB.
Daniel Murphy has hit .247/.315/.363 with 17 2B and 5 HR in 292 AB.

It’s hard to argue that LaRoche wouldn’t be an upgrade, but at will the modest improvement be worth the cost?

So the Sox and Braves swapped LaRoche for Casey Kotchman. I get why LaRoche was expendable after the Sox acquired VMart, but why isn’t Kotch equally superfluous? And is that an upgrade for the Braves?

I just don’t see the Mets doing anything significant today, so lets take a look back at the short-season teams last night.

SSA: Staten Island Yankees 12, @ Brooklyn Cyclones 3

@ Brooklyn Cyclones 3, SI Yankees 0

The Yanks bombed Darrin Gorski for nine runs in two innings, and that was pretty much the end of things in a 7-inning contest.

In game two, errors, balks and wild pitches by Staten Island helped Brooklyn score each of their runs, while Wes Wrenn (1-0, 2.92) did the work on the mound.  Wrenn fired 5.2 shutout innings with a walk and five strikeouts.  1B Sam Honeck was 3-3 (.315/.380/.354) in the nightcap.

Rookie (APP): the K-Mets had their whole series against Pulaski wiped out by rain.  They’ll try to play baseball tonight vs. Greeneville.

Rookie (GCL): @ GCL Cardinals 4, GCL Mets 3

The Mets had only four hits, but that inled a three-run HR from CF Javier Rodriguez (.250/.283/.432), who was 1-2 with a walk.  In 11 games this year, Rodriguez already has two HR, or one more than he hit all of last summer in 38 games when he hit .193/.258/.237

AAA: @ Buffalo Bisons 4, Pawtucket Red Sox 1

Nick Evans hit a tie-breaking three-run homerun in the bottom of the eighth inning to give the Bisons their third straight win over Pawtucket.

Lance Broadway danced around nine hits to allow just one run in 7.1 IP.  He fanned four and did not walk a batter.

Milt Northrop in the Buffalo News does a nice job in a story focusing on Sox RHP Michael Bowden, who pitched well against the Bisons for seven innings Thursday, and trade deadline attention.

AA: @ Altoona Curve (PIT) 2, Binghamton Mets 1 (7 innings)

Binghamton Mets 5, @ Altoona Curve 1 (7 innings)

In game one, the Curve got to Eric Niesen (1-6, 6.91)  for two runs on four hits in five innings.  Niesen walked two and didn’t strike out a batter.

In game two, 1B Ike Davis (.306/.392/.545) and RF Lucas Duda each went yard one batter apart in the sixth inning to turn a one-run lead into a four-run B-Mets advantage.

With hits in each game, Davis pushed his hitting streak to 14 games.  Over that span he’s hitting .375/.435/.714 (21-for-56) with four doubles, five homers, six walks and 13 K.

A+: Lakeland Tigers 8, @ St. Lucie Mets 5

Angel Calero (1-8, 4.75) pitched for the first time since July 9, and retired exactly one batter in a first inning in which he gave up five runs on four hits and three walks.  Yuck.

1B Stefan Welch continued his surprising and magical run in the FSL with a 2-4 evening with a double that pushed his line through 22 games to .353/.418/.506.  Welch will be 21 in August.

Both SS Reese Havens and 3B Zach Lutz were 1-5 with an error their 17th and 8th respectively.

The B-Mets, K-Mets and Cyclones are all schedule to play two today.  Use this as your gametime thread.

By the way, four lefties will throw in the B-Mets doubledip with Eric Niesen in game one and Michael Antonini starting game two.

Trade deadline?  Who needs trades?

This is the ninth and final installment of my continuing review of my pre-season ranking of the Mets Top 41 prospects.  Part 1 (36-41) is here, part 2 (31-35) is here, part 3 (26-30) is here, part 4 (21-25) is here, part 5 (16-20) is here, part 6 (11-15 is here), part 7 (6-10) is here and part eight (3-5) is here.

#1 OF Fernando Martinez

Stock: holding, but injured

Martinez did what he was supposed to do as the organization’s top prospect in his minor league time in 2009: he earned his way onto a big league roster decimated by injuries.  Martinez got off to slow start, hitting .233/.288/.411 in April, but that turned into a .337/.378/.663 May that convinced the Mets to call him up on May 26^th, the same day the team placed Ryan Church and Jose Reyes on the disabled list.

It’s worth noting that even while putting together the best XBH% and HR% of his career at AAA in 2009, Martinez’s walk rate was the lowest it had been since 2006.  Big league pitchers were able to exploit his aggressive approach and made him look like a 20-year-old. And that’s still one of Martinez’s greatest strengths: he’s still extraordinarily young for a player with 100 MLB PA.

Of course, 2009 marks the fourth season in a row in which he has lost significant time to injury.  Martinez is recuperating from surgery to repair the meniscus in his knee.  Are the recurring injuries a concern?  Beyond a shadow of a doubt.    He might return in September depending on his rehab, and the shape of the Mets.

#2 SS Wilmer Flores

Stock: Holding

On May 11^th, the 17-year-old Flores was hitting .243/.293/.280.  Citing fatigue, the Mets sat the youngster for nine days to give him a chance to rest.  Since May 20^th, Flores has hit .293/.325/.390, extremely strong numbers for a player of his age in a full-season league.

He’s earned strong scouting reports for his feel for hitting and his mature approach.  However, some of the power he displayed in the Appalachian League last year is still in the hills as his XBH% has dropped as the level of play has risen.  This development must be viewed through the prism of his youth.   The power should come back.

However, at this point, he’s a player without a position.  No one thinks he can stay at SS when he reaches the big leagues.  If his destination is to be an outfield corner or 1B, he’ll have to hit a ton, and hit for power to be an impact guy.  There’s no reason yet to think he can’t do that, but he’s still years away.

This is part eight of my continuing review of my pre-season ranking of the Mets Top 41 prospects.  Part 1 (36-41) is here, part 2 (31-35) is here, part 3 (26-30) is here, part 4 (21-25) is here, part 5 (16-20) is here, part 6 (11-15 is here) and part 7 (6-10) is here.

#3 RHP Brad Holt

Holt Mid-Season Review

Stock: Holding

Holt has made strides since 2008 in Brooklyn, but still has a significant way to go to become a successful MLB starter.  There are still scouts out there who believe he will be best in a bullpen role.

Last year in Brooklyn I saw him 93-95 with his fastball.  This year in Binghamton he was sitting at 93, but his location was much improved.  Also, his curveball has made major strides.  He throws it more, and it has a sharper bite.  He’s learning how to use it in a variety of counts, when for example, he can throw a get me over offering, or when he can really bury it ahead in the count.

B-Mets Pitching Coach Hector Berrios, who had Holt last year in Brooklyn, claimed that Holt’s changeup is his better secondary offering, but Holt only threw a handful in the start I saw him in Binghamton.  That day at least, he was clearly more comfortable with his curve.  In other starts, he has thrown his changeup more than his curveball. This too, is an important piece of a pitcher’s development: learning to work with his arsenal on a given evening.

In his last two starts, Holt has given up nine runs over just 12.1 innings, so he has not yet conquered AA hitters.

Numberically, the most important indicators are there for Holt at AA: roughly a strikeout an inning and a k/bb above three.

#4 LHP Jonathan Niese

Stock: up

Niese’s season line above masks the fact that he’s really had two different seasons, one from Opening Day -June 1, and one afterwards.

Niese, the Buffalo Bisons Opening Day starter, lasted just two innings, while giving up five runs in his first appearance in a Bisons jersey on April 9.  That rocky opening foreshadowed some of the troubles to come in Buffalo and for Niese.  When the Mets needed a starter on May 8, they called up Niese who at the time was 0-2 with a 6.55 ERA at Buffalo where the IL was batting .309 against him.  Niese lasted two starts in the MLB rotation, firing six good innings against Pittsburgh, but yielding five runs on seven hits in 4.2 innings in his second outing against Atlanta that got him bounced from the starting rotation and back down to Buffalo.

Returned to Buffalo after his two MLB starts, Niese got lit up over his next three outings, giving up a combined 20 runs on 26 hits in 16 innings in three losses.  At that point, he, with the help of the Buffalo staff changed.

After his start on June 1, Niese was 0-5 with an 8.05 ERA and an opponents’ batting average of .329 in 38 innings.  And yet, his peripherals were solid; he was striking out 8.5 batters per nine innings and walking 3.1.  The IL owned six homers against Niese.

Since June 1, Niese has been rolling both in AAA and now the big leagues.  In his last  56.1 AAA innings, he allowed just seven runs and owned a 0.95  ERA.  His strikeout rate was (7.3 K/9 IP), but his walk rate dropped to just 2.1 per nine innings.

What accounts for the split seasons?  Niese insists he’s doing nothing differently mechanically.  However, he acknowledges that he’s mixing his pitches more.  In addition to relying more on his superior curve, Niese has learned to trust his changeup and cutter, while introducing a two-seam fastball that he uses to produce groundballs.  Josh Smolow has done a terrific series here on this site using pitch-fx data to show Niese’s development and his increasing reliance on both his two-seam fastball and cutter, and the progress he’s made with his four-seamer.  You can read his last article here.

Following Niese’s strong performance in Houston on Saturday night (7 IP, 4 H, 1 R, 2 BB, 3 K) I’m more optimistic about his big league future than I’ve been in quite some time.

#5 RHP Jenry Mejia

Stock: UP

Mejia has been sidelined since June 23 with a strained middle finger.  That’s about the only thing that’s gone wrong with the 19-year old’s season.  Striking out over 10 batters per nine innings is no joke, but neither is his groundball rate which has been above 60% at every stop in his professional career.   Mejia’s doing it with a fastball that lives in the mid-90s, a changeup with nasty sink and a breaking ball that continues to improve.

His next step: getting back on the field.