John Maine 2009

John Maine had arthrscopic surgery at the end of last season, but is expected to be fully recovered by the start of Spring Training in 2009. His 2008 season was slightly disappointing as he only managed 140 innings pitched, and took a small step backwards from his 2007 performance. He struck out 7.8 per nine innings and walked 4.3 per nine innings, both worse than the previous year, although his groundball rate did rise slightly to 40.6%. I would expect something like a K/9 of 8.0 and a BB/9 of 4.0 from Maine this year. He does have one thing going for him though, as do all of the Mets pitchers. I had previously talked about Citi Field and speculated that it is likely to play as a slight to moderate pitchers' park. An interview of Greg Rybarczyk of Hit Tracker by Eric Simon of Amazin Avenue has convinced me that it will be an extreme pitchers' park, possibily the worst home run park in baseball. The corresponding increase in other hits (especially triples) will not come close to compensating for the lost home runs, except possibly for a triples machine like Jose Reyes. Be very wary of Mets hitters in 2009 and look for reasons to use Mets pitchers on your team.

On an unrelated note, one of my readers correctly criticized me for crediting Rotoworld for some of the news reports I've mentioned. He (or she) was right. That was very lazy of me, since Rotoworld was only the place where I read the news, not the original source of the report. I have the perfect solution. From now on, I'll be even lazier, and not report the source at all. I will simply say 'according to reports' if it comes from a trusted source, 'according to rumors' if it's not from a trusted sourced, and 'allegedly' if I'm skeptical of it.