Beltran was back in the lineup and had a mediocre game, same old same old. I lost 4 steals from him over 2 games, but it's costing me just half a pt so it's not too bad.

It looked like I had already clinched as my lead was up to 12 earlier this week, but the 2nd place team has gained 6 pts on my team in 2 days, now I am only up 166-160. It's a good thing my offense came up huge in the last couple of weeks. I was in the mid-150's most of the year, he would have blown right past me. My lead is still fairly secure now, but knowing my luck this year, there's still a chance...

I've needed every one of Blalock's jacks.

Stupid Mets choked again down the stretch.

My own team isn't doing so hot.

Up by 4 coming in, and I don't think I gained any pts today. If I win, it'll be by like 2 pts...

The Mets have one the best lineups in the NL and decent enough pitching. They should be ashamed.

Minaya is gonna be back for 4 more years it looks like, which doesn't bode very well for the future of this team. I am not sure whether it's the Wilpons putting pressure on him or it's the big market year by year approach, but Minaya has done a poor job with the farm system, and he's made foolish moves for aging veterans. Delgado was the only older player to answer the bell this year, and even he looked done for half of the year.

I didn't think they'd win the division at the beginning of the year, it looked for a while like I was wrong, but the familiar Sept. choke did them in. Once Wagner went down, it really became a mess.

I can take some solace that my fantasy team didn't choke even though it was close. Beltran hit a homer and that was my offense. I think my team lost 1 pt today to end at 166 (out of 192) for the season. The 2nd place team may have gained half or 1 pt despite playing well so I either win by 2 or 2.5 pts. I could very well have lost if the teams I was fighting for pts with all had big days, but only 1 team did.

166 out of 192 is great win.

In my preseason predictions, I said Wagner would go down by the All-Star break. It came as no surprise really and the Mets should've prepared better.

Finals results turned out 165.5 - 163, much closer than I would have liked. I lost 1.5 pts and he had no change. The raw stats were close enough that he could have past me if he got almost all breaks his way. My team certainly left the door open, and his played well, but luckily the spoiler teams did not hurt me or help him too much yesterday.

I wanted the Mets to sign Ryan instead of Wagner, but it turned out Ryan got hurt sooner and it would not have mattered much either way. I hope they don't go out there and throw the money that it takes to land KROD. KROD's numbers is actually a little worse than usual this year outside of saves. I don't know if Minaya would notice or care.

You better start resigning yourself to K-Rod getting a huge salary from the Mets. They actually could use some MRs more than a closer. Example, Todd Jones in previous years or Percival this year. Crappy closer and top MRs and you should be fine.

MRs are so fickle that you usually can get one or two unexpectedly good performances, such as Roberto Hernandez and Bradford a few yrs back. They had a pretty interesting guy in Kuntz, but he never got a real shot.

I think Heilman's struggles, later revealed to be injury related, was the biggest hit to the pen even more than Wagner. If H was 100%, he would have been the closer at the end, and possibly have been able to go two innings at crunch time to keep the ball out of the hands of Ayala, Schoenweiss, Feliciano, et al.

I also think Manuel mixed and matched too much at the end. If you have a bunch of bad pitchers, and you pitch all of them every game, you're bound to be burned. You're better off sticking with the one guy who seems to be ok for more than 1 or 2 batters at a time. Then again, he didn't have much choice with Maine before the injury, Martinez, and Perez all being 6 inning guys even when they're good.

Ayala, Schoenweiss, Feliciano, et al... I think that's all that needs to be said when someone asks why the Mets bullpen wasn't very good.

In January of this year I said, "Wagner - ...His collapse towards the end of last year has me very nervous. I’m going to pass on Wagner this year, but he could be better than fine. You’ve been warned. Projections: 2-3/70/3.75/1.35/25 saves and Heilman takes over in August and gets 15 saves."

As you can see, Wagner's collapse was foreseeable. I think the Mets should've preemptively fixed the problem.

Wow, I just rediscovered this thread by looking at my profile. I'd forgotten just how crazy 2008 was for my fantasy team. Mostly the "crazy" part was me. All that incredibly bad luck really made me wonder if somehow there was a higher power toying with my head. The rational part of me knew there wasn't, but statistically it must be a very small probability to have things break the way they did.

Fortunately it would be very unlikely to duplicate close to the bad luck suffered that year.