You guys know that Selig doesn't own, and hasn't owned, the team for about 4 years now right? I'm sorry for what he did too, and was glad to see him go (esp. after the AllStar game fiasco), but please don't associate this Milwaukee Brewers team with Bud Selig.

Also there is no truth to the rumor that we tried to re-sign CC in the midst of the champaign shower on Sunday, however clever that might have been.

"Scott Schoenweis looked suicidal. He said something about how there are more important things in life."

He was talking about his infant child that went into the hospital this week. Oops!

The Mets lost Sunday for the same reason they lost a lot down the stretch. Their bullpen, that easiest of all things to fix.

Easiest of all things to fix? Really? I think exactly the opposite. I think the bullpen, especially nearing the trading deadline, is one of the toughest things to fix. Middle and semi-late-inning relief (6th-8th innings) is notoriously difficult to gauge because it's riddled with has-beens and never-wills. Granted, I wouldn't have touched Ayala with a 100-foot pole, but look at a club like the Diamondbanks, who got Jon Rauch from the Nationals. Rauch closed a bunch of games for the Nats and looked like a great pickup, but he blew a whole mess of games down the stretch as well.

randy_khan I was not aware of a source for that particular statistic other than looking at every team's stats one by one (and still haven't found one).

Baseball-Reference league splits, found on the main page for each league-year.

It still seems to me, and I realize that verifying this would require a laborious search through box scores that I'm not going to undertake, that the Mets bullpen was better earlier in the year and worse the last six weeks, while other bullpens did not have the same dropoff.

The Mets bullpen was definitely better early in the year, but, at least by ERA, which I'll admit is not the best way to judge a bullpen, September was their best month since May. Bullpen ERA by month:

April: 3.40

May: 4.04

June: 4.43

July: 4.61

August: 4.92

September: 4.38

rpackrat King, it's too bad you felt the need to publish such a mean-spirited article. It's really beneath you.

Come on. Nothing is beneath me.

Brewers vs. Pirates: 14-1.

Brewers vs. MLB: 76-71.

You're welcome.

The truth is that the Brewers are a mediocre team that had the good fortune to play a lot of games against one of the worst teams in baseball*, one that played even worse against the Brewers. In contrast, the Mets failed to so utterly dominate the Nats (13-5), but actually won the season series against the Phillies.

I know King likes to say that good teams kill bad ones (rather than winning close games), but I think it's telling that the Brewers made hay vs. the Bucs, while losing the season vs. the Cubs.

On a related note, in late May the Cubs were actually under .500 against the non-Pirates, but then they got white-hot for three weeks, and ended up 16 games over .500 against the non-Pirates. The Pirates: Pittsburgh's gift to the rest of the NL Central.

* 9 times after the deadline trades that turned a bad team into an abysmal, 111-loss pace one

Except, your list isn't comprehensive.

There are five places, eight historical figures, two fictional characters, and three others listed on the Wikipedia disambiguation page for "Farnsworth."

Of course, it is none of them.

It is someone you have almost certainly never heard of. But that's OK.

OK, which is it then: the actor Richard; the inventor Philo; the Futurama character Professor Hubert J.; the Ludwig Mies van der Rohe house in Plano, IL; or the Rockland, ME museum?

Those percentages are interesting but do not change the fact that the Mets' payroll is still closer to the Brewers (and the Rockies, for that matter) than it is to the Yankees (who outspent the Mets by a sum equal to about 90% of the Brewers' payroll). Nobody is saying the Mets are a small market team, but it is sheer ignorance to lump them in with the Yankees.

Regardless, King, it's too bad you felt the need to publish such a mean-spirited article. It's really beneath you.

As i turned on the tv this morning and tuned in to sportscenter i was waiting to hear about my beloved brewers making the playoffs. All i heard about was "mets collapse leads to brewers getting the wild card." The story wasnt about the brewers, it was about the mets collapse..and then every sports show from there on out, the big topic was the mets collapse and how they gave the season away as if it was theirs to lose. How can you not be sick of hearing about new york when your team, who ive been faithfully rooting for since ive been alive makes the playoffs for just the 2nd time in their 39 year history. Its ridiculous. Lets take a look at the entire season shall we? It was not until the brewers collapse in september that the mets ever had a better record than the brewers. All you new york mets fans should be happy that you even had the chance to play for a playoffs spot this year. Until september, the brewers were the 2nd best team in the NL. So stop your complaining and just realize you didnt have that good of a team this year. Its only fitting that it was the new york mets the brewers beat out considering the only world series title ever in milwaukee was when the milwaukee braves beat the new york yankees in 1957

Yes, the bullpen was awful this year, all year. They had a some stretches where they recorded a few outs without giving up a run but for most of the season, the pen, other than Wagner, was horrible. They blew 30 saves this season. 30!

But that is not the only problem with the 2008 Mets. They were not clutch. They did not play sound fundamental baseball. They did not score enough runs to help their pitchers. For the past few years they have not been able to tack on insurance runs late in games to finish off teams. They allow teams to hang around and put pressure on the bullpen.

The Mets lost to the Nationals twice this season by the score of 1-0, the first on May 15, a game I attended, and again in September when they still led the NL East.