Wednesday catch-all thread (2/12/25)

Please use this thread all week to discuss any Mets-specific topic you wish.

People like to worry.

My wife is a worrier, which puts me in the sometimes uncomfortable position of minimizing something that’s going on in our lives, just to avoid having the house going to DEFCON1. The whole thing is exhausting.

Which brings us to Kodai Senga. As you know, Senga missed almost the entire regular season in 2024. He’s in camp, perhaps a bit behind most of the other starters, but all signs point to him being healthy. We’ll all feel a lot better once we see him pitch in a game. Yet on a worrying scale of 1-to-10, with one being the least amount of worried, my level would be a two or a three. There’s the realization that things aren’t perfect and could go sideways. But it’s not currently a huge concern on my part.

Others are significantly higher on the scale, like there’s a prize for being the first one to have a level of eight.

How do you want to live your life? Do you want to be so stressed out all of the time, worrying about everything that could go wrong? If you’re this worried in mid-February about something that doesn’t become relevant until six weeks from now - is that a good thing?

Sandy Alcantara missed all of the 2024 season but is expected to be ready for Opening Day. Do you think Marlins fans lose their shirts worrying about him? Spencer Strider missed all but two starts last year and is expected to miss the first month of 2025. Do you think Braves fans are losing their mind over this? Josiah Gray missed all but two starts in 2024 - where are Nationals fans in their worrying/misery index?

Pitchers get hurt all of the time and no amount of worrying is going to change that fact. Maybe Senga’s going to miss half the year rehabbing. Or maybe he makes either the first or second start of the 2025 season. Nobody reading this has any clue which scenario is more likely.

If Senga suffers any type of setback during Spring Training, then we should increase our concern level. If that happens, we’ll have the appropriate information to be more worried. We’re not stuck at any level. Is it better to go from an eight to a one on the worrying scale or one to eight? As fans, it seems the latter would be preferable, as there’s nothing we can do about it.

Some might say that having a big concern this early - or earlier - should have been what drove David Stearns to make a move to bring in a big starter. And there’s certainly logic to that point of view. But who has the most to lose in this situation? The world’s not going to roast me for not being panicked about Senga’s health. But you can bet the mortgage that if Senga does, indeed, prove to be hurt or get hurt in Spring Training - people will be out with their pitch forks wondering why Stearns didn’t make a move.

Stearns has both the most information on Senga’s health status and the most to lose if things go wrong. And he’s not panicking. To be sure, Stearns isn’t infallible - one has only to look at his Opening Day bullpen last year for proof of that. Still, it’s not unreasonable to take our cues on Senga from our PoBO.

My opinion is that anyone who’s above a five on the worry scale with Senga is doing it wrong.

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As you know, I’m manually converting my old articles from WordPress to Substack, having done this with over 3,500 stories to date. The process isn’t hard but there are a lot of steps, including two where Substack tries to get me to send out notifications to everyone. In the past couple of days, there have been a few - believe the number is three - where me clicking the wrong button sent out the notifications. I apologize for the inconvenience.