First, in addition to my last post, I wanted to add a slight edit and say the best part of There's Something About Mary was that opening short Jonathan Richman song, which somehow kept getting caught in my head for a couple days after.

Now, to simply respond to a stupid point about the Mets - ESPN's Jayson Stark recently wrote:

“Not having Jose Valentin might be the biggest difference between this team and the 2006 team … He not only played well. He’s a tough guy. He kept other players in line. And he added to the toughness and the winning attitude of that team. You look around that clubhouse now, and there’s not one guy like that.”

Fuck "toughness" and "winning attitude" - it's pretty easy to see the differences between the 2006 team and the 2008 version without having to have been in the clubhouse at all:

Example #1: Carlos Delgado OPS+ed for 131 in '06, while OPS+ing this year for a whopping 82
Example#2: Mets catcher in '06, Paul LoDuca OPS+ed a 102, while this year's catcher, Brian Schneider OPS+ed a 71
Example#3: Carlos Beltran OPS+ed 150 in '06, and has a 113 this year.

Is this simplistic? Sure.
Are there other ways to analyze it? There are
And I'd have to look at the pitching too which has been worse
And, yes Valentin in '06 played a fair amount better than Luis Castillo is now, but not by as much as any of the three examples above. So unless he was the force keeping Delgado's bat speed up, which somehow managed to do all right the last 10 years before he was a Met, I don't think his toughness and winning attitude are the main factors in the difference between this year and 2006.