There are days early in camp when the biggest story is which reliever showed up with a new haircut, and then there are days when the president of baseball operations steps to the microphone and casually drops enough news to make everyone in the room reach for their phones at the same time to post to Twitter. Tuesday was firmly in the latter category. David Stearns opened his media availability with what could best be described as a one-two punch: one that caused Mets fans to

There was a time when Craig Kimbrel entered a baseball game and opposing hitters immediately started thinking about their families. They wondered if they had said I love you enough. They wondered if this was how it ended. That Craig Kimbrel was a menace. A right armed horror movie with a bent over stance, a fastball that hissed, and a breaking ball that vanished like socks in a dryer. He piled up saves the way the Mets used to pile up injuries. Four hundred and forty of them.

One of my father’s favorite sayings and trust me, many of the others are not fit to print was: “Figures don’t lie, but liars figure.” It’s a wonderfully sneaky line, and like most good wisdom, it works on more than one level. The figures themselves, the numbers, are factual. They are what they are. But the figuring, the interpretation, the selection, the framing of those numbers? That’s where things can get slippery. With enough creativity, or agenda, even honest data can be