A few weeks ago, David Wright told Jon Heyman that he was “extremely optimistic” about the chances of reaching a long term contract extension with the Mets, and said all the right things about loyalty, about the franchise heading in the right direction, and about idolizing Cal Ripken because he stayed with one team for his entire career. Generally, when you have a 29-year-old posting a +6.7 WAR season who is openly talking about wanting to finish his career with your franchise, you’d be rushing to the table to get him locked up. And a few months ago, that looked like the easy call, as Wright was re-establishing himself as one of the league’s best players.

However, something funny has happened on the way to Wright and the Mets agreeing to a new contract that would keep him in Queens for the remainder of his career – for the last few months, David Wright has been pretty bad.

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Collin McHugh’s nine-strikeout debut against Colorado at the end of August (box) created reason for enthusiam apropos the Mets right-hander. His third major-league start, Monday night in Washington (box), was decidedly more challenging.

Here are three lessons regarding Collin McHugh from that same Monday start.

Lesson One: Slider Location Is Probably Important for McHugh
McHugh’s slider does not have particularly sharp break or particularly excellent velocity. As a result, he’s (a) unlikely to induce as many chase swings with it as another pitcher and (b) more likely to be punished for mistakes. As a further result, McHugh’s ability to locate his slider will have no little effect on his overall success.

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Cardinals right-hander Shelby Miller was ranked fourth overall among all prospects by our Marc Hulet on his preseason top-100 list and within the top 10 on most other lists of that sort. Despite a poor start to his season at Triple-A Memphis, Miller was excellent over his last 10 starts there, posting a 70:7 strikeout-to-walk ratio in 59 innings.

After being officially recalled to the majors on Tuesday, Miller made his major-league debut in relief on Wednesday afternoon against the New York Mets, posting this mostly cartoonish line in a 6-2 Cardinals loss (box): 2.0 IP, 7 TBF, 4 K, 0 BB, 2 GB on 3 batted-balls (66.7%), -0.16 xFIP.

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We’re only three days from the expansion of major league rosters. On Sept. 1, all players on a team’s 40-man roster will be eligible to play in the big leagues without an accompanying move. Often times, baseball fans are treated to a sneak preview of teams’ top minor league talent as a result of September call-ups; or they’re surprised by a relatively unknown player who manages to contribute over the season’s final month.

In preparation for this year’s roster expansion, I thought it would be interesting to look back at the greatest-ever September call-ups, defined here as players that made their major league debut during the month of September.

There are, of course, two ways to look at this: The first is to look at players — position players and pitchers — who generated the most value for their clubs during their call-up. The second is to look at players whose careers began as a September call-up and then went on to have great careers.

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There’s a sense that the knuckleball is more prone to the home run. The guys on the MLB Network, while watching R.A. Dickey give up three home runs to the Reds, thought out loud that the lack of spin meant that it would go further upon contact and lead to more bombs. The home run seems to be the source of some of the ‘risky’ label attached to pitchers that use the knuckler. Even physics professor Porter Johnson said in a recent interview that if a knuckleball “doesn’t move, it’s basically a home run.”

As with all conventional wisdom, this link is worth unpacking.

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New York Mets pitching prospect Domingo Tapia is in the midst of a breakout season for Savannah of the South Atlantic League. With nearly eight strikeouts per nine innings and a ground ball rate of 65%, his 2.65 FIP is good for second best in the league behind San Francisco Giants 2011 supplemental first round pick Kyle Crick. So what’s driving his success? A mid-to-upper 90’s fastball with heavy sink which rates as one of the single best pitches I’ve scouted in person. But what about the rest of his arsenal? It lags significantly behind, but Tapia may be taking a rather unique approach to to starting as an attempt to maximize what the young right-hander does well.

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Subjective questions swirl around most awards discussions — should a pitcher win MVP, should the Rookie of the Year be the best player that season or the one with the brightest future, does the Manager of the Year and/or MVP need to come from a playoff team, etc. But Comeback Player of the Year may be the most loosely defined award. As I detailed in this exercise last season, the only criteria is that a player “re-emerged,” which is very much open to interpretation. So, let’s try to take an objective look.

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According to excellent journalist Andy McCullough at the New Jersey Star-Ledger, the Mets are going to keep working on an extension with their newfound elder statesman ace, R.A. Dickey. The team elected to wait and see what the season would bring before putting pen to paper, which was a smart move considering that the organization owns an affordable $5 million option for the 2013 season. But now that he’s put up a Cy-worthy season, the discussion has changed. Making the conversation difficult is the lack of comparable players.

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The Miami Marlins grand experiment hasn’t worked this year, leading to the trades of Hanley Ramirez, Anibal Sanchez, Omar Infante and Randy Choate before the non-waiver trade deadline. In a perfect world, they wouldn’t have had to trade those players, because they would still be fighting for a playoff spot at this point in the season. But it hasn’t been a perfect world for the Marlins, and one of the major imperfections is the performance of high-priced reliever Heath Bell.

Signed to a lucrative three-year deal this offseason, Bell was supposed to help transform the Marlins into legitimate championship contenders. He has, however, been quite bad, losing the confidence of his manager and the closer role itself, and there haven’t been any signs of him turning things around.

The Marlins have already unloaded a number of valuable assets, but have had trouble finding a suitor for Bell. That’s what tends to happen with relievers who make a lot of money despite being shells of their former selves. Bell was already linked to the Red Sox in a rumor that had him and Hanley heading to Boston in exchange for Carl Crawford. The deal never materialized, but it was a very interesting thought experiment, as the salaries getting swapped were similar and the move represented a change-of-scenery challenge for those involved.

According to a recent Ken Rosenthal report, the Marlins were engaged in another change-of-scenery challenge trade involving Bell this week. This time, they spoke to the Mets about trading Bell and catcher John Buck for Jason Bay. No formal deal was proposed and the idea didn’t truly gain traction, but it again represented an interesting idea. Considering that no other team is going to relieve the Marlins of Bell’s salary, or the Mets of Bay’s, this is a deal worth revisiting before the waiver deadline.

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Matt Harvey, whom the Mets drafted with the seventh overall pick in 2010, began the year as a much-ballyhooed prospect. Coming out of college, Harvey was expected to progress quickly, and he has — he reached Double-A by the end of his first professional season, and started this season in Triple-A. Now he has graduated to the show, and if last night is any indication he may just be in it for good, in what has become an imposing New York starting rotation.

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