For a while I’ve been trying to figure out why the Mets’ whole off-season is just not sitting right with me. It’s not the lack of moves and acquiring such useless pieces such as Gary Matthews Jr that I have a problem with. It’s not even that the pitching staff is built on hope rather than ability. I think what has put me off about the Mets this winter is that their “promise” to do what it takes to put the most competitive team out on the field has the distinct sound of the kind of rhetoric that you hear in presidential election campaigns.
You know the kind of lip-service where the candidate will list a host of initiatives that they will accomplish when elected, if only you support them. But at the end of the day, the list of all those initiatives have fallen by the wayside and you feel duped buying into all of the talk. Now I am not talking about anyone specific, I’m using a metaphor here, so please don’t send any letters. But you get the idea.
Last week, Buster Olney reported that the Mets were done spending money this winter and that this was the team going into Spring Training. With apologies to Seth Meyers and Amy Poehler of SNL but, REALLY?!? Did they forget that you need a catcher to throw the ball back to the pitcher? Oh Really? They’re done spending money? You know adding a quality starter to the rotation doesn’t mean going out there and a grabbing a guy who has only pitched 5 innings in the last two years and recovering from labrum surgery. Seriously? Really? And here’s an idea: since the Mets only hit 45 home runs at CitiField the entire ’09 season and were last in the Majors in that department, rather than having spent the money to bring the Home Run Apple over from Shea, maybe they could have had Mr. Met paint his head red and do some knee-bends when somebody hits a home run. Really? They’re done spending money? Seriously? Oh really?
Last week I posted an article attempting to look at the Mets’ lack of off-season moves from an optimistic viewpoint. And while I do believe that not spending money on a pool of poor free agents is prudent and could serve them well, I wasn’t necessarily buying all of the grub I was serving up. I mentioned that perhaps the Mets actually have a plan in place. While I hope that is the case, even I had a hard time chewing on that piece of fat. Much of their decision process seems to be made in a bubble. Their inability to multitask and make decisions with a big picture approach has them chasing their own tails much of the time with getting nothing accomplished. Alex Cora is receiving $2M this year with an option for 2011. Cora’s a good supporting player with good instincts and baseball smarts, but he is coming off of surgery on both thumbs. Couldn’t some of this money been used to secure a player in an area that really needs to be addressed? Wouldn’t it have been better to use that extra $2M on the rotation rather than a glorified bench player? Really?
But the primary issue is that the Mets front office is alienating their fan base. A fan base that has supported them through thick and thin and over the past three years have endured 2 collapses in a row and a year where the Mets roster resembled the emergency room at the local hospital. So it becomes to feel disrespectful to a devote fan base when you promise them that the team will take an aggressive approach to field a competitive team and then doesn’t follow through. It’s becomes disheartening and feels like deception. The baseball community looks at the Mets and sees an organization that is poorly run. The media looks at the Mets and sees an organization that is in need of an extreme makeover. Other players from other teams look at the Mets and see an organization that they don’t want to play for. And as a Met fan this becomes a further embarrassment to what has already been years worth.
The front office would do well to start to attempt to repair the developing rift that is dividing the fan base from the team. How refreshing would it be if the front office actually told the truth about what their plans for the off-season were rather than deliver a bunch of bologna (feel free to substitute your own expletive for bologna)? What if they said, “Met fans, we don’t think the free agent pool this year is worth spending money on. We don’t have a concrete plan in place and feel it would be better to use this season to assess the talent on the team, in the minors and the personnel. We can then more easily identify the changes that need to take place and develop a plan that will allow us to move forward for the next season in a positive direction that will make the ball club a consistent winner and a better place to play for players. So this year, we are going to stick with what we’ve got. Retool. And go from there.”
How refreshing would that be? Really!!
