Mets’ fans are reaching the boiling point

Hot town, summer in the City…or Citi, if you will.

The temperatures in the New York-Metro area have ratcheted up significantly in the last week and a half. In typical NYC summer fashion, the mercury has reached the 90s, bringing with it shirt-drenching humidity. Par for the course in these parts, for sure, but for Met fans, it isn’t just the heat that’s rising: capacity for getting irritable is increasing as well. In a season that’s shaped up to be exciting and competitive, the fans are grumbling.

There was a PBS special on a few nights ago, reminiscence on the Blackout of ’77. Looking at the footage – many shots of streets piled with garbage, homeless sleeping in doorways, derelict buildings ablaze – it was depressingly easy to see this great City slowly but surely slipping back into that blighted state some 38 years later. All that’s missing is the looting and the Son of Sam. As any longtime Met fan will tell you, 1977 was a pretty terrible year for the team, as well – your intrepid columnist was 12 at the time and can tell you so, looking past the numbers. But that’s a story for another day. For this day, as of right now, the Mets find themselves three games over the .500 line, three games behind the Washington Nationals for the NL East lead and three-and-a-half behind the Wild Card leaders. Tonight, they’ll welcome the Los Angeles Dodgers to Citi Field in the windup to a post-All Star break stretch that at first flush resembled the Bataan Death March. Three games in St. Louis, three in DC and four at home vs. LA would be discouraging to the stoutest of teams, let alone one with the pitiful offense the Mets currently sport. The fact that they found themselves within four measly outs of taking the Washington series speaks more to the strength of their pitching staff and the inconsistency and injury problems with which the Nationals are dealing than anything else.

This Mets team is a bad ballclub with terrific pitching. OK, a fan can deal with that. We’ve seen it time and again, in the history of this team. The problem – the reason for the ire and gorge rising among this fan base – is that no one seems to be willing to lift a finger to make any of this better. There are any number of options available to GM Sandy Alderson in trade – according to the MSM, anyway – that are being cast aside almost out-of-hand. For instance, it came to light that the super-versatile Ben Zobrist of the Oakland A’s was available and that the two teams even got as far as talking about specific players to be included, only to have all that talk scuttled because the Mets balked at paying Zobrist the roughly $3 million he’s due for the rest of 2015. Three million dollars! Ashtray change for a team in New York. Meanwhile, they’re paying Michael Cuddyer slightly more than that, pro-rated, for a slash line of .250/.303/.380 with questionable defense. And speaking of that, the Mets’ refusal to put him on the disabled list is beyond baffling. He’s been dealing with a bone bruise in his knee for about a month and has been out of the lineup for the better part of a week. He is currently undergoing a “last ditch” pain treatment. So the Mets, then, will have played their three biggest series of the season a man down. And as tepid as Cuddyer’s statistics are, those of his replacements are downright pathetic. To wit: John Mayberry, Jr. is batting cleanup tonight, sporting a .170 batting average and a .565 OPS. Oh, and the Mets will be facing Clayton Kershaw.

The fans know it’s not the players’ fault. The fans know it’s not the pitchers’ fault. No. The anger is directed – and rightly so – at the men in the tower. Owners Fred and Jeff Wilpon are hanging on to this franchise by their fingernails. Everyone can see that. And while teams like Kansas City and Pittsburgh – once the poster children for small-market misery – have taken the recent gobs of TV money and their portion of revenue sharing and invested it into their respective teams, building sustainable contenders, all that cash heading to Queens has gone into debt service and into Wilponian pockets. Fans can draw no other conclusion than that these guys simply don’t care about winning and don’t care about putting a product on the field of which their fans can be proud. In fact, they probably don’t care about the fans at all, all bromides and lip service aside. They care about their profit margin and how far they can leverage the team, that’s apparent. They care about the land-grab of the Iron Triangle adjacent to Citi Field and how owning the Mets eases their way through all those transactions. They care about the bottom line. With the current pitching staff, this team could have a real chance at competing deep into September, at least. Without help for this anemic offense, they’ll have no shot. None. These owners are treating the team like a toy, rather than an investment or a public trust – which it ultimately is. These owners cannot seem to grasp the concept that an expenditure now will yield the rewards down the road for which they yearn: a packed ballpark resulting in increased revenue in 2015 and a commensurate attendance bump next year, resulting in even more cash coming in. Not to mention the good will of their customers and some relief from the bad PR they’ve suffered since time immemorial. These owners are not stupid, but ever increasingly, they appear fools. The unthinkable alternative, of course, is that they’re doing it on purpose: no one could be so blind as to see this team as presently constituted contending for third place, let alone a playoff spot.

It makes me wonder what it will be like when the time comes to actually pay those pitchers. But that’s a story for another day…

Follow me on Twitter @CharlieHangley.