Over the past five years or so, there hasn’t been a fan base more abused from within than that of the New York Mets. Or at least it seems like it. No doubt, there has been mischief done — mostly unintentionally, one would hope – by the team’s ownership group, Fred & Jeff Wilpon and Saul Katz. From a shiny new stadium devoid of home team identity to ill-advised contract awards to myriad financial shenanigans, it looks like Mets’ ownership has gone out of its way to whittle its customers to all but the staunchest of die-hards. Your intrepid columnist bears the psychic scars of the staunch.
So, the Met fan can be forgiven for being as least a little skittish. When Sandy Alderson was hired as general manager, the team was in utter chaos. He waded in, assessed the situation and began the painstaking process of steering this franchise toward recovery. If by “painstaking” you think I mean “painfully slow,” you’re partially correct. There were the oft-mention awful contracts on hand – poster-boy Jason Bay, Francisco Rodriguez, Johan Santana, Carlos Beltran, Luis Castillo and Oliver Perez. These needed to be shed as soon as possible. The Wilpons – lacking the Steinbrennarian wherewithal – could not simply swallow these deals and pay these men to go elsewhere. Trying to find a trade partner for any or all of them was a worse-than-Herculean task. Couple that with the fact that a direct result of these signings was a decimated farm system and forfeited draft picks and you have the perfect cocktail for malaise among the fans and disasters on the field. We’ve been preached patience, because there’s been nothing else to sell. The cooler-headed among us can get that, but a majority of fans are beyond disillusioned.
This offseason – the one we’ve been promised – seems to be going according to script, however. Look around: all those contracts are gone. They have not been replaced by anything outrageously or patently stupid, as would have happened in the past. Yes, Curtis Granderson’s deal may be regrettable by the time 2017 rolls around and Bartolo Colon may pitch down to his age and build over the span of his own two-year accord, but Sandy Alderson is to be lauded for refusing to fight the previous war, a pitfall repeated time and again by his predecessors. Now, the lament among the fans is that the winter is over for the Mets, that Granderson and Colon will end up being the entire haul. Alderson is smarter than that. There is no way he can miss the remaining chasms in the Mets’ lineup: a reliable shortstop, another bat for the outfield, a bottleneck at first base and a tested bullpen arm. The problem is that everybody else sees these holes, too. Management finds itself in a somewhat similar predicament as the sainted Frank Cashen found himself in 1981. Back then, to quote a rival GM, the Mets were “so eager to make a deal that they were ready to be [fleeced].” Sandy Alderson needs to bring all the restraint and judiciousness he can muster to fill the team’s needs without crippling it.
My money’s on him: he’s far from done.
Follow me on Twitter @CharlieHangley
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Would of been even better had you said intrepid columnist bears the psychic scars from the stench! But I guess that would have been perceived as to strong an indictment over current owmership.