Home Teams with Howard Megdal, September 8, 2020
The all-time great Mets waste — Must-click New York sports links
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The all-time great Mets waste
No, it’s not your imagination. These Mets are different than any you’ve seen before.
Following Monday afternoon’s game against the Phillies, the Mets have an OPS+ of 123. That’s better than Carlos Beltran’s career mark of 119. It means the Mets, as a team, are easily posting the best offensive numbers of any season in franchise history.
And it isn’t nearly enough for proficiency, thanks to the lack of pitching. Monday’s 9-8 loss dropped the Mets to 19-23, fourth place in the NL East. They could make a late run and earn a playoff spot in this expanded postseason structure. But in any way we typically measure the way baseball teams are successful, they are well short of the mark.
The reasons are obvious, and predictable: the Mets built a pitching staff on hoping no one gets injured, as usual, and it didn’t work, as usual. While the failings of ownership are most obvious in the largest ways — few big-ticket items despite New York revenues, interference on the key baseball matters — things like a desire to avoid backup plans have routinely derailed promising Mets seasons for lo the past 60 years or so. That’s been especially true since Fred Wilpon wrested the franchise from Nelson Doubleday.
But it’s always been the case, really. The 1970s Mets, wasting a front three of Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman and Jon Matlack with remarkably impotent offenses. (Rusty Staub in 1975 was the lone Met to drive in 100 runs until Gary Carter came to town, a quarter century of LOB!) The 2008 Mets were a competent bullpen short of 100 wins. The middle of the last decade had young, cost-controlled starting pitching, but perilously little offense. All those teams depended on older players returning to form, without much of a Plan B, and then faltered when that inexcusable way to build a baseball team worked out.
Baseball is an unpredictable game when efforts are made to leave nothing to chance. The Wilpon-era Mets have reveled in leaving plenty to chance, then cursing fates when it doesn’t go their way.
Sure, Steve Cohen, the would-be new owner, should have financial resources the Wilpons haven’t enjoyed, well, ever, and certainly not since Bernie Madoff went poof in the night. A good 20% or so of Mets history has been held hostage to those monetary handcuffs, a sobering thought.
But a baseball ops department permitted to find fallback plans — the kind of talent collection that allows the Dodgers and Yankees to routinely win when their best players get hurt — would be the greatest gift to Mets fans of all.
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