Post article speculates Beltran's season and/or career may be over based on the procedure that the 2nd doctor he visited typically performs.
Regardless, until Omar is no longer with this team I will curse not picking up a free agent Torii Hunter as one of the worst moves of all time. I will also curse not trading our core players at the end of last season like I wanted, when they had high trade value. Now, you will probably get shafted in return for Beltran, Delgado and Reyes. Good luck rebuilding this team when all your valuable trading chips just got severely downgraded.
As the song goes, you've got to know when to hold them, know when to fold them. And unfortunately Omar held them too long, IMHO.
11 comments:
If Beltran and Reyes are permanently impaired, then this team is significantly damaged and it will take years to recover. With the farm system depleted in an effort to "win now" around the Reyes/Wright/Beltran core, it seems likely to be a long road back.
Omar will likely bear the brunt of the Mets decline. My guess is he's probably got the rest of this year and maybe one more season. Since it's hard to imagine the team improving considerably unless the prognosis for Reyes and Beltran changes considerably, or the Wilpon's open the flood gates for multiple big ticket free agents, Omar will likely be gone soon.
There were many voices, including some here and in the press, that were calling for Omar to break up the core last offseason. There was no consensus that pressing forward with this core was the only way to go--it was a value judgment by Omar that is likely to be proven wrong.
The injuries are the coup d'grace for Omar. My guess, and it's somewhat reasonable based on past performance, is that this team wasn't winning a pennant even if healthy. And that's why Omar needs to go. While Reyes and Beltran are certainly more prone than the average player, I can't hang Omar for these types of severe injuries. You could never plan a team around the worst case contingency, that even in a risky player, still only has a 5% chance of happening in any given season. But the fact is, he can be blamed for not breaking up a group that hasn't shown the ability (and in many cases, the desire) to win.
If Beltran and Reyes don't get back to full health in the next 12 months, the die will have been cast, and it won't just be the 2009 season that is lost. It could be several more.
Your Hunter suggestion, IMAO, was silly then and isn't less silly in hindsight.
Beltran was locked up for $100M+. You don't sign another big ticket FA at the same position. You can't decide the cornerstone you laid a year ago isn't any good and pick it up and move in a year later. Buildings don't get built that way.
Plus, the whole idea is contingent upon trading Beltran, and there is zero, and I mean zero, indication that you would have been able to move him and his contract. I don't care what some drunk stenographer at the BloGlo had to say, unless Theo was inquiring with Omar it's meaningless drivel.
I'd say my push to pick up Torii was dead on. It gave you 3 options:
1. Keep both and move one of them to RF/LF, giving you an awesome set of fielding and batting capability in OF.
2. Trade Beltran.
3. Trade Hunter.
The Red Sox were offensively dying, and could have offset some of Beltran's contract by trading Drew elsewhere and giving us Youk or Pedroia in return. IIRC the Yankees were also looking for some OF bat pop at the time, and may have been interested. Both the Sox and Yankees had the payroll to afford the move, and as I said worst case you could keep both until a trade opportunity arose.
Strategically the opportunity to get a player of Hunter's caliber as a FA is rare these days, so I hate passing up the opportunity.
Well, you can think whatever you want, but zero out of 30 MLB GM's would have made that move.
In the real world, you don't sign the biggest price FA available one year and then turn around and tell your owner you want to trade him next year and sign a player of lesser value. Not unless you seriously want to undermine your own credibility and job status.
Likewise, when was the last time you saw a GM sign a high priced FA and trade him before the season started? It doesn't make any sense, b/c if the team that wants himm (Torii) thinks the price you (Omar) is paying for him is fair, they'll sign the deal themselves. If Omar has to bid the price up to get Torii to a level that the destination team thinks is overvalued, why would they bother to trade for him? It's just a strange suggestion, and I can't think of a single case of it happening with a big name/high priced player.
And third, if your suggestion was sign him and play both, I think that's a fair suggestion. But there's nothing really groundbreaking there. You could simply say the Mets could have signed any number of FA outfielders to play the corner position. Basically you are saying the Mets shouldn't have been content to give Alou one last shot in '07 (IIRC the year/player sequence). Fair point, but I doubt Torii was the only possible target.
My preference in order would be to have played them both or traded Beltran. My point is that in order to get someone of Hunter's caliber, normally these days you have to make a trade. We really have practically no useful chips we can afford to trade, so given that I am strong on picking up a free agent. Granted, if he were already LF/RF rather than CF it would make it a much easier no-brainer, but I'd still have made the deal.
After the collapses in '06 and '07, I wasn't wed to Beltran and I think we could have traded him.
Not to mention, despite your claim about 0/30 MLB GMs making the move to pick up Hunter, that's exactly what the Angels did. They already had Matthews, who was good enough that it caused Hunter to say about the Angels picking him up: "I didn't see it coming. They already had Gary Matthews Jr." Matthews is paid $10 M/yr, Hunter $14 M/yr, and Matthews was moved to corner OF. So moving Beltran or Hunter to LF/RF is not a crazy idea.
Seemingly good news, Beltran's knee is just bruised according to 2nd opinion. This would obviously help enormously with keeping his trade value high.
True, Matthews had to move positions. At no point did I say that a GM doesn't sign a player that forces an existing player to move positions or get replaced. What I said was that no GM would sign a player for a position that they just got Beltran for (i.e., best player in the league at the position, with a massive sink-or-swim contract that ties the franchise's success to the success of this one player)
As a result, your comparison between Matthews and Beltran is off base. When the Angels signed Matthews to a 5 yr/$50mm deal in 2007, they were adding a piece. He was not the highest paid player on his team, no less one of the highest paid players in the league. The GM certainly needed clearance from ownership to make the deal, but it was far from the type of "all in" investment Omar was demanding from Wilpon.
Moving Matthews' position was also not that big of a deal. Matthews has never hit 20 HRs in a season in his whole career. Has never had 80 RBI in his whole career. He has never had a Gold Glove.
When Torii was available as a FA, here were the numbers that the Mets and Angels were looking at for their respective CFs (Beltran and Matthews) when considering whether Torii would be an upgrade:
Matthews .250/18/72
Beltran .275/33/112, and a GG CF.
Bottom line: the Angels were upgrading by spending on Torii. It's easy to justify an upgrade, even when expensive. The Mets were downgrading (on paper) by replacing Beltran with Hunter in CF (as you yourself said, SHK, "Hunter is definitely a drop-off compared to Beltran").
The difference between an upgrade and a downgrade is pretty stark, especially when you're spending $18mm per for the privelege.
So I'll stand by my premise--no GM would have the cojones to say,
"that $100mm++ of your money was mispent a year ago. Lets go spend $90mm more on a guy who hasn't been as good historically, and see if I can get someone else to eat this contract that I took on through my bad judgment. And, by the way, if I can't, hope you enjoy choking on that $100mm for the next 6 years."
That is GREAT news on Beltran's knee. Even if he can't play till Sept., and this season is wrecked, having him healthy is huge for '10, '11, and '12. Whether he's in the lineup or we can trade for someone else.
If I were Omar I don't see how it would be hard to sell the Wilpons to pick up Torii. The pitch is really simple. We have a chance to get a great player for cash only, no trade. In so doing, if we move Torii to LF/RF, we will have an unbelievable outfield, both offensively and defensively. We can keep this situation, or, down the line we can trade either of them to get something incredible in return.
We desperately needed pitching and another useful bat at that time. Torii would have helped with the latter, while a trade of either Torii or Beltran could help the former.
The Mets (Wilpons) have wasted and continue to waste huge $$ on players that have underperformed. In contrast, Torii is a player of proven talent who would've been worth all $14 M. Look at his #s this year: .306 / 17 /57. And 0 errors in CF so far.
"The pitch is really simple. We have a chance to get a great player for cash only, no trade."
This is a universally true statement. Every year, there are great players that can be had if you're willing to spend another $18mm per year.
I can guarantee you that Omar did not have permission to add that much to the payroll.
Your sign-and-trade idea is plausible financially, but is just not practical for all the reasons I went through above.
If you'd like to go back in time and say Hunter would have been a better addition than player X, Y & Z that the Mets signed that year, you could be right. That's a different conversation than the one we've been having.
But to just go get another big ticket guy who would have been scouted as a downgrade to Beltran, and add him to the payroll in the hope that someone will give you (1) fair value and (2) a player who actually address a need, in return for Beltran (assuming you were willing to give up on Beltran, which Omar wasn't, and probably still isn't)? There's a lot of stuff we can hang on Omar. I don't see the need to get this fancy.
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