Always great to see more people jumping on the Pedro Exposed bandwagon. Pedro ran out on Boston the second the Sox won their first World Series in a long long time, and carpetbagged his way to the Mets to become the face of the franchise and some curious marketing decisions made by the GM.
I can’t believe I missed this one but New York Magazine jumped on the Pedro Bash. Ecerpts below and the full thing here.
It’s hard to argue that the signing was successful in pure baseball terms: Martinez was great through 2005 and the first two months of 2006, then got injured, struggled through the season, and missed the playoffs. After surgery, he openly discussed retirement and missed most of 2007 while the best Mets team in twenty years came up justshort of the World Series. (MP assumes he means 2006). Pedro made five starts in the last month of the ’07 season, pitching well — but not well enough to help the Mets avoid one of the worst collapses in baseball history. For those five starts, he earned $14,002,234. Last season brought twenty mostly ineffective starts. His ERA was 5.62, by far the highest of his career. Four years wasn’t too much to give Pedro. Two, it seems, was pushing it.
Pedro’s early “success†fooled the Mets into thinking big-name players were all it took to become champions. (Or become the Yankees — whatever.) Thus: Beltran, solid; Wagner, destroyed by injuries; Delgado, initially effective and then a mess until the second half of last season; Santana, outstanding — for now, just like Pedro in his first season — and with five more years to go; and Castillo, horrific, and with three more years to go. The team spent a ton of money with no World Series to show for it. Once those contracts end, odds are that the Mets will breathe the same sighs of relief that they are now with Pedro leaving.
