In a must read that will make you mad and make you sad, Sports Illustrated lays out something I said back in the winter about Sandy. Watch this video and stick with it – I made it over the winter but it’s more and more prophetic. Sandy can make the choice that noone else will face. The right choice.
Trading Reyes isn’t a white flag. It isn’t a bad PR move or something that should be seen as the Mets tanking their season. Their TV ratings are already bad. Their attendance is already low. A deal like this one isn’t going to make a significant difference in any of that.
It’s just the right choice. The smart choice. The choice that makes the most sense, given the probabilities.
It will hurt. Of course it will.
And it will. And it sucks to have to let one of the franchise career leaders go…but if you think a 7 year deal makes sense I don’t agree. If you think Jose and his friendly agent are going to give the Mets a home-town discount, especially so Fred can have his $100 million payroll, I disagree.
It will be harder to get good stuff back given the DL stint, but as we’ve seen with K-Rod, Sandy is good at this.
You can make the choice that noone else will face. Yes it sucks. Start throwing rocks at me now.
If the Mets give away Reyes, and that is what it would be at this point (no one is trading anything for a guy who 75% of 2009, 20% of 2010 and is on the DL now) then they continue to be what they have been since April 1962, a joke franchise.
If Reyes is worth getting into a bidding war over the winter, he’s worth an arm or a couple of top prospects in a trade. The only circumstance under which that statement can’t hold true is if he’s worth significantly more to the Mets than he is to every other team, which is a warm and fuzzy thing to say as a fan, but no way to run a ball club.
One of the biggest “joke” periods of the franchise has been from the end of the ’07 NLCS through the present. They aren’t going to fix it by making unwise decisions for the benefit of the status quo.
*end of the ’06 NLCS. typo.
In a word… WRONG
Ahhh…you have revealed yourself to be a died in the wool Met hater. No Met fan would say they have been a joke for 50 straight seasons…48 out of 50 maybe. But not 50. I think they have been a joke only for 1962-1966, 1977-1982, 1991-1996, 2002-2004 and 2009-now.
wow, ya got me, okay so only 96% of the time they are the joke of New York. In all honesty what I was getting at is this team can’t manage to keep any sense of self, develop any real history. When CitiField opened, the outcry was were is the Mets? Where is the history? And while admittedly the Mets front office did a crappy job, part of the reason it was so easily overlooked is that the history is spotty, erratic, and often somewhat embarrassing “second” city.
Whether the Mets sign Reyes to a 5 year $80MM deal or a 6 year $125MM deal or a 7 year Eleventy Billion dollar deal, he will be overpaid.
But more precisely, when you start looking at guys that you develop, that you nurture and spend time on, those should be the ones you invest in, not the Jason Bay type, or Johan Santana, or even Carlos Beltran thought the Mets got value out of him.
The one thing guys like Theo Epstien and Brian Cashman have been good at more often than not, is getting the right roles filled around their developed players, Yankees have lost their way a bit as much as Cashman has tried, but when you look at the New York Mets and the landscape of talent they have and around major league baseball, what makes them better than they are now?
Dumping Reyes and then what? Waiting until 2015 for Ruben Tejada to be able to sport a .700 OPS at SS? The Mets will have affordable talent at firstbase, secondbase, cf, rf and C for the near future. Spending on Reyes and Wright as simple arithmetic.