A longer than usual excerpt, but Howard Megdal nailed it again.
…they were young: Reyes 23, Wright 23. The team’s two best players, following baseball’s typical aging curve, would only get better.
The Mets didn’t win in 2006, of course, but fell to the Cardinals in the NLCS, a team with only 83 regular season victories. Management failed to put adequate secondary players around Reyes, Wright and Beltran, who then took the brunt of the blame for late-season collapses in 2007 and 2008.
And then the injuries returned. The Mets handled them recklessly, sending Reyes back out onto the field quickly instead of taking extra precautions with him. It seemed more important to them to convince everyone that Reyes was OK than to ensure that that was actually the case.
So since I don’t want Howard to beat me up in the schoolyard, plese buy his book.
