(In)Credible Sources

Wait... what? Now Jacob deGrom doesn't hate New York?

Remember earlier this summer when baseball pundits were tripping over each other to breathlessly report another rumor about where Jacob deGrom really wants to pitch next year? ESPN's Buster Olney tweeted: "There is a perception in some corners of the industry that if Jacob deGrom follows through with what he said in the spring and opts out of his Mets' contract, the Braves will be the favorites to land him." SNY's Andy Martino assured us that Olney's tweet constituted a "highly credible report." Martino reinforced that with some vague prattle about Georgia being closer to Florida, and even more ambiguous rumors that Jake "does not seem to enjoy the extra attention that comes with playing [in New York]."

Playoffs Are Chaos

The Mayhem Guy loves
the MLB playoffs

All of the uncertainties and chaos of the MLB postseason are on full display this October.

All I kept hearing and reading, over and over again, was that the Mets were too timid at the trading deadline. They were a win-now team who should have gone all-in, even if it required parting with one or more of their top prospects to secure the players they needed to push them over the top. This was only amplified louder when the Mets played so poorly in Atlanta and lost the division, then fell rather meekly in their wildcard series against the Padres.

The Relentless Road Forward

The Mets are undeniably down after falling in Atlanta, but the future is much brighter than it currently seems.

When the Mets dropped Sunday night's finale in Atlanta, a friend of mine who is a Mets fan sent me a two-word text, "it's over." I wanted to answer back at some length but, not feeling particularly eloquent at that moment, I replied, "not even close," and promised to elaborate further when I finished bandaging my feelings. Well, it took a couple of days, but here are some thoughts on why the club's face plant in Atlanta signified the end of nothing more than the club's chances to grab a rare NL East title.

On Extending Lindor and Sustaining Success

Now that the Mets have Francisco Lindor on their roster, the next big question is how they go about trying to keep him past this season. I think we can assume that it's a given that they at least make a big effort at extending him. I've seen some in the media postulate that the Mets may want to wait until they've had a chance to see how Lindor reacts to playing in New York, which would obviously mean that negotiations wouldn't even start before the season got underway. I could understand the rationale for that thinking. Not every player thrives in this city. I might even feel the same way myself if Lindor was under contract for a couple of years. That's not the case, however, so if the Mets decided to go that route they would need to ask themselves how long they would be willing to wait to begin negotiations, and if Lindor would even be willing to negotiate during the season. At his press conference today he indicated fairly strongly that he wouldn't do that.

Embracing the Pressure

Now that we've left 2020 behind, I hope that some of the players and teams resolve to not let January be as boring as December was, and that the hot stove season can finally live up to its name. The only sparks of excitement so far have been courtesy of the San Diego Padres, who have made themselves into one of the best teams in baseball by building a very deep farm system and being aggressive using it. For all of the deserved credit that the Rays get for making their voodoo work, it's good to see a team in a relatively small market like San Diego making a bold and aggressive push in a much different way to challenge the Dodgers in the NL West. 

Here's to a Future Lurker

This is my first full offseason blogging in a decade. One thing I learned my first time around is to have some writing ideas at the ready for the long periods with no news, particularly over the holidays. As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I have a "saved stories" folder in my newsreader with stuff going back to October. I didn't have time to write about this stuff then, but It's a great source for content at times like this. Or maybe I do what I did during the weird coronavirus extended offseason this spring when I came back to blogging, and write a series of posts on a particular past season that had a special meaning for me. I'm interested in a lot of facets of baseball and enjoy writing about them, so I usually don't struggle too much coming up with writing topics.

Damn (Yawn) Yankees

If someone can decipher the purpose behind Mike Vaccaro's piece in the New York Post yesterday, I would be grateful if you could share it with me. Vaccaro shared a story from the 1934 season when Giants manager Bill Terry made a dismissive comment about the Dodgers, then in Brooklyn, and it came back to bite the Giants at the end of the season when Brooklyn knocked them out of a pennant chance. Fast forward to today. Apparently, there is some parallel to this because everyone is excited about the Mets, and nobody is talking about the Yankees.

Waiting for What Happens Next

Yesterday turned out to be a pretty great day. I listened to some of the Cohen/Alderson press conference live, then listened to the whole thing again last night. I've been a Mets fan for a long, long time, but caring that much about what was said in a press conference is a new phenomenon for me. I can't imagine listening to Fred or Jeff Wilpon talk for even a fraction of that amount of time without losing all hope for the Mets ever being more than a punchline. But today doesn't seem a day to dwell on the sins of owners past. This one definitely seems to be a keeper.

Why Winning by Losing Wouldn't Be the Right Call

If you missed it, Saturday's post on this blog was a rebuttal to a Daniel Kaplan article on The Athletic site that took a pretty negative point of view on the team's future. Kaplan's angle was that the Mets would be unable to keep up with the Yankees in New York without deficit spending that would slowly bleed new owner Steve Cohen dry. The gist of Kaplan's view was that the Mets' revenues are significantly less than the Yankees and Citi Field was less ideally located than Yankee Stadium. I'm not going to rehash it all here, basically, I found his argument to be remarkably weak and superficial.

They're Going to Hate Us

The Mets spent the years from 1977-1983 as one of the worst franchises in all of American sport. Their best record during those seven years wandering in the wastelands was 68-94, and that was 1983 — the last year before they turned the corner. You would have thought that those terrible years preceding the resurgence might have caused folks around baseball to look at those 1984 Mets as plucky overachievers trying to turn around a moribund franchise, but you'd be wrong. I remember being somewhat surprised at the time how quickly in 1984 other fanbases started looking at that team as a bunch of bad guys.

The Keys to the City

After I had written my last post on the type of organizational changes the Mets could make to ensure sustained success, I took a few moments to think about the one time in my life that really happened. My first year as a Mets fan was 1969. I was 10 years old, and it seemed to me quite likely that my team would go back to the World Series every year. After all, we had Seaver and Koosman, and all the other teams didn't. Although the Mets managed to sneak back into the Series four years later, my youthful optimism definitely took a beating in the 1970s. Despite continuing to have Seaver and Koosman and eventually Jon Matlack, the only time the Mets managed to win their division between 1969 and 1986 was the "Ya Gotta Believe" season of 1973, when the futility of the rest of the NL East allowed the Mets to grab that honor despite a quite mediocre 82-79 record. Other than that bit of luck, the Mets wouldn't finish above third place until 1984 and usually brought up the rear.