Then Came the Last Days of Jake

This one undeniably hurts, even though I'm sure the Mets can successfully move on from Jacob deGrom.

I was going through my email last night when I saw one from the New York Post about Jacob deGrom signing with the Rangers. That's how I first heard the news. I've always understood that deGrom returning to the Mets wasn't a given, even though the chances have been looking better over the past couple of months. I also clearly understand why it might be better for the Mets to have their ace pitcher move on. But still, it hit me like a hard slap to the face. Logic is important, but it's straight emotion that underpins being a fan of a baseball club. That's only more valid for being a Mets fan. If logic ruled, I never would have lasted 5 years, much less more than 50.

Catching up on the Mets

The New York Mets are in the midst of their first nice winning streak in months. After today's ugly but ultimately successful game in Washington, they have won 7 straight games they have played. Technically their streak is 6 in a row, as the first of those wins was the final 8 2/3 innings of a game suspended on April 11. Even though only one single out of the game was recorded in April, it goes in the books as a win on that day. Go figure.

Some Quick Thoughts on the Baez Trade

Ken Rosenthal is reporting on Twitter that the New York Mets have made a deal with the Chicago Cubs for SS Javier Báez and RH starter Trevor Williams. We're still waiting to hear about who the Mets are giving up. Also on Twitter, Bob Nightengale is reporting that the Mets are sending the Cubs our #5 ranked prospect Pete Crow-Armstrong. Crow-Armstrong made a big impression in camp this year but injured his shoulder only 6 games into the season with Low-A St. Lucie. The injury required shoulder surgery and put the 19-year-old out for the season.

Major League Ballplayers Wanted, Enquire Within

While it was gratifying watching the New York Mets win last night, it felt more like a temporary reprieve than the start of something big. Bad news about Noah Syndergaard and J.D. Davis offset some of the thrill of victory. Also, for a very well-pitched game by Jacob deGrom, Miguel Castro, Trevor May, and Edwin Díaz, it didn't feel as if it was safely in the books until about five minutes after the last out was recorded. And this was against a Colorado Rockies team that had only managed two measly road victories coming into the series. The Rockies are in the discussion for the "worst team in baseball" honors, but they're still hard to beat when you're fielding a team of Triple-A ballplayers.

Some Early Thoughts on Mets Starting Pitching

As a lifelong baseball fan, I always look forward to the start of spring training. This year, of course, was extra special. The combination of the Wilpons exiting the scene and the deep roster the Mets have built over the offseason has led to increased expectations. It was cool over the last few weeks to see it all come together on a playing field, even if the games didn't really count. But, at least for me, we're now at the point of spring training where the thrill is decidedly gone. Although not every question has been fully answered, we have a pretty good idea of what players the club will take north with them. Any questions still lingering about the 2021 Mets will require real games for the answers to be revealed.

Spring Fever Dreams

Today is the first day of spring. It's always among my favorite days of the year. Although I tolerate winter pretty well, I'm absolutely not a winter enthusiast. This day always feels significant to me, even though Mother Nature often doesn't show much respect for the Vernal Equinox here in the northeast. The weather gods have been generous in 2021, giving spring a warm and sunny Opening Day after a few cold, blustery days leading up to it. Even my two dogs have taken note of the upgraded meteorological conditions, giving up cherished couch time to enjoy the warm sunshine in the yard.

Surviving Carlos Carrasco's Sore Elbow

An old baseball adage is that you can never have too much pitching. This spring, it didn't take the New York Mets very long to prove the wisdom of this saying. Now likely to begin the season without Seth Lugo, one of their best relievers, and Carlos Carrasco, their #2 starter, the depth the Mets put together this winter is already being tested. Fortunately, the Mets seem in a pretty good position to survive these setbacks. Not that it's ever ideal to lose key contributors for any length of time, but having a deep and flexible pool of pitching to draw from is going to be key for any team hoping to make some waves in 2021.

Coming Soon to a Ballpark Near You, Baseball That Looks Familiar

2020 will always be remembered as a bizarre baseball season, by far the weirdest of my lifetime. The only seasons that approached it in sheer peculiarity were 1981, where a strike shut the game down for two months from June 12 - August 9, and 1994, when baseball just packed up and shut down for the rest of the year without crowning a champion. Still, at least to my mind, 2020 stands alone. Not only for the dramatic accommodations MLB had to make to play an abbreviated season at all, but how very weird all of our lives became outside of the game itself.

No Free Pass for Luis Rojas This Time Around

Tim Britton had a good profile of Mets manager Luis Rojas up on The Athletic earlier this week. All in all, Rojas endured a strange year in his first season on the job. It started with Carlos Beltran resigning as manager three weeks before spring training started, thanks to the Astros sign stealing scandal. That spring training came to a screeching halt, but not before it was revealed that his second-best pitcher Noah Syndergaard needed Tommy John surgery. Then, after we all sat around for a few months, waiting to see if there would be a baseball season in 2020, everything ramped up way too quickly for the weird 60-game season that followed. Before that season even began, his now second-best pitcher Marcus Stroman opted out of the season. The abbreviated slate of games was barely underway when his star player, Yoenis Céspedes, also opted out in a manner that was equally poorly handled by the player and the club. To put a cherry on top of it all, Rojas was given a roster, particularly the pitching staff, which proved woefully inadequate, and Brodie Van Wagenen did a poor job of juggling the useful pieces the Mets did possess.

Signing Taijuan Walker Was a Terrific Move

Mets fans received some good news today. Signing a starting pitcher to compete for one of the two bottom-of-the-rotation slots really was a must for this team. Don't get me wrong, David Peterson and Joey Lucchesi are both perfectly acceptable options for the role, but there needed to be more competition for those spots. Now there is. Bringing Taijuan Walker into the fold for a reasonable 2-year, $20 million deal seems to be, at least in my opinion, exactly the right balance of risk and potential upside. While it seems almost comical to refer to a $10 million per year salary as "reasonable," it really is in the context of how players are valued these days. As a fan, I feel much better about the Mets' chances of having enough starting pitching to survive this season today than I did yesterday.

The Mets Can Still Use Starting Pitching

Now that Carlos Carrasco has joined Francisco Lindor on the Mets, the team has a top 3 in their rotation to match up with anyone in baseball. If Noah Syndergaard makes it back and the other three remain healthy — always a big if when you're talking pitching — the Mets would have as good of a rotation 1-4 as they've had in many years, easily one of the best in baseball this year. Combined with the solid offense and a defense that has certainly been upgraded and could be a really solid group if a true CF is signed, this is a legit playoff contender with a real shot at going all the way. But the questions certainly remain when it comes to the depth of this rotation, and we've seen lack of depth sabotage many promising Mets seasons in recent years.

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.

Maximizing Player Value

The Tampa Bay Rays get a lot of credit, most of it deserved, for running a pretty successful baseball club on a small budget. Of course, it wasn't always that way. When they came into being as the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, they spent their first decade of existence in last place in the AL East. Their best year from 1998-2007 was in 2004, the only time they won 70 games. Meanwhile, they lost over 100 games in three different years. I know the Mets franchise got off to a much tougher start back in the sixties, but baseball was much less liberal in giving players to expansion teams back then, and there was no amateur draft until 1965. I'd argue that being terrible for a decade puts the Rays in a class by themselves for ineptitude, despite the assist from the Mets in giving up Scott Kazmir for Victor Zambrano in 2004.

Depth Isn't a Four-Letter Word

Although anything certainly can happen, we're probably not going to see a big flurry of moves in baseball over the next two weeks. The Mets have made some progress in signing depth pieces, while also adding Trevor May to the bullpen and inking James McCann to a four year deal. Getting Jared Porter into the fold as their new General Manager was important for this offseason and for the future. They still have a lot left on their to-do list, however. If they went into battle with the players already under contract, you'd probably be looking at a .500 baseball team, and that would be dependent on key players staying mostly healthy. Of course, we'd all bet the farm that major additions are still coming, and we would be pretty disappointed in 2021 if the Mets weren't at least strongly competitive for a playoff spot.

Some Thoughts on McCann, Arenado and Springer

After listening to some of James McCann's press availability, I came away impressed with the Mets new catcher — at least as a person. I have a pretty good feeling that the Mets pitchers are going to like working with the guy. After a couple of years of reportedly not being very happy with Wilson Ramos, this is a big deal. As for the rest, only time and a chance to see him play will provide an answer to whether or not this was a good signing. He doesn't have to win a silver slugger award to be an asset to the Mets, he needs to hit enough to justify a starting job and do the job defensively and handling the pitching staff.

The Mets Get Their Catcher

Good news about the Mets and free agent catcher James McCann agreeing to terms. With the other recent news that the Mets are close to naming their new GM, this hot stove season that seemed anything but hot a few days ago is finally gaining some steam. Looking at Mets Twitter, the general reaction seems to be one of happiness, although it's not universal, of course. I'm not sure there are many things in the world that you can get 100% consensus of Mets fans, we're just not built that way. I saw some tweets from fans that were very disappointed the Mets didn't seem to pursue J.T. Realmuto very hard. McCann might have been seen by most as the second best catcher on the free agent market, but he was a very distant second.

It's All About Balance

It doesn't seem like that long ago that the Mets were all about pitching. The Mets rode the back of terrific starting pitching all of the way to the 2015 World Series, despite featuring a relatively weak lineup even after the addition of Yoenis Céspedes. Michael Conforto was on that team despite being in only his second year of pro ball and, to his credit, performed well in the playoffs. Daniel Murphy was just coming into his late career power surge, and carried them through the early rounds, although he fell off badly in the Series. David Wright had less than 200 at bats left in his injury-shortened MLB career. Curtis Granderson ran endlessly hot and cold for the Mets, but was a decent player. Travis d'Arnaud was having his last good year as a Met, but wasn't the hitter he would become after departing. Michael Cuddyer was one of Sandy Alderson's biggest mistakes, and the rest of the roster was littered with filler such as as Lucas Duda, Wilmer Flores, Juan Lagares, etc. Their defense left something to be desired, too. It was only great pitching that got them to the brink of a championship before falling short.

Free Agents, Post-Coronavirus Baseball and the Weight of Expectations

Joel Sherman had an article in the New York Post yesterday about the Mets' reported pursuit of pitcher Jake Odorizzi. According to Sherman, the Mets seem to be viewing Odorizzi as more of a fallback, depending on how the free agent dominoes fall this winter.  Which makes sense. They're probably not going to sign Trevor Bauer and Odorizzi unless they strike out completely on position players and settle for cheaper options there. It might go the other way, too. They might lose out on both Bauer and Odorizzi and look elsewhere for starting pitching. You never know how the free agents will start to fall. Remember, in 2005 the Mets were never looked at as the frontrunners for Pedro Martinez or Carlos Beltran. Sure, Omar Minaya was aggressive, but some of it was beyond the Mets' control. If the Red Sox wanted to keep Pedro and the Yankees were more interested in Beltran, neither one of them would have wound up as Mets.

Pitching Is Serious Business

As we await with bated breath to see if Cleveland's Mike Chernoff is, indeed, the frontrunner for the Mets' head baseball honcho job, I thought I'd take a look at an area where the Mets have to drastically improve to extend their season into October. It's pretty obvious that the Mets will need to make significant upgrades to their starting pitching if they really want to contend in 2021. As it stands right now, their starting rotation consists of Jacob deGrom, Marcus Stroman, David Peterson, and the hopes that Noah Syndergaard can return and be a force sometime into the season. Seth Lugo may also wind up there, I guess, although I thought it was a mistake when the team moved him there during the season. Steven Matz is a complete mystery, and any other starting pitching candidates the Mets have on their roster now look more like depth pieces than viable starters

Another Day in Paradise

After moving this blog and bringing it back to life yesterday I'm faced with the task of what to do now.  This blog is still going to be a New York Mets fan blog going forward. For now, however, with the baseball season a casualty of the virus that put me out of work I don't want to be just another voice rehashing the few pieces of Mets news that are floating around out there, Others, frankly, do it much better anyway.