Appreciating What You Have

Matt Harvey's star burned so brightly, it's hard to imagine that his greatness only lasted for 3 MLB seasons.

I've been working on another piece for several days, outputting about 1,800 words of prose, never coming close to producing something I wanted to share with my readers. That doesn't happen to me very often, but it's very frustrating when it does. It's a subject I care about very much, so I'll get back to it soon with a fresh start. In the meantime, the announcement on Friday night that Matt Harvey is retiring from baseball produced a slew of memories for me as a lifelong Mets fan. It also gave me something to consider in how I approach being a fan.

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.

The Céspedes Debacle

Apologies for taking the day off yesterday. After another listless Mets loss against the Braves and the whole sorry Céspedes affair, anything I would have written yesterday would have been reactive rather than thoughtful. While 24 hours hasn't changed the dreadful position the Mets have put themselves in with their awful 3-7 start, everything does seem a little clearer to me now than it did yesterday.

I guess we should start with Yoenis Céspedes, since it seems virtually certain that we will never see him in a Mets uniform again. What Céspedes did, opting out of the season without being man enough to at least let his manager know face to face, was a crap move. How the Mets, particularly GM Brodie Van Wagenen, elected to handle the situation was typical of the weird, passive-aggressive nonsense that we've come to expect from the Mets over the last couple of decades.