1. I don't think a New York baseball team has the option to pack it in at the all-star break, start selling, and play for next year. The fans and the media would simply not support it and the profit line for the Wilpons would get even lower. This is not the time to panic and go buy another Zembrano or Benson. Play as hard as you can with what you have.
2. The division has already proven that the winner this year will play the season around 5-8 games above .500. That means four teams, includng the Mets, are still in a pennant race, no matter how bad they are playing right now.
3. The first think the Mets need to do is put the best defensive team they can find out on the field. All Fernando Martinez, Nick Evans, and Daniel Murphy are proving is the fact that they are not ready, talent wise or emotionally, to play in Queens. Send all three back down to Buffalo and leave them alone for the rest of the season. Nobody is going to accept a trade package right now with any of these guys in the lineup, especially with the way they are kicking around the ball.
4. Injured players will be back, but July will be a lonely month. You may not see either Jose Reyes or Carlos Beltran until after the all-star break, and you might not see John Maine again this year. It looks like the first to come back will be Oliver Perez and he needs to be back in the current rotation, He's paid handsomely to pitch and, on paper, he's better than some of the players being thrown out there right now.
5. Johan Santana, Mike Pelfrey, and Livan Hernandez deserve to stay in the rotation, but piggybacking two pitchers on a big market team is, first, an embarassment, and secondly, exposes the lack of direction coming from management these days. This isn't spring training.
6. Right now, until things heal, I want consistency, and I don't believe either Fernando Nieve or Tim Redding is going to give me that. DFA Redding, send Nieve back to Buffalo, and bring up Nelson Figueroa to man the SP5 slot. He's done nothing wrong this year, has pitched his heart out for a very bad Buffalo team (2.61 in 12 starts), and is bleeds Mets orange and blue.
7. Play Michel Abreu at first base until Carlos Delgado comes back or you trade for someone better. He's a natural first baseman, has only three errors in Buffal0 this year and
will hit .250. No, he's not going to make the all-star team, but the pitchers will sure like his defensive skills.
8. The rest of your infield should be Luis Castillo, Alex Cora, and David Wright. Any combination of Brian Schneider and Omar Santos behind the plate is fine. And play Ryan Church, Fernando Tatis, and Gary Sheffield in the outfield, with Jeremy Reed as their sub.
9. Concentrate on playing a pitchers game. It's amazing how quickly the opinions of all of us would change if the Mets pitchers won the next three games with a score of 3-1. By now the Mets know when one of their starters are beginning to falter. There's talent in the bullpen and, surprisingly, very little injuries there also. If you stop making the errors and get an early lead (Wright has this kind of ball down this year), the key person in this system could easily be two long men.
10. Shop Murphy. There's no place for an everyday player on a National League for someone that can't field. And, he's not even hitting well this season. There's always a market out there in small-marketland for someone like this. The least you can get for him is someone to fill one of the holes this season left from all the injuries.
As usual, Mack makes sense - especially about bringing up Figueroa. I saw him pitch against Tidewater in early June, and he is SHARP!! 7 IP and 1 ER. This is the kind of pitching we need at Citi. Also, he got most of his outs from grounders. I didn't see anything else I disagreed with, except maybe trading Murphy. I think he showed enough talent at first to justify bringing him back to Buffalo and letting him learn the position right. He's already shown he doesn't learn well while with the big team, so let's give him a real chance before we write him off. I think the biggest mistake made this month was in releasing Wily Mo Pena instead of bringing him up and seeing what he could do. At best, he could have helped with some power. At worst, he still could have been DFA'ed.
ReplyDeleteYou might be right about both Pena and Murphy.
ReplyDeleteI like Murphy, and the worst thing was how well he hit last year and looked like a superstar. The Buffalo team should be Murphy, Martinez, Evans, Neise, Gee, Antonini, Merritt, etc... all the 22-24 year olds who could use one more good year in the minors.