New Feature: Q&A With Mack And Teddy

I had the pleasure of meeting Teddy when he played for the Savannah Sand Gnats.

Since then, he has married a hottie.

I know in some way I am partically responsible for this,

Anyway, Mr. Z and I both write for Mack's Mets and I thought I would add a weekly feature in which I get from him an ex-Mets player's thoughs on what's goin on out at Willet's Point.

Here's this weeks:

Mack: - Teddy, you've been observing what's been going on (or, in the Mets case, what's not been going on) this week in free agency. As a former professional ballplayer in the Mets organization, was all this folly going on when you joined the team?


Teddy: I feel like the team that selected me back in 2006 was an entirely different franchise than the one that you see today. I can still remember driving home (In NJ) from Boston to sign my first professional contract, and pulling into my driveway, I was greeted by blue and orange balloons and cutouts of Omar Minaya's face adorning my front door and mailbox (My mom got a little carried away). It was the same face that signed Carlos Beltran long term, landed a perennial 30-HR hitter in Carlos Delgado to anchor the right side of the infield, and put together arguably the most productive infield unit in all of baseball, with Wright and Reyes primed for Hall of Fame Careers, and a 55-year old Jose Valentin defying the laws of nature to somehow still produce at the big league level. Back then, Tony Bernazard was a barely recognizable former Union rep and the term "Los Mets" was something only insiders knew about...the mainstream media thought it was just Minaya's way of leveraging his ethnicity to acquire the top international talent available.


It was a team I was proud to be associated with and in June 2006, it seemed like a world series championship was literally a few months away.



Fast forward 3 years...Willie Randolph - a NY legend and a guy I thought would become the face of the Mets organization for decades to come - gets muscled out at 4:00 in the morning because he had opinions of his own...Rick Peterson is also canned so that Omar and Tony could instill a staff that followed orders...The genius GM who could do no wrong spends more time taking cheap shots at Beat Writers than signing players to fill holes in the roster...His right hand man spends his free time calling teenagers "pu$$ies" and challenging them to shirtless brawls...And a $140 Million dollar roster produces 95 home runs with the leading slugging knocking TWELVE over the fence (Sorry to offend the purists out there, but home runs puts fans in the seats, and watching teams that can't hit home runs is like watching paint dry)


Maybe its just a product of the 2009-2010 free agent market (There are no Latin closers in the decline of their career to hand $40MM to) with the marquee players being Caucasian, but a losing team with a bloated payroll and no prospects of winning in the next 5 years does not entice top talent to come aboard. Nobody with a brain and any talent wants to be associated with a laughable franchise with a history of racial bias and a proclivity to mistreat its players, which is why I'm not shocked that Lackey, Halladay, Lee, and the rest of the big names donning new uniforms haven't given much thought to the boys in Queens.

(Editors note: hopefully, Teddy won't hold back next week.)