Mack: Teddy... we hear a lot about this "Los Mets" attitude from Omar & Company. Any thoughts on that?
(step away from the blog...)
Teddy: Talk about a loaded question eh Mack?
The way I see it, giving my honest opinion on this matter is really a lose-lose situation for me...
If I said no, I'd be lying to you and the fine readers of Mack's Mets
If I say yes, I leave myself open to being labeled a racist
Even worse, if I say yes and fail to substantiate my claims, then I'm just some bitter Ex-Met douchebag with no credibility.
You'd have to be a bigot or just an a$$hole to say that Omar Minaya is some racist mastermind, cleverly diverting the Wilpon's fortunes to Latin American countries by way of bloated big league contracts. A bad GM? Maybe. He is the guy who traded Grady Sizemore, Cliff Lee, and Brandon Phillips for 3 months worth of Bartolo Colon. And he is the guy who gave $40 Million to K-Rod despite declining peripherals across the board. And he did just pay a utility infielder with 2 broken thumbs $2 Million to cheer on his teammates from the dugout. But did he make those moves because solely because he's from the Dominican Republic? Of course not. However, I would argue that the Mets predilection for foreign talent during the International signing period in recent years has spurned a dynamic in the minor league system that not only favors the development of certain Latin American ballplayers, but hinders that of the college-aged draftees - who are predominantly Caucasian Americans for those of you keeping track.
In minor league baseball, player development staff is constantly torn between riding players with polish and refined skill sets versus toolsy underperformers who possess that hint of greatness. Please don't call me racist, but a 22-year old American with a few years of college baseball experience will inevitably know the game better and be able to perform at a higher level right out of the gate than say, a 17-year old coming stateside for the first time. This poses a problem for coaching staff and front office personnel because the name of the game is playing time, and even with 9 minor league affiliates, their is just not enough innings and at-bats to go around.
The only way you get better in this game is to play every day, face live pitching 500 times a year, and learn from the mistakes which you are absolutely going to make over time. Admittedly, this is even more so for younger talent because they have not seen the game at the speed of professional baseball nearly as much as an older signee and need to play catch up. The Mets simply signed wayyyyy too many players to appropriately ration out proper amounts of playing time.
Picking on the Latin players is an easy target, and its probably unfair, but from my perspective, the disparity between game-readiness and future potential is the widest when evaluating Latin talent. I've seen Flores, Marte, Tejada, Familia, and Mejia up close, and they truly are special talents with hopefully long careers in the big leagues ahead of them. But for every hyped up stud from the DR and Venezuela that you see on the prospect lists, there are a dozen kids like Luis Rojas, spiking 95 MPH fastballs 5 feet in front of home plate and endangering the safety of other players. Say what you want, but I didn't see that level of ineffectiveness out of American born players, and in the rare cases that I did see that, the player was released within a week. The bias comes in because I feel like Latin players were given a longer length of rope to hang themselves with, and the trigger wasn't pulled on them until after years and years of poor performance. You could absolutely argue that a 33-round pick from a division III college isn't worth the time or effort to give playing time allocated for the development of some 16-year old Venezuelan who can hit a 400-foot home run in batting practice but can't hit a curve ball thrown from a pitching machine let alone a professional pitcher. But why waste a draft pick in that case? I feel that a draft pick warrants an opportunity for that player, and there are just too many former Mets farmhands to count that never had that opportunity because of the high number of international signees the Mets keep in their stable.
Jonathan Sanchez was a big bag of tools who never quite figured out how to hit professional pitching. The story that was told to us bench players by the Brooklyn coaching staff in 2006 was that their hands were tied when it came to managerial moves and/or playing time, and they cited Bernazard's insistence on playing Sanchez in the lineup every day, demanding that he could hit no lower than 6th in the lineup. After a month of 0-4, 2 strikeout performances out of the 6-hole, they took mercy on Sanchez and "promoted" him to Hagerstwon, but its just one example of an opportunity squandered on a player who probably didn't deserve it in the first place. It reminds me of players like Michael Parker, who came out of George Washington University as a finished product, who could absolutely hammer professional pitching from day one as a Met. He spent two uneventful years in the system losing playing time to the likes of Juan Lagares and Greg Veloz, who despite their high ceilings, could never perform at the level Mike did for his entire professional career. You know how this story ends...Mike gets one game a week, plays well for a couple months, but eventually pitchers make adjustments to him and he doesn't get the amount of playing time required to make his own adjustments, and he is released a year later, despite being a much better baseball player than most of his peers, even to the keenest of talent evaluators. When you see enough Michael Parkers not make it in this system, and you factor in the ridiculous antics of a small subset of immature teenagers who don't know the meaning of the word "professional", and then you heap on top of that the extra hour that each meeting takes because the English words need to be translated...I wish I could properly illustrate with words what this all made players like myself feel like...It was a 24 hour, 7 day a week, pervading sense that something unfair was going on.
I tried to keep this high brow, and give an educated perspective as to why this whole "Los Mets" dynamic is around. But before I sign off, I will say that previous management (Honestly, it was just Bernazard) did do some specific acts which I feel were overtly racist, and guided out of what I feel was preferential bias towards a certain group of players - who were in fact Latin.
Spring Training 2007, 200 minor leaguers in a fairly small complex in Port St. Lucie, FL, meant that getting extra time in the cages was a free-for-all, and you had to get to the ballpark by 6:30 to get an open batting tee. In 3 years as a Met, the only time I ever saw Tony Bernazard not patrolling the grounds on his trusty golf cart, was when he hand-picked Jose Castro, Hector Pellot, Jose Coronado, and one other ballplayer (I want to say it was Ambiorix Concepcion but I am not positive) to take some swings before early sessions. Bare in mind, this guy never left his golf cart even when Fred Wilpon came to speak with him, but here he was, the main decision maker in the futures of every minor leaguer in camp, and he was putting in extra effort to ensure that his four boys got their work in. If his job was to remain unbiased and make decisions based on talent and merit for who would move up and who would be let go, this display made it seem like he would only make an effort for "his boys" whom he clearly wanted to succeed more than others. Truth be told, the only time I ever heard Bernazard shed a tear was the day Castro was traded in the Jeff Conine deal. Their was also an incident where Tony made a direct slight to one of the Australian pitchers while driving past him in his golf cart, but thats not my story to tell. You keep hearing stories like that, and keep seeing contests with arbitrary rules which inevitably favor the young latins, and keep seeing their names in the boxscores despite the low output...day in, day out...and maybe your mind wanders to the thought that maybe this really is an initiative, stemming from the top down, that is putting certain demographics of ballplayers at a clear disadvantage...
Then you see Danny Murphy starting in the big leagues and you realize that Teddy is probably just full of shit. But didn't Danny play college ball with Bernazard's son? Maybe its not racism...its just about making contacts and "who you know"
Unfortunately, when you're a Met, knowing Minaya gets you alot further than knowing Adam Wogan...just ask Alex Cora
One final thought... in general, the Latin ballplayers made more mistakes, but were praised and commended when they did something right. Tons of positive reinforcement. It was the exact opposite, for me at least. It was as if we didn't need positive reinforcement because we should have known better anyways. Constant negativity does nobody any good
Really interesting post and I thank you both for sharing these insights.
ReplyDeleteIt will be interesting to see what if anything changes with Bernazard gone. Whoever is in charge is going to have their favorites, but hopefully it won't be to the extreme that this post paints.
That Bernazard's favorites were Latins really doesn't matter to me (and the Old World way of spelling my last name is only one letter off Ted's, so I assume we have similar nationalities). What is troubling to me is the philosophy of pushing prospects, regardless of their nationality, to higher levels than they are capable of handling, just to see how they handle failure. I disagree with that method 100 percent.
The major league roster was not an extremely Latin dominated one, and I could point to numerous trades where Latins were dealt for Whites. These are things which I assume that Minaya had more direct influence over.
Of course, as the one who hired and to a lesser extent protected Bernazard, Minaya has to accept some responsibility for his underling's actions. But my hunch is that this falls much more on the shoulders of Bernazard than Minaya.
We should know more this year with how the Mets handle their prospects with Bernazard no longer on the scene.
Again, thanks for an enlightening post.