Justified Anger at Middle Relief Frugality???

By David Rubin

Over the new year holiday, we tend to reflect back over the prior year, and the mind can't help but wander into thoughts about what could have been...and, logically, we begin to focus on what might be over the coming year. During these moments of "lost thought" I couldn't refrain from focusing on all of the players that will no longer wear a Met uniform in 2011, and of course there were really only 2 players who most of us will truly miss- middle relievers Pedro Feliciano and Hisanori Takahashi (who signed with the Yankees and Angels, respectively.)

Each reliever ended up signing for approximately $4 million per year with 2-year contracts, seemingly an amount of money that shouldn't make a team playing in the number one media market in the United States blanch at all. Additionally, with 6 young or lower-priced players cracking the roster last season (Davis, Niese, Thole, Pagan, Parnell & Dickey) one would think that there should be additional monies available for 2011, regardless of whether or not there are substantial "dead weight" contracts littering the roster, which, of course, there are, in the form of Castillo and Perez, of course. If each and every player on the roster averaged $4 million in salary, with 25 roster spots to fill, a total of $100 million would be committed to payroll. We all know that the Mets have a substantial number of players making far more than $4 million per year - Beltran, Bay, Castillo, Reyes, Wright, Santana, K-Rod and Perez- who combined make an average of $14,546,ooo for the 2011 season, and combined will draw $116,370,000 of salary, with approximately $24 million dollars ear-marked to fill the remaining 17 spaces on the roster, or an average of $1,411,764 per remaining roster spot.

Mike Pelfrey, RA Dickey and Angel Pagan are all in line for reasonable raises, and the team is still carrying $1 million dollars owed to Gary Matthews Jr as well as beginning the first of 25 years worth of payments to former Met Bobby Bonilla, to the tune of approximately $1.2 million dollars each July. For 2011 at least, that's another $2.2 million worth of sunken costs with a zero return factor.

Furthermore, when you consider that the team still has to sign at least one, if not two, remaining free agent starters at a minimum of $3-4 million dollars per arm, you start to realize that the decision to replace 2 pitchers who would equate to approximately 5.5% of the team's budgeted payroll ($8 million) versus replacing them with 2 arms that will end costing less than $1 million combined (Beato and Misch) or 0.75% of total payroll, amounts to a positive business decision, putting on-field performance aside for a moment. Takahashi appeared in 53 games, starting 12, throwing a total of 122 innings; Feliciano appeared in a monster-like 92 games, but only threw 62.2 innings. In sum, that's 184.2 innings, or approximately $43, 431 per inning at 2011 rates. If each of the new pitchers, Beato and Misch, only threw 10 innings each, they would average the same amount of money as Takahashi/Feliciano per inning; if they were to average merely 40 innings each, the cost would be approximately $12,500 per inning pitched, or $30,000 less per inning.

Finally, when you factor into the equation that Feliciano has appeared in a combined 266 games over 3 seasons and will be 35 this August, and Takahashi will turn 36 at the start of the season, along with the fact that middle relievers tend to have the greatest fluctuation of success from one season to the next when compared with other positions on the roster, you can understand the business reasons as to why GM Sandy Alderson and his team decided to pass on re-signing both pitchers. Whether we want to see it or not, baseball is still first and foremost a business; the "game" portion only commences when the business affairs have been put in order.

As a fan, of course, we don't want to have to deal with the business side of things- after all, that's why the team is paying so many executives. Unfortunately, our beloved team is in a similar position as the US economy- they've spent a great deal of money with a certain expectation level of performance, and like many of us are all too aware, when performance levels aren't met, regardless of who is responsible, cuts are, and have to be, made.

What's most upsetting, I think, to the millions of Met fans across the world (and most baseball fans, in general), is the fact that the business of baseball too often overshadows the game of baseball, and this season, in particular, the fans are once again expected to root hard for a team that has failed to live up to expectations for 10 years, with the past 2 in particular failing to even generate even reasonable expectations, at a time when the cost of attending a game has increased exponentially while the U.S. economy has declined dramatically. It's a really unfortunate confluence of events, and it's amazing that the decisions of whether or not to re-sign 2 middle relievers stand as the poster child for the new regimes re-focusing on the business end. The hope is, of course, that silly contracts will mostly be a thing of the past, and increased spending where it matters, in player development (drafting, signings, etc.) especially, will result in an organization that, at some point, won't be afraid to step beyond their budget in order to sign exceptional players, much like Red Sox GM Theo Epstein was able to do this off-season.

After all- baseball is supposed to be a distraction from the chaos that surrounds us in the "real" world; when your distraction takes on qualities too similar to those of the "real" world, you have to expect outcries from dedicated fans who are left once again without a reasonable means of diversion. As I've said many times this off-season, I'm more then willing to give Alderson and company enough time to right this ship; I truly hope, for the fans' sake, that it'll be smoother sailing sooner than later, because I'm not sure how many fans might jump the plank permanently this time if the team fails to do so within the next few years. Sadly, they'd be 1000% justified- let's hope it doesn't come to that.