The Small Market Met Reporter

The Small Market Met Reporter

By Mack Ade – 11-21-11  

I woke up this morning with the intention of writing my thirteenth version of what the future will bring to the Mets; however, I abandoned the project after realizing that I had already wrote this story… err.. 12 times.

I then was going to move on to an anti-Wilpon family piece in which I give the ten reasons why… no… done that too.

There really isn’t that much going on in both the real and make-believe Met-land. In fact, the whole hot stove thing is sort of lukewarm. The Matt Kemp re-signing has been the biggest free agent story and he wasn’t even a free agent. What it also did was set the bar for high priced A-talented free agents. Every team is going to now have to pay at least $20million if they want one of the top dawgs.

Let me write that number another way:  $20,000,000.00 – 162 games - $123,456 per game, played or not.

So instead, I turned on one of the HBO channels and they had some documentary named Teenage Paparrazo”.  It was made by that Adrian guy from Entourage and it was about a 14-year old paparrazo (that’s an individual member of the paparrazi), trying to compete with the other photographers that annoy stars like… well, Adrian. By the end of the documentary, the kid was an annoying, ego driven star and Adrian was frankly, the paparrazo annoying the kid.

Interesting.

I couldn’t help thinking while I watched that film that we’re all become small-market people chasing starts we’ll never see in our favorite uniform. Let’s face it,  Moneyball is like oral sex. It’s a nice appetizer, but was never designed as the main course (my friend Louie from Richmond Hill begs to differ).

I’m a Mets baseball writer. All I have been doing for the past five years is telling you that things will get better, that there are kids on the farm that will become stars, and, don’t worry, we’re just around the corner.

Now, stars with ending contracts are being traded to clear salary, others are simply not even traded, and my web site has doubled its hits because I feature stuff about kids that are projected to be stars some day.

I feel like I write about Cleveland.

I can’t even look at anymore articles about David Wright and it amazes me how people who write online actually believe that the talent the Mets will get from the two players they draft with those supplemental picks actually are going to pan out better than keeping Jose Reyes as your leadoff hitter.

Are you out of your fucking mind? I’m 64 years old and I’m supposed to wait around for, what, 4-5 more years for someone to possibly play as well as someone I could have signed six months ago?

Oh yeah, that’s right. I’m sorry. I write for a team that doesn’t have any more money and is too busy building new walls in a stadium that, in real estate terms, is already under water.

Joe D over at Mets Merized has been writing a lot about the future new Commissioner of Baseball. What amazed me were the comments on that story. Not one person called out Joe and said he was nuts.

The hiring of Sandy Alderson (and the firing of Omar Minaya) has been totally orchestrated by the current Commissioner of Baseball, who gave Fred Wilpon millions of reasons to get it done. This doesn’t seem to be a story.

Mets Blog said today that Jose will get $120mil/6-yrs. It was a prediction by Jon Heyman and didn’t have what team will give it to Reyes. It’s a prediction, which is a nice word for a rumor.

This is what small market sportswriters do.