What Does Jack Think?

Jack thinks that Jenrry Mejia wants to win – and that’s something to like about him.

Did you see Mejia’s reaction to the home run he gave up to Justin Upton last week? There he was, throwing his glove, screaming at himself, squatting on the mound. Unprofessional? Yes. Cause for concern? No. A reason to be optimistic about his future? Absolutely.

Let’s put this in perspective for a moment. This was just Mejia’s second start of the year, in a season where even the most bright-eyed optimist can’t see the Mets competing for a division title. The 2014 season will almost certainly be the sixth straight in which the Mets finish under .500. It’s easy to believe that a loser’s culture has permeated this franchise, even if only on a sub-conscious level. That’s just an unavoidable consequence of years of mediocrity on the field and criminal incompetence off of it.

Mejia has come up through this culture and has already spent parts of four seasons with the big club. He’s been jerked around by the front office, which took a successful minor-league starter and put him in a major-league bullpen before he was ready. He’s had to come back from two elbow surgeries since then, which has stunted the normal course of his development. As the Mets have stockpiled young arms, Mejia has become something of a forgotten man in the past few seasons.

But there he was, on the mound in Atlanta and holding his own before Upton’s moon shot. There was no reason for Mejia to be that upset about Upton’s home run. No pitcher in the world likes giving up a dinger, yes, but Mejia’s over-reaction revealed an internal fire that should give Mets fans excitement about his future.

You can teach a player to tamper his reactions to adversity. You can’t teach a player to care enough about a single result to have an unprofessional reaction to adversity. Mejia has the desire – now he just needs to learn how to channel that desire. That’s the attitude I want to see in a young player – especially one who has had to deal with the trials and tribulations of being a Mets farmhand for parts of eight seasons now.

Mejia looks to be locked in as the fifth starter, and the Mets owe it to him to give him time to settle into the role. The Las Vegas rotation has Daisuke Matsuzaka, Rafael Montero and Noah Syndergaard waiting in the wings, but Mejia deserves a spot in the rotation at least until the All-Star Break. I think that if the Mets give him that much time to get comfortable, they won’t even be thinking about replacing him come July.

Jack is very happy that Jose Valverde is the Mets’ closer.

Hear me out on this one. I’m not happy that Bobby Parnell’s season is over, but not because I think he would have been substantially better than Valverde. I’m unhappy because the Mets had two chances to trade Parnell – first at last year’s trade deadline and then again in the off-season – but were seduced by the closer myth and failed to act. The 2014 season and Valverde’s performance in the closer role will serve to reinforce some important lessons for the Mets’ brass.

The first lesson is that closers aren’t nearly as hard to find as baseball people make it out to be. At any given time, there will be five to seven elite closers in baseball – pitchers that are good enough to lock down with multi-year contracts that will save 95 percent of the games they enter for the length of that contract. Think Craig Kimbrel in Atlanta or Koji Uehara in Boston.

Parnell isn’t in that class. If you had ranked closers from, say, the sixth-best to the worst going into the 2014 season, Parnell would’ve fallen somewhere in the middle. What you also would have noticed, however, is that there really isn’t much difference between #6 and #30 anyway – and that teams can often find someone better than #30 by scouring the waiver wire and bringing in a handful of non-roster invitees to fight for the job.

That’s what the Mets did with Valverde and Kyle Farnsworth, even as they prepared for another season with Parnell as the closer. Now Valverde is the man in the ninth inning and has done all right so far, even if he was victimized by Raul Ibanez in a save situation on Saturday night.

Meanwhile, the Cubs have already demoted Jose Veras ($4 million in 2014) from the closer’s role and the Athletics have done the same with Jim Johnson (making $10 million this season). Ask yourself – is it better for the Mets to have Valverde on a one-year, $1 million deal or someone like Veras or Johnson clogging up payroll?

Unless you can lock down a Kimbrel or a Uehara, the Jose Valverdes and Kyle Farnsworths of the world are always a better bet – especially for teams that aren’t going to win 80 games anyway. That’s the other problem with the closer myth – it propagates the notion that bad teams need good closers. Simply put, they do not.

Parnell was 22 for 26 in save chances last year. Swap Parnell out for Kimbrel and you have a 77 or 78-win team instead. Swap out Parnell for Heath Bell, who blew seven saves in Arizona and lost the closer’s job for part of the season, and maybe you have 71 or 72 wins instead.

What’s the difference between 71 and 78 wins? Nothing that’s worth paying Bobby Parnell nearly $4 million a year in 2014. Perhaps if the Mets had realized that sooner, they’d have another prospect or two at Las Vegas and Parnell’s busted elbow would be someone else’s problem.

Jack thinks that diving head first into first base is the stupidest thing a baseball player can do.

I don't want to waste my time explaining why to you. (Actually, I can do it in one sentence. The base runner does not get to the bag faster, he makes it harder for the umpire to make a call and increases his chances at injury.) I figure that 99 percent of you are saying, "of course it is," and the rest of you aren't very familiar with the game of baseball.

I will say this - I would have a system for addressing head-first slides into first base. The first time a player did it, he'd be fined heavily. The second time, he'd be designated for assignment and released if I couldn't trade him within 10 days. This is just common sense, people.