Reese Kaplan - Mets' Decision Making

Let’s take a quick look at the decision making processes used during the 2014 season.  The Mets are slipping further and further into irrelevancy but the team turns its familiar tone deaf ear to the cries of the fans: 

Signing Chris Young – looking at a steadily declining body of work and offering over 12% of your budget to a guy who no one else even seemed to notice.

Not addressing the obvious 1^st base situation – allowing both Ike Davis and Lucas Duda to begin the season as a two-headed lefty platoon.

Bobby Abreu – he was the first call-up when the team felt they needed a veteran pinch hitter.  He’s failed miserably at that role but surprisingly done well playing in games in which he starts.  How is a 41 year old outfielder a way to build for the future?

Juggling the outfielders – after inexplicably signing Chris Young, they benched the best defensive outfielder in Juan Lagares in order to find at-bats for Eric Young.  Now they've added Kirk Nieuwenhuis to the mix, too.

Allowing the Ruben Tejada era to continue – starting off even worse than 2013, they eventually farmed out his backup, Omar Quintanilla, in order to declare him the number one.  Even with a scorching hot week he’s batting .254 for the month of June.  His defense is worse than ever, he’s not stealing bases and about the only surprising offensive development is that he’s slugged two home runs. 

The Wilmer Flores debacle – they brought up the hot hitting Flores and buried him on the bench until his bat went cold, creating a fait accompli.  He was unceremoniously sent back to Las Vegas where newly promoted Matt Reynolds is tearing up pitching at the new level while playing shortstop.  So not only did they do everything they could to ruin the young man in Queens, now they’ve done the same in AAA as well.

Eric Campbell – another example of taking a sweet swinging player and doing everything possible to stick his bat into a deep freeze.

Andrew Brown – are we seeing a pattern here?  The man was lethal against all kinds of pitching in AAA yet would only start once per week against lefties only and they wonder why he didn’t keep up the hot hitting.

John Lannan – they took a guy who wasn’t performing well, coming off bad recent history and shoehorned him into a role he was never prepared to play.  It was the pitching equivalent of promising playing time to Chris Young, minus the oversized paycheck.

Kyle Farnsworth and Jose Valverde – it seemed important to bring in pitchers with a track record many years ago of being effective and then being surprised when success (and youth) didn’t magically reappear.

Terry Collins – after finishing worse in year two than year one then repeating the same underachievement, instead of showing him the door they rewarded him with a contract extension.

Standing pat at the trade deadline – the last time I looked the Mets had Daniel Murphy pricing himself out of a job, Bartolo Colon and Daisuke Matsuzaka pitching themselves onto other teams’ radar (Thursday night notwithstanding for Dice-K), Bobby Abreu demonstrating a DH-in-waiting career reboot, and six outfielders with no real shortstop at the major league level…yet they are delusional enough to say they can’t overhaul the roster for fear of falling out of contention.  Dillon Gee’s return makes a starting pitcher superfluous, Wilmer Flores and dare I say Eric Young make it possible to trade Daniel Murphy.  For a cash-strapped franchise, they should see what Flores at minimum wage could do rather than inventing ways to force a $3 million reserve player into the lineup.