Tom Brennan - "A REASONABLY COMPETITIVE PRODUCT"

(pictured above: half stepping ownership)

Tom Brennan - A "REASONABLY COMPETITIVE PRODUCT"

How's that for a drab title?

Maybe I should have used something more catchy, like:

"HONEY, I SHRUNK THE FAN BASE."  

Maybe a title for another day.

But for this team, today, I will stick with DRAB.

Some teams settle for nothing less than being at the top of the heap.  Some teams buy dumb and bring us DRAB.

Baseball is a game where success is hard to accomplish every year.  We all know that.

Unexpected injuries, not knowing when veterans will begin to decline, and how precipitous a decline that will be, make it a constant battle to stay at or near the top.

With appropriate advance requests for forgiveness for even mentioning the name of the team that rhymes with Skanks, the Y..ks and Red Sox are both highly and ruthlessly driven to be one of baseball's top, and successful, teams. 

Anything but DRAB.

They get there through a willingness to spend big, to be brilliantly strategic, and to draft and sign prospects (domestic and international) that can be game changers.

Season changers. 

 

Decade changers.

 

Banner hangers.

The Mets don't really compete that way.

They mostly just try to put a reasonably competitive product on the field.  With fingers crossed.

They try to spend about the same, perhaps a bit more, than the average team, but are overly budget-conscious, not seeing that giving the fans a real feeling that this team will win it all (rather than assembling a fingers-crossed roster) will put enough fannies in seats to recoup the extra spending on elite players.

Half-stepping spending normally results in mediocrity, with an outside chance of sneaking into the playoffs, but an equal or greater chance of imploding.

Astute fans get that, and go to fewer games, if any.

Less revenues are the result.

But if you don't spend big, you can't implode while also spending big but poorly, the worst of all worlds, making you look grossly incompetent, so you half-step spending.

And hope for a lot of luck.  Luck be a lady tonight.  Please.

They also don't spend enough to have a first class drafting and international signing apparatus...resulting in a pipeline that historically produces few stars, especially of the offensive variety.

They seem to not fully realize that astutely drafting and developing, let's say, a star outfielder who can make $10 million his first 5 seasons is economically better than signing a Cespedes type for multiple years at $28 million per year, a Frazier, a Bruce, a Swarzak, a Vargas, etc., especially since older players have higher injury rates.  Just ask David Wright.

Doing just enough to hopefully market a reasonably successful team, in hopes of a miracle Sprint to a World Series in 2015, will more often result in the favorite word associated with the Mets:

IMPLOSION.

And words like DISGUST; BORING; BETTER THINGS TO DO; SICKENING; AGGRAVATION; TURN IT OFF ALREADY; yes, even SUCKS.

Those, after all, are abused long-time fan's reactions that I am hearing with greater frequency...fans who want the darned glass to be FULL and not almost always half empty.

Those reactions are our REASONABLE response.

We hate implosions.

We don't want DRAB.

"Honey, where's the clicker?  I don't want to watch a drab team, can you put on the exciting one instead?  Thanks, my little cupcake."

P.S.  This just in...Jake deGrom is in Family Court, suing for non-support, and asking, "when does free agency start?"

P.P.S.  Playing the kids in game 2 last night was NOT DRAB, and ought to happen more often, regardless of paycheck size.  But PJ Conlon appears to be outmatched by higher level hitters this year.