Reese Kaplan -- Let's End it With the Reunions!

Reunions are sometimes a lot of fun.  You rediscover people you haven’t seen in many years.  You reminisce about the good times you shared together.  Sometimes you strike up new relationships quite different than what you had back then. 

The flip side, of course, is participating in a reunion expecting everything to be as it was but finding out that time has not necessarily been kind.  You mentally start making notes of who gained the most weight, lost the most hair or whose career path didn’t evolve as expected. 

Personally, when I made a last-minute decision to attend my high school reunion it coincided with a medically induced weight loss and it let me be a part of the “in” crowd for the first time.  While flattering to my ego, I soon realized that as much as it was perhaps some maturity on the parts of my old schoolmates, it called to mind the old Groucho Marx joke about never wanting to belong to a club that would have someone like me for a member. 

This nostalgic flashback both good and bad came to mind with the parallel to the New York Mets and how often they’ve gone back to the people with whom they’ve once before parted ways only to sign them back when they are older and their skill sets have changed.  I’d gotten into a conversation recently with more than one Mets fan who advocates just such a reunion with Daniel Murphy who is set to become a free agent.  While you can argue day and night about the foolishness of having let him walk away for relatively little money compared to what he provided the Nationals, this season he’s only been up 159 times.  He hit .306 with 5 HRs and 15 RBIs over that stretch – down a little from a 2^nd career typical Murphy output – but .306 with 20 HRs and 60 RBIs is still productive.

The problem, of course, is that he’s going to be going into his age 34 season, the injuries are likely to become more frequent and is defense skills which were never very good are not likely to improve.  Furthermore, given his output in Washington he’s in a price stratosphere north of what the Mets are willing to entertain. 

Last year, however, they were fine with doing just that when it came to a reunion with Jay Bruce.  He had earned $13 million with the Mets after picking up his option for 2017 and his current deal with the Mets in his age 31 season has been a total flop due to a myriad of injuries to his hip, his foot and his back.  Like Murphy, he was never known for his defensive prowess and there’s been talk of shifting him to 1B where it so happens the Mets biggest power threat who has driven in over 140 RBIs over the past full season’s worth of ABs. 

Of course, the reunion tour is a page right out of the Mets’ playbook.  Let’s see, just off the top of my head there have been second times around with Rusty Staub, Tom Seaver, Bobby Bonilla,  Jason Isringhausen and the aforementioned Bruce.  I'm not even getting into re-signing their departing free agents.  Have they ever worked out? 

Yet every time a player who was formerly in orange and blue becomes available the chatter starts up about the desire to have a second player marriage.  Remember talk of Carlos Gomez, Lucas Duda and others in the recent off season?  The lack of original thought and the fear of trying something new is especially frustrating to people actually interested in winning. 

Of course, the discussion many people are having right now is about the team getting younger and more athletic.  Somehow adding aging players whose best days are behind them hasn’t worked over the past several years of the current administration, so we HOPE that a new regime will actually take over and the approach will change.