Since the end of the season, I've spent a lot of time pondering what it would take for the Mets to be a serious contender - not just to possibly squeak into the playoffs but legitimately contend for a title. When the Mets made it all of the way to the World Series in 2015, it was on the back of a terrific starting rotation. Those days are long gone. This year the Mets starters went 13-22 with a 5.37 ERA. Forget about trying to recapture the dominance of 2015, the Mets are going to need to regain competence and adequacy from their starting pitching in order to contend again.
The Mets have a lot of work to do to fix what's wrong with them. It's assumed that they will be very aggressive in the free agent market this offseason, although we don't know that for sure until we see how things play out. Even assuming that they are, I don't think we're going to see a fully-formed championship caliber Mets team take the field in 2021. They can certainly be good enough to make the playoffs, but it's almost undoubtedly a multiyear process to make the Mets a truly legitimate contender. Whoever will be making the decisions regarding personnel will need to demonstrate patience and long-term vision. Any decision regarding a Mets player, whether a current major leaguer or prospect, needs to be made with short- and long-term goals in mind, and with a full and accurate assessment of the value of that player.
If you were the GM, your task would be simple if the Mets were truly a couple of players away from being a really good team. You'd take whatever attractive prospects you had and turn them into major leaguers. It would be just as easy if the Mets were a disaster. You would trade whatever value there was on your Major League roster for prospects, and pick a time 3-5 years down the road when you wanted to compete again. Because the Mets are not currently in either situation, it becomes a lot harder.
After watching Brodie Van Wagenen in action for a couple of years, it seems pretty clear that he is not the man for the nuanced job of leadership that will be required going forward. It's also pretty obvious that Steve Cohen didn't see Brodie as the right man for the job, either. Cohen wouldn't have announced that Sandy Alderson was coming on in a superior role if he felt confident the Van Wagenen possessed the qualities he was looking for when he described Alderson as a "respected baseball executive who shares my philosophy of building an organization and a team the right way."
I could rehash all of Van Wagenen's mistakes here, but they've been discussed so often this year that I think most of us already get the idea. While his tenure in New York hasn't been an unmitigated disaster, Van Wagenen did not cover himself with glory with the moves he's made since taking over. He's traded away too much of the team's future for too little in return, starting with the trade for Robinson Cano that never really made any sense and has not looked any better in the intervening time. He has a history of giving up too much for too little in return, and didn't do a very good job at all managing the roster during the abbreviated season just completed.
1 comment:
John enjoyed the conversation last night and agree on BVW but hoping his one strong suit was his drafts but of course time will tell.
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