A key question any free agent should ask, besides "what's the dollar signs?", is:
"Will I do well with the team?"
Well, our own writer, "Remember 1969", in a recent Mack's Mets article, reminded me not of a free agent deal, but of a trade, where the Mets traded Jeff Kent to get Carlos Baerga.
Baerga had been tearing it up in Cleveland, hitting .312, .321, .314, and .314 from 1992 thru 1995, ostensibly during his age 23 through 26 seasons. He had solid extra base pop in those years, and even stole 44 of 54 bases in those 4 seasons.
In the year of the trade, 1996, purportedly at age 27, he was hitting significantly lower, as in .267 for most of the season with the Indians. The Mets got him and (naturally?) he hit .193 in his 26 games as a Met, in spite of (if the stats are correct) striking out just twice in 91 Mets' plate appearances.
He then had two decent years for the Mets, but much more devoid of power, and generating just 105 RBIs in 1,050 plate appearances in those two seasons. With Cleveland, in contrast, he had back-to-back seasons with 105 and 114 RBIs.
As a Met, in slightly more than 2 seasons, he had a .267/.302/.373 slash line, and accumulated just 18 HRs and 116 RBIs, and was 2 of 9 in steals. In those 3 full seasons, the former three time .300+ hitter's on base % hovered around just .300. He suddenly, as a Met, started playing like a declining, aging veteran - while in his late 20's.
I don't know if it supports the "hitters do worse as a Met" thesis, or if perhaps Baerga may have fudged his age, as some Latin ballplayers in the past who were vying for signing bonuses were sometimes alleged to have done. He most likely did not, but it is a bit odd to me that he did well as a rookie at age 21, very well at age 22, and was terrific at ages 23-26.
If he was becoming a free agent instead when the Mets got him, perhaps the Mets would have given a mid 20s guy who was about to go into a steep decline the 1990s, inflation-adjusted equivalent of a 10 year, $341 million contract. Another cautionary tale for baseball teams who are being "bold with years and bucks", perhaps.
Anyway, Wikipedia reports thusly:
Baerga became the first second baseman since Rogers Hornsby in 1922 to have back-to-back 200+ hit, 20+ home run, 100+ RBI, and .300+ average seasons when he accomplished the feat in 1992–93.[2] He was a 3-time All Star in the 1992, 1993, and 1994 seasons.
He then started to decline in hitting, power, and speed at age 27. As soon as he became a Met, naturally.
He had a terrible year in 1999 after leaving the Mets after his slightly over 2 seasons, playing weakly in the majors and hitting a weak .273 in the minors...then dropped out of baseball for 2 years in 2000 and 2001. Maybe he just wanted to celebrate Y2K.
He returned to baseball in 2002 and did pretty well in a part time role for 4 seasons. Maybe he was just banged up as a Met. They say his knees got cranky. If so, maybe, just maybe, the Wilpons shopped poorly.
He actually (much to my surprise at the time) found the fountain of youth in his age 34 season with Arizona, putting up a .343/.396/.464 slash line in 237 plate appearances that year. In one season, about 5 years after his Mets tenure, Mr. 2 for 9 in Mets' steals stole 6 of 6 with the Red Sox. Odd, huh?
In any event, his Mets' performance was drastically below his Cleveland performance in the seasons immediately prior to when they got him. Wonder why?? The Mets' magic touch.
Jeff Kent, on the other hand, got lots of bad Mets press, even though he actually hit well as a Met in 1993, 1994, 1995, and 1996, where in 1,718 at bats (basically a 3 full season equivalent) he had 90 doubles, 10 triples, 64 HRs, and 252 RBIs, while hitting about ,280. He was only successful in steals 12 of 28 tries. Just slow, or was it something else, like insufficient motivation, maybe? Read on.
He had a short stay in Cleveland after that Baerga trade, then went to San Francisco, where he became a feared slugger.
In fact, in his post-Mets career, in 6,667 at bats, he had 313 doubles, 25 triples, 310 HRs, and 1,251 RBIs.
Remarkably, while getting older, the happier and perhaps more motivated and appreciated Kent was also much more successful in stealing - 82 of 114 as a post-Met.
Frankly, as an aside, I am puzzled how a guy with a .290 lifetime average, .500 slug %, 984 extra base hits, and 1,518 RBIs, including eight 100+ RBI seasons (all from a guy who made his MLB debut kind of late at age 24) is not in the Hall of Fame. Just because the press didn't like him?
(Oddly, his slugging % in nearly 200 post-season plate appearances was also an excellent .500.)
The Mets certainly miscalculated as to how good Baerga would be, and what the post-Mets trajectory of Kent would have been. Maybe they should have spent more time and effort trying to make Kent happy in Queens. And maybe considered a little harder whether health was why Baerga was playing more poorly in Cleveland before they pulled the mid-season trade trigger.
But Kent's superb post-Mets performance certainly supports the theory that players very possibly play better overall when they leave the Mets.
If the front office is not doing a deep dive to see if there are factors that make this sort of thing more than a Jeff Kent aberration, they ought to.
Consider how poorly both Francisco Lindor and James McCann did in 2021, as compared to prior years. How much of it was an off year, vs. how much of it was just playing for the Mets in their pitcher-friendly park? Do Mets players who do well for a while, such as Pete Alonso, Dominic Smith, Jeff McNeil, and Michael Conforto, tend to do worse over time, just because of the less-than-joyous atmosphere sometimes surrounding the Mets (or just perhaps due to coincidence)? Why have the Mets as a team hit in substandard fashion almost every season, and for quite some time?
Worth asking and investigating.
Around the time of the Baerga-Kent trade, they had 3 very talented acquirees who did very well - Bernard Gilkey, Lance Johnson, and John Olerud. A few years later, Mike Piazza came and did very well.
I am not doing a deep-dive analysis on Met player performance results post-acquisition and former Met player performance once gone. But the front office should.
Because if there are factors outside of a player's skills that inhibit Mets' hitters that are fixable, such as Citifield being a poor hitting ballpark, they might want to fix them. Pronto. That is, if the team is truly committed to playing "meaningful late October baseball" - all impediments to success (and surely there have been some) should be addressed.
10 comments:
I'm hoping this is the day Clark Kent leaves a comment. That would be Super, Man. Happy Ides of February, everybody.
I wonder what kind of career Kent might have had if he had stayed with Cleveland?
I think Kent would have done great in Cleveland. He was young while with them, and about to blossom. Unless he hated the city and wanted to play out west, and dogged it to force a trade.
It happens - just seems to have happened with James Harden and the Nets.
Interestingly enough, the Indians turned around and traded both Kent and Vizcaino to the Giants for Matt Williams, who probably helped Cleveland to the pennant in 1997.
Sort of makes me wish the Mets had dealt directly with the Giants.
Bob W.
Waiting for our Pacific coast commenters to check in. The eastern half of the US readers clearly kicked their Kent cigarette habit.
So coincidence that a slightly better than average hitter all the sudden became a hall of fame hitter when he got to the Giants in the late 90's?
I don't think it is a coincidence.
My guess is it is three things: 1) Barry Bonds as a lethal teammate. Lifts all boats. 2) Unhappy players (less press trash out west) probably under-perform, as it impacts motivation. Hitting around Bonds must have been a blast. 3) Perhaps Shea robbed him of extra base hits....it, like Citifield, tended towards "hitter unfriendly" environs.
I'll throw in a 4th - the Mets stunk in those years, like a cloud hung over them.
I did not look at his home v. away splits in his Mets years, to see if the latter was a factor.
Bob W, the Mets' trades and free agent moves under the Wilpons should all have been checked by adults before the trigger was pulled.
Daniel Murphy? How many articles did I write in the fall of 2015 pleading for the Mets to sign Murphy and trade Duda? Too many. Deaf ears.
To long-time Mets fans, Tom's article rings all too true - that so many players are more successful outside the big apple than when they are here. New York is a pretty unique place to play - with many distractions and temptations. Read any number of the autobiographies of former Mets players (Dykstra's "Nails" comes to mind) and you can see that it takes much more than just baseball talent to survive. I wouldn't accuse any of the players in this article of abuses, but there is more to the story than just bad luck or an invasive press corps.
Paul, for many, many years, it was less of a problem for the Yankee players. Success breeds success.
There is this negativity with the Mets - they need to dominate the town again and make that go away.
Post a Comment