Reese Kaplan -- When an Experiment Fails, Do Not Repeat Hoping for Success

One of the many things that the media covering the New York Mets, their fans and the rest of baseball found frustrating about the Wilpon era team was the front office's propensity to build a roster not with the best available options, not with splashiest minor leaguers getting promoted, but instead with players who enjoyed a moment or two of competency that the often misdirected ownership felt was a bargain-priced way to pull one over on the rest of the world.  

Let's call it the great Michael Wacha Experiment.  

For those of you who chose to cover your eyes with an impenetrable mask providing blindness, fill your ears with more than just cotton balls to drown out the moans and jeers during the pitching performances, or fill your brain with enough adult beverages to excess to cloud over your otherwise infallible memory to make you blot out what the one awful year of 2020 was all about.  

The only good part of the Wacha experiment was the fact that the season in 2020 was mercifully brief and it therefore hampered the numbers from becoming even worse than they turned out to be.

Now to be fair, back in 2018 Wacha delivered perhaps the best pitching of his St. Louis Cardinals career.  He took a no-hitter into late innings which finished up as a shutout victory and one-hitter when a single in the 9th took him out of the record books.  

The overall numbers were decent -- there was an 8-2 record, a 3.20 ERA and a .221 batting average against.  Considering that for his career Wacha was not this level of performer, you'd have to wonder if he'd made a significant breakthrough or just had a half-season of good luck before an oblique strain kept him off the mound for the rest of the year.  

Unfortunately, 2019 was more of the usual for Wacha in his arch-based hometown city.  He went 6-7 with a 4.76 ERA and once again his otherwise unimpressive strikeout to walk ratio remained under 2:1.  It was not surprising that St. Louis management felt after seeing him struggle through baseball there from 2013 through 2019 it had been more than enough and they unsurprisingly let him walk away as a free agent.  

The Mets did their usual shell game, looking to uncover the ace without being rooked and they signed the relatively bargain-priced Wacha to a one-year deal for just $3 million.  Unfortunately you often get what you pay for.

During the COVID-abbreviated 2020 season Wacha looked even worse than the 2019 version that performed at Busch Stadium.  For the Mets he went 1-4 over 7 starts with a 6.82 ERA and a nearly unprintable WHIP.  About the only thing he did right was improve his strikeout totals and reducing his free passes, but that didn't make up for the  46 hits given up in just 34 innings of work.  

The Mets cut ties with the man abruptly after one highly forgettable year where he signed for an identical $3 million with the Tampa Bay Rays.  He slightly improved to a 5.05 over 23 starts, finished with a losing record and was sent packing out town the day the World Series ended and they'd seen quite enough, thank you.

Now the truly puzzling aspect to Wacha's career was how he even found employment for 2022, let alone more than doubling his salary to the tune of $7 million up in Boston when it's hard to imagine there was a long line of suitors demanding he become one of their teams' five starting pitchers.  The joke, of course, was on the rest of baseball when Wacha somehow stayed healthy enough to make 23 starts, go 11-2 and kept the ERA down to 3.32.  He actually had a positive WHIP number of 3.1 and Boston is likely laughing all the way to the bank.  

That means this year someone will probably cross the $10 million threshold thinking that at age 31 he's a late bloomer and well worth whatever it takes to secure his services.  There have even been some obviously drunk baseball writing Mets fans who suggested a reunion was something the Mets should consider.

To be fair, I'm not merely picking on Michael Wacha but classifying him as a type that appealed to the last Mets management regime.  I could have just as easily picked on any other failed free agents or trade acquisitions that were met with yawns, head scratching or copious amounts of alcohol by the fans and media wondering what in the world was the Mets front office thinking.  

They weren't going after someone with a proven positive record but were instead trying to catch the proverbial lightning in a bottle performer who would somehow blossom here when he fizzled regularly elsewhere.  

Now that Steve Cohen and Billy Eppler are in charge, the team can't be headed in that same direction once again...or can they?  There's a hot rumor making the rounds that the Mets have put Andrew Heaney on their radar as a prospect to become a part of the New York starting rotation.  For a guy with a career 4.56 ERA, he finally put together a decent year for the Dodgers this past season when he went 4-4 with a 3.10 ERA to go along with an eye popping 13.6 strikeouts per 9 IP to go along with just 2.4 walks. 

For Los Angeles he was paid $8.5 million and will surely be looking for a big bump in pay off this one-year of isolated positive output.  Does this roster construction seem like the southpaw version of the great Michael Wacha experiment?  Wouldn't securing the services of Taijuan Walker had been a less risky endeavor?

Now every team is going to make some bad personnel decisions.  Even the current one can hang their heads over the acquisitions of Joely Rodriguez, Darin Ruf, Tyler Naquin and others.  No one gets everything right.  

However, it would seem to make more sense acquiring a player with multiple years of productivity recently instead of banking on someone turning 32 finally to have figured out how the game is played productively.