Mike's Mets - Masquerading as Wisdom

 By Mike Steffanos

Don't believe everything you read from the so-called experts. They can be every bit as uninformed as the guy on the next barstool over.

Just because something is stated unambiguously in a confident manner doesn't mean it is a fact. The rise of social media platforms allows folks to "do their own research" in an environment free from real expertise and rigid fact-checking. If you really want to believe something, there is no doubt that you can find plenty of corroboration to reinforce your beliefs. However, if you care about discovering what is true, you'll have to work much harder. You'll also have to be willing to, at least occasionally, deal with finding out that your preconceived notions were wrong.

Now folks in the mainstream media sources will tell you that their standards of journalism make them less prone to presenting a false statement as truth. In most cases, this is true. The standards to which these organizations hold themselves work against the spread of outright lies. It's far from a perfect system, but it does pretty well, particularly outside of political reporting. I promise we won't get into that here.

I came across something the other day that really threw me. It wasn't a piece about the Mets, although they were used as an example. Rather, it was Ken Rosenthal's piece on the A's prospective move to Las Vegas in The Athletic. Much of Rosenthal's writing was about how historically bad Oakland's team is this season. They're a legit contender to displace the 1962 Mets as the worst baseball team of the modern era. Rosenthal believes that Oakland's historic level of suckitude creates an unfair advantage for the NL West teams that don't win their division to take a Wild Card spot just by virtue of playing 13 games against Oakland.

That is true to a point. Still, as the Mets proved several times in their first 1/4 of a season in 2023, you still have to win those damn games. Speaking of the Mets, Rosenthal made this further point:

Again, the A's are not the first team to create competitive disparities by fielding an awful product. Just last season, under the more unbalanced schedule, the Phillies and Mets secured two of the three NL wild-card spots by going 16-3 and 14-5 against the 107-loss Nationals. The introduction of a third wild-card team, at least, left an opening for the Padres.

Mets fans have felt that Rosenthal has a bias against their team for a long time. I'm sure Ken would laugh at that, using the eternal boorish statement of every national writer, "every team's fans think I hate them." That could well be true, but for a seemingly pretty smart guy, Rosenthal does write stupid stuff about the Mets often enough.

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