Mike's Mets - Finding Value

 

By Mike Steffanos

If the Mets are to take a step forward under David Stearns, it will be because the organization finally figures out how to unearth value in building a deeper roster.

With the regular season all but over, we await the official beginning of the David Stearns era with the Mets. Although there has been plenty of speculation regarding what that might mean for the club, we won't really know what sort of changes Stearns might bring to this organization until the new PBO officially takes over. That should happen sometime on Monday. The time will depend on whether the suspended Mets-Marlins game from Friday needs to be completed to determine a Wild Card spot or seeding.

I hope Stearns's arrival will help the organization kick things up to the next level. There has already been a lot of improvement. The Mets team Stearns will take control of in October has been on an upward trajectory for a while despite this season's disappointing performance on the field. They've become a club that handles itself well in the MLB draft — no small achievement when you look at how bad they were in drafting amateurs in the early years of this century. Under Steve Cohen, they're also finally being aggressive with international signings. The Mets are looking to build on that strength with all the upgrades they made to player development over the last couple of years. Finding talent is nice, but the real goal is to take those talented kids and turn them into Major League ballplayers.

Even for a club that drafts and develops well, it's crucial to be adept at getting talent onto the roster in other ways. An essential method of accomplishing this is to turn other teams' trash into your treasure. This is a subject that I've been writing about here for a while. The Mets have been mainly on the wrong side of this: Justin Turner, Paul Sewald, and Rafael Montero are former Mets who went on to great success after the club cut them loose. This has been happening to the club for a while. I wrote a piece in February about Darren O'Day and Dan Wheeler, a couple of young relievers the Mets had in the aughts who went on to great success with other teams.

Tim Healey wrote a piece in Newsday a couple of weeks ago, "The Mets' Paul Sewald lesson isn't what you think." In it, Healey made a point about the club's mishandling of the reliever that captures my feelings:

You might think you know what comes next here. It should be a roasting of the Mets for letting another One Who Got Away get away, for not knowing how to get the most out of their own players, for being so inept or so enamored with others’ players that they don’t understand what is right in front of them.

Wrong. Maybe the above is true, but their real Paul Sewald lesson is different — and crucial to incoming president of baseball operations David Stearns' overarching goal of building a perennial playoff team. The Mets need to be much better at turning fringe players into impact players.

The "One Who Got Away" is a popular subject for the New York media, whether it's about Major League ballplayers like Paul Sewald and Justin Turner or prospects like Jarred Kelenic. The Mets haven't covered themselves in glory over the past couple of decades in identifying these players. For instance, the Mets had a bunch of possibilities for the bullpen at the beginning the year, some quite interesting. As the season concludes, none of them looks like a long-term answer. But, as Healey points out, "[The Mets] beefed-up analytics department ... and newly opened pitching lab in Port St. Lucie, Florida, are reasons to believe that can change.

To finish reading this article on Mike's Mets, please click here.