Phone Day

I had to watch my 9-year old granddaughter, who had a virus, while my daughter was taking her other two to the dentist, so I got up early, wrote from 5:30AM (take that, Adam Rubin…) and got on the phones around 10am.

I called scouts, players, ex-players, soon-to-be-ex-players, team officials. Other writers, scouting site chiefs, etc.

Here’s what I walk away with today:

1.     The baseball world continues to leave the Mets on their own island. Agents aren’t suggesting to their clients that the 2012, 2013, or 2014 World Series is going to go through Queens, so not many, if any, top free agents are going to show much interest in joining New York.

2.     Everybody wants what they know they can’t have… Matt Harvey and Zack Wheeler. One scout told me “the chatter on these two are just about over”. They simply are not available.

3.     The other two “unavailable players” are R.A. Dickey and David Wright, for so many reasons that they are not worth going into here. They’re just not.

4.     That being said, no one in the Mets organization is telling anyone that everyone else isn’t in play.

5.     Overall, any phone calls from the Mets have dried up since they have lost five out of the gate post-ASG. Sandy Alderson continues to say that the team are buyers, especially for pen pitchers, but there’s nothing floating around (how this works sometimes… let’s say the Mets call and ask about ‘Joe Blow’…well, then the team ‘Joe Blow’ plays for begins to talk to the Mets… but they may also put the word out that ‘Joe Blow’ is in play with another team and, if you are interested in him, tell us what you are offering…  well, everything has just quieted up and no one had any good juice for me.

6.     I asked five guys (why are they always guys?) who the Mets best bargaining chips were and the consensus was Wilmer Flores, Jordany Valdespin, and Luis Mateo. The first two represent someone that could be slotted into a 25-man squad by the end of the day and that team would be able to continue their quest to make the playoffs. The third name, Mateo, would be the second man in a deal (I remember the key piece in a deal a few years back was an A-ball pitcher named Makiel Cleto. The deal simply wouldn’t go down without him being ‘thrown in’.

7.      I understand the Mets are winning big time today. Frankly, this probably won’t get the phones ringing yet.  A loss today, followed by six more, would change everything. So would seven wins in-a-row beginning today. We’ll just have to wait and see.