Mike's Mets - Spending Wisely is Cool

 

By Mike Steffanos November 13, 2020

Nice feature on former Marlins president of baseball operations Michael Hill in the New York Post yesterday. He was the first person interviewed by Sandy Alderson for the same position on the Mets. If the reporting is correct, he's still the only one the Mets have interviewed for the position. That might be the case, or it might be indicative that the organization does a lot better job of not leaking everything that happens to the press any more. According to Mike Puma, the piece's author, the final selection will be made in the next week to 10 days, so I'm assuming there will be names of other interviewees popping up shortly.

Hill did a good job with a very small budget in Miami, and I guess the thinking is he could utilize the creative thinking he developed working for the Dollar General of Major League Baseball while enjoying a real budget. The Mets haven't really done a tremendous job of finding value in the marketplace, particularly when it comes to building organizational depth, so Hill's skills in that area could provide useful. It's going to take some years before the farm system builds into a dependable pipeline of talent. In the meantime, talent is going to have to be mined from other places.

Sandy Alderson didn't have a large market budget when he was GM of the Mets. He also didn't have a really great track record of finding value with his free agents signings, as Joel Sherman noted in the Post. I never blamed Alderson for everything that went wrong during his tenure, by that point I don't think anyone could have come in here and made much of a difference. The Wilpons with money to spend were a large enough obstacle to the Mets success, without money it was pretty hopeless. Still, if the Alderson regime did a better job of finding value with the money they did spend, things could have been at least a bit better.

That's basically why I'm not rooting for the original band to get back together again. J. P. Ricciardi can stay with the Giants as far as I'm concerned, and Paul DePodesta can stick with the Browns. As a group, they did a nice job improving scouting and development with the limited resources ownership handed them, but they fell short when it came to getting maximum value out of what they were given.

The point of hiring Hill or someone with similar experience would be to utilize those abilities to get maximum value out of whatever money the team has to spend. Even if Steve Cohen allows his baseball people to run the largest payroll in the game, it would still be important to spend it wisely. At his press conference, Cohen mentioned that he could give his people permission to spend on multiple top free agents, and the likelihood would be that 5 years down the road the team finds itself saddled with a bunch of bad contracts.

Cohen was right, of course. Spending wisely at the top of the market is important. You have to plan ahead intelligently if you want to be competitive year after year. You have to consider the implications of that contract all of the way through. If the system does its job of producing good and great young players, you need to plan ahead for what it might cost you to keep some of these players long-term — so important to building a team identity. These decisions can really impact sustained success.

But it's also important to find value to fill out your roster. A team's success in finding value lower down the roster is likely going to be the difference between having a good team and having a great one. That's why, at least to me, it's so interesting to watch for who Alderson is interviewing for the baseball operations job. Hill is a guy that has a track record of finding value without a huge budget, and that's still going to be a desired skill even without extreme payroll constraints.

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