To those that missed it yesterday, Happy Bobby Bonilla Day to all of you! Yes, July 1st is that infamous day that former Met Bobby Bonilla gets another installment on his deferred contract. People love to lament this deal, but at the time it was some very creative finance by both sides. The fact that Bonilla never excelled as a Met has nothing to do with the dealmaking. Yesterday’s $1M check to Bonilla is frankly insignificant compared to the current underperformance of the $350M 2026 team. It is also small change compared to what others like Shohei Ohtani are going to be getting in their extended future. The owners are currently proposing to eliminate the ability to offer salary deferrals in the collective bargaining agreement negotiations. We’ll see how that plays out.
Back to the current issues, there seems to be no end to the bad news. Freddy Peralta continues to sabotage his trade value for the midseason by having bad outing after bad outing. Yesterday’s line read: 4.0 IP; 7 H; 3 BB; 5 ER on 91 pitches. His ERA is just under 5 now for the first half of the season, and the way teams are hitting his fastball, one may wonder whether he will have any interested suitors around the trade deadline.
On second thought, maybe there will be lots of suitors for Freddy, Bo, Jorge, and others. You see, the Mets’ development system is breaking players at all levels. There is something fundamentally wrong that is turning gold into dust. If I were a rival GM, I would be very happy to buy low on some of these underperforming Mets because it is possible that many of them can be fixed. We have seen that before, whether it is a pitcher like Paul Sewald or a hitter like Carlos Cortez, when they get into another system their success multiplies. This is a very serious problem, because it is destroying the value of players that the team invests in. If I were Steve Cohen, I would bring in an independent group of auditors comprised of former baseball experts at all levels to review this system and make recommendations on how to fix it.
Meanwhile, Steve Cohen told the NY Post that he is worried about big contract holders opting in for 2027, handicapping his ability to acquire players that can help turn things around. The development system that produced gems like Benge and Ewing is sputtering, so there is not much hope on that front either.
Here is what you need to know:
Many people are calling for David Stearns to be fired. They want him to pay the ultimate price for reconstructing a team and having it fail. The problem is that there are not a lot of competent GMs just sitting on park benches waiting to be hired. Stearns did fail in this rebuild, but at least he had a plan and he executed it. The flaw may not have been in the plan itself, but in the assumption that a collection of working parts could be assembled into a working machine. In this case, the parts (players) all had the numbers to justify a greater outcome, but they did not come together and play as a unit. Then by overextending to correct the problem, there were injuries, slumps, and mental mistakes that sunk this team into a hole they could not crawl out of.
If Steve Cohen fires Stearns, he will spend the rest of the year searching for the equivalent and lose all that time understanding what went wrong and how to correct. Then the replacement would want to do their own re-build with potentially similar results. I think that the team has come to grips with their mistakes and should burden Stearns with implementing a solution as a condition of continued employment. Use the trade deadline to make adjustments to the costlier mistakes, find root cause and corrective action for the failing development system, and then continue building around the young players like McLean, Scott, Benge, and Ewing. Lindor and Soto must be part of the solution, so they should become part owners of the plan and fully bought into how it will be implemented.
None of us likes the current situation, but we have to recognize that this was brought about by too much rapid change. Eliminating the man with the power to correct it would only accelerate the chaos. We need to repair the damage, not create more.
9 comments:
Kin Ng
Chicago White Sox are 10 games ahead of the Mets. You want to fix the Mets. Move them to Nashville.
Why? You keep bringing her up. Did she do anything if significance with the Marlins?
Let’s see how Dave Peterson does in Chicago…
Peterson should be under less pressure in Chicago than he was in NYC, but it is still a big media city and they will jump on him if he does not live up to expectations.
She may be a bright star for Miami, but so was Stearns for Milwaukee. If you keep throwing away one (player or front office) for another, you create enough churn that the team never settles in. That is the point of the article.
I ran into Bonilla in the Mets spring training clubhouse one day. I mean, literally ran into him. I turned the corner and he was standing there, facing away, talking to someone. First impression? The broadest shoulders I had ever seen.
Paul is surely correct. Good analysis.
Frankly, I think that the most important problem the Mets must solve is what is going on in the development approach. I devoted some considerable space to the issue in my last post. The development issues impact every thing the organization is trying to do. When you can't figure out who you can bring up to the majors, it impacts all aspects of roster construction: from which free agents to sign and which positions, who you should hold on to and who you should trade, and if you can't figure out who to keep and why, neither can your potential trading partners feel confident about what they are getting. so that makes trades more difficult and you have to reduce the risk they are taking by adding more to a trade and/or giving up higher ranked players than otherwise would. It's a mess. And it also goes to show that the drafting and development of players is the most important element in creating a system capable of long term success and is also the one with the most consistent cost variance: it has the most impact on the cost curve and the variance. You want to narrow that variance so you can develop a reliable and predictable approach to your 'time alignment' issues and know what you need to invest in free agents, etc.
Right now the level of confidence in the developmental system is at a low point.
I am all with Paul on this, but I think we have to go beyond a group of auditors composed only of baseball people. If we are relying as we appear to on technology to the extent we do, we really need to bring in people who understand the data and can translate it meaningfully, people who understand how to change movement patterns and people who can help players discover their optimal movement patterns. The auditor group needs all of these people to give a full and complete assessment.
Ng built a Marlins team that went to the playoffs. She has worked for big market teams in NY, LA and Boston.
Post a Comment