Cautious Optimist -- A New Day Dawning

 

You may not believe it, but I did not have white hair before the current baseball season began.  Golf is all I have left to carry me through the summer and into the Fall, when I can be entertained/depressed by the Jets. 

If I had only grown up privileged or at least with different sports alliances.  I sometimes wonder whether it would have made a difference, and if so, in which direction.

After all, there is something noble, if not rewarding, about supporting the misfortunate and misunderstood.

Alas, the Jets and Mets are both owned by billionaires so they are hardly among the downtrodden and misfortunate.  Misunderstood?  I don't think so.  We know all too well what both teams are, or at least have been, and, for all I know, may well continue to be.

But for some reason that I am not sure that I can explain,  I truly believe that today (or yesterday) marked the first day in the rest of my life aa a Mets fan.

As of right now, It's a New Day Dawning in Metsland, and I feel fine

Of course I know that statement is both obvious and banal, but as a philosopher by trade I have nothing against either.

But I mean for it to convey not merely a note of genuine optimism, but a sea change.  For as I see it, while not everything about the Mets has changed as of today, and while the immediate future remains murky at best, the Mets have not just changed course, they have taken the first serious steps along the pathway to sustained success that both RVH and I, each in our own way, mistakenly attributed to them during last offseason.

I don't want to speak for him, even if I could, so I will confine my reflections to my own premature assessment of the wisdom of the path they had chosen.

Roughly I understood the Mets to have broken with the past last offseason while setting up an execuable plan to experience success both in the mid term and for years thereafer.

As I saw it 

I understood the Mets to have adopted a several stage approach to ensuring long term success.  The first step was to break cleanly with the past, which they accomplished by jettisoning by trade or free agency, three of the core players that had taken the team deep into the 2024 post season.  The FO determined that the core had gone as far as it could and maintaining it would only prove to be a hurdle to getting on a more promising pathway to success.

I agreed with the overall assessment of the team and both the ceiling of a team constructed around the existing core, and more importantly, the roadblock to getting on a more promising path any further reliance or investment in the core would likely become.

We can disagree about the specific decisions they made in saying goodbye to Alonso, McNeil and Nimmo, but I am hard pressed to believe that many among us thought staying the path with minor adjustments here and there would have been a better overall strategy for success.

Second, the FO also recognized that, no matter what the baseball publications thought of their farm system,  no matter the quantity or quality of prospects within it, the total number of high end talent and its distribution both in position and in readiness to contribute to the majors was nowhere near where it needed to be.  I fully agreed with this assessment.

The approach the FO took to remedy the situation was, in effect to buy time while staying highly competitive.  Buying time would allow the team to draft or trade for additional prospects and to develop those already in the pipeline.  Staying competitive while doing so is all a fan base could reasonably ask for.    And the FO believed, given the talent still on the roster, competitiveness could be assured by filling the gaps of the departed with highly competent replacements on short term contracts, thereby blocking no one among the prospects and minimizing overall investments in FA.

We can agree that the strategy failed miserably, but not completely.  The FO managed to put together one of the best bullpens in the majors at relatively low cost, but was unable to duplicate that performance anywhere else on the field.  

That is an understatement.  In all honesty, most of the trades and signings of position players has been a flat out disaster.  The team has been anything but competitive.  Worse, it was unwatchable and expensive.  It really simply stunk -- in ways few of us thought possible.

But it's worked out for the better -- and here's why

The original plan was never going to work. Two years of a competitive team would not have provided enough time or opportunity to collect talent across the diamond and to find enough of it at different levels to create the necessary time alignment that sustained results require.

Worse, had the team been successful enough this year to compete for a wild card or for a division title, we likely would have been buyers at the deadline forced to trade at least some of our valued prospects for immediate help.  We would have traded the future to some extent for the possibility of immediate success, which can never be the right approach when an organization already has too few genuine prospects unevenly distributed by position and readiness.

The best thing that could have happened did.  We weren't just bad, we were horrendous and loaded with high performing relievers and back-ups on expiring contracts.  We had lots of players we would not have had on the roster had we not adopted the wrong strategy in the first place.  And we had these players at virtually every position teams in competition for the playoffs are looking for!!

What good fortune.  No pretense here of good planning.  Just pure luck.

I don't know how many times during the season I wrote lamenting the absence of quality infielders throughout the upper regions of the farm, or how bereft of talent in the outfield beyond Morabito those same affiliated teams were.  Not to mention, no one within a metaphorical mile of the majors ready to play either 1B or 3B.  And if that weren't enough, I noted that beyond Santucci and Tong, no pitcher in AA or AAA gave any indication that they were ready to compete for a spot in the major league rotation.

I was wrong about that, as Zac Thornton has made clear.  But I was not wrong about anything else I claimed about the state of our farm affiliates.  I was not some sort of savant.  It was obvious to anyone willing to look carefully.  We were counting on the likes of Baty, Vientos and Mauricio to carry us to the wave of infielders three or more years away from competing for a major league roster spot.  That was never a plausible expectation.  Never.

So let's look at what's happened over the past week or so

We don't need much in the outfield and won't for a few years, but through the draft and deadline trades, we have added more potential promising prospects than we would have otherwise -- had the original ill-conceived strategy actually worked out.

But that's nothing compared to what we have accomplished on the infield.  Before the trade deadline period, we had only Voit and Snyder as possibilities before the likes of Pena and Asigen made their way to Queens.  And you know I'm right, because one of the few interesting discussions we all had with one another was whether Ewing should be shifted to 2B.  And those like me who were opposed to this idea were mostly worried about how few outfielders we had on the farm who could conceivably replace Ewing.

Now, we not only don't have to think about moving Ewing to 2B, we think only about how quickly we can move Semien out of 2nd and who among the handful of potential replacement for him will emerge as his replacement and how soon they will do so.

And there's more.  We may be just a year away from having the fastest and among the finest fielding infields and outfields in the majors.

Sure we are still a bit short of power, but if only two or three of the individuals we have drafted or picked up during the deadline make the roster, we will be one of the few speed burning teams with capable power.

As to pitching, we have a ways to go, but we have more arms who have established some area of excellence who will be vying for a spot on the roster in a year or two.  We are exactly where we never could have been had the original plan worked out -- this season.  And we are here only because we put that plan in place and other than succeeding in the bullpen failed everywhere else.  We traded away that bullpen, and changed the dynamics of our farm system entirely.

Truly sometimes it is better to be lucky than good.

I'm not an idiot or a Polyanna.  There's more to be done and it's possible that it will all blow up.

I recognize that.  We have three major offseason moves to make.  Two of these involve the pitching staff. We need two veteran top flight starting pitchers.  Maybe only one until the trading deadline next year, but two by the playoffs.  I think there is no choice but to go all in on Skubal.  Bichette's money will come off the books the first year of Skubals contract.  

I am not ready to trade Lindor.  Of course I wish he and Soto had a better relationship, but I view their forms of leadership as complementary, not conflictive. 

We need to put together a new bullpen.  

People who read my posts know that in my book the two most important parts of the team are starting rotation and back of the bullpen.  There is no point in trying to cut corners on either.  The one thing Stearns did very well in Milwaukee and pretty well here, so far, is to put together a bullpen. We have a few potential pieces in the minors, but most of the reliever corps will come from trades and FA.

Skubal will be expensive in both money and years, but you need an ACE if you can find one.  An ACE makes everyone else better.  He reduces costs elsewhere as a result.  

The hardest job of the offseason will be finding creative ways of unloading the disastrous Senime contract, as much of the Senga contract as possible, and if he fails to perform, the remainder of Polanco's.

I know it's crazy to say, but it is only money.  It's much better to be in a position of having money rather than poor performance holding you back.  I'm sure Steve Cohen knows that as well.

Ever the optimist,  I am happy to end on this note.

Onward and Upward

We're on our way HOME.