The Loveable Losers. The Miracle Mets. The Amazin's!
Yes, the New York Metropolitans have been called a number of things, but let's add another to the list: one hell of a consolation for Yankees fans.
In spite of the forgettable year that the Yanks had, I can't even be angry after seeing what Mets fans are going through. They missed out on the playoffs by one game ... on the last day of the season ... for the second straight year! That sort of thing is logically, statistically and mathematically unbelievable — and highly hilarious.
But I'm not just going to laugh at you, Mets fans. I'm going to do what everyone does in sports when something goes wrong: figure out who in the world is to blame for this Metastrophe (take that, headline writers!).
The man who was wholly blamed for the Mets' poor performance for much of the season was their former manager, Willie Randolph. But was he really so bad? Maybe he made the occasional questionable bullpen call, but every manager can be second-guessed, especially when your bullpen is as bad as theirs.
So was it the players? Pedro Martinez was injured for the majority of the year and was mostly ineffective for the rest of it. Jose Reyes choked in September (again), hitting .243 over the team's final 27 games. But baseball is a difficult sport, and players are allowed to get old or have bad months, especially at the end of a six-month season.
So if it wasn't the guys on the field and it wasn't the guy who got fired earlier in the year, whose fault was it? The guy is reportedly about to get a four-year extension: general manager Omar Minaya.
Mets GMs have been so poor in recent years that Mets fans don't even realize how bad Minaya is. Just because he hasn't had his Kazmir trade or Mo Vaughn signing, they think he's actually done a good job.
The problem with Minaya is that he's a flashy GM. Sometimes he likes to make a trade because he knows it'll get him headlines, and sometimes he likes to make trades just for the hell of trading. Does anyone remember when he took over the Expos for three years?
You probably recall that he made a big move in 2002 by acquiring Bartolo Colon from the Indians. You probably don't remember that the players that Minaya traded away included Cliff Lee, Grady Sizemore and Brandon Phillips. But hey, at least the Expos got to finish second for trading away the next 10 years of their franchise!
And what about with the Mets? He made some big moves, like signing Pedro, Beltran, Wagner and Delgado, and they mostly worked out well. But that was at the beginning, when he was righting a train wreck.
More recently, what was he doing signing Julio Franco to a two-year deal and counting on Moises Alou's production this year? Why did he never address the starting pitching situation? Did he even look at the bullpen roster before the season?
This is where those random and terrible trades come in. Two years ago, Lastings Milledge would have been the centerpiece in a deal for Dan Haren. This year, Minaya traded Milledge for Ryan Church and Brian Schneider.
Know who Ben Johnson and Jon Adkins are? Well that's too bad, because the Mets traded Heath Bell for them. Maybe he and his 3.58 ERA, 2.54 K/BB and 8.19 K/9 would have helped the Mets' struggling bullpen.
What about Jason Vargas and Adam Bostick? They didn't help the team this year? Perhaps Matt Lindstrom, who the Mets gave up for them, and his 3.14 ERA, would have. (If the name seems familiar, it's because Lindstrom closed out the Mets and their playoff hopes on the final game of the season).
The Mets shouldn't just be in the playoffs, they should be in the World Series. Yet, Willie Randolph gets fired in the middle of the night, and Minaya gets four more years of job security. I need to stop writing before I have a brain aneurysm.
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Dave Heck is a junior majoring in philosophy. He can be reached at David.Heck@tufts.edu.
