Like 2005 All Over Again

For a team with a massive payroll, superstar players at four everyday positions with one in the rotation and one in the bullpen, a lot of the emphasis this spring has been on the team's farm system.

Indeed, youngsters Jenrry Mejia and Ike Davis are the toast of Mets camp, earning praise for their blossoming skills and potentially putting management in position to make tough decisions as April 5 draws ever closer.

The storyline surrounding those two, and Josh Thole and Fernando Martinez (remember him?) as well, is the greatest cause for optimism we've got.

I'm on record saying I see this 2010 Mets team as an 80-84-win club. After a 70-win season in 2009, almost anything in 2010 would come as an improvement.

But better than improvement is momentum.

Their minor league system looking not-quite-so-barren anymore, the Mets are starting to look a lot like their 2005 selves again.

I remember the 2005 team with great fondness. Sure they frustrated the hell out of us sometimes. Sure Willie Randolph didn't always know how to call for a double switch. And yes they ran out Kaz Ishii every fifth day for an incredibly long time.

But they also had the look of a team on the make. They'd imported Pedro Martinez (terrific that first year in Flushing) and Carlos Beltran (as bad as Pedro was good). We'd finally seen our first full seasons of David Wright and Jose Reyes, and we liked what we saw. And best of all, free agents at positions of need (catcher, first base, closer) would be available at the end of the season; management snapped those players up, and the result was the magical 2006 season.

After an atrocious 2004, 2005 set the whole thing up. To my mind, 2010 can do the exact same thing for 2011 and beyond.

Between Wright, Reyes, Johan Santana, and Jason Bay, we should have, at least, four very good players on 2011 roster. Depending on what they show us this year, you could very well put Beltran, Francisco Rodriguez, and Jeff Francoeur in that category too.

Imagine if Davis is ready to take over at first base, and if Mejia is ready to slot in as a No. 2-3 pitcher with Thole as his battery mate. Imagine if the Mets complement that group with a stud second baseman and solid arms in the rotation and bullpen.

We'd really be getting somewhere at that point.

Now, I concede that all of this optimism is based on about a week's worth of Spring Training, and I appreciate that Rome wasn't built in a day.

But I, for one, and am starting to look at this team a lot more positively. Even if 2010 isn't the year (and baseball's a funny game, it's not impossible that this team would contend for a playoff spot), it's beginning to feel like a tablesetter type of year.

And if we can show strong improvement over 2009 (eminently doable), it would go a long way toward restoring the organizational momentum that's been on the fade since September 2007.

New Mets!

- A.F.O.M.G.

Info Like It Oughta Be

It wasn't too long ago that Spring Training was one of the most frustrating times of the year.

Growing up, I don't want to say I was any more of a baseball fan than I am today, but somehow the advent of Spring Training came with more breathless anticipation than it does for me today. Maybe it's because time seems to move slower when you're young (i.e., I feel like I wake up every other day now and it's Christmas; when I was young the wait seemed interminable).

Back then I was desperate for information, but as I remember it, information was scarce. You had the stories in the local dailies, I'm sure, but the truth is that back then all I really read was the New York Times' sports section (I want to say we didn't start getting the Daily News until I was in high school).

Really my only Mets news came from the Times and from SportsCenter, which back then would give you about 30-60 seconds of Mets highlights in a given day, except for that one AWESOME day each spring when they would go down to Port St. Lucie to profile the Mets in a 2-minute segment.

I needed more; I needed to know everything I could about the team, but information was always scarce. Spring Training was the biggest tease of them all; somewhere you knew real, live baseball was being played, but you couldn't watch it, and you could hardly read about it. 

Zoom forward to the present and the information age has finally met the Mets. The evolution in Mets Spring Training coverage has been going on for years now, but I feel like it's reached another level this year.

That's thanks, in most part, to MetsBlog, which has really done an outstanding job covering the team from Port St. Lucie.

Say what you want about their editing standards or their dot-dot-dots, but the sheer amount of original content they're providing right now is really astounding.

Before the games started, it got to the point where it felt like information overload. There would be random videos of people throwing but you couldn't see the catcher, and videos of hitters swinging but you couldn't see what happened to the ball.

Things have shifted in the past week or so. Cerrone's interviews with the players make for great viewing, and his video yesterday of Jose Reyes really put my mind to ease about that whole last minute doctor's appointment thing. In the past I'd have had a few quotes to go on, but I'm sure I'd have had lingering doubts about his health; this year I could see it for myself.

Anyway, kudos to MetsBlog for keeping us all informed. If only I'd had this when I was 10 years old, then I'd really have been in business.

- A.F.O.M.G.

Beware of Falling Objects

Sometimes I wonder if there's anything the sports department at the New York Post delights in more than ridiculing the Mets.

This is especially true when the topic is the Mets' beleaguered new ballpark, Citi Field. First there was the article about the lack of outlets in the laundry room. Then came the report on Citi Field contractors with mob connections.

Yesterday the Post had (seemingly exclusive) word that the "C" in Citi Field above the jumbotron in center field had come crashing down, shattering into a million pieces and promising fatal injury to any fan who should ever find themselves on the receiving end of a cascading "I", "T", "I", and all the rest. 

"This thing was falling from on top of the stadium," the Post's source said of the 15-foot long, 35-pound letter. "Something falling from that height, it will definitely split your head."

In their defense, the Mets said that no ballgame would have ever been played under the kind of weather conditions that felled the C.

"A baseball game would not take place under such weather conditions," the team said. "No one was harmed, and no one was in any danger. The lens is in the process of being remade, and we are checking similarly constructed signs throughout the ballpark."

Translation: Nothing to see here, all is well!

It really never ends with this team. I'm used to them threatening my emotional and mental well-being, but my life is an entirely new level.

Oh well. For all the Post's coverage of Citi Field's failings, I really don't hate the new park. Like every other fan, there are elements of it that I dislike, some things I find confusing, and other things I would change if I called the shots.

The Post on the other hand seems to have a deep and abiding hatred for the place. Again, none of the other dailies are pushing the "Shitty Field" storyline quite like the Post (does that mean the Post has an axe to grind, or that they're more diligent?), and thankfully/deservedly the Post's readership is low compared to the Times and Daily News. All of which is to say that hopefully this story won't go viral. 

That doesn't make it any less true, however, and the truth in this case is kind of disturbing.

The good news, I guess, is that the Mets have 5 weeks to fix the C and check all the other letters. I'm sure they'll apply that patented Mets diligence (never fails!) to correcting this issue.

Or so we pray.

- A.F.O.M.G.

Me and D-Wright, Lunchtime Roll Dogs

Baseball is back, people!

You see it on SNY. You see it on Metsblog and ESPN. And you see it in the Pulitzer-worthy reporting in the Daily News and New York Times (the Post has some good stuff too every now and then).

Just open your local daily for the proof. I mean, you can go your whole life (or at least an entire offseason) waiting for a story like David Waldstein's in today's New York Times, "Mets' Wright Trusts His Work Ethic, and His Sandwich".

It turns out me and David Wright share more than a misplaced love of the Mets (and the attendant misery). That's right, we both love us a good old fashioned peanut butter and jelly.

"By his own estimate, Wright eats these sandwiches 75 to 80 percent of the 365 days on the calendar," Waldstein writes.

At that rate, Wright's PB&J consumption even tops the Glass Man's. Using his estimate, Wright's eating PB&J's 274-292 days per year.

I'm more of a once-per-workday type of guy; on the weekends or on vacation days, it's pretty unlikely I'm having a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Doing some quick, unscientific, and mostly unreliable math puts my number of PB&J's-per-year around 240, approximately 66% of all days in the year.

It's off Wright's pace, but it's enough to get people's attention. Put it this way, my peanut butter and jelly sandwich consumption rate is a topic of conversation among my colleagues at work (who almost uniformly find it strange).

Unlike Wright, I don't make them myself (Little Miss Citi does the honors, though for the record I never asked her to) and I don't put honey on them (though I've heard good things, and perhaps I should explore).

Anyway -- just a little ditty for you on a snowed-in Saturday.

- A.F.O.M.G.

Can You Mejia Me Now?

Just one question for all of us to consider as we grapple with the Jenrry Mejia hype (note: I learned yesterday that each of the last three words have "h" sounds in them) machine.

Why exactly do we want to make this kid the next Joba Chamberlain?

I know the town went nuts for Joba a couple years ago when he was a flame-throwing, fist-pumping, 8th-inning savior for the Yanks, but look at him now.

Now there's a never-ending circus of people who are either shouting that he'll never be as good as a starter as he was a reliever, or that he'll never reach his full potential if he remains a reliever, and besides, you'd be nuts not to want that kind of stuff working 7 innings a night.

Of these three points, only the last has legs. The other ones are only going to screw with Joba's mind; maybe he's tough enough mentally to drown out the voices/doubts, but maybe he's not. Even if he succeeds in either role, there are always going to be questions about whether the Yanks are getting top value out of him.

The question I have is, why put Mejia through that kind of ringer? Why institutionalize that question of whether he would maximize his value to the team if he were an arm out of the bullpen, rather than a starter?

It's one thing if it's September and, somehow, the team is in a pennant race and you want to give the kid a few looks out of the bullpen because you think he can come in and shut the other team down in a big spot. Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention.

But in April there's no necessity for having Mejia up with the big club, it would be, at best, a short-term luxury that could have disastrous consequences for his development down the road.

To my mind, this is where the Yankees went wrong with Joba -- it was fine for them to use him out of the pen in a pennant race in 2007, but they messed up when they decided to break camp in 2008 with him as a reliever, only to turn around a month or two later and make him a starter.

Let's try to avoid that situation with young Jenrry, shall we? If we let Mejia get another year under his belt in Double-A it sounds like there's at least a chance he's pitching at Citi Field regularly come 2011.

Why push it? Who among us thinks the 2010 season is going to prove worth mortgaging any element of our future on?

I realize that (one bullpen session in) he's knocking on the door, and after a full day of media attention, all of us hear the kid knocking. All of us see his tall, lanky frame and his 20 years of age and conjure up dreams of a reincarnated Dwight Gooden.

You know what? I'll bet you Doc would have been a hell of an 8th inning guy too. But imagine if the organization had never given him a full chance to realize his potential as a starter.

I'm getting ahead of myself. Mejia is almost certainly not another Doc.

All I'm saying is, give him a chance to prove it to us.

- A.F.O.M.G.