Latter Day A-Hern?

Let's play a guess-the-player game.

Player A had been considered an all-glove, no-bat prospect, but he silenced those critics by hitting .326 with Binghamton for half a season, and then hitting .303 with Norfolk the other half fo the season. His OPS with the two clubs was ..821 and .733, respectively. Some people questioned whether he was ready for big league pitching, but nevertheless, the next year he was a starter for the Mets on Opening Day.

Player B was beginning to get dogged with the same reputation, but he respondedwith a breakout year with the bat in 2009, hitting .289 with a .732 OPS. Some people were still concerned about his bat, but due to injuries, it began to appear likely that he would break camp as a starter on the Mets' Opening Day roster.

You may have been able to guess that Player B is Ruben Tejada, the 20-year-old shortstop who will be our starting shortshop in place of Jose Reyes, if the early buzz is correct.

Player A was Anderson Hernandez. I'm no scout. I've never even seen Tejada swing a bat. Maybe it's not a fair comparison.

But for some reason, whenever I hear about Tejada I start thinking about Hernandez. There were a lot of questions about Hernandez's ability to contribute offensively at the big league level, but a lot of us scoffed at that; the guy had just hit over .300 in Double A and Triple A after all. 

In the end, A-Hern as he was affectionately known was exactly what the scouts said he was: a good-to-great fielder with absolutely no bat whatsoever.

I remember watching Hernandez in 2006 and thinking to myself that I had never seen a Major League player look so completely overwhelmed by Major League pitching. The only guy that compared, for me, was Al Leiter, which is about as unflattering a comparison as possible.

Again, maybe it's not a fair comparison, but I feel like I keep hearing a lot of the same questions being raised about Tejada. They say he's mature beyond his years, they say he's already there defensively, they say he's been successful everywhere he's gone. They say he's ready for the big leagues.

Maybe he is. But maybe he's the second coming of A-Hern. If he is, he doesn't belong as a starting shortstop on a Major League team.

As we consider our options to fill the void left by Jose Reyes' gigantic thyroid, I hope we look at our players for who they are, not who we hope they will be.

- A.F.O.M.G.

Team Eyeroll

I remember Tuesday.

On Tuesday I was flush with optimism. That evening I wrote a piece comparing 2010 to 2005, saying that this season would be the harbinger of another Mets renaissance (mini or grand, to be determined).

It was a hopeful piece, as hopeful as I'd written in months about this team. 

I'm not saying everything I wrote the other day is down the tubes, it's not, but yesterday's news that Jose Reyes would miss two to eight weeks with gigantism (sorry, but the last 12 months with this team are starting to feel like that softball episode of The Simpsons where each of Mr. Burns' Major League ringers, save Darryl Strawberry, goes down with injury or inconvenience) thyroiditistitis (not a technical term).

The news on Reyes doesn't obviate the excitement around Jenrry Mejia, Ike Davis, and all the other kids we have on the farm, but that feeling of optimism I wrote about the other day was a two-step process; we still have hope for the future, but what hope do we have left for building organizational momentum in 2010?

Maybe it's the 2009 season talking, but let's treat the "worst case" scenarios as probable. Using that math means no Reyes and no Beltran until around Memorial Day (accounting for rehab assignments).

They say in baseball you can start eliminating teams around Memorial Day, but the way this season is shaping up, that's the earliest we can really hope this team will get on a roll.

Honestly, I never thought this team had a real shot at the playoffs in 2010, but I did have hope that they would keep things interesting in the division/wild card race until September, and that they would be fun to watch.

Without Reyes they're markedly less fun to watch. God knows I'll still tune in every night, but it's just not as enjoyable watching Alex Cora (bless him) as it is watching Reyes; ditto watching Angel Pagan instead of Beltran.

Beyond that, it's beyond frustrating that (ONCE AGAIN!!!!) the Mets have completely bungled the communication around an injury.

Remember when Reyes first went down? All the talk around the team was that this was a day-to-day type of situation, that he would be back in a week at the most.

WRONG!

Why do they set themselves up for failure? Don't they have doctors? Don't they have people who can tell them what some of the worse case scenarios would be? Don't they have a way of communicating reality to their fans, instead of bullshit?

I realize they need to sell tickets, and that in the days when they led us all to believe that this was just a hiccup with Reyes they might have sold some tickets that they otherwise wouldn't have, if the truth had been out there.

But in the long run, fucking with people's expectations alienates more people than it attracts. That's management 101, and yet with these clowns in charge, they just keep making the same mistakes over and over and over again.

It's all so frustrating.

- A.F.O.M.G.

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.