The Departed, Part II

On Monday we began our retrospective look at the now-former Mets who left the team over the offseason.

After reviewing names like Aaron Heilman and Moises Alou in Part I, it's a pleasure to start off on a more positive note this time. But be warned, it's all downhill from here.

Pedro Martinez

We've devoted a lot of blog ink to Petey's Mets legacy already, but more important than how I feel about him (which teeters on adoration), what's relevant for our purposes here is how other Mets fans view him.

For a not insignificant number of Mets fans, Pedro the Met was basically a bust. To these people, for $53mm, Pedro basically gave us one good season (2005), two injury-plagued seasons (2006-2007), and one complete dog of a season (2008).

I'm not going to call those people wrong, but for me and, I think, the broader population of Mets fans, Pedro's legacy is about much more than his won-loss record, his inability to stay healthy, or his declining skills.

The last couple of years at Shea were profoundly disappointing, but the years that preceded Pedro's arrival were a virtual wasteland of despair. It's difficult, almost, to remember how bad the Mets were in 2002-2004.

The Mets' more recent success has been built to some degree on exceptional home grown talent (David Wright and Jose Reyes), but the key has been the Mets' ability to sign and trade for high impact players, and of those, Pedro was the first.

It's become cliche to say that Pedro opened the door for Carlos Beltran, who opened the door for Billy Wagner and on and on through Johan and K-Rod -- but all these years later, I still believe it's true.

Signing Pedro signaled to the rest of the league that the Mets were not a laughingstock. It signaled the Mets were back. More importantly, to Mets fans, it signaled that we weren't crazy after all; if a complete outsider like Pedro could see the potential in the Mets, maybe things really weren't so hopeless.

That first season in Queens Pedro delivered wins, but he also delivered excitement and a sense of fun. With his twin gun salutes and his running through sprinklers, Pedro was like a big kid out there, and the fans ate it up. If there's one thing fans understand, it's players who clearly love playing the game. And Pedro was just like that.

Pedro may yet return to Queens a Met. No matter what side he's on, I suspect he's earned himself a lifetime of standing ovations at Citi Field.

Ricardo Rincon

To summarize briefly, 2008 was the year of the ineffective Mets bullpen. In a desperate effort to instill a sense of order, Jerry Manual adopted a strategy that essentially consisted of throwing out relievers like they were spaghetti thrown against the wall, you just hoped something stuck. Ricardo Rincon was that spaghetti.

Unfortunately for the Mets, their fans, and any person with a sense of compassion, Ricardo Rincon did not stick. That said, he wasn't the problem either; Rincon would never be the fall guy for 2008.

Going forward, his saving grace is that most people probably won't even remember that he was ever a Met, and those who do probably won't care enough to boo a guy who threw a total of 4.0 innings for us. Life's too short.

Scott Schoeneweis

Victor Zambrano. Kaz Matsui. Scott Schoeneweis. If you're a Met, you do not want to find your name among this ignoble pantheon (I'm looking at you, Castillo).

When Omar Minaya declined to give Chad Bradford a three-year deal following his terrific 2006 season, Mets fans were angry. When Omar then turned around a short time later and gave Schoeneweis a three-year deal of his own, Mets fans found a reason to be negatively predisposed to the new reliever.

But make no mistake, Schoeneweis' unpopularity only cemented itself when he turned in a 5.03 ERA in 2007 and followed it up with a 5.40 ERA in September 2008. In the end, it was only fitting that Schoeneweis allowed the final, season-ending home run to the Marlins that doomed our playoff hopes last year.

He was a bust through and through; there was nothing to like about his performance, and fairly or unfairly (because I've heard he's actually a pretty good guy), there was nothing to like about him personally.

When Schoeneweis returns, hang on to your fucking hat. We will not have seen this kind of vitriol since, I don't know -- Bobby Bonilla? John Rocker? Hitler? Tough to say. It won't be pretty.

Joe Smith

This might be the hardest name on the whole list. On the one hand, I think most fans appreciate that Smith was one of exactly two effective relievers last year (alongside Pedro Feliciano), but woe unto he who underestimates the stigma attached to the 2008 bullpen.

Smith's in a particularly precarious position because he was included in the great bullpen purge that helped land J.J. Putz. Rightly or wrongly, because of his inclusion in that deal he's now lumped in with guys like Aaron Heilman or Schoeneweis, bullpen disasters from 2008 who were jettisoned for the good of everyone involved before the calendar turned to 2009.

That all said, I'm going to give Mets fans the benefit of the doubt on this one. Smith put up solid numbers during his time in New York, and any player gets a bounce from being home grown and cheap. He won't get standing O's or anything like that, but he can probably expect a faint smattering of applause if the Indians are ever in town.

Jorge Sosa

I have this theory that the really dislikeable thing about Jorge Sosa was his seeming incredulity about his struggles. Say what you want about Schoeneweis, but he knew he sucked.

Sosa always seemed to react to, say, backbreaking home runs, by getting this puzzled look on his face, like he was contemplating how it was that the cosmos had aligned and allowed whichever opposing player it was to hit a home run off of him. It sent the wrong message.

Sosa quickly became an extraordinarily unpopular Met, and by May 12 he had played himself off the team. He wasn't involved in the second half bullpen meltdown that doomed the Mets' season, but that look of incredulity at a 7.06 ERA in 2008 did nothing to endear him to the Shea faithful.

Expect boos when he returns. Lots of them.

Jason Vargas

As ineffective and unproductive as he was in his Mets tenure, Vargas has one really good thing going for him: Chances are most people won't even remember he was ever a Met. His anonymity will spare him the booing he probably deserves. So be it.

* * * * *

That's all for Part II. On Friday we'll bring it all home with Part III, taking a look at the names on our two lists and trying to make sense of what these departures mean for the Mets.

Like last time, if you feel I was unfair to any of the players above or if you feel I got it wrong on any of them, please, have at it on the comment board.

- A.F.O.M.G.