all of those contracts are about paying for 3 or 4 years over the course of 6 or 7. And for those first few years, Santana was an absolute beast. He was a legit ace brought here to put the team over the top for October. It’s not his fault there were so many deficiancies in other places.

Did it work out? No. But they needed a legitimate #1 starter, and they were on the brink of something special that just didn’t pan out.

My take at the time was that the deal was a big risk (since he had some previous arm issues), but that the team really needed to take it. So even if it doesn’t end up really working out, hard to criticize them for rolling the dice.

Santana was the right move!
160 Mil would have been a good salary to add one more like him to the rotation!

Look at what another mere 10-50 game winner in our rotation would have done for 07, 08 and 10!
Who wins the division those years if you do that?

Would we have Attendance and financial issues now?

HELL NO!
Bottomline is sometimes penny wise is pound foolish!
And we are going to see that this time next year when Sandy has to step in front of a mike to say we lost 70 Mil AGAIN despite cutting 50 Mil in salary because those cuts cut into the bottomline ATTENDANCE!

Might have done nothing for 2009 but in 2010 we would have had a record close to 94 wins and a division title with another 15 game winner on the squad. Well over 100 wins in 2008 and 2007 if we had that.

I believe the mistake wasn’t that we spent too much it was that we stopped short before the buying was done! And when we did buy we bought the wrong thing!

The thing about buying yourself to the championship is you do have to keep going until you get there. And while your doing that you can be able to build up the Minors so it can replace those players once their contracts run out!

If you look at what Omar did you see the way the timing would have been.
Santana is set to expire about a year after Harvey and Familia are expected to have a year under their belt.

If we want to blame Omar for anything we should blame him for working his BUY while rebuild to coincide with HIS contract which was not guaranteed and was canceled just before his plan was due to blossom!
It’s no coincidence that Beltran was due to expire right around the same time Davis and Duda were expected to come up! Not a big coincidence that We have all these 2Bs and SSs in the MiL waiting for a place to play and if not for Murphy’s bat and some injuries would be our 2B this year! Murphy himself being a 1st and 3rd baseman makes the cheap replacement for Wright should he go elsewhere! Pagan was always destined to replace Beltran in Center.

The timing for all of this is uncanny but only if you don’t give Omar credit for thinking that long term.
Which is what a lot of people think or choose to think because they want to think he was just awful due to some Philosophy they want to see implemented here!

He wasn’t a bad GM and he wasn’t a Boy Wonder either!
Not many GMs in baseball are! There is no comparable to Bill Belichik who manages to win no matter what kind of crap he has to work with.
The only GM who is close to that is Cashman and he buys more than anyone which is why he doesn’t have problems not rushing and stockpiling MiL replacements because he doesn’t need many replacements from there and when he has them ready to go thats when he decides not to spend more money than he has to!

That said I just thought it was odd that X made the same arguments I have made in the past when he was on the other side of those arguments…so it struck me as a bit funny!

As for Santana, I thought it was a great deal. A little longer than I would have liked to have seen, but Santana’s numbers prior to trade/signing were stellar and he gave the team some solid seasons. And the only prospect I wanted to stay was Gomez, but between Gomez ans Santana, you take Santana ever day of the week and twice on Sundays.

Metsie, for the most part, Xtreem thinks rather rationally, I’d say. I tend to agree with a lot of what he says. But as I’ve told him before, we just look at things analytically a little different.

On the topic of this post…
I completely disagree.

We definitely won. Whether Santana’s contract was on the books this season or not, we wouldn’t be spending. The contract may be way more than I would hope to pay for a pitcher, even of his caliber (the years as well) but the market dictated this to be the price. If we didn’t give him this extension, there was no trade. And if we didn’t trade for him, he was getting the deal from someone else. Santana was an ace-caliber pitcher at the time of the trade and he definitely has given us some value – PLUS there’s still time left in the contract to judge.

Add in the fact that none of the players we traded over there have come even close to being significant contributors at the MLB level – and I’d do this trade again.

- It is not my belief you can really grade a trade. What if Matt Peterson had remained a Met and had a breakout season. what If Fmart was in this trade and not C.Gomez…(with gomez now the CF and leadoff hitter), What if deolis was a Met and now ready to be a star.

- Santana, when he pitches …at 75% can[pretty much deliver a game. His breakdown was predicted. But given age I think he can comeback AND if he can give 75% will be better by far than anyone else we throw out there.
- For all I hear about Brandon Webb, there is a converse in Frank Liriano. Guys do comeback. Not always. But I for one I hope Zohan does. As for 7yrs…Carlos was washed up and had knives in him but in his first full yr back gave all star numbers and returned a bluechipper in trade.

So lets just wait a little on this one.

The prospects given up gave Minnesota 3 chances to get a great pitcher or 3 chances to get 3 average pitchers or anyway you want to look at it plus at the very least a back up or platooned CFer and it kept Johan out of the AL.

The one and only thing that we actually have been successful with from a front office standpoint is the salary dump deal. obviously those are among the easiest things for a GM to do since they first and foremost have to do with the finances of the owner and to a much lesser extent the actual horse trading although you do have to beat the value of the two draft picks, less the signing bonuses they would command.

Humber, Mulvey, Deolis and Gomez represented the risk but the 600 IP with a sub 3.00 ERA is something we just weren’t going to be able to produce for ourselves and a pitching staff of Pedro, Pelfrey, Maine, Perez and Figgy wasn’t going to give us a chance going forward.

Sometime’s it is the right time to strike and usually it’s best to have the pieces in the farm to go out be able to talk to anyone about any player rather than constricting your focus to just those that are type A free agents.

imagine if we had gotten Zito the year before? No way we get 600 IP with a sub 3.00 ERA over 3 years. What will we get going forward? hard to say, I’m not expecting anything more than 150 IP and a 4.50 ERA but that’s the risk you take when you don’t develop your own ace’s.

It was still a worthwhile and credible attempt at providing a vital piece that has eluded us since the the early 80′s.

My point is, high innings pitched totals shouldn’t necessarily be such a big deal, especially when Santana was still just entering his prime years at the time the contract was signed. You just simply cannot accurately say that this guy or that guy will surely get hurt based upon the number of innings they have pitched over a period of years.

I, for one, do not regret the Santana deal. Sometimes you have to take risks in order to get what you want or where you want to go. The Mets viewed Santana as a shut down #1 starting pitcher, which he was, and a key component of what they hoped would be a long run of playoff appearances. That that has not happened is far more due to other circumstances on and off the field with the Mets than Santana’s injuries. Although they certainly contributed. But no one has a crystal ball that will tell them that this is the exact scenario that was going to play out. It was a risk worth taking, even though it didn’t pan out as hoped. And how many of us would have been digging on Omar had the Yankees ended up him and he helped them win a World Series or two along with a Cy Young award or two?

“Santana was also a STEAL compared to the Barry Zito and Mike Hampton deals, lets not forget that while we’re at it.”

Look at the Zito and Hampton contracts and the terrible numbers they put up.