You think the ONLY competitive team is a Young Rebuilt franchise….

That isn’t the ONLY way to make a competitive team….

There is a difference between competing using kids (REQUIRING TOP 5 DRAFT PICKS) and being competitive for a long time (FA Signings and good Trades)

You seem to think the only way to be competitive is via Kids…
For that to work you need top 5 picks in the draft…

My way doesn’t require that….It just requires you to spend money when the players and needs warrant it and just making good draft choices by being BETTER than the other team instead of just first where you can’t be outfoxed!

uh, its pretty much exactly what you’re saying.

To do what you CLAIM we are doing (rebuilding for a long sustained competitive team) you need those top 5 picks Who if you pick correctly will be the SUPERSTAR CORE that you can Free Agent around (Yankees) or trade the other picks to fill around to get you that full decade (Braves, Phillies, 86ers).

Those top 5 picks get you the kids that come to the MLB and are immediatly impact type players.The Goodens, The Strawberrys, The Jeters, The Strausburg types that hit the ground running. Since you control them the first 5 years of competitiveness is sealed provided you didn’t surround them with scrubs when they came up (Something Sandy seems to be prepared to do this year and next considering all the Kids we have will be starting sometime in 2013)

After you have those guys and just before you see they are ready to be promoted you use the rest of those high picks in the remaining rounds to get players at positions you couldn’t draft….The Hernandez’, the Carters, The Gio Gonzales’, The Adam Laroches , and the Bobby Ojedas and Ron Darlings.

Then you have a shot at a decade of dominance and sustained winning.
But in our current plan we have traded off our best players (5 of them) and all we got out of it was Two Kids Maybe 3 in three more years when all is said and done…

Thats not a rebuild it is merely a purge and a lot more like what Grant did than anything Cashen presided over!

Don’t try scratching your head. You see, God Writes Straight with Crooked Lines and since we all know, God is a Met fan, Sandy has a vision from God for which the true plan us mere mortals would not be able to decipher.

I am convinced Sandy is following the religious path from the All Mighty. He already seems to be obeying the commands of the prophet Moses “Let My People Go.”

Can’t believe I just made this up off the cuff… LOL

The team has indeed bounced back after some very bleak days.

Great prospects have much to do with it. The Miracle Mets certainly were powered by a great young staff with most of the offensive players traded for.

The 86 Mets were powered by a once in a lifetime pitcher and an incredible hitter gotten in back to back drafts. Most fo the rest of the team was gotten in trades.

The 2000 Mets were a collection of trades and free agent signings for the most part.

The 2008 team was certainly about Wright and Reyes along with mostly free agent signing.

Home-grown, exciting Reyes was not offered a contract by the current front office. We could certainly have used him.

I am not convinced that the new prospects are on a level of Seaver, Koosman, Ryan, Gooden, Strawberry, Reyes and Wright. Far from it.

I would love to be proven wrong.

And I don’t want to hear about building around a ‘core’ after they let home-grown Reyes go.

I reckon it will be at least another two years before we even think of competing. And that will come the way it always does – through a series of home-grown prospects along with trades and free agency.

Two more bad years will probably be as long as it will take for the front office and ownership to realise that fans won’t come to the park. That’s when something will be done.

What some might forget in BOTH the cases of the WS winners were they were both preceeded by a long stretch of losing…Losing that in 86 got you that Strawberry and Gooden who were both top 5 overall picks in the draft (the draft was not available to help the 69ers until 1965 and Seaver was not a draft pick of ours (atlanta actually picked him in 66 we actually passed on him and took Chilcott with the 1st overall pick) and after some controversy regarding the NCAA and eligibility the Mets were able to match the offer the Braves gave him and thats how we got him.

The Moral of the story is if you suck good and long enough you will get first shot at the best players in the draft and as a result get the two players who really drive the winning that makes it easier to fill around and create a champion.

In the generation K example Wilson was the only top 5 pick and why it just wasn’t enough to make that HOPE turn to reality.

86ers had 5 top 5 picks to work with (hit on only two)
69ers had 5 top 5 picks as well (hit on only one really unless you want to count Foli who eventually got you Rusty Staub)

This is the pattern that helped to make those teams what they became….
it is the same pattern that led to the Braves in the 90′s and
to a lesser extent the Phillies of the 2000′s (only three top 5 Picks)

Cause picking high in every round of those post losing drafts gets you the players who make you a winner and a whole slew of players you can trade (because they were highly picked and therefore have a higher cieling than thier round mates) to get the guys you couldn’t draft.

The second was the late seventies – and this is where history parralles itself with today’s situation. Instead of trying to build around the players they had, the Mets were not replacing their aging veterans with others and were shipping off their good stars for a variety of reasons – Seaver, Staub, Kingman so by 1978 they were a team of mostly young players. The young players at the time didn’t work out but the process stayed the same till they hit pay dirt with a great blend of young talent and (and this is where the resemblence ends) skilled veterans. Since that time, even through the late ninties when we got ourselves back into contention, we did it not by being patient with the development of the young players and adding to them veterans but rather getting mostly veteran players once more.

So like the late seventies, the Mets put themselves in a situation where they had to be patient awaiting the youth instead of combining youth with veterans.

There will not be help if our “rebuilding” is nothing more than stocking our roster simply with as many prospects as possible because that is simply the least expensive way to fill a roster. So far, Sandy has not shown us that his plan includes anything other than prospects which is still only one third a plan, the other two being the keeping of the good players one already has and trying to fill the holes with both prospects and players from the outside.

I’ve always believed in this approach over loading up on FAs that don’t necessarily constitute a “team”. We’ve seen countless examples of teams, including the Mets, buying a bunch of high priced talent that don’t live up to their perceived potential. Team cohesion matters, particularly in baseball with a 162 game season.

An article by André Dobiey

Just like 69, just like 73, just like 86, it’s about the pitching staff getting better. The seeds of those teams started when the pitching started to come through. We need the minor league pitching to improve the majors staff. Niese, Gee first, then Harvey, Edgin, Familia, Carson, Ramirez and hopefully McHugh and Wheeler next, with Syndergaard and Fuller and Montero next. One of these guys can be traded for a hitter down the line, depending on the need.

And him adding to his numbers will get him in all the quicker.