No. Win. People in general don’t care if you win with a $50 million payroll of a $500 million payroll. Winning is what counts. Consistent winning brings in consistent crowds.

Spending money is not some golden ticket to success. Anyone who has been paying attention the last 20+ years should know that. Not only the Mets, but the Cubs, the Red Sox, the Marlins plenty of others have proven that.

“I’m betting that Ike Davis and Jon Niese will be rocketed out of town for another team’s top prospects should they have All Star campaigns this season. That seems to be the trend – all being done under the guise of a plan. A week doesn’t go by where Davis and Niese are mentioned as trade chips on the Mets’ flagship site MetsBlog. It’s as if they are warming us up to the idea.”

Or maybe it’s February and people are board and Ike and Niese are the 2 most attractive chips. Amazing how pick and choose people can be about what rumors they buy.

Have often commented about how the Wilpons have put any potential new owners into a bind because they built a smaller capacity park that needs to charge more per individual. Don’t believe they can make going to a game more affordable unless the sale of the Mets includes some sort of stake in SNY (which the Wilpons do not want to give up).

You have two major reasons why the fans have stopped coming – and will continue to.

One is the cost. If you add transportation, parking, food, souvenirs and tickets, the price of taking a family of four hits around the $300 mark. It just isn’t feasible to go to many games as a family outing. Maybe four to six games a year if the team is good. Maybe one, possibly two if the team sucks. And this team sucks.

Second is, of course, fielding a bad team. The Wilpons have made it clear that this coming season is not one that they will put much money into. And that’s a shame because, while a family of four might struggle financially to go to a lot of games if the team is good, a group of friends wouldn’t necessarily have that problem if the team was good. But the team is bad.

A conversation that will be heard around the New York metropolitan area this summer will go something like this – “Hey, do you want to go to CitiField tonight to see the Mets?” “Naw, they suck.” (Not, who are they playing – or – who’s pitching).

There is a difference between how many tickets are sold for a game and how many attend. I reckon it’s a pretty fair guess that actual attendance will be under 2 million this year.

Better than that, sell the team. The phony good will bit went out the window years ago after the last game was played at Shea.

Lets face facts here what has happened the last two years is we traded Dickey (a Cy Young Pitcher) and got Wheeler and traded Beltran for an Upgrade to Thole….

Thats pretty much ALL we have done other than cut payroll!

And if they lose another 20 Mil in revenue (easy if they just decline to around 2Mil attendance)

What we will have done is what I said above, cut 60 Mil in payroll off the books and will have saved a grand total of 7 Million off the losses we had in 2010!

Whats going to happen then? Who gets cut from payroll?

Wright, Niese, Davis, perhaps Murphy goes too….
See ya in 2020!

Obviously, a lot rests on the right arms of Matt Harvey & Zack Wheeler. But a young frontline SP or two can do wonders for an organization. Both have been managed and monitored well so far.

Obviously the W-L record is, by far, the most important reason, but the bad economy does have a noticeable impact when you factor everything.

The way people are being indoctrinated into thinking about how to win in baseball that happens now has turned this place is upside down, backwards, beyond bizarre. It’s really sickening.

The Wilpons’ just don’t like Davis. They will hate paying him market value. Plenty of weak fielding players in the organization to take his spot. Davis will go for several top prospects.

Does anyone here think that we could finish better than third in the NL East? No, me neither. Sandy has the system stocked will filler. He has plenty of inventory to sell.

There’s not as much work to do as Cashen did, not even close so the time to start adding the pieces is NOW. And by pieces i mean acquiring major league impact players who start.

wow…

your ability to cut and paste matt cerrones pathetic excuses here are amazing !!!

the downturn in the economy???

are you serious?

you do realize that met tickets are dirt cheap on stubhub…and people would rather spend MORE money on ANOTHER thing to do…

99.999% of the reason the mets have declining attendance is their team’s record…

the key, of course, is if you have a duplicate at a specific position, you want to make the best LT use of both of them. So assuming that there is a viable replacement at 1B, and the trade value of Ike is high (and a lot higher than the other 2), then it can certainly make the team better, immediately, to trade him.

The Phils went down this road when Howard was coming up and they had Thome. Yes, different players, but same dilemma.

So, say they look at Flores as the real deal, and they can turn Ike into a really good OF. In that scenario, of course it makes sense to explore trading him.

as long as they do it for baseball reasons (and that includes being able to allocate resources to fill other needs, as in saving $$ one spot to put elsewhere) then it should be on the table, and it does not mean Sandy is cheap, wilpons are broke, etc.

Harvey is here and I think he’s legit and I keep hearing how Wheeler & d’Arnaud is the real deal, the Mets already have an infield so what’s the hold up? What’s this nonsense about 2014, 2015, 2016? Back in the day I didn’t keep hearing about 1985, 1986, 1987 etc. We knew they were getting better but we always lived in the present because at the same time of knowing the Mets had some kids coming up. We weren’t arrogant enough back then to think like the current generation of cheapskate sabermetric know-it-alls who probably stay at home and analyze everything from their TVs instead of going to the games.

The previous administration left the current administration with a NICE farm system and a NICE major league roster so they don’t have to work as long as Cashen did. He inherited a lousy team that had been bad for years. And in 1983 when he got Keith Hernandez the pitching staff was Tom Seaver, Mike Torrez, Craig Swan, Ed Lynch, etc. Wow! What a motivator right? Yet Cashen was confident enough in his system to start acting in 1983.

Not Alderson.

Back then I don’t believe Cashen sat back and waited as if they wanted the kids to prove it first like it seems they’re doing here. I’m sure they already know if Wheeler can pitch in the bigs this season or not.

Start getting good MAJOR LEAGUE starting players NOW and give the fans a reason to get excited. They can afford it. Start telling the fans you will try and fight for a post season spot this year. That’s what the summer is all about. Enough with this waiting, and waiting, and constantly barraging us with one minor league signing after another, one piece of filler after another. They keep on purposely going cheap after filler that THEY think they can turn water into wine with their “Theories on Deliberate Practice” beliefs perhaps? They think they can turn a journeyman into a star maybe? When they CAN’T. He can have a good year from time to time but you’ll never turn them into what they are not. Especially the rag tag players they keep signing.

Want to get the fans back in the stadium, start a campaign that you think you’re ready to fight for the post season, and with the 2 wild cards work hard on selling this. If you are confident enough in those 2 players – d’Arnaud & Wheeler than this is what they should be doing.

And indeed there’s a huge difference between Dickey, Beltran and even Reyes vs Niese or Ike.
Ike may eventually get traded if Flores breaks out or Duda really starts hitting but can’t play LF.

But pretty sure that 2013 will be the final season in which winning will be secondary for the sake of building…

More than 3 rebuilding years will be impossible to sell in NY…