Gary Cohen brought up an interesting and sensitive point during Friday night’s broadcast, asking Ron Darling if he thought Curtis Granderson and David Wright would rebound next year.
It was a lively conversation that I thought would be worth discussing on MMO so I went ahead and transcribed it.
Gary Cohen: Granderson missed most of last year and hasn’t had a great year. But I don’t understand how you simply assume he’ll rebound next season. I mean how do you do that as an organization? How do you just go with these assumptions going forward?
Ron Darling: I don’t know. It’s a very relevant question but I don’t have a good answer for you. I think it’s almost impossible to make that assumption.
Cohen: They can spout all these advanced stats based on age and performance and all the Pecota predictions and what have you, but they don’t give you any answers whatsoever, and lets face it, all of it only amounts to an educated guess.
Darling: That’s absolutely right.
Cohen: So are they just gonna act on that and simply hope things get better without any contingency plan to do X, Y, or Z? Are they just going to tell us, ‘of course he’s gonna bounce back why wouldn’t he?’
Darling: They really have no other options. There are only two things they can do here. First, you act on optimism and you hope that both these guys, Granderson and Wright, return to form. And secondly, and most importantly, financially the Mets are stuck in a place where they have to perform. They just have to. There’s nothing else you can do.
Cohen: I understand that. You can’t trade them… You can’t trade them… You have to play them. So no matter what, these two have to be in the lineup no matter what regardless if they are good or bad.
Darling: Exactly. There is no Plan B. There’s no Plan B for the Mets now that they’ve decided to have that much money invested in two players. This is it. When the Mets made the decision to give those two players those kind of longterm contracts, essentially they made both Granderson and Wright their core players. Guess what, now they have to live or die with those core players.
Gary and Ron raise a lot of interesting points but the takeaway here is that with Wright and Grandy swallowing up 40% of the projected payroll, both players will need to produce and produce big. I never really thought of Granderson as a core player, but given the huge contract I guess they’re right.
Sandy Alderson has already said there’s no big bat coming via free agency and that he’s unwilling to trade a Wheeler and Syndergaard unless it’s for a difference maker under team control.
The Mets will have the pitching, but that will get them nowhere if they fail to improve an offense that ranks 29th in batting average and 28th in OPS – and that begins and ends with Granderson and Wright.
