I am getting so tired of this season that I wish it would end already. It’s not the games that bother me, I love Mets baseball so much that I can find enjoyment even in a loss, but this lack of direction is really wearing thin on me.

In a few weeks we’ll head into another offseason and it won’t be long until we get into that ole wait ’till next year mode. It seems like only yesterday we were saying that referring to this season. What’s changed?

Last year we went into the offseason with questions and concerns about Carlos Beltran, Jose Reyes, Oliver Perez and John Maine. This offseason we’ll have all those same exact concerns plus the added headaches of leftfielder Jason Bay and closer Francisco Rodriguez who will both be returning from injuries. You could say we might be in a worse position than we were last year at this time.

We still need a number two starter and we still need a setup man, but mostly we still need a 30+ home run bat for the middle of the lineup. I guess we’ve just been spinning our wheels in the past 12 months. Damn, that burns me up.

Sure we’ve had some nice surprises like the emergence of Ike Davis, but didn’t we feel the same way about Daniel Murphy a year earlier? In fact looking at Ike’s numbers now, is he really all that different from Murph?

  • Ike Davis: 250 BA – .756 OPS – 39 extra-base hits
  • Daniel Murphy: .266 BA – .741 OPS – 54 extra-base hits

All I’m saying is that under present management, we’ve basically wasted an entire year and are no closer to a championship than we were a year ago.

We are still held captive by the same problems we had last season and have thrown some new logs into the fire. There has been no real progress with Omar Minaya calling the shots off the field and Jerry Manuel calling the shots on the field. We have regressed and continue to do so and even those who continue to wear their rose colored glasses can see that.

Can you even imagine another offseason with endless blog posts about which players the Mets are interested in, and which players the Mets have spoken to, all the rumors that get debunked, the jokes made at our expense, and… you get the picture.

It’s abundantly clear that these Mets are locked in financially and can’t make ANY big additions this offseason.

Thanks to huge back-loaded contracts to Santana, Beltran, Perez, K-Rod and Bay, the Mets have $85 million tied up on those five players alone in 2011. That leaves $40 million for improvements, but in reality it’s only $9 million after you deduct what’s owed to Reyes, Wright and Castillo.

Just $9 million dollars to fill 17 other roster spots…

Now think about the big raises Mike Pelfrey and Pedro Feliciano will get in arbitration this offseason… Then throw in huge raises for R.A. Dickey and Angel Pagan, two of the teams best performing players…

You can see the painful reality too, can’t you?

The Mets payroll budget of $126 million dollars doesn’t go very far does it?

We’re top heavy on players who produce at a level far less than what they are getting paid. It’s disgusting really, when you think about how much money the Mets pay for each win as compared to every other team in baseball… THE METS ARE THE WORST!

So here we go into another offseason with HOPE as our strategy. And as always there will be throngs of fans who will buy into that strategy as they always do when Spring Training rolls around. So I ask all of you…

What’s really changed in the last twelve months?