Jon Heyman of SI.com totally infuriates me at times with the joy he seems to get out of taking potshots at the Mets. Some of you may think I’m overreacting, but he does this incessantly 2-3 times a week. However, this one takes the cake as I’m sure you will all agree.
Before the weekend, Heyman posted a list of his most overpaid and underpaid free agents this offseason. It sounded like a good read, and I expected to read the obvious, but man was I wrong.
Listed among his overpaid players I see the name of D.J. Carrasco – Mets. He writes,
D.J. Carrasco: $2.5 million, 2 years, Mets. If they think he’s going to replace Pedro Feliciano and Hisanori Takahashi, they have another thing coming. Couldn’t this money have been better spent on a starter with upside? And two years? For him?
What does that even mean? Carrasco is a right-handed pitcher, how could Heyman possibly think he was intended to be a replacement for southpaws Takahashi or Feliciano? Hey, I’m not defending this signing, in fact I’m not even sure I like Carrasco myself, but this just seemed like a very ridiculous argument for Heyman to make.
Considering that the Mets had not paid more than $1.5MM for any players this offseason, I never expected to see any Met listed as “overpaid”. The fact that he included him seemed more like his way of taking another jab at the team he loves to kill.
Noticeably absent from his list was none other than the highest paid reliever in baseball, Rafael Soriano who will get paid 3/$36MM to be the bridge to Mariano Rivera, who just signed a two-year deal himself this offseason.
That is an obscene amount to pay for any setup man, and for Heyman to not include him among his list of overpaid players shows an acute bias against the Mets and an undiscerning fondness for the Yankees. Pure unobjectivity at its best.
Furthermore, as I kept reading, I find that he included Cliff Lee, now of the Phillies, as one of the most underpaid free agents this offseason. Really???
Given the overwhelming fact that Cliff Lee is now the highest compensated pitcher in all of baseball, undeservedly so I might add, how can he possibly be considered underpaid?
If you want to say he’s worth it and leave him off your overpaid/underpaid list entirely, that’s fine. But to include the highest paid pitcher in the game in your underpaid list is just an insult to our judgment. How many more tens of millions would it have taken for Cliff Lee to have gotten a fair deal in Heyman’s estimation? Ten million? Twenty million? Fifty million? Can anyone else spot the absurdity in that?
That’s why I say, Heyman, nice shot.
