I’m so very tired of all the complaining and whining about how bad the Mets are. The Mets aren’t really that bad and unless some crazy stupid series of unfortunate events take hold, things should get better.
There are far more hideous things in the world than the state of the 2013 Met roster. For instance, what if the Mayans were only off by a few months? How smart could they be if they got annihilated by a bunch of guys in tin hats, it could all end tomorrow, POOF!
We could be hit by a massive wayward asteroid. NASA didn’t even see the one that scared the heck out of Siberia so not a whole lot of faith there — the cosmos kind of snuck that one by us. We could have a zombie apocalypse. That would be bad — though less bad for some. I know I’d be ready – even my kids agree I was made for that sort of thing. My compulsive tendency to hide weapons in convenient places (a trick I learned on my long walks to I.S. 61) and my agility putting a choke-hold on the dog speak for themselves.
The world could end with another ice age, you could be trampled walking out of Zabar’s staring at your new garlic press by a stampeding herd of Mastodons or you could be flattened crossing the street by a rogue high-speed glacier. Or, like those slower than lava Pompeii people, you could end up covered in ash and molten rock, frozen forever in your last act – just as you were about to take a bite of your toaster strudel or obsessing about your fantasy baseball draft order.
Jeez, you’d think we could find other things than the quality of Met outfielders to complain about. Now we’ve got this Higgs Boson particle. Bunch of eggheads at the “Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory” in “Geneva” crashed some stuff together at high speeds and decided our universe is fundamentally unstable and therefore vulnerable to being wiped out by a more stable better looking universe with great hair. My thinking was, you’ve GOT to be kidding me? I just scheduled a teeth cleaning! Unstable universe?
When I was a kid I used to crash trucks together at high speeds all the time but I don’t think it ever resulted in a negative time vortex expanding in every direction at the speed of light. Heck, even the Beltran/Cameron collision of 2005 didn’t trigger a catastrophic chain reaction.
Higgs (not to be confused with “Higgins” from Magnum P.I.), the energy field that gives subatomic particles their mass, is unstable? Unstable how? Like a three legged chair, or like Lindsay Lohan? Is our universe going to pop a bunch of pills and crash a car into a jewelry store? Why would God make our universe unstable? Was he cutting corners? Did he run out of rebar by the time he got to our universe? Maybe we should ask for a refund!?It all makes Daniel Murphy’s oblique injury seem trivial doesn’t it?
We Met fans need to keep things in perspective because honestly, at least we’re not the Marlins. So much complaining about Sandy Alderson, really?
Over the past 30 years the guy has worked for two organizations. The first is a perennial contender that manages to be competitive on a shoestring budget year after year. The second, was a moribund mess when he took over in 2005 and people say he left it not much better in 2009, but here’s the rub, sports fans, when I did an unofficial survey of minor league system rankings on 5 major sports sites, the Padres minor league system was ranked in the top three in every one and was ranked the top system in baseball in 3 of the 5, with comments like “system rife with both depth and quality.”
Yep, rife, that means their system stinks of talent… say your prayers NL West. I wish we were rife. Oakland has had a pretty nice run too, sustainable even. They recycle their seemingly never ending stream of prospects every few years — bringing up talented youngsters and trading off the older and too expensive players for even more prospects. Sound familiar? That’s Sandy Alderson,. That’s who he’s been and that’s what he’s done.
Now fast forward a few years to Fred Wilpon in dire financial straits sitting in Selig’s MLB offices. Bud looks at Fred (who is sweating profusely) and says, “OK Fred, I won’t do you like Frank McCourt because, well… because we’re pals right?”
“Sure Bud, we’re tight, just like this,” says Fred twisting his fingers together.
“But, here’s the thing Fred, you’re going to do me a little favor. These big market bullies, we need to bring them down a notch. This league screams for parity like a 2006 LeSabre with a busted engine rod. I’m going to cut their brake lines and undermine their business model.”
“Freddy my boy, I’m going to make you an offer you can’t refuse. We’re going to show the world how a big market team can succeed using small market methods. We’re going to bring them all down to our cheapskate level. I’ve got this friend of mine I want you to talk to, name of Sandy… He’s in the Dominican right now… Cigar?”
Sure it didn’t go down exactly like that, It probably never even happened, but hey it makes for a good Godfather-like Mets spoof and there’s probably a kernel of truth somewhere in the premise. Namely that Selig’s guy is here to put another organization on an Oakland / San Diego sustainable trajectory.
Things could be a lot worse Met fans. Our farm could still be a shambles. We could be Kansas City having just traded our best prospects for James “I just pitched 8,000 innings” Shields We could have signed Michael Bourn and Nick Swisher to huge contracts. We could have traded Matt Harvey and Zack Wheeler for Justin Upton.
Instead? We have three ace level pitchers heading our way in Zack Wheeler, Matt Harvey, and Noah Syndergaard, with several other babies in the low minors making some big noise.
We have two division foes in the Phillies and Nationals with acknowledged minor league weaknesses in right-handed pitching. Our strength? You guessed it, right handed pitching.
We finally have a catching prospect who looks like he might be up to the task of ushering in a new era where we’re not getting our asses handed to us by the likes of Shame Beefarino, Chased Mutley and Jimmy “I’ve eaten stacks of pancakes taller than” Rollins. These guys are going down people, like asteroids burning up in the Met stratosphere, like glaciers melting from Met carbon emissions, they’re going to whither like crackling thistles under a wave of molten Met lava, mark my words.
Seriously, If I were Ruben Amaro or Mike Rizzo I’d be concerned with what this Alderson guy is up to. So yeah, things aren’t so bad, they can’t be, not with the tsunami of pitching we have coming our way. My only regret is that we ditched Acosta before I could use my Acostalypse jokes.
