According to Jon Heyman of CBS Sports, the Mets will be one of many teams that will be pushing to sign free agent Yoenis Cespedes beginning in November.
While Mets people won’t discuss it publicly, writes Heyman, word is they are expected to make a serious play for Cespedes, whose willingness to play center field has been a huge plus, not to mention all the well-timed bombs he’s hitting.
“The reasons they’re not talking about their intentions are two-fold; they don’t want to set fans up for a potential disappointment, and they don’t want to detract from what’s transpiring on the field, which is nothing short of special.”
Heyman believes the Giants, Rangers, Mariners, Phillies, Angels, Cubs, and Yankees will be among the teams with serious interest in Cespedes, who will be the premier outfielder available this Winter.
On Sunday, Jeff Passan of Yahoo sports spoke to six agents and general managers who believe discussions with Cespedes will begin at $125 million and end up perhaps in the $160 million range.
Almost echoing everything I said on Thursday, Passan writes that how the Mets ultimately handle Cespedes, will be a referendum on the Wilpons. Either they can act like owners of a big market team or they can remain the NL East paupers.
“The Mets used their Bernie Madoff-induced poverty to enter into this unbecoming period where they don’t even bother to meet with the marquee free agents because they wouldn’t dare wade in that financial pool.”
“The story goes the Mets were rebuilding, though that was just a red herring…They forced general manager Sandy Alderson to try and win with the resources incompatible with such a goal.”
Passan asserts that Alderson and the Mets got good in spite of ownership because of a solid player development apparatus.
On Thursday, I speculated it would take at least $150 million and likely more to sign Cespedes this winter, so I was in the same range as Passan’s expert panel. I also wrote:
“The way the Wilpons have done business over the past ten years, it seems very unlikely to me that the Mets will do anything more than put up a good pretense and ultimately retreat to the usual “we tried” white flag.”
All media outlets owned or controlled by the Wilpons have already begun the whisper campaign against Yoenis Cespedes.
On Wednesday and Friday night, the topic was broached by SNY’s Gary Cohen and Keith Hernandez who highlighted all the negatives about signing Cespedes.
During one play when Cespedes swung and didn’t run to first after appearing to hurt his thumb, Cohen surprisingly said “what an embarrassment.”
During one Mets Post Game, show Nelson Figueroa laughed when asked by Gary Apple if the Mets had any chance at signing him. Then went into him “not always hustling” and “not being a team philosophy kind of hitter.”
Although I personally didn’t hear it, a reader also told me that Howie Rose said during a broadcast on WOR that Cespedes does not feel comfortable with all the media attention in New York and that he is not a big city guy.
On MetsBlog, Matt Cerrone also highlighted the same downside and negatives that were pointed out by Gary Cohen and concluded, ” I don’t know that he’ll be worth paying, say, $25 million a season when he’s 34-years-old. Do you?”
Back when Nelson Doubleday was running things, he overruled the Wilpons and signed Mike Piazza. At the time the Wilpons and their cronies were saying the same things as you are hearing now about Cespedes.
If Cespedes got you into the postseason during the first five years of his likely seven year deal, would you care that much about his last two years?
Did you care about Piazza’s last two years and wish we had never signed him? Of course not.
And remember that Cespedes is clearly a much more athletic specimen than Piazza ever was and would likely be productive well into his age 34 season.
But anyway, once the Wilpon propaganda starts doing their thing we all know the eventual outcome. So you may as well kiss any chance of signing Cespedes out the window.
