Manager Terry Collins says “2015 is gonna be the year,” and that the Mets are “gonna be in the mix to play in October.”
“We’ve been preaching patience for four years, and it’s time to step up,” said Collins on Thursday while volunteering at a food bank in Queens. “We’ve got Matt coming back, Michael Cuddyer coming in. We’re gonna be a different team. We should be playing in October.”
I hope Collins is right, but there’s so much the Mets need to go right for that to happen and the top two items on that list are big rebound seasons from Curtis Granderson, 34, and David Wright, 32.
It reminded me of a conversation I transcribed between Gary Cohen and Ron Darling during a Mets broadcast, last September.
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 raised 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 for the Mets to have a real shot in 2015.
The addition of Michael Cuddyer makes the team better, but that gets negated if it’s coupled with the loss of Daniel Murphy.
The Mets will certainly have the pitching, nobody disputes that. But they will need an offense that can complement it and minimize all those one-run losses they endured in 2014.
