Even the most pessimistic Mets fan believes right now the 2015 team will be an improvement over the last five versions of the team. Given any kind of reasonable health one expects 82 wins at a minimum. The optimists foresee 89 or 90 wins and a wild card slot. If the Nats were to do a total el foldo then perhaps even a division title is conceivable.
The Alderson administration has not set a very high bar so that even if the club just gets over .500 it will be a high water mark of sorts and touted as significant progress and a step forward.
So there will be fewer losses this year than in recent years and that must be all good, right?
Actually I am not thinking so. Let’s look at the things we’ll be saying and thinking when those losses occur.
For those who think that Terry Collins is a subpar manager there will be those days – as there have been in the past – where he misuses his bullpen or tires the hell out of his pet reliever. When those kinds of losses occur they figure to sting more than in the past few years.
If we think Terry has cost his team a couple of wins with faulty strategies it really only made a difference between being a bad team and a very bad team. But these few blown games in 2015 could be the difference between being a playoff team and being on the outside again. Ouch.
Similarly a goodly number of Mets fans question whether Wilmer Flores has the skills to be an acceptable defensive shortstop. There likely will be games when the keystone of Wilmer and Murphy will fail to turn a turnable DP. Or days when Wilmer’s lack of range turns a potential out into a key hit for the opposition.
Yes, there will be days when Flores’ bat will save the day and we have to hope that those days will outnumber the bad-fielding days. But the losses from a weak up-the-middle defense will surely sting quite a bit as they happen.
And when Michael Cuddyer inevitably finds himself on the DL, as Michael Cuddyer so often does, the RF spot gets turned over to den Dekker or Nieuwenheis or Mayberry. Those losses from a weakened offense will be dispiriting especially when the June draft comes around and the Mets aren’t selecting in round 1.
All this is to say that while the typically passive offseason by Alderson and Co. might work out, when the avoidable losses occur there will be many of us in the Mets community wondering why many of the known leaks weren’t plugged and whether we could have done more this offseason.
