Dealbreaker is a mild way to describe what the Mets have in their hands.
Trade ideas, who comes and who goes, how to spend the Wilpons’ money, etc, etc, etc. The battles about what 2011 will look like are still raging as we speak. Quite honestly, this team is in a place I never in a million years thought they would ever be. They are in real trouble as a franchise. Everybody can see this except perhaps those that are involved. There are so many voices, opinions, and people who either want to reach out and help this team restore itself to a place of relevance. Then some who want to get as far away from this franchise and the memory of it as fast as humanly possible.
This is just a game and I get that. But it’s a game that we love and we have given a lot in support of. In my opinion, any fan that thinks things are cool as they are or they are very close to a breakthrough is either delusional, offering conflicting opinions just to feed the banter monster, really don’t love the Mets and support them as much as they publicly profess to, or just don’t understand baseball in Flushing.
I think much has been forgotten about where this team was and its direction. I think that is part of the problem. This franchise has not shown the propensity to correct its mistakes. Willie Randolph, being in town for the Brewers-Mets series, had much to say about his tenure in Flushing and this highlights a lot of what was wrong with this team. Issues still yet to be corrected or addressed.
“I don’t really know how to answer it because I just look at my time when I was here,” he said. “We had one really big disappointment, but I think for the most part my staff and I were able to get the team back to a certain respectability or way of playing the game.”
“The situation with Johan [Santana] is tough,” Wright said of the ace of the rotation, who had season-ending surgery and whose timetable for a 2011 return is unknown. “Going into any season not knowing who your No. 1 is, especially in this division where other teams have two No. 1s, it’s not what you want.”
“They really embraced me and made me feel welcome, like I never left,” Mays said. “I want to do something for them.”
“The Mets don’t need to spend more money to win. They simply need to make reasonable plans based on likely events, with effective alternatives.”
“The bottom line,” said Jim Callis, Baseball America’s executive editor, “is they just have not spent on the draft, and they have not spent internationally.”
The team lacks the ability to think ahead and have their hands in free agency and pays for older players past their primes with albatross-like contract.
Did I miss anything? This team needs to tap into the importance of tradition and make the hard decisions and most of all, stop lying to the fan base and make a real effort to give the city what it deserves: a winner that’s not from the Bronx.