“The players won’t say it or admit it publicly, but the fact that the Front Office didn’t make any moves to help them at the trade deadline, was a “kick in the teeth” to them.”

Before you hit “Leave Comment” and go off on a tirade against Adam Rubin, let me confess that it wasn’t Adam who made that quote. It was in fact SNY’s Kevin Burkhardt. My apologies to Adam, but I wanted to use this opportunity to make a point.

Kevin Burkhardt made that statement during last Thursday’s Mets Pre-Game Show on SNY while reporting from the field to studio analyst Bobby Ojeda.

The comment went unreported and if not for catching a little exchange about it on our threads over the weekend, it would have probably been long forgotten. However I didn’t want it to be forgotten because the quote speaks volumes. Read it again.

“The players won’t say it or admit it publicly, but the fact that the Front Office didn’t make any moves to help them at the trade deadline, was a “kick in the teeth” to them.”

The problem here is that if Adam Rubin had reported that, it would have launched a thousand inflammatory tweets and posts, all bashing him for not naming the players or sources, calling the charge untrue, and questioning his integrity. Bloggers like Howard Megdal and Mack Ade would have dashed to their keyboards with all due haste to pen an appropriate (in their minds) retaliatory response as they’ve done many times before.

After thoroughly checking Kevin Brukhardt’s twitter feed that night, there was not so much as a peep about this let alone a tweet. Not one word. Weird, huh? Most Mets fans and bloggers either chose to ignore it or pretend like it was never said.

The problem here is that it was said, and the reason Kevin said it was to impart the feeling in the clubhouse regarding the front office and their inaction when the team got hit with injuries to Francisco, Gee and Santana. The team was still battling for a wild card and expected something in the way of help, but help never came and naturally the team began to struggle and never recovered.

I thought long and hard about whether I should post about this or not, and in fact I even reached out to Kevin to try and get a little bit more clarity (hence the delay), but he had already hit the road for Dallas to cover the Cowboys game and I never got a reply.

I think this is a perfect example of how un-objective the Mets blogosphere can be at times. A quote like that from someone who covers the team as closely as Kevin does, deserved a lot more prominence than it got. I’m sure even Kevin himself wondered why nothing came from it. It took guts to say it…

I’m almost certain that if this had appeared on ESPN New York instead of SNY, the you-know-what would have certainly hit the proverbial fan.

This isn’t a knock on Kevin, who we love… Kevin did his job and he gave us a great insight about the the players that was both important to note and also very relevant. Kevin is a a top-notch reporter and an absolute gem. He’s not a shill and in fact neither are GKR and Bobby-O. In fact they were all recognized this week for being the least biased broadcast team in baseball. Congratulations, guys….

My purpose here is twofold.

First, lets talk about the sentiment in that clubhouse and whether the players have a legitimate gripe.

Second, I simply wanted to point out the unevenness and bias that takes place every day in the Mets blogosphere and Twitterverse. Unfortunately, too many like to pick and choose what they want to believe and what they want to report on. Sorry, but we don’t roll that way on MMO.

I believe it’s very important to represent all opinions and every angle, otherwise all you’re really doing is pushing an agenda. Having a community like ours which espouses all points of views from our writers and our readers leads to many a heated debate and frequent tensions on our very active comment threads. But that’s what passionate Mets fans have always done. We argue at the games, we argue at the dinner table, we argue at the bar, we even argue at weddings and funerals…

Arguing about our team? It’s our lot in life. 🙂