What is it about the last ten years of Mets baseball that makes so many Met fans resistant to change it?
What is so extraordinary about the last decade that make so many reluctant to let it go?
I keep hearing and reading that these same fans who are opposed to change, are only interested in winning and yet they want to hold tight to years of losing and ineptitude. Why?
I would think if these fans really did believe in winning, that they would be leading the charge toward a radical philosophical change that would undo the dysfunction that our fan base has been forced to endure for far too long.
What are they fighting to keep exactly? Why are they so angry?
Didn’t anyone ever tell them that if you keep doing the same things, you’ll keep getting the same results? Or that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it?
What are they so afraid of? Perhaps a front office that in addition to traditional scouting will also consider other ways to evaluate players so that they can avoid the costly mistakes that led to the financial quagmire that has had this franchise in a stranglehold in the last four seasons?
Or maybe winning has nothing to do with their angst… Maybe it’s just a fear of the unknown.
“I don’t know what FIP or VORP is, but it sounds evil so I’m going to fight it to the death.”
That’s it, isn’t it?
It’s unfortunate that many fans would rather endure ten more years of failure before accepting a modernized, forward-thinking front office who only wan’t to ensure that the next 50 years will be far greter than the first 50 years.
According to Thomas Edison, he ran into these same resistances from those who were vehemently opposed to giving up their candles for light bulbs.
Imagine if you will that the previous regime was still in charge and that Minaya was still the GM. Here you have a general manager who couldn’t win with a $145 million dollar payroll, and yet you expect this “Checkbook GM” to win with just $100 million or less to play with?
The first thing Minaya did to try and make the Mets relevant in 2005 was to hand out the biggest free agent contracts of the offseason to Carlos Beltran and Pedro Martinez. Wow, what a formula for sustainable success.
Every season after that, he continued spending like a drunken sailor while wasting top draft picks for aging talent on the wrong side of 30.
And with the picks he did keep; used them on the likes of Kevin Mulvey, Eddie Kunz, Nathan Vineyard, Steven Matz and yes, Mike Pelfrey. You want more of that?
This front office came here under the most difficult of circumstances, not only having to rebuild the team and retool the farm system they inherited from Omar Minaya, but also getting blindsided by ownership who never told them how dire the financial circumstances really were.
We are in what I can only call a “Mets Great Depression Era”.
Who do you want to lead you out of it, Herbert Hoover (Omar Minaya and his failed policies.) or Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Sandy Alderson and his New Deal policies.)?
