It is probably very hard…wait…it is very hard to be Omar Minaya right now. But watching the Diamondbacks aquire Dan Haren from the Athletics and then trade Jose Valverde to the Astros makes me wonder: what is Omar doing? Or not doing?
We could have had Dan Haren, or at the very least Joe Blanton. And it would have cost us Lastings Milledge. I understand that if Billy Beane wanted to make a deal, he would have talked to Omar, but if Omar knew that Beane wanted Milledge, wouldn’t he talk to him and try to work something out? Instead, we traded Milledge to a division rival who has improved drastically this off season (face it, any improvement the Nationals make is drastic). At least in the American League, with Oakland, we would only face Milledge six times every three years.
This year, another move of Omar’s that I think is questionable is acquiring 5 catchers, and then non-tendering Johnny Estrada. Okay, so we have no need for him, but we still have 4 catchers. The Mets have no real home-grown catchers. The only one I can think of is Todd Hundley, and his name ended up on the Mitchell Report. Really, a simple solution to this would be to draft a catcher, and let him grow and develop.
Okay, so Omar got us Pedro Martinez, Carlos Beltran, Carlos Delgado, Paul Lo Duca, John Maine, Oliver Perez, Endy Chavez, Shawn Green, Billy Wagner, El Duque, Ryan Church, Brian Schneider, and he basically worked out a deal to give away Guillermo Mota, but why isn’t Omar working on what he said he would work on for the last two years? We need pitching. We don’t need the ace that will cost us our AAA farm system. Really, we need a solid #2 guy. He should go for Bartolo Colon or Livan Hernandez because to be quite honest, we have nothing to trade. We need at least one more reliever.
Omar Minaya says he’s gonna get us a pitcher, but actions have always spoken louder than words. Until I see that pitcher, I think that Billy Wagner is right: 2006 was our year.
