State of the Mets Address

By: Mr. Met Staff Writer NFL PROZACH

 

Well it is now mid- May and I have to say I am not surprised by the Mets 14-19 record this season in fact I expected nothing more than a losing effort.  Why you ask? Well that has been the trademark of the Sandy Alderson era thus far.  However, Sandy never tried to sell us (Mets Fans) on the now he has been about building a consistent winner from within a team that unlike the team’s Omar Minaya built in the last administration could sustain winning. With that being said I think even the Alderson supporters, fans, and all Mets optimists have to start to worry about the future of this franchise.  Let me start by saying this nobody expected this team to win this year, a .500 record is something that fans, analyst, and bloggers alike hoped for and benchmarked as a good season for this team.  But even with that the most important thing to a successful 2013 for the Mets was too start to build on some of this young talent that they supposedly have coming up from the minors or here already on the Major league roster.  Judging by this standard this season thus far has been an absolute disaster!  Once again Ike Davis has looked horrendous at the plate early in the season.  Once again Dillon Gee and Jon Niese have been inconsistent and borderline horrible!  For the record I do believe both will turn it around but the facts thus far are the facts and their statistics are absolutely horrible!  After a hot start John Buck has cooled down and what about that outfield! The only bright spot on this team as of now is the development of Matt Harvey into an ace and perhaps also Lucas Duda starting to flash some of that power more often.  But even with that he is as clumsy as they came out in left field.

So what am I getting at?  I think it’s about time somebody holds Alderson responsible for his plan.  You see lets discuss his plan to build around “prospects”.  When it is said help is coming it means Travis d’Arnaud and Zack Wheeler.  Noah Syndergaard and Brandon Nimmo are easily at least 2 full seasons away from making an impact on this team and I believe from searching around the web, listening, and reading about their development mid 2015 would be the earliest we could see Syndergaard and who knows with Nimmo.  To discuss Wheeler first it has been talked of how much of a great thing it was that Alderson got him in return for Beltran. Well fast forward some years later Carlos Beltran is still a top producing outfielder in the big leagues.  What of Wheeler well now there’s a question of his maturity after an incident with a fellow team mate in spring training.  However, more telling was his struggles early this year in triple a Las Vegas where he had all the excuses in the world except that he needs to be better.  The conditions in MLB will vary from night to night, day to day, and start to start.  More importantly the Mets play in the northeast so if he struggles in early April and May or worst in October is he going to blame it on the weather?  Is this the type of franchise player we applaud Alderson for acquiring?  The kid could still be fantastic but these are defiantly some major concerns I have.  Now to get into d’Arnaud, who is well injury prone!  d’Arnaud is out again with an injury the injury itself is not important.  What is important here is again the 24 year old d’Arnaud is missing another chunk of time with an injury preventing him from development.  We know can’t expect to see him the big leagues for his MLB debut anytime soon making it very possible that he may not see any significant time in the big leagues until the age of 25 and that’s as long as he can get healthy and stay on the field and not suffer another injury, thus far he has not proved that.  Again is this a franchise player? 

Two things I would like to discuss about this year’s version of the Mets is the garbage that this team’s strength would be the starting rotation as well as the Collin Cowgill situation.  First for the rotation it is far from this team’s strength.  I know a lot of you reading this will be well how could he have known Santana would go down for the year so early?  Well my answer to that is how could he have not prepared for it!  Alderson knew Santana did not pitch the last few months of the season last year.  In fact, he even created a situation with it with his mouth which I will not get into again in this post.  He should have known there was a strong possibility Santana would land on the DL sometime this year and having Jeremy Hefner or Aaron Laffey as a replacement for Johan Santana is a complete joke and shows the lack of effort he has put into building this team.  Also, knowing the health problems you have with Santana and with the Dickey trade the Mets should not have bet on Shaun Marcum especially with the health problems he had last year.  That was a little foolish on the part of Alderson.  Now to get into my thoughts on Collin Cowgill which have been heavily criticized on twitter.  Cowgill hit .254 last year in triple a the fact that not only was he on the major league roster opening day but the leadoff hitter was not only short lived but a complete joke that probably stemmed from once again Alderson’s big mouth.  I believe that because of the jokes that Alderson made, throughout, the offseason about the outfield he was desires of one of his minor league pickups to play well to start the year so he didn’t look foolish.  Hence the Collin Cowgill experiment out in centerfield and it came at the expense of better outfielders!

Now to move on to Matt Harvey who has been in short phenomenal! There is nothing I can write that hasn’t been written about the kid or his success. I would just like to point out that Omar Minaya drafted Harvey not Sandy Alderson.  To take it a step further for those of you who like to tell me on twitter that Alderson is responsible for the plan that brought Harvey here that’s nonsense.  Do you people use your EYES!!  The kid is incredible any team that has a kid with his talent with any GM would include him in any type of plan for the present or the future.  Alderson was handed a future Cy Young Award winner and all he did was not mess it up!  I would also like to point out that other than d’Arnaud and Wheeler who I discussed earlier in this post Alderson’s plan for the future is still all guys brought in by Omar Minaya and Steve Phillips in David Wright’s case.  Unless you believe John Buck is the catcher of the future and not d’Arnaud you cannot argue against this point! So I pose the question what has he really done?  When will Alderson be held responsible for the loosing and poor shape of this franchise?  Yes I said this franchise is in poor shape because even if all those ifs and all these players I discussed on this roster pan out do you guys still think this team is in any shape to compete with the fire power of the Braves or the Nats?  Because I sure don’t!

 

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