Tuesday Applesauce

by Eric Simon on Aug 5, 2008 10:30 AM EDT in Applesauce

Nice article by Steve Popper at The Record about Carlos Delgado's status heading into 2009. Specifically, the Mets hold a $12 million team option on Delgado which seemed very much up in the air a few months ago. Now, with Delgado's resurgence and the likely cost of replacing him, that $12 million doesn't seem so bad. As Popper deftly points out, though, it's not *really* a $12 million option. The Mets would owe Delgado a $4 million buyout if they declined the option, so picking him up for that extra year would really only cost them $8 million. Safe money is on them exercising that option.

The Mets are one of several teams who have been scouting the rehab of Freddy Garcia. Garcia has missed the whole season to this point after shoulder surgery last year, and his agent feels he will be ready to help some team in September.

At The Sun, Steven Goldman writes about the Mets' farm system and their general inability to develop (and draft) contributing players over the past ten years or so. Apart from a few studs (Jose Reyes, David Wright, maybe Mike Pelfrey), the Mets have very little to show for a dozen years of drafting and player development.

Chris McShane has a potentially troubling update on one of the NYCEDC's property acquisitions at Willets Point. Chris writes the terrific blog Develop Willets Point which contains all of the latest news and notes related to the proposed development project for the ~~complete and utter shithole~~ area around Shea.

At MetsGeek, Alex Nelson previews the pitchers the Mets will face against the Padres at Shea.

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Heilman

Poor performance this season notwithstanding (and maybe due to overwork), the Mets drafted Heilman and developed him into a serviceable reliever for the past few seasons. Maybe not as much of a challenge as developing an everyday player or a starter, but worth noting.

I also think it’s a bit of a distortion to say that the Mets “have very little to show for a dozen years of drafting and player development” (sorry for quoting you rather than clicking through, but I’m lazy) when that’s resulted, in part, from active choices made to trade young players for veterans rather than attempt to develop some of those players. Who’s to say that Mike Jacobs wouldn’t have turned into a better player than he is now, perhaps by learning about plate patience from Rickey Henderson at the same time as Jose Reyes was doing so, if the Mets hadn’t traded him for Delgado? Or that Milledge and Gomez wouldn’t be pretty good starting corner outfielders if the Mets hadn’t traded them last winter?

Personally, the predilection for trading guys before they get a chance to develop into good major leaguers (Kazmir the most egregious example, Bell another) bothers me more. I guess it’s similar, but not exactly the same issue.

by JoshNY on Aug 5, 2008 12:48 PM EDT reply actions

beg, borrow, or steal prospects, it's the same thing

One way or another, for a baseball team to succeed, it has to have a fairly steady influx of talented players at the start of their peak years (say, around 25 years old). The trade market for players like this is thinning pretty dramatically in this decade, it seems to me, and teams are looking more and more to develop players from within. I think Eric is right to say that the Mets have not been a great success at player development in this environment where youth is becoming more valuable. All of Omar’s best moves as Mets GM have been trades, in which he grabbed other teams’ undervalued young players for less than their real worth (Perez, Maine, even Santana fit this category). The one counterexample I can see, as I said a while ago, is Pelfrey: the Mets accurately decided he was the one young pitcher they wanted to hang on to and develop, while letting guys like Humber and Bannister go, and (at least right now) it looks like they made the right decision.

If the team manages to guess/know better than other teams what the actual value of its prospects (and theirs) is, it can make good decisions in both directions—keep the future stars and sell high on the “promising” ones that aren’t as likely to pan out. It’s the same thing either way; trades and development from within both hinge on accurate evaluation. What burned so badly about the Kazmir thing was precisely that the average fan had a better sense of the mismatch in value on both sides of that deal than the Mets front office, or Al Leiter, or whoever made the decision there.

by anonymous on Aug 5, 2008 1:39 PM EDT up reply actions

Are we only counting guys we keep?

What about Scott Kazmir? What about Jason Isringhausen? What about Jay Payton? What about Mike Jacobs? What about Butch Husk-...OK OK, I just loved that guy is all.

The 2008 NY Mets: Reyes singles. Castillo infield single. Wright walks. Beltran lines out. ZaBlanc bitches. Delgado strikes out. Reyes picked off third. Fans boo. Padres win 2-1.

by ZaBlanc on Aug 5, 2008 4:09 PM EDT reply actions

Count whoever you want—if we have to reach as far back as Isringhausen then Eric’s point is made anyway. But somehow pondering the talents of Scott Kazmir doesn’t make me feel any better about the Mets’ ability to develop young players.

by anonymous on Aug 5, 2008 4:24 PM EDT up reply actions