Home Grown! The Beginner's Guide to Understanding The Mets, Vol. 2

they are playing much better baseball are two imports RA Dickey and Tak and mysterious injuries that have put Maine, and the met we all love to hate, Perez on the dl

I’d be pretty pleased if they got that close. Who even thought that was a possibility before this season began?

http://www.amazinavenue.com/2010/4/5/1405487/amazin-avenue-2010-season

Oh . . . never mind. ;)

as usual, and gracious. Love the home grown angle. I bet you won’t bury your Mets stuff even if they fall short this year.

Do you mean “misallocation” (of people to roles) or something like that?

If this season is the peak of a slow-crescendoing player-development success story, I will forgive a lot. If the Mets fall short of the playoffs again, I’ll bury all my Mets stuff in the back yard and start watching the NFL network.

Couldn’t both these things be true? If the Mets are, as you’re highlighting here, getting pretty good at player development, but they are also (Omar’s fault or not) bad at roster construction and at constructing a supporting cast without big holes in it, then couldn’t they both be showing lots of signs of hope for the future and failing to be as good as they should be in the present?

“Whether or not Omar Minaya’s talents are best served as a General Manager—it’s an open question—”

No. No, it isn’t.

For all the talk about homegrown talent, the Mets are a remarkably mediocre team, one that has gotten phenomenally lucky. Minaya, bless his odd little heart, accidentally pulled two guys out of his ass who are both pitching like aces, or near enough.

In a very real sense the difference this year is all Tak and Dickey. The Mets are 10-3 in games they started, 11-2 total. Without those two the Mets are 30-28. Prorated, that puts them nowhere near even the wildcard lead. A team throws two afterthoughts, two middle relievers, into the starting rotation and, voila, the wildcard lead, no less.

What’s genuinely hilarious about this is how the Mets are succeeding despite Minaya’s (and Manuel’s) best efforts. Maine and Perez were brutal in spring training. Designating them both as members of the starting rotation when the damage they were likely to do could have been limited by having them pitch long out of the pen was obviously insane. They were nowhere near the top five starters the Mets could have run out there. Further, Manuel (and, presumably, Minaya, by fiat) could have limited the damage Perez did by skipping most of his starts, but he specifically put Pelfrey and Santana on five days rest in order to make sure Perez didn’t miss any turns. It was idiocy on a level that was only surpassed this year in the inanity sweepstakes by the Zambrano-to-the-bullpen nuttiness in Chicago.

Similarly, the madness with Matthews, Jacobs, and Catalanatto, with Minaya getting and Manuel playing guys who were clearly not major leaguers, and whose performance wasn’t merely subpar, but actually destructive.

So here we are, with the team a half game out. More credit to the players, who are succeeding despite Minaya’s, Manuel’s, and the Wilpons’ best efforts. Takahashi and Dickey are pitching very well. Their FIPS are good (xFIPS less so, but I’m unconvinced by its normalization of FB/HR rates), and whatever we think of Santana’s decline, that still means the Mets currently have five pitchers who are above average. Tie that to an average offense and you have a team that’s going to win a lot of games. Call it the Angels method.

As postscript, without adding a starter the rotation will start to fall apart in August. None of Niese, Takahashi, and Dickey have much experience pitching much over one hundred innings in a season. At least one of them is going to get hurt, come up with a dead arm, or become otherwise ineffective. Too, his injury has affected Santana’s abilities. It may have affected his durability as well.

I have no more faith now than I did during the remarkable offseason that the FO will add the right starter, let alone that it understands the genuine importance of adding one, but this club is delightfully impossible to predict. The only player injured since the start of the season is the first player we would have picked whose getting injured would be most likely to help the team. The team is playing in good luck as well as dumb, and sometimes that lasts a season.

p.s. I don’t think the standard counter to one of my arguments, that if you remove two good pitchers from ANY team that team’s record will suffer substantially, disproves my point that the Mets are succeeding through blind chance. The Mets intentionally went into the season with a rotation that was almost certainly doomed to fail. It did fail. The FO even DFA’ed their most obvious backup plan/sixth starter, and even THAT didn’t kill them. It was as if Omar had gotten hammered during a night at The Dunes and lost his entire bankroll. He then went outside, pulled his emergency stash of bills out of his money belt, giggled madly, tore the stash to pieces and threw it into the air. Then he flagged down a cab, got in, and found an enormous wad of thousand dollar bills wedged down behind the seat.

I wouldn’t count on that run of luck continuing, much as I’d like it to do so.

I am a lawyer, and a joke among lawyers—which is funny mostly because of its truth—is that lawyers went to law school to avoid math. Putting a lawyer in charge of mathematicians is kind of like putting, well, damn, I can’t think of a more ridiculous analogy to the concept of putting a lawyer before mathematicians (maybe putting Corky from Life Goes On in charge of the National Academy of Sciences).

Second, I think that it’s clear that although Omar didn’t dump the farm, he was supposedly renowned for being able to spot prospects, and the farm system isn’t nearly as complete as one would hope it would be. This is especially so with last year’s $150 million rebuilding year. What success we’ve had this year is a mix of certain players playing slightly under expectation and others playing beyond who were thrown into a situation by circumstance and not plan (if someone had told you our starting lineup would include Dickey, Neise and Tak in June, would you have renewed your season tickets?). So I question your idea that he is a renowned scout. Buying established players on the decline seems the opposite.

And I know you’re trying to be positive, and I’m not attacking you. But we’re not a small-market team. We’re a big fat New York everyone hates us because we have money market team. I love homegrown talent, both for the efficiencies it presents and for some sort of moralistic view on how baseball should take place. But we have a very thin minor league system at present, period. I know people can point to this one and that one, but there have been some very lucky surprises. The 35 year old knuckleballer is one of our top starters? That’s like an accordion player winning American Idol. We have recently cleaned up against awful teams, and even have won some series against good teams. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Can we beat the Braves and Phillies consistently? I’m not so sure. And supposing we face injuries beyond what we have? I’m very doubtful that we have call-ups to adequately fill the roles. We’re a team on thin ice that has held recently, but the heat of summer tends to melt ice.

We had 3 hits today.