Trading Francisco Rodriguez is No White Flag

in the sense that this move can be justified by almost any team, even one with a much better chance of making the players. indeed, even if you were clinging to first place.

but the mets dont need to officially enter white flag mode to start makign these moves. despite not being mathematically eliminated, they should be planning for the future sense, since the start of the this season till the end of this one.

i want them to win as much as the next fan. in fact i have a sizable amount off money bet that they will beat their o/u from the start of the year (well not that sizable). but if they should still be looking long term. staying at a 1% playoff chance for the rest of the year does no one any good.

K-Rod was not a white flag, and was actually a good thing to my half-brother. In the course of our half-hour long back and forth to him via text messages, I made a sabermetric convert out of him. He knew of advanced stats, in theoretical form, and market inefficiencies/inflation, but it took literal form here, and he got it, and will be reading Moneyball in a few weeks.

even if we were sitting in first place, KRod should have and would have been traded mid season.

As other above this have pointed out, you don’t need to spend 17.5 MIL on a closer to win, especially one that has been middle of the pack when it comes to closer stats.

How great would it be if we ‘discover’ an arm in the system that would be an effective closer for years to come?

The Mets are bleeding cash and simply could not afford to pay K-Rod that type of money

Marty Noble: Mets’ Trade Deadline fate may be sealed | mets.com: News

My whole argument:

While Marty Noble makes some good points here, the fact that he considers trading away talent, in the form of K-Rod, as a showing of leaving behind a compromised bullpen and as not being a recommended remedy, is merely propaganda. Alderson knows as well as the most intelligent Mets fans that risking an obligation to K-Rod’s vesting option at 55 games poses a significant risk going forward, and hinders the necessary progress for re-allocating those resources more efficiently – toward free agent signings, contracts and prospects. Had the option on K-Rod’s contract vested for 2012, it would cost the team $17.5 million for a player who only pitches about 70 innings per year. That’s absolutely ludicrous! By those standards, starting pitchers would deserve $50 million per year. Seriously, it’s time to create a sustainable process of development for years to come, instead of thinking only about the current season, as Minaya had done before. The best teams in baseball manage their payroll effectively by building primarily on the foundations of their farm system and by maximizing the efficiency of that payroll. $17.5 million for a closer is a gigantic waste of money, even on the best closers out there.

Besides, this team has done remarkably well in spite of the absences of Wright and Davis, and a somewhat questionable bullpen. Imagine how good we’ll be once they return! Daniel Murphy has been a very pleasant surprise, for that matter. We still have the offense to make a run at the playoffs, the pitching to get us there, and the resources to ensure we stay in contention year after year, instead of putting all our eggs in this season’s basket, like Minaya. Alderson knows what he’s doing, and this trade will have a greater net benefit than net deficit, in sum, going forward.

It appears too many of us are worried about doing all we can to make a playoff push this year, to spite the success of the team in the future – have we not seen this with Minaya every year, with those megacontracts!? Did his plans ever work? Ultimately, NO! It’s unbelievable that so many of us have forgotten what his regime was all about, that we often fall into that same hypocritical trap. Our mentality as Mets fans, in general, must change – forget what sports pundits like Mike Francessa and Jon Heyman say. They often times don’t know what they’re talking about, and we often assume that they do just because they’re mainstream media figures – we unnecessarily put them on this superficial pedestal. So the trading of K-Rod is not the waving of a white flag by any means – don’t fall for the hysteria that the sky is falling. If we trade Beltran for prospects, however, THEN we can pretty much look to success in the years ahead instead of this year.

Also, don’t fall for the mass hysteria created by the Wilpons – we should be able to resign Reyes and sign other players to contracts. We got rid of K-Rod’s vesting option, and Beltran’s contract expires this year, netting us a profit margin of about $35 million. Also, it was revealed not too long ago in the Madoff case being handled by trustee Irving Picard, that the Mets may not have to pay $1 billion and hemorrhage their assets, as Picard had previously determined. But if they do, the Wilpons will have to sell the team, and somebody will purchase it instead – once that happens, all that Madoff case debt falls solely on the Wilpons, and not the franchise. If this happens and the Wilpons don’t sell the franchise, the Mets will go bankrupt like the Dodgers, and they will be acting much like the lowlife scum we see nowadays, in the form of bank CEOs, who will sacrifice their own banks to pamper their exorbitant appetites.

If you want to go on believing dumping K-Rod and that dumb vest was a bad move, then go right ahead. But if you look at the peripheral stat comparison between Parnell and K-Rod, you will see that Parnell is just as good, if not better, than K-Rod. Over the last two seasons, K-Rod has posted tERAs (advanced metric that measures performance by batted ball instead of simply earned runs determined in part by defense and luck) of 2.63 and 2.77, and Parnell 3.22 and 2.71. Also, in terms of xFIP (Park-adjusted fielding independent pitching), over the last two seasons, K-Rod has posted numbers of 3.16 and 3.19, and Parnell 2.54 and 2.66. Lastly, Parnell has had better K/BB rates, and has been more dominant as well. (See www.fangraphs.com for these advanced stat metrics.) As Parnell progresses, he will learn to develop his secondary pitches, relying on more than just merely his 103 mph fastball (77.6 %) and slider (19.4 %).

That’s all I have to say. I’m done.

even though we dumped his vest, i think if omar would have just gotten the 10 team list, we wouldn’t be in such a hurry to get rid of him.

Let’s see how this played out. First Sandy comes out and emphasizes how important this series of games are to how management will act at the trading deadline, the team responds by having a winning road trip and immediately Sandy takes them out at the knees by dealing their closer….surely sounds like waving the white flag.