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The Mets want you to believe that they have control over it all. They want you to believe that they are adequate traffic policemen directing all the chaos of baseball that keeps on coming and confusing them, that they are not the abject joke of the wrongdoing and misunderstanding. Incompetence, they seem to be in the naked eye.
They want to sell you about it. So bad.
And then, Sunday afternoon, the team reported to Citi Field not knowing who was the starting pitcher. This was not due to the fact that it was thought to motivate the players, or to go back to the old school, when a pitcher was learning that it was starting that day because the manager had placed a baseball in his pikes.
No. This happened because Jason Vargas was injured while jogging Wednesday in Denver. The Mets knew it, even if it did not seem serious enough at the beginning to justify a relay of DL. This did not happen before Saturday. It was an unfortunate moment for the Mets (and less fortunate for the Dodgers, deprived of aiming for his 8.60 AVE).
The Mets would not be the first team in the history of baseball to justify an emergency start. Yes, it is a long-standing failure that the Triple-A team is in Las Vegas and so it is difficult for travel arrangements. But the Double-A team is in Binghamton. It's a three-hour ride in the lead. Someone could easily have been summoned.
Instead, they opted for a board game. That was Jerry Blevins, the left-handed southpaw of the Mets (even though he was compromised in this function by left-handers who almost never retired), asked to make his first career, at age 34, after 532 appearances in big league. To nobody's surprise exactly – probably not even Blevins himself – it was 2-0, Dodgers, after two hitters.
So, yes: it was a sufficient nonsense of aptitude.
Later, it's the daily doozy that emanates from Mickey Callaway's press conferences. The Mets spent a fun day off the beaten track, marking the start of a series of big hits, relegating the game to the end of Kevin Plawecki's unlikely run in the eighth inning. In the 10th, José Bautista took the lead with a walk. Dominic Smith was next, and the Dodgers outdid him, begging him to give birth.
A problem:
"Dominic Smith has never broken before," Callaway conceded.
The biggest problem? Callaway actually says that Smith has never done any straining before, which is just a remarkable comment (or a telling explanation) of the horror of the Mets players' development plan. And what is worse? This is essentially true. In 2,511 minor league plate appearances, Smith has exactly one single sacrifice, at the 2014 Savannah Single-A. This is for a player who has only hit 42 homers in six minor seasons.
Beautiful.
That 8-7 loss against the Dodgers was just another, constantly reminding how badly the Mets are headed, an indictment that landed at the feet of Sandy Alderson. It has already been a full year of unskilled replacements, criminal mishandling of injuries, absurd use (or not) of the LD, of an offseason choice after the other exposed as horrible – and it is only June.
How long can it continue?
Look, you can complain about how the property of Mets is cheap, and it's 100% right. But you can win with a payroll of $ 150 million. Alderson was the man who built this product, up and down, for eight years and with a notable exception of two months in 2015 – emphasized, remember, by an acquisition of Yoenis Cespedes that only happened when the Offers for Carlos Gomez, Justin Upton and Jay Bruce could not be consumed – it was a failure fiasco, and it will almost surely be six losing seasons.
The biggest question around the Mets should not be if they should swap core assets Jacob deGrom and Noah Syndergaard; It should be this: How can the Wilpons think that it is a good thing to entrust Alderson with making these crucial decisions? What about his background in building eight Mets teams telling you that it would be a good idea?
Having the Dodgers in town only exacerbates the problem. The Mets think they're in trouble from injury? The Dodgers have returned to their season with Clayton Kershaw sitting most of the last few months, without Corey Seager, with as many games lost at the DL as the Mets. In a way, the Dodgers find a way.
Why can Alderson never find someone like Max Muncy, an Oakland defender who destroyed the Mets this weekend? Why does his low-risk veteran play the icy Adrian Gonzalez and Bautista instead of Matt Kemp (and his .904 OPS)? Why can not he ever find someone like Justin Turner, who hit the win-win circuit … oh, wait. Right.
Hell: Why can not he find a way to set up a complete team in a game that really counts, and that 34,060 have actually paid? That's what it does. That's who are the Mets now. Scream to the owners; they deserve it. Curse in the players; they have been mostly ugly. But most of this is on GM, whose life learning must end sometime. Preferably soon.
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