So I tossed up a slightly disparaging -- though mostly in good fun, at least from my vantage point -- throwaway post about the Mets over the weekend, and somehow it got picked up by one of the more popular Met blogs going, Amazin' Avenue. Unfortunately both the author and the commenters who came over to my site to post such wonderful things about me didn't seem to pick up on my humorous tone.Just for fun, here's a sampling of some of the more erudite comments people felt inclined to drop:
"Haha. You just won the WORLD SERIES and take to bashing the Mets. Class act you are."
"I actually kind of pity this blogger."
"go f yourself....you'll never be a true journalist....you win a world series and you're still worried about the Mets.....what are you 13 you idiot?"
"go kiss jeter's ass homo."
"larry lies on his bed at night holding jeter's poster with one hand."
Now I'll grant that, for those not familiar with my generally dry style of writing, I can see why what I wrote might raise the ire of Met fans. Additionally, as per my response in the comments section of the aforementioned post, calling why people root for the Mets into question has little to no utility, as it essentially posits that everyone should be a Yankee fan -- this is shortsighted, asinine and completely out of touch with reality.
However, I do find it interesting that a lot of the Mets fans from Amazin' Avenue, at least the anonymous folks who decided to post comments, seem to derive pleasure from the Mets being this supposed underdog in New York, as if a team with a $149 million payroll could ever truly be looked at as such.
Quite frankly, the Mets certainly have the resources to compete with the Yankees, but the team's primary problem has been poor talent evaluation. The Mets were making all sorts of headlines in the 2004 and 2005 offseasons, between signing Pedro Martinez, Carlos Beltran and trading for Carlos Delgado, adding to a solid core of homegrown talent in Jose Reyes and David Wright. But let's be honest here, no one thought Pedro was going to hold up for the duration of the four-year deal they gave him, and he didn't. They did make the right move in signing Beltran (a move I still wish the Yankees had made), yet all Mets fans do is complain about the guy. Delgado was another nice pickup at first, but now he's pretty much done for. Johan Santana's easily the best thing GM Omar Minaya's ever done, and even that took a masterstroke of stupidity on the part of Twins GM Bill Smith, not to mention Johan getting hurt this year (obviously not Minaya's fault, just saying).
Not only do the Mets evaluate talent poorly, but then they go out and spend money on the wrong players. There is no excuse for signing mediocre players like Luis Castillo to four-year deals, picking up scrap heap like Tim Redding and Livan Hernandez to fill the 2009 rotation out and incredibly giving Alex Cora, a career 74 OPS+ hitter, $2 million. I know a ton of things went wrong for the injury-plagued 2009 Mets, but I'm not sure how much better the team's prospects are for 2010, given that the NL East not only has has three good teams in the Phillies, Marlins and Braves; the team's farm system is barren; and the inmates seem to be running the asylum.Quite frankly, the Mets certainly have the resources to compete with the Yankees, but the team's primary problem has been poor talent evaluation. The Mets were making all sorts of headlines in the 2004 and 2005 offseasons, between signing Pedro Martinez, Carlos Beltran and trading for Carlos Delgado, adding to a solid core of homegrown talent in Jose Reyes and David Wright. But let's be honest here, no one thought Pedro was going to hold up for the duration of the four-year deal they gave him, and he didn't. They did make the right move in signing Beltran (a move I still wish the Yankees had made), yet all Mets fans do is complain about the guy. Delgado was another nice pickup at first, but now he's pretty much done for. Johan Santana's easily the best thing GM Omar Minaya's ever done, and even that took a masterstroke of stupidity on the part of Twins GM Bill Smith, not to mention Johan getting hurt this year (obviously not Minaya's fault, just saying).
Maybe the Yankees are about winning at any cost, but it's not like the Mets are afraid to spend money, either. Maybe now they are, given the Wilpon family's supposed involvement with Bernie Madoff. Regardless, I just don't buy this "we're scrappy underdogs that no one thinks has a chance" excuse -- it's an easy crutch for Met fans to fall on when the Yankees are succeeding, but people are so quick to forget that the Mets were very good the last four seasons prior to 2009. The Yankees had their "Mets 2009" season in 2008, spent a boatload of money -- on the right players -- to fix their problems, regrouped and won it all. Unfortunately for the Mets, they have so many holes to fill that they'd probably have to spend at least twice as much as Bobby Valentine's monthly fake mustache budget to fix everything currently wrong with the team.
If I'm a Met fan, I'd have been calling for Minaya's head for years now -- Yankee fans have a tendency to rail on Brian Cashman, but Omar Minaya has to be one of the worst GMs in the game.
Buster Olney reported something in his column today that fully backs up Larry's assertions. An analysis of free agent dollars spent in the past decade:
ReplyDeleteYankees- 1.45 billion
Mets- 651.3 million
Red Sox- 621 million
Cubs- 598.4 million
Giants- 595.2 million
Mets have spent the second most amount of money in free agency money by just over 30 million. The two other teams that have spent more than 600 mill this decade have won 2 World Series each... the Mets have not.
"However, I do find it interesting that a lot of the Mets fans from Amazin' Avenue, at least the anonymous folks who decided to post comments, seem to derive pleasure from the Mets being this supposed underdog in New York, as if a team with a $149 million payroll could ever truly be looked at as such."
ReplyDeleteThat's all you really need to say. Now if you write a blog bashing the Pirates for trading away their future every July and both Bucs fans write mean comments then you are on your own.
Met fans talking smack about the Yankees' spending is the equivalent of the kid that failed a test with a 50 making fun of the kid that failed the same test with a 30. And if we're both going the spend-to-win route (which, for the record, I don't enjoy or advocate), which the Mets clearly are, maybe the Mets SHOULD have spent the extra $800 mm - then they might have had 3 championships to show for it in that period of time, instead of almost $700 mm down the drain for no championships.
ReplyDeleteLarry,
ReplyDeleteWanted to thank you for writing this and apologize on behalf of my fellow Met fans who are still smarting from the worst World Series imaginable. I also wanted to respond to a few of your points, so here goes.
1) The whole underdog thing. I can't speak for other peoples' motives, but I became a Met fan for a few reasons. Genes and geography were big factors. Geography can quickly become intertwined with the choice of the underdog. Growing up in New York and Connecticut, I had the choice of loving the Mets or Yankees. My family were Mets fans, so that heavily weighted in one direction, but there was also nothing appealing about rooting for the team that was supposed to win every year. Rooting for the Yankees, to me, was like rooting for the house in a game of blackjack. You're absolutely right to say that a team with a $150 million payroll can't rightfully be an underdog, but in comparison with the Yankees, EVERY team is an underdog.
2) The Met record on talent evaluation. This has been the number subject on Amazin' Avenue for quite a while. Omar has some strong points, to be sure. The 2006 Mets were the perfect example of Omar's strengths. His ability to find value off the scrap heap should be commended (Jose Valentine, Endy Chavez, John Maine, Oliver Perez, Darren Oliver) and he his acquisitions of Carlos Beltran and Johan Santana are moves that any GM could retire on. Overall, however, he has demonstrated an incredible inability to effectively manage his roster and assets. Just this week, for example, the Mets were totally outclassed by Boston when Billy Wagner signed with Atlanta, netting the Red Sox draft picks that could have gone a long way to beefing up the Met minor league system. And don't even get me started on the Alex Cora signing. The White Sox were able to get Omar Vizquel AND Andruw Jones for less money. All this is to say that I have very little confidence in Omar's ability to help this team rebound in 2010 or beyond.
3) Carlos Beltran. He's my favorite player. Anyone knocking him doesn't know what he's talking about.
4) The Met minor league system. It's not great, but there are certainly some players that we are excited about. We have to be careful about the New York hype, certainly, but players like Josh Thole, Ike Davis, Jennry Mejia, and Fernando Martinez are quality prospects who would be highly touted everywhere.
5) Inferiority Complexes. It's hard to deny that fans take pleasure in seeing their rivals lose (I know that I smile when it happens), but there is something grating when opposing fans and players point out your team's weaknesses at the moments of their greatest triumph. When Jimmy Rollins goes out of his way to trash the Mets during his World Series victory parade, it screams inferiority complex. It's hard for a Yankee fan to have an inferiority complex when their team is the best in the galaxy, but it sometimes make me wonder if they like to rub it in Met fans faces because they have grown tired of celebrating their own success. That 26th World Series probably wasn't as exciting as that 25th, so let's add to our fun by tormenting Met fans. That's fine, our team deserves it and I for one am certainly used to it. I'm sure that Met fans will do it to you guys if we ever have our own victory parade. It doesn't mean that I have to enjoy it.
Anyway, I'm sure I could write a whole lot more on this. It beats thinking about Bengie Molina's .285 OBP. Have fun this offseason.
Joe Budd and every other Met fan that might read this:
ReplyDeleteYou know how they say that you can take the first 120 games of a season and throw them out the window, i.e., each team will win 60 games and each team will lose 60 games? Well, you can sort of do the same thing with Met and Yankee fans.......throw out the bottom 90%. Just like there is a large majority of idiots out there that call themselves Yankee fans and give Met fans guff, and trust me on this, there are just as many morons who call themselves Met fans and give Yankee fans hell for something else stereotypical and tired.
Also, Joe Budd, you show your relative inexperience by saying that the Yankees are expected to win. Many of us grew up, endured, and became Yankee fans during the worst of times.
Fair enough. I'm not going to turn this into a debate about who has more to complain about. I simply made the point that when choosing a team to root for, I could choose the team with 2 World Series or the team with 22 (I probably became a Met fan in 1989 when I was 6). That is why Met fans embrace the "underdog" thing. Relatively speaking, we are always the underdogs in New York. Looking back at it, I probably could have saved myself a lot of grief and frustration at that point, but oh well.
ReplyDeleteFor the record......in 1989, the Mets were the toast of New York and the Yankees were the laughing stock. You didn't exactly pick the underdog at that point, regardless of what their respective histories were. So let's ease off the "underdog" gas pedal, eh?
ReplyDeleteSorry to be picking on you, Joe, just trying to make my point. Appreciate your candor and obvious familiarity with baseball and not just the Mets.
ReplyDeleteIn the end, I think this discussion can get a little silly. It often feels good to look for something deeper in your team choices (i.e. I like to think I root for the underdogs), but let's be realistic; we root for the teams we have always rooted for then justify it later with this stuff. There's nothing inherently wrong with rooting one way or the other. Unless you are a Phillie fan. Then you've just got issues.
ReplyDeleteAs a met fan and regular contributor to AA, I can assure you it wasn't the vast number of "good" posters that came over here and said these things. I can also agree with you that Omar needs to have an unfortunate accident. With the exception of Pagan, Beltran, Santana and signing Jose and Wright through their arb years he has made so many insane mistakes. Cora, Perez, Pedro, Rodriguez, Marlon Anderson, Julio Franco, trading Castro, Francoeur. The list goes on and on. My only complaint about Cashman really was three of his pitcher signings, Wright, Pavano and Burnett. Giving Burnett that much kind of inflated the market for good but not ace type pitchers as we are seeing now with lackey. At least thats my opinion
ReplyDeletePeople who write things like "go kiss jeter's ass homo" are not Amazin' Avenue's constituency. You wrote something on the internet about a team and random fans of that team were obnoxious morons. I don't see how that's one site's fault.
ReplyDeleteThe whole "they can't be underdogs with a $149 million payroll" thing is more than a little silly. When I really got into baseball, the Mets were most certainly the less popular team in my area, and that's why I thought it would be fun to root for them. Once you form your allegiance, you don't change it. The team's payroll now has less than nothing to do with anything.
Your little switcheroo to talking about Met management is cute, but you won't find anyone on Amazin' Avenue who wants Omar around for another day, or who doesn't like Beltran. There are one or two people who don't think the Cora signing was that terrible, but they're mostly trying to keep the rest of us off the ledge.
I'm not sure what the point of your post is. Are you suggesting that Mets fans should become Yankees fans because Yankee management is better? Or are you just a Yankee blogger writing about the Mets because... why, exactly?
First, as a life-long Mets fan, I, too, apologize for those fans who take time from eating paste to make Mets fans look bad. All fan bases have their fair share of morons, I guess.
ReplyDeleteSecond, Larry, I think you've done your fair share to take the high road and address the blog that caused all this. Kudos.
Finally, as Joe Budd and others correctly mentioned, no learned Mets fan can possibly support the current front office. I, and every other Mets fan I know, have called for the public tarring and feathering of Minaya and his cronies (as well as the gutting of a large portion of the team) ever since the collapse of 2007. (And, yes, fans who bemoan Beltran are delusional). Nevertheless, despite its becoming the great albatross my team is today, it's still MY team - for better or for worse. I'd like to believe if your team were in the tank, you wouldn't jump ship, either. And there lies the heart of the matter. It's not about rooting for the Mets OVER the Yankees, it's simply about rooting for the Mets. Period.
I, for one, will remind my fellow Mets fans to be civil when the tide turns again in favor of the Orange & Blue. No one likes to be kicked when he's down.