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Matthew Cerrone, from MetsBlog: Speaking of position players, I was sent a question from Ted in Brooklyn, and he asked, ‘When you have guys like Damion Easley and Argenis Reyes, who maybe weren’t hitting so well off the bench, why didn’t you turn to guys like John Rodriguez or Val Pascucci, who were hitting really well in Triple A?’ Why don’t guys like that get the 
call? Is it a roster situation? Or contracts? Why not turn to those guys? Because they were hitting really well in Triple-A.
Omar Minaya: They were hitting really well, but the reality is that Easley had a very good year. I mean, we’ve got a really good bench. And the fact that a lot of our guys were hurt, early those guys were hurt, we had injuries, and guys like Fernando Tatis – as a bench player – were outstanding, Easley as a bench player was outstanding. Castro as a bench player did a very good job. Those guys, though they may have numbers that look good in Triple A, still they have never been proven guys in the major leagues and you can’t take Triple-A numbers and correlate them to Major Leagues numbers.
Question 4, during which we talk about ‘gritty players,’ and how you scout such a player, will post at 12 pm.
To read a full transcript of this entire interview, click here.
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Easley had a very good year? He had like an awesome 2-3 week period, but other than that I don’t see how anyone could say he had a good year.
yeah, he was good briefly shortly after Castillo went on the DL. and he had a good week when Castillo came back from the DL. (Motivation? nah…)
easley did have a very good year if he was on our bench the entire season with spot starts like they envisioned going into ‘08. problem is he became a starter and we relied on him a lot as we did tatis, evans, murph, etc.
I don’t even know what to make of this… who cares about John Rodriguez or Val Pascucci
This was a very good question by matt. The response by omar is right but we will never know until given the chance. Val and John had some good numbers and i was waiting for the post that they were summoned up…not to be the messiah as some people believe he was for a while but to get a look in. I think the reason we didnt see any AAA guys here was because due to injury reasons the mets were always struggling to catch up to the phills and at the end of the season the WC. Omar/manuel did not want to take any chances. Experiance vs Non-experiance was the driving force during september and every game was crucial to win. If we had more breathing room i think we may….have seen them. I hope they will play a bigger role next year though.
30 year old guys are in AAA for a reason. Generally it’s because they’re – get this – not good enough to make an impact at the major league level.
As for experience –> What were they doing starting Jon Niese, Nick Evans, and Daniel Murphy?
Good call brah.
Niese was our best pitching prospect…
Nick evans and daniel murphy i believe was the extent of omars gamble with AAA. They paid off but i doubt he was willing to take any more risks with people from AAA. Evans could cover for delgado if needed. Both Murphy/Evans got LF. Tatis had RF. Why did he need to bring up any more AAA personell with the bench being able to handle replacements if needed. Had there been more injuries reg the IF(besided castillo where argenis/easley took over) i believe we would have seen those guys but again there really wasnt a need to bring them up. I dont think its about val/john ability to play because their numbers were solid but there was no need for the other guys. Not to mention they were defensivly impaired. Murph never played the OF but he adjusted well enough that he could play…same with evans. So basically yea i had a good call..thanks for the kudos.
Only thing is that those guys could have most likely given a better AB off the bench than Awful Reyes, Easley and Anderson. They did not count toward’s roster spots anyway. Yes you would have had to juggle the 40 man some but that would have been easy with all the injuries.
wow ok im really getting fustrated with my comments dissapearing…..
i think you have a point real about perhaps crowding that locker room even more and giving us better ph options than castillo/argenis.
hopefully this shows up at least.
Dont you guys know anything, if we had called up 30-year old AAA lifers we’d be playing the Dodgers right now!!!
I think the question is more about why they weren’t willing to give those guys a chance when what we were doing clearly wasn’t working.
i believe its because they were playing by the book and didnt want to be second guessed by giving someone with no ml experiance a chance to potentially influence their playoff chances in a negative way.
Because they’re not good.
Neither are Damion Easley and Marlon Anderson.
Interviews like this make me think Omar doesn’t actually get it.
“As General Managers, we have to make decisions based upon what a player has done in their whole career. Up until that point, if I’m not mistaken, Luis Castillo had been a consistent .300 hitter with about a .360, .370 On Base Percentage”
It is also a GM’s job to understand aging patterns and react accordingly with proper contract lengths.
“When we looked at the market place, we liked David Eckstein a lot. We tried to do a deal with Eckstein and we couldn’t get it done. “
Why? Why would we trade for Eckstein? How would he be any better than Castillo? Increased scrappiness?
but the reality is that Easley had a very good year.
Easley as a bench player was outstanding.
I guess Omar meant Easley had a few clutch hits, but was horrible defensively, had a mediocre batting average, a bad on base percentage, did not hit for much power, did not show a ton of patience at the plate, is not especially fast, and is in his late-30s.
Those guys (Pascucci), though they may have numbers that look good in Triple A, still they have never been proven guys in the major leagues and you can’t take Triple-A numbers and correlate them to Major Leagues numbers.
Yes, you can. There has been a ton of statistical work done in estimating Major League Equivalent performances. It isn’t perfect, but they certainly correlate.
Interviews like that remind me that Omar gets the “big stuff,” like not signing mediocre players to $10m/yr long-term contract, but still misses the little things that would help turn a contender into a championship-quality ballclub.
“It is also a GM’s job to understand aging patterns and react accordingly with proper contract lengths”
-isnt it also a gms job to secure trusted/reliable options for their product(team). Eckstein was apparently not an option so castillo was the next best option on the table in FA. I have a feeling omar did not give castillo the 4th year willingly but was rather handcuffed to make that deal with our needs and supply. Castillo was in the driving seat and he took advantage. We needed a 2b and a 2b was available. This contract imo was just to plug up 2b because we lacked a viable replacement inhouse or a better option on FA.
zod you are most likely very very wrong, when no major league team has any desire to have these guys on the mlb roster there is a reason for it and they know more about baseball then we do, or else we would be in there shoes.
You put your best 25 guys on the roster period, theres no other factor here and everyone in the organization thought Easley and AReyes are better than Val the savior….and if they polled every manager and executive in baseball I would be shocked if less than 99.9% agreed with Omars decision with the roster
Val is probably the greatest hitter ever when playing in an incredibly inflated offensive environment against AAA pitching.
Unfortunately the Mets play well, now played) at Shea and they play against guys in the Majors. Not many guys can have 62 big league at bats, 11 hits (.587 OPS!), 22 ks, and 18 total bases! SAVIOR!
No major league team wanted Tatis either and he worked for a while.
This is silly. Barring injury we would have had one of the best benches in the NL. Not many teams have backups for their backups backup. How many removed were we in LF and RF?
Eh, maybe out of the whole NL but when you compare it to teams that were actually contending for a play-off spot I think our bench looks pretty week.
If our bench was Easley, Pagan, Endy, Castro/Schnieder, Tatis
That’s not too bad at all.
Looks a lot better than
Easley, Awful Reyes, Ramon Hernadez, Cancel, Endy.
true and as you said injury messed our game plan up…but even with that people stepped up..just not enough im afraid.
agreed….the black hole of marlon anderson(cold shiver)
argenis(cold shiver)
easley was decent
castro had his moments
martinez had a good 2 days
cancel/casinova-had their moments
idk it just seems the phills(hate to admit) had better options in bullpen/bench than we did…as well as like gina said contending teams……
tatis/evans/murph/endy were good bench(guess turned starter) options
Agreed Dirty. Again though the did not face the same injuries that we did. Again, look at LF. Alou gets injured and his backup Pagan gets injured then his backup Nixon gets injured then his backup Tatis gets injured.
gina you are so wrong about this, so wrong….tatis had major league experience and at what time was a reputable player. Pascucci is the kind of guy you only give a chance to if your team is 20 games out, if you are going to risk an unkown in a pennant race they better be young and not some over the hill minor leaguer who hasnt learned to give it up already and who ted berg fell madly in love with
In my opinion the question isn’t only about hitters. What about in the bullpen, why did they bring Muniz up and down pretty much every month but stokes didn’t get a call until august?
Without looking wasn’t there a big difference in their minor league numbers as well as their overall purpose? Stokes was a starter and was originally only thought of as a long man.
good point…muniz was very effective early on in the year and i guess thats why he got the call over stokes…once the wheels fell off on the muniz train they turned to stokes who i guess they thought would have the same type of early success….
I think what Ted and alot of fans are frustrated about is… If thinks were not working, why not take a chance on a guy that’s have a good year in AAA? Maybe give him week or two and see what he can do. It’s better than bringing up 3rd and 4th string catchers and at one point a guy that was hitting .200… for a couple of games and he didn’t even play!
The real question is.. Is this a philisophy on the part of Omar and most GMs? Don’t bring up guys with no track history? Why even have these guys in our system if there’s no hope for them? Sometimes you have to take a chance and think outside the box!
I think this is why you can’t go out and get that ONE MISSING PIECE. We don’t have to have allstars at ever position. Me don’t have to have Manny and crap on the bench, BP, 2B SP. We need a well rounded team that fits the already present core of the team. Someone in LF that is going to give you league average numbers EVERYDAY. Same for 2B. Same for the BP.
I agree completely. Unfortunately it’s also why I don’t think there’s any way we can realistically turn this current team into true contenders in this one off-season.
On the contrary. I think we can.. We were ONE game short of the playoffs for the past 2 years.. All we needed was one impact BP arm to get over the hump and Omar did nothing… Except get Ayala which was not really a success. The Dodgers got Manny.. They made the playoffs. Brewers got CC.. They made the playoffs. Phils got Haren.. you guessed it.. We did nothing and got left out in the cold.
The problem is we were one game short in the current NL. If every other team stays stagnant then we’ll get in, but I would as-sume other teams are going to get better too. I mean the Dodgers were no where near the play-off last year, now they in the NLCS. The Cardinals were in the NLCS, they went out and got Haren and then added Dunn on top of that, they ended up 5 games back of the division. It’s not as simple as oh we were one game out so if we add a few key pieces we’ll be in.
Will the Dodgers get BETTER? Do you see them resigning Manny, Frucal, Lowe, …… They have a lot riding on this year and at this point I am not sure they would even be the favorites in their division next seaosn.
The Phillies have question marks too. LF, SP, can their pen do that again? The Cubs are a year older in some key positions as well.
im sure you were ref to the diamondbacks instead of teh cards but your right…this team concept is wrong and we are HR dependant. I think we have good pieces to build around from but we need to address alot of the team makeup and strategy…that is something that as gina said most likely will not be done in one offseason.
your right real…i mean bottom line alot of teams will have question marks including us. I dont know the depth of the dodger farm nor the phills but i heard during the game yesterday that the rays have 9 ML ready pitchers….(biden) let me repeat that…the rays have 9 MAJOR LEAGUE READY pitchers…
We all should have known that we were the dominant team in 06 and if we didnt win it all that year…the majority of teams in the nl were going to improve and thats what we are facing now.
The dodgers had one of the best farm systems in the league the last few years but I don’t know how many of those guys are already in the majors.
But the real I do think the Dodgers could get better. Even before Manny came they started turning things around because Pierre & Jones got hurt and Torre was forced to start using Either, and Kemp, who kind of aren’t terrible. Those guys, plus Martin, Dewitt, Loney, Billingsley and Kershaw, especially Kershaw, are just going to get better. Even if they don’t resign any of those guys, which I think they at least have a good chance of getting Furcal back because of his injury issues, I would expect them to at least be as good as they finished this year.
Then I would expect the D-backs to be better, the cubs and phillies to at least stay the same, and I would say the phillies don’t have any more questions than we do. maybe the cards to be better, possibly the marlins if they don’t decide to fire sale, maybe even Atlanta depending on what happens with their rotation.
I mean last year we were one game out. We replaced Glavine with Johan and got an unexpected awesome year from Pelfrey. We also got a much better offensive year from Delgado than we probably would have expected and we ended up three games back.
Is Ted in Brooklyn really Ted Berg…
Most definitely.
sign matt stairs
omar: “I mean, we’ve got a really good bench.”
BA HA HA HAHA HAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
This can be accomplished in one offseason. Why can’t we get a guy like Carlos Gullien for LF? Polanco for 2B? Those are not superstars and would not cost our BEST prospects.
We dont know that real…tahts the problem…we can speculate all we want but we dont know what those guys would cost. I know they both have really expensive contracts and the tigers cannot afford them for long….if we can pry those guys away that would be awsome for us but again we dont have alot of prospects to offer up in the first place not to mention the payroll we would inherit thereafter. I have not done the research into their contracts so i could be wrong…but i can say those guys are not going to come cheap…both guillen/polanco are fine players.
True but they will not cost Fmart or Niese. There are other guys out there that would work as well. We CAN fill all of our weakness with good sound moves in 1 offseason.
I think we can address alot of our needs but not really make a team like the rays or redsoxs. We can plug up holes but again depends on the market and what we can/cannot get away with. Can we get gillen and polanco w/o fmart and niese….idk. Would it be ideal of course but whats in it from the tigers standpoint. What would we have to give up to get those guys. We dont have an adequite 2b replacement to give back to them..they arent picking up renterias option…idk real i hope your right but i dont see enough substance on our side for the tigers to pull the trigger.
The Tigers have a ton of payroll ot cut this offseason. That’s their motivation for the trade. It would be a straight salary dump on their part to get them back in the black.
bring up manriquez (c) and malo (infield utility)
I think geography may have a lot to do with roster placement. Do you really want your best prospects playing a road game in Tacoma?
I think there will be more movement between Buffalo and Binghamton, where players are more accessable for call ups
we saw chris aquilla and that was enough
lmao thanks i forgot the name of that guy who came up for a while.
I’m not an Omar fan by any means, but look back at the Wilpons recent track record with picking gms, who knows who/what we’d end up with if they fired him.
Wow. I posted this in the completely wrong thread.
Enough for what? To see that one player is representative of the whole farm? There are diamonds in the rough.. just need to look for them. It’s better than bringing up the crusty old veterans that has no shot. If they were doing bad in the minors, they shouldn’t have been brought up at all.
One thing that we DO know for sure is that you don’t have a life.