Matthew Cerrone
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I knew this day was coming. Didn’t you? And, just like I also knew would happen, I’m totally torn on the reality of what might be about to happen. My brain knows it is not wise to give Jose Reyes more than five years. But, emotionally, I am beyond disappointed about this – and actually sad – to know he might not be back next year (and worse, playing for the freaking Marlins).
The Mets are probably doing the right thing here, and it seems their thinking is oddly in line with most fans (at least based on the polls being run on this site). Nevertheless, this isn’t going to stop every fan from being pissed, and it will not stop reporters from saying the Mets are broke and framing this as them ‘letting him go.’
Personally, I would have given him a six-year deal. I mean, seriously, what’s the difference at that point? For starters, those last few years will likely be the next GM’s problem anyway. But, most important, this is New York City, there is a level of expectation that must be met to stay relevant, and I think fighting to keep him sends a positive signal to everyone involved.
The countless number of e-mails in my inbox today can mostly be summed up like this: “What is taking so long? When are the Mets going to do something?”
Yes, things have been quiet. But, it’s not just quiet for the Mets, it’s quiet for pretty much every team right now (short of a few small deals here and there).
Why? Well, I think teams were taking a wait-and-see approach towards the Collective Bargaining Agreement. The deal got done, executives then traveled back from the GM Meetings, after which free-agent arbitration offers had to be made, and then came the long Thanksgiving holiday. And so, it seemed like that made for the perfect time for teams to re-group, consider the new CBA, look at the markets and get back at it this week. It’s also important to note that several front office executives switched teams these past few weeks, and so that can often mean a reshuffling of approach as well.
The MLB Winter Meetings begin a week from today in Dallas. And so, my sense is that we will probably start hearing more substantive talk about free agents and possible trades this week. In regards to Jose Reyes, back when he was meeting with the Marlins, people close to the situation seemed to be eyeing this week and next as the time when they’d likely narrow down two teams and eventually lock something in. In addition, I bet Albert Pujols signs a new deal not long after the Meetings (personally, I still expect him to go back to the Cardinals), while Prince Fielder could easily drag out beyond the new year.
In terms of the starting pitching market, I think most are still trying to figure out what Yu Darvish is going to do. From what I can gather, his team is expected to make an announcement around the Winter Meetings. Also, before giving a long-term deal to a veteran free agent, I think teams are trying to determine what it will take to acquire Jair Jurrjens from the Braves. Lastly, it seems every team is interested in Mark Buehrle (and I’m sure that is creating a bit of a log-jam as well).
And then there is the Mets…
Personally, I’m not expecting much to happen any time soon.
Obviously, Reyes Watch will consume the storyline … as it should. He could occupy close to $20 million of next year’s payroll. However, if he signs with another team, though the Mets will then have all of that money available in the budget, I only expect them to spend a portion of it. Frankly, I think this front office would rather allocate that money to the draft and future budgets than spend it on this year’s crop of elite free agents. In addition, though I can see them trading Angel Pagan (and maybe Mike Pelfrey), I think there is little chance they move any prospects. In either case, Reyes or no Reyes, the Mets will likely keep working on rebuilding the bullpen, while looking for extra arms and another catcher; they’ll pick over each player and not rush to act. And so, I bet they wait until after the Holidays to start making acquisitions.
Major League Baseball and the Players Association announced a new, five-year Collective Bargaining Agreement yesterday, which you can read more about here.
The new CBA includes a significant tax for teams that spend ‘over slot,’ not to mention the added penalty of losing future draft picks depending on the circumstance.
In the past, the idea of paying draft picks based on slot (or where they were drafted) was essentially based on the honor system – it was more political than a hard rule. Obviously, the MLBPA didn’t want a hard slotting system like in other sports, i.e., first round picks get this, second round picks get that, etc., so they agreed on a penalty route. And so, they have gone to these rules, as explained by Grantland:
- Any team that goes over total recommended slot spending in any one year’s draft by up to 5 percent must pay a 75 percent tax on the overage.
- Any team that goes over total recommended slot spending in any one year’s draft by 5 to 10 percent must pay a 75 percent tax on the overage and lose its first-round pick in the following year’s draft.
- Any team that goes over total recommended slot spending in any one year’s draft by 10 to 15 percent must pay a 100 percent tax on the overage and lose its first- and second-round picks in the following year’s draft.
- Any team that goes over total recommended slot spending in any one year’s draft by more than 15 percent must pay a 100 percent tax on the overage and lose its first-round picks in the next two drafts.
“We traditionally haven’t gone crazy with draft picks, but we did go over this past year,” Mets assistant GM John Ricco told the New York Post. “It changes your strategy going into the draft and with everything you do when you’re rebuilding your system.”
I keep reading fans and reporters saying this new deal ‘penalizes teams who try to build through the draft.’ However, the goal here is to make building through the draft more fair, and to penalize teams who try to overspend when building through the draft. It’s not a draft killer, it’s a draft equalizer - or so says MLB. They set up financial boundaries so that teams stay in line and thus the draft becomes more fair and less about total money spent. The thing is, according to Baseball America, two-thirds of the league would have paid additional taxes last season, including the Mets.
Interestingly, the Pirates spent more on last year’s draft than any other team. In fact, it’s been the smaller market, low-revenue teams who have spent most on the draft in the last few years. I talked to people in Kansas City last night and they are not happy at all. For instance, the Pirates would have paid close to an extra $7 million, plus might lose future picks, for spending $17 million on last year’s draft. The Royals made a decision to overspend on the draft during the last few years ago, topping the league in 2008, and they now have an amazing farm system and burgeoning young big-league talent because of it. They could not have done this on the open market. It seems these rules were created to help them, but they don’t need the help. There is no way they can afford to pay those sorts of penalties going forward, all while a team like the Yankees can (should they choose to do so). And so, while this new system can be fair, time will tell on whether it has the desired effect in curbing and behavior and leveling the playing field.
As an aside, this leveling and limiting of how much players get paid in the draft could have a serious impact on how young, premiere athletes view baseball (as they might now choose to play basketball or football, knowing they are more likely to get a bigger bonus in a different draft).
For the Mets, who are clearly in the process of rebuilding their franchise from the ground up, this makes life a bit more difficult as well. Before, they could allocate money away from MLB talent to the draft (like they did at a franchise-record level last year). And, while they technically can still do that, if you’re going to go over slot you better be VERY sure of the player you are betting on. In this system, scouting and smarts become A LOT more important – as does how you groom that talent. For instance, the Braves are notorious for sticking to slot, and they’ve had no problems developing young, big-league talent over the last decade. It’s possible, but it will now take more work.
The new CBA is mostly good, but I fear the MLBPA may have hurt the lower-revenue teams more than they helped (not to mention what it does for young athletes and the international draft).
To read more quotes from Ricco, check out this report in the New York Post.
Bud Selig announced yesterday that there will be a second Wild Card team in each league in 2013.
The two teams in each league will play in a one-game playoff.
Selig said there is a chance this could go in to effect next season based on additional research, though that has yet to be determined.
By adding a second Wild Card team, according to Mike Silva, the Mets would have made playoffs every year from 1984-1990, as well as in 1997, 1999, 2000, 2006, 2007 and 2008.
Sure, those massive leads would have been erased, and the Mets would have been backing in to the post-season as a Wild Card team, forced to boil it all down in a one-game playoff, despite being a division leader just a few weeks earlier. But, what if the Mets won the playoff and ended up with a second chance to take out the Phillies? How would today’s story be different? How would Willie Randolph’s and Omar Minaya’s legacies be different? Or not? It’s interesting to think about…
To see other scenarios, including the Mets and Yankees, as well as how things might have been different in Queens during 1997, check out Silva’s post here.
Yesterday, at Citi Field, the Mets made a series of announcements about how they will honor their 50th Anniversary during the 2012 season.
During the Q&A portion of the event, Dave Howard said the Mets will not be bringing back Old Timer’s Day.
The way I understand it, the team has to pay for former players to fly out and be part of any event. In the case of more prominent players, they may require an appearance fee… and this goes for former franchise players as well.
At best, roughly 5,000 fans go out to see Yankees Old Timer’s Day every year, which that organization takes way too seriously by the way. I mean, Hal Morris is worthy of Old Timer’s Day? Anyway, given that attendance figure, and given that the team only has access to these guys on so many days, the Mets say they’d prefer to use that time and money to scatter multiple appearances across multiple dates.
Personally, I’d like to see the Mets and Yankees team up and figure out a way to do a joint Old Timer’s Day, maybe around the Subway Series, and let the two groups play one another… perhaps this would be a good charity event?
Here are some other thoughts about yesterday’s press conference:
- I LOVE the new – or, I should say, old – uniforms. They looked great in person, especially with the traditional blue hat. My hope is that in 2013 – in addition to a winning team – the Mets field these old-school uniforms and replace the black shirts with the orange-on-blue ones made popular on two occasions last year.
- The patch the team will wear is well done. I’m not sure who designed it, but I’ll assume it is not the same person who designed the 2009 Inaugural Season patch for Citi Field.
- The team will give-away jerseys to one fan each game with No. 50 and the word Fantastic on the back. Get it? Fan-tastic. It’s a nice gesture, but it looks kind of goofy. I wonder if they’re going to allow online customers to customize the 50th Anniversary jersey with our own name above No. 50, as I bet people will buy that?
- The first reporter asked Howard: “Do you think this will serve as a suitable distraction for the trouble brewing on the field?” This has got to frustrate the team, because I have no doubt that if the Mets were not doing this celebration next year the same reporters would accuse them of ignoring their history and being ‘out of touch.’
- I’m glad they are bringing back Banner Day, not for adults, but for kids. As Vinny says at the end of this post, it will be a VERY fun experience for parents and children to once again walk the infield, be creative and show their pride – and that can only be a good thing.
Also, in listening to Sandy (in my talk with him, which I posted yesterday), and in his talk with SNY last night, it’s pretty clear he isn’t going to spend money just to spend it… and so, just because Reyes might allocate $20 million, it doesn’t sound like Sandy will take those dollars and (for the sake of using them now) apply them to other free agents if Jose signs with another team. Instead, I suspect it goes back in to the team, in to the draft, the farm system, future budgets, etc., assuming he sees no one now worth giving long-term deals to. My guess is that fans will find this frustrating, which lends itself to Steve DiMartino’s point from yesterday about the team being more open about its future plans.
Steven DiMartino, in a series of posts on Twitter, earlier today said:
“Look, all I’m looking for (from Sandy Alderson) is direction. … This team has a HUGE public relations problem here. … You have to tell me, the guy buying season tickets, where are you going with this team. … If you say, “Look, we have young pitchers and we want to rebuild and reset to support them,” then fine. … What I hear, though, is ‘payroll,’ ‘reduction,’ and no indication of reinvestment. … And I guess I’m upset because (in his interview with you on MetsBlog) Sandy Alderson is saying that he can’t invest more until we come out to the park. … But, why should I invest in the team if they won’t even tell me what they plan to do. They ruined that trust relationship.”
People in sports will tell you a team is a private company and it’s none of our business what and how they do what they do. Technically, they’re correct. But, it’s also your business and my business how we spend our money. In addition, like you said, there is an element of trust that goes in to being a sports fan and I think teams sometimes take that for granted.
In New York City, this relationship is a more intense animal, where (like I mentioned the other day) a team like the Mets must compete for entertainment dollars against seven other sports organizations, not to mention college teams, Broadway, world-class restaurants, museums, and so on. To assume we will keep caring enough to spend on their product is a gamble, especially as the cost of living and entertainment goes up and the economy remains stale.
So, instead of just stating the team’s financial reality, which Sandy Alderson articulates quite well, I think Steve is right: it might help the organization to be even more honest than that with regards to how they see our future together (even if they feel it is technically none of our business). I talk to hundreds of Mets fans every week, be it on e-mail, here or on social platforms, and I believe most fans would be understanding and they’d genuinely support a ‘rebuilding program,’ so long as we knew what to expect. Instead, those fans feel like they’re in the dark and so (given how things played out the last few years) they’re skeptical of everything the team says. Again, I am certain the team will scoff at this because it would reveal too much. But, that’s the point. In this city, with so much competition for eyeballs, and with a fanbase that is very fragile, beaten down and bordering on apathetic, including us in the process might rebuild some of that trust and help to unify everyone around a common goal … even if it will take a few years to get there.
In a series of statements on Twitter, Adam Rubin wrote:
Here’s the reality: The St. Louis Cardinals won a World Series in 2006, stripped down the team, shuffled in 21 new players, then won another World Series five seasons later (while also making the playoffs in 2009) and did it while never spending more than $105 million in a single season (despite one player occupying a quarter of that money). The point is, what Sandy is trying to do is not impossible.
That said, where I do agree with the idea of a ‘New York Payroll’ is in terms of entertainment and relevancy. The difference between New York sports and other cities is that our teams have to compete with eight other franchises, not to mention Broadway, world-class restaurants, historic museums, and a variety of other ways to spend an entertainment dollar.
The Mets current front office will make the case that – and it’s the case every team in baseball (not named the Yankees) will make as well – in order to start spending big bucks on payroll, in order to become relevant and entertaining, the team must first develop a core of young players to lean on (Pedroia, Youklis, Elsbury; Rollins, Utley, Hamels, Howard; Posada, Jeter, Mariano, Pettitte, etc.); after which it can pull from a larger revenue stream (when they start selling tickets in Augusts and Septembers) so they can spend more and keep things sustainable.
The general rule is: MLB teams break even at the All Star break, they turn a profit from a pennant race and it’s all gravy in October. So, by struggling in the second half as they have over the last few seasons, revenue has dipped for the Mets and so their spending must dip accordingly. In other words, the goal is to ramp up to success and sustainability, because (as we’ve seen SO MUCH in the last decade) the only guarantee in baseball is that if you compete, get hot and get to October, anything can happen. This idea of using your off-season to build a post-season roster is laughable … just ask the Phillies. It’s about putting yourself in the best position every year to simply get there, after that it’s pretty much a crapshoot.
I get this. It makes sense to me. However, because the product in New York must be entertaining in a way that it can compete with other things (so to bring in that revenue), keeping a player like Jose Reyes should take on a different meaning for the Mets than it might for a team in a different city. And so, viewing him strictly as a ‘baseball player’ with a specific skillset and value – to me – is incomplete. Of course, I am pretty certain this front office would then tell me I’m being myopic, because success and sustainability (with or without Reyes) will be entertaining. The thing is, how long will that take, and what are we die-hard fans suppose to watch in the meantime?
Here is a series of statements that were sent to me on Twitter:
In August, the majority of voters (58%) said in a poll on MetsBlog that Jose was worth committing to for five years. However, two months later, while more people still felt he was worth five not four years, the percentage of people choosing five years dropped significantly (down to 44%). All the while, the number of people who said four years doubled (from 19% in August to 40% in October). In other words, in terms of how to value Reyes, as the Mets have downgraded how they value him, it seems most readers of this site have done the same … but, like me, I suspect those exact people will be upset if he leaves, even if it’s to sign a deal you and I would never have agreed to give him in the first place. In some ways, it’s a lose-lose situation: We want him to stay, but we know it probably will not end well, and so this whole thing is very uncomfortable, emotionally confusing and complicated.
The point I’m trying to make is: How do I ‘blame’ someone without knowing the ultimate impact? I know I use this excuse all of the time. But, it’s true. I mean, you can only assign ‘blame’ when the end-game goes terribly wrong. If the goal is to turn this franchise around and win a World Series before my 4-month-old daughter can be convinced by her 
mother to be a Yankees fan, and that all cannot happen this winter, how can I accurately assign blame right now? If, however, your goal is simply to watch Jose Reyes play baseball in a Mets uniform, and the goal has nothing to do with winning, and Jose leaves to play baseball for another team, well, yes, you can assign blame. That’s not my goal, though. My goal is to see this team win … and to have fun doing so. I suppose if your realistic goal is to see the Mets win it all next season AND watch Reyes in blue orange, you can blame people in a year if that doesn’t work out for you. But, personally, I think that’s a lofty goal. Instead, I understand to get to the winner’s circle management will probably need to make difficult and unpopular decisions and they will need multiple seasons to make it happen. So, if parting with Jose means putting the team in a position to win sooner than later, and my goal is to see a winner, and they eventually win, what’s the complaint? Why should I blame anyone today?
Yes, I will be pissed, disappointed and emotionally fired up if the Mets do not re-sign Reyes. The thing is, intellectually, I know it is mostly not wise to sign anyone to a six- or seven-year, $120 million contract. And this is the conflict: What is best for the team going forward? What gets them to a World Series sooner than later? But, at the same time, what is most fun? What makes watching Mets baseball most exciting, while seeing them build toward a winner? They are not always the same thing. I think Sandy Alderson is smart. I think he’s correct in that to build a winner (just like most every other organization has done before their big run), you need to strip down, spend less on the 25-man roster and invest that money in to the organization and farm, deal with weaker attendance (which means less revenue), but develop young talent, then start winning, then sell tickets, then build revenue and then spend on free agents and on keeping your best, young talent so to create a consistent, sustainable winning situation. We are in Phase One of that, basically, and I need to trust that these guys know what they’re doing. And so, if that means letting some other win-now team lock in to Jose for six or seven years, though it will make me emotionally distraught for a few days (maybe even a few years), if the Mets can win a World Series at some point soon, than it will have all been worth it. If not, blame Sandy.
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