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The near conclusion of this holiday weekend means we are ready for the Hot Stove League to intensify. Like, starting tomorrow. More free-agent signings, more trades.
Industry eyes naturally will zoom in on free agents like Josh Hamilton and Zack Greinke and big spenders like Texas and the Angels.
There will be some attention left over, though, for one notably thrifty team and its two high-profile non-free agents. It’s around the baseball world, not just in New York, where folks wonder, “What will the Mets do with R.A. Dickey and David Wright?”
If you’re a Mets fan, here’s what you should hope they do with their two best and most popular players: Focus on the process of their decisions and let the results flow organically.
Sound lame? It’s nowhere as lame as the notion that the Mets absolutely have to extend Dickey and/or Wright, both of whom can be free agents after the 2013 campaign, in order to satiate their justifiably unhappy fans. Because the only way the Mets’ justifiably unhappy
fans will be pleased for the long term is if their team contends each season, and overpaying for either of these two men will hinder the franchise’s efforts to build a perennial contender.
The Mets appear considerably more open to a Wright contract extension than to one for Dickey, and that makes sense. Wright has the longer history with the team and the more definable market. As a third baseman who turns 30 next month, he has the framework of what he should be paid by looking at his pal Ryan Zimmerman of the Nationals, whom Washington extended last February for six years and $100 million.
It’s more difficult to find comparable players, and to project, for a 38-year-old knuckleballer who just won the National League Cy Young Award — and whose current trade market should be dynamic, given the massive need for pitching and, as The Post’s Joel Sherman mentioned last week, Dickey’s seeming willingness to sign an extension.
In this age of increasing parity, the Mets’ recent ineptitude stands out all the more. Thanks to the 2012 successes of Baltimore and Washington, the Mets’ four-year run of consecutive losing seasons now ties them with Cleveland and Houston for the third-worst such streak, albeit well-behind doormats Pittsburgh (20 straight seasons) and Kansas City (nine).
That streak, on the Mets’ side, is a testament to yes, the Bernie Madoff mess and the subsequent payroll slashing. But it’s also a by-product of the flawed past process that prioritized short-term gratification over the big picture.
The process, in other words, that brought Jason Bay to the Mets, because, after the disastrous 2009 season, the team wanted to bring in a big name to assuage the fears of fans. Though the Red Sox, the (at the time) intelligently run team that employed Bay before his free agency, couldn’t wait to say goodbye to the affable outfielder.
The process that made Johan Santana the game’s highest-paid pitcher because the Mets wanted to change the subject from their 2007 collapse. Though folks around the game questioned how long Santana, coming off his own diminished ’07, could stay healthy.
Of course, the Mets and their fans need no reminders to the folly of short-term gratification. They saw both the 2011 and 2012 campaigns open with considerable promise, creating waves of enthusiasm in Flushing, only for everything to unravel, laying down more foundations of dejection.
You can rail at Sandy Alderson, now building his third Mets team as general manager, but most of his transactions have been inconsequential. Yup, giving away Angel Pagan for Andres Torres and Ramon Ramirez was brutal, yet Pagan and Ramirez are free agents anyway, and Torres will become one when the Mets non-tender him. Frank Francisco looks like a bust. The Mets will try to fix him in 2013, and if they can’t, well, his contract will conclude next fall and both sides can move forward.
Alderson’s most important, long-reaching moves have been, chronologically: 1) Extending Dickey in January 2011; 2) trading Carlos Beltran to San Francisco for Zack Wheeler in July 2011; 3) retaining Jose Reyes through his contract year and letting him depart via free agency; and 4) extending Jon Niese in March of this year.
Three of those four calls look very good. We have to wait on Kevin Plawecki and Matt Reynolds, the two 2012 draft picks the Mets obtained as compensation for losing Reyes, before determining whether
Alderson would have been better trading Reyes in June or July of 2011.
Now come two more huge decision points for Alderson, his lieutenants and his bosses. Extending Wright and Dickey would generate the most immediate enthusiasm, trading them would bring more rage toward Citi Field, and retaining them for ’13 with uncertain futures probably would be received more negatively than positively, because of the many fans’ desire for the extensions.
None of those responses should be considered worth a darn. The Mets have to stick to their plans, to their negotiations, and not worry
about vague notions like credibility and fan satisfaction. Only concrete results — wins — will put those abstractions to rest.
kdavidoff@nypost.com