PORT ST. LUCIE — In Sandy Alderson’s first year as general manager of the Mets, he had to wrestle with the prospect of trading two of the team’s most potent offensive threats: Jose Reyes and Carlos Beltran.
Alderson is going to face a similar situation this season with David Wright, who has a $16 million team option for next year, but Alderson shied away from drawing any conclusions from what he did last season.
“I think that his future is independent of club performance,” Alderson said of Wright at the Mets’ spring-training complex yesterday. “There are certain decisions that one takes that are a function of where a team is at a particular time and so forth, but if there’s anybody on the team whose performance and future is independent of the club’s performance, I think it’s David’s.”
That sounds a lot like what Alderson said during the first half of 2011 about Reyes. After an MVP-caliber start to the season, the Mets opted to hang on to the shortstop before losing him in free agency to the Marlins.
“I hate to make comparisons to Jose because he’s not here right now,” Alderson said with a smile. “So I’m not sure that would be a good basis for comparison. David’s future is a function of a lot of different things and only one of those is team performance — and I’m not sure that’s very high on the list.”
Wright is coming off his worst season, when he was hobbled by a stress fracture in his back and finished with a .254 average, 14 homers and 61 RBIs in 102 games.
And Alderson was equally averse to drawing parallels between Wright and Beltran, who was shipped to San Francisco before the trade deadline and then signed with the Cardinals in the offseason.
“If I go back and look back at that scenario and how that developed, it was presumed going into the season that depending on what we did and how well Carlos performed — given the fact he was in the last year of his contract— that he might be traded at the deadline,” Alderson said. “David’s case is a little bit different: Number one, there isn’t that presumption and number two, he has an option for next year.”
Still, don’t expect the uncertainty surrounding the third baseman and the Mets to go away any time soon.