Another hellish week for the Mets. Good grief. Although in their defense, they hadn’t endured one of these since all the way back in … April.
So what does their patriarch think of this? Mets chairman and CEO Fred Wilpon cheerfully entered Major League Baseball’s Manhattan headquarters yesterday morning, reporting to the quarterly owners’ meetings, and, amidst some small talk, declined comment. He deferred — or deflected — the line of questioning to general manager Sandy Alderson.
“We just spoke,” Wilpon said of Alderson.
Queries about Wilpon’s level of concern and Terry Collins’ job security went unanswered.
Such a speak-no-evil approach has its merits, yet it also produces consequences with an unhappy fan base, many of whom wonder: What would it take to prod this franchise into major action?
Wilpon doesn’t publicly discuss the team much anymore because he often steers himself into trouble during his rare such forays. During spring training, he raised eyebrows when he boasted his family was debt-free and ready to increase the Mets’ payroll back to its pre-Bernie Madoff arrest level, just with better investments (in baseball, not in pyramid schemes) than the last time. The timing of such confidence, just days after the Mets failed to sign Michael Bourn, stood out negatively.
Ownership has decided Alderson should do the bulk of the upper-management talking for the Mets, a largely successful call. Alderson’s cold-blooded approach means he won’t blow up during a long losing streak, won’t overreact to a storm swirling over someone as insignificant as Jordany Valdespin.
Not that Alderson bats 1.000 in this arena. On WFAN Monday, Alderson said, “I’m not sure that things can devolve any further,” and that predictably led to Zack Wheeler’s medical examination in New York yesterday and Collins’ ripping into the fans on Tuesday over the Valdespin nonsense, not to mention two more losses in St. Louis.
In mid-May, the only drastic move a club can execute is the firing of its manager, and Alderson has made clear his opposition to pushing that button. The only person who can force Alderson’s hand on that is Collins, with a few more outbursts like Tuesday’s.
It’s sit and wait time, as miserable as that sounds for a fan base that has endured so much. Wait to see if Jon Niese can revert back to last year’s form, and if Ike Davis can fix himself again, and if Travis d’Arnaud can establish any sort of major-league base in 2013.
For ownership at a moment like this, though, there’s an appealing middle ground between the hysterics of the late George Steinbrenner and Wilpon’s silent fiddling. The Mets need to look only at the way the Yankees’ new boss Hal Steinbrenner conducts himself at DEFCON 2.
If the Yankees are slumping, Steinbrenner will do his best Bill Clinton “I feel your pain” shtick and profess his concern, thereby validating the fans’ anxiety, and then let Brian Cashman, Joe Girardi and the players do their jobs. It’s a dash of love to the customers at a low cost.
I have criticized Wilpon for saying too much (while the Mets were being sued by Madoff trustee Irving Picard), so I’m reluctant to tear into him for saying too little. It becomes a Goldilocks situation.
Yet when there still exists such a large trust deficit between the Mets’ owners and their fans, it wouldn’t hurt Wilpon to announce that he, too, is hurting. With no major action on the immediate horizon, some minor sentiments could help soothe the raw feelings.