Did you see it this week? I know if you are a Mets fan, you were too happy — or maybe just relieved — that your team won its first home series in a month to care about the opponent. But if you could, I really would like you to consider the opponent for a minute.
The Pirates arrived with the same record as the Mets and — after losing that series at Citi Field — left one game worse. And if you are wondering what this has to do with tea in China or the New York Mets, it is this:
Taking the time to rebuild and “doing it right” slowly and methodically with player development does not guarantee an extended stretch of winning. Though that is what you are sold.
Be patient, you are lectured. Sure, it is going to take a period to create a fertile farm, to get through a few drafts, to get an entire organization to buy into the new regime’s gospel. But the payoff you — the fan — are promised is that all the misery will be rewarded on the back end with sustained contention.
At best, that is a false promise; at worst, a con game. There is nothing that saves jobs in this sport like pledging a better tomorrow. The value of prospects has risen for many reasons, namely because salaries for the best players continue to soar (though ownership never does broadcast that revenues are climbing even more). Also, in a game that wants to believe it has done a superb job of severely reducing use of performance-enhancing drugs, keeping away from too many old players and retaining a flow of young ones feels vital.
However, there also is this: If you tout all that is coming, you escape some current accountability. It is not just the Mets. Check out the Astros and even the Cubs, another big-market club that has a payroll befitting San Diego or Minnesota. You can get into good conversations with executives from all these organizations about the winning percentages of their farm teams or how many players they had in the Baseball America Top 100 prospects.
That is what I would be discussing, too, if my club spent this much time in the cellar. Self-preservation is a beautiful thing.
Now, smart folks run the Astros and the Cubs and — truth be told — if you talked to Mets general manager Sandy Alderson, you would know you were in a conversation with an intelligent, passionate, dedicated man.
But reality is that slow and steady wins all the time only in Aesop’s fables.
Various administrations told Pirates fans to be patient for two decades of sub-.500 humiliation. Pittsburgh finally made the playoffs last year, and the belief was that was a cornerstone to regular October invitations. These Pirates, though, look a lot like that two-decade malaise.
Maybe because the 2013 group really wasn’t a tribute to steady development.
First, GM Neal Huntington took over in September 2007 and inherited a system that already had Andrew McCutchen, Starling Marte and Neil Walker — as surely as Alderson inherited David Wright, Daniel Murphy and Matt Harvey. Huntington did draft Gerrit Cole and Pedro Alvarez, but that was with the first and second picks overall. That doesn’t assure automatic success, but you should hit on picks that high, and the Mets have not had picks that high.
Besides that, little else helpful has come from the Pirates’ system aside from useful set-up men Justin Wilson and Tony Watson. Those 94-win wild-card Pirates of 2013 were as much about importing Russell Martin, A.J. Burnett, Francisco Liriano, Jason Grilli and Mark Melancon as anything. Yes, let’s give credit for drafting someone such as Vic Black, whom Pittsburgh traded to the Mets for Marlon Byrd down the stretch last year.
But this year Burnett is gone, Martin and Grilli have been limited by injury, Liriano has regressed and new import Edinson Volquez has been bad. But more pertinent to this conversation is that Cole — rather than going from a strong cameo to ace-hood — is enduring growing pains. Alvarez has remained a frustrating brew of big-time lefty power, but too many strikeouts and too low an average. He has some similarities to Ike Davis, who coincidentally is now his teammate.
Alvarez hasn’t steadily improved, just like Davis didn’t, just like Mike Moustakas hasn’t. Once rated as high as the ninth-best prospect in the majors by Baseball America, Moustakas is back in the minors. And his Royals — kind of the AL version of the Pirates — have gone from 86 wins last year to sub-.500 this year. The window they thought might be open for a while with that slow, steady building might already be closed.
It wasn’t too long ago that the Mets thought Davis was their cleanup hitter for a long future.
But it is hard to break in a single player successfully. Now think of doing it with a bunch of players at the same time and trying to have them all sustain high-level success. The Yankees were a dynasty because that happened with Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera and Andy Pettitte — good from Day 1 and all the days after. That is extraordinarily rare.
Think if you had not your own top 10, but the entire sport’s top 10 prospects (according to BA) from 2007 (assuming that group should be in their prime now). You would have one star (Evan Longoria), two very good players (Alex Gordon and Justin Upton), two up-and-down starters (Phil Hughes and Homer Bailey) and five players — half that top 10 of the whole sport — of varying low-end-to-no impact (Daisuke Matsuzaka, Delmon Young, Cameron Maybin, Brandon Wood and Andrew Miller).
So if you believe Harvey, Zack Wheeler, Noah Syndergaard, Rafael Montero, Travis d’Arnaud, Brandon Nimmo, etc., all are going to seamlessly rise to major league prominence, forget it. Already, Harvey has needed Tommy John surgery, and we have seen the problematic apprenticeships of Wheeler and d’Arnaud.
If you say, well maybe the Mets will be the Rays, know that the Rays have had three original signs since 2007 do much in the majors — David Price (who was a first overall pick in 2007), Matt Moore (who is out after Tommy John surgery) and Derek Dietrich (who was traded for Yunel Escobar). Tampa Bay has found its success being ingenious in other ways.
If you are thinking the Moneyball A’s are the touchstone because of Alderson’s roots, then know that Oakland had four players it originally brought to its organization on the Opening Day roster, though one was Sonny Gray, whom Alderson passed up in his first draft (2011) to take Nimmo. Again, Oakland has upheld success not with a lengthy buildup of personnel, but with crafty maneuvering of personnel.
So while the Mets continue in the slow-and-steady portion of the program, you might wonder if it is a fable that will work.