He has taught an actual class, at Cal-Berkeley. Now, from Citi Field, Sandy Alderson teaches a different annual course:
Marketplace Patience 101.
Your 2018 syllabus starts with Jay Bruce.
Look, we spend about 360 days a year ripping the Mets, and nearly all of it is deserved. Let’s just say that the F5 key on my laptop has been programmed to spit out “payroll gap,” and F6 “trust deficit.”
Nevertheless, when it comes to evaluating offseason performances, you owe it not to the Mets, but rather to common sense to let things play out. And the longer things have played out for three years running now, the savvier Alderson and the Mets have appeared for taking their time. Bruce, the Texas-bred slugger back in the fold, represents their latest triumph.
Bruce has returned to the Mets for three years and $39 million, an eminently reasonable deal for a 31-year-old-to-be who brings power and durability to an environment sorely in need of both. In this freezing-cold Hot Stove League, Bruce agreed to a deal that he probably wouldn’t have envisioned accepting back in, say, Game 2 of the American League Division Series, when he was helping the Indians dominate the Yankees.
In January 2016, Yoenis Cespedes returned to the Mets on terms (three years and $75 million) that fell short of the conventional wisdom, though he at least got himself a one-year opt-out that he leveraged into his current, four-year, $110 million pact. Last February, with spring training days away, reliever Jerry Blevins took a one-year, $6.5 million contract from the Mets that featured a $7 million team option the club proceeded to exercise.
So that’s three straight years of incomplete Novembers and Decembers, followed by rewarding Januarys and Februarys.
More work clearly remains for this club after last summer’s purge of veterans. The Mets need either a second baseman or a third baseman, with Asdrubal Cabrera occupying the other slot; it might just be a return of old pal Jose Reyes. They should really capitalize on this slow-moving market and get a veteran starting pitcher on the cheap, too.
The tasks seem both more exciting and more manageable with Bruce joining Cespedes and — soon enough, the Mets hope — Michael Conforto for a respectable middle of the lineup. And with Anthony Swarzak, the team’s only previous pickup of note, teaming with Blevins, Jeurys Familia and AJ Ramos for a better bullpen, run by a better tactician in new manager Mickey Callaway.
I fully admit, I thought Bruce had enough of Flushing in his year-plus roller-coaster ride to never come back, and his agent Matt Sosnick went on record last month admitting Bruce would love to sign with his hometown Astros. Houston never made a full run at him, though, and Bruce honored his public words that he would be open to a Mets re-up. The fans largely took to him last season, when he rebounded from his awful 2016 arrival to show off his grinder’s mentality and proclivity for big hits, and unless the Mets bring back Bartolo Colon (hey, didn’t someone just mention getting a starting pitcher on the cheap?), Bruce might very well get the loudest ovation on Opening Day March 29.
For sure, the Mets’ Faniverse, typically as bleak a setting as post-war 2029 in “The Terminator,” sparked to life upon the news breaking Wednesday night. They earned some good news.
They received a lesson refresher, to boot: Working yourself into a lather over your New Year’s Day roster constitutes wasted breath, and all the more so when the entire industry has paralyzed itself. Alderson, his flexibility limited by payrolls considerably tighter than the rival Nationals, has proven particularly adept in waiting out relative bargains.
Suddenly, a 2018 Mets revival feels like less of a prayer. The longer this Alderson course goes, the better his club’s chances of acing the final.