CHICAGO – The visceral re action is understandable: Break the bums up. Take a hammer to the core of this Mets club that has inflicted back-to-back assault and battery on its fans’ nerves, a Tin Man team whose heart failed once more at the worst possible time.
In this case, that would also be a foolish, short-sighted course of action, a complete concession to the bloodhounds at the gate. Trade David Wright? Trade Jose Reyes? Trade Carlos Beltran? Ridding the Mets of any of these parts while keeping Johan Santana would be cutting off their pros to spite their ace.
MORE: Floyd’s stunned by Mets collapse
MORE: Oliver braces himself for a ‘tough off season’
“I would have to say that nothing is off-limits,” Omar Minaya said recently. And to a baseball populace suddenly starved out of October, that may well have sounded like previous Mets untouchables are now very much touchable. “You can’t be through what we’ve been through and not look at everything. We will do that.”
That is as it should be. There are obvious parts that need to be moved, swapped, shipped away or simply discarded. Outside of Wright, Reyes and Beltran – and Santana, of course – anyone who finished the season as a Met could – and should – be starting next season somewhere else.
Does that limit the Mets’ possibilities? Maybe it does. But ask yourself this: If we’re all in agreement that the element that killed the Mets worse than anything else – the bullpen – is what needs to be fixed first, is there any way you would even think of swapping any members of the core for relief pitching, shy of summoning Mariano Rivera at age 28?
What’s the point? You get rid of any of them, all you’ll be needing are mop-up men anyway. Hard as this may be to admit, there is something to be said for playing well enough across the first 145 games of a season that you’re even in position to squander the final 17.
It is worth remembering that the Mets’ spiritual antecedents, the Brooklyn Dodgers, endured back-to-back Septembers that were even more apocalyptic than what these Mets endured. They lost in 1950 when the Phillies’ Dick Sisler hit a homer in the top of the 10th inning of game 154. They lost in 1951 when Bobby Thomson hit a homer in the bottom of the ninth of game 157.
In this very newspaper, the great Jimmy Cannon posed this question: “The Dodgers make you wonder if there is something wrong with them that can’t be found in a boxscore. Can they keep going back to the drawing board with the same pieces of chalk?”
The answer was an unequivocal “yes.” They kept coming back, year after year, with the same core. Of the nine men who started the final playoff game against the Giants in 1951, six of them – Carl Furillo, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, Gil Hodges, Don Newcombe, Jackie Robinson – started Game 1 of the 1955 World Series four years – and three additional heartbreaks – later. And a seventh, Roy Campanella, would have been in both lineups if he hadn’t been hurt in ’51.
Sometimes, patience really does pay off. You say that was a different time? Fine. Look at the Mets’ prime tormentors. From 2001 – Jimmy Rollins’ first full season – through 2006, the Phillies finished third twice and second four times, and lost out on a playoff spot by two, five, six, one and three games in five of those years.
But they kept the key elements of their emerging core – Rollins, Chase Utley, Ryan Howard – and dealt the older, peripheral component of it, Bobby Abreu. Abreu yielded little in return but did allow for a change in culture that provided room for winning players like Aaron Rowand, Shane Victorino and Jayson Werth to arrive, and thrive.
The Mets’ version of Abreu right now is Carlos Delgado, an ancillary member of the core and a polarizing clubhouse element. Delgado’s resurgence (and reasonable 2009 contract) makes him as valuable a chip as the Mets have as they search for their own version of Rowand, Victorino or Werth – the kind of dirty-uniform players the club so badly needs.
The good people of Brooklyn prayed for Gil Hodges, who as a young player struggled every bit as much in the clutch as David Wright; it was Hodges who hit the go-ahead home run in Game 7 of the ’55 Series. It would serve the good people of Flushing well to remember that.