Yet another miserable experience for Mets fans Saturday at Citi Field, with their team managing just two hits in a 5-0 loss to the awful Padres. Back down to a season-worst eight games under .500, at 30-38, the Mets will try Sunday to even this homestand at 3-3 before heading to St. Louis then Miami for a challenging road trip.
It’s possible that for a select group of the announced 38,269 on hand — a bump for the 50 Cent postgame concert? — the most aggravation might have occurred before the game started, when beleaguered Mets general manager Sandy Alderson danced around the issue of a payroll increase and sounded wary of trading his impressive pitching surplus for an impact bat.
Alderson has made some bold moves — the trades of Carlos Beltran and R.A. Dickey and drafting high-school players, for instance — to increase the Mets’ talent pool to its current level. If anything, the Mets need to be bolder, not less bold, as they try to leverage that pitching depth into steady respectability, if not contention.
Alderson joined his manager Terry Collins and pitchers Jacob deGrom, Matt Harvey and Jon Niese in a question-and-answer session with Mets season-ticket holders at the ballpark, about four hours before first pitch. Not surprisingly, Alderson fielded the majority of the questions, one of which covered potential trades down the road.
“I think one of the problems with trading pitching, no matter how much you have, is you can never have enough,” Alderson said. “We’ve used eight starting pitchers this season. If minor-league pitching is our strength, the question then becomes, ‘When do you trade some of that pitching for hitters?’
“We’re cautious about it. One of the things that makes us particularly cautious is knowing who can or can’t play in New York. If a guy plays well in Seattle, for instance, how is he going to do here in New York? You watch how Curtis [Granderson] carries himself — win or lose, strikeout or not — and there’s something to be said for a guy who knows how to play in New York. It’s a different environment.
“I’m cautious about trading something we know for something we’re not sure of. But it’s something we’re always considering.”
For sure, clubs trade pitchers with extreme hesitance. This year’s Tommy John surgery epidemic underlines how one must get quality out of quantity, to steal an old Branch Rickey phrase. Dillon Gee has missed extensive time with a right shoulder blade issue, and Noah Syndergaard is currently recovering from a freak injury to his left (non-throwing) shoulder at Triple-A Las Vegas. And, of course, closer Bobby Parnell joined the Tommy John parade in April.
Moreover, Alderson’s reservations over importing just anyone into this situation are valid. Those who view Alderson as strictly a numbers-cruncher might be surprised to see him express the thought that New York isn’t for everybody. And he’s right. Some players are best served playing far away from baseball’s Boston-New York-Philadelphia corridor.
Nevertheless, sometimes you just have to do your due diligence, trust your scouts and statistical analysts and go for it. Look over at the Yankees. They signed four big names last winter, and they’re batting .500 on those acquisitions right now, with Masahiro Tanaka and Jacoby Ellsbury succeeding and Brian McCann and Carlos Beltran flailing. McCann in particular doesn’t seem very comfortable in his new environment, after the Yankees felt assured the Georgia native would thrive in The Bronx and even compared him with the late, great Thurman Munson. But the Yankees will hope McCann turns it around and will learn from the experience regardless.
Now, maybe Alderson was just playing coy with his audience. No GM is going to publicly display all of his cards.
Or perhaps Alderson was covering yet again for his bosses, who didn’t raise the club’s payroll last winter after at least intimating they would do so. Would the Wilpons and Saul Katz even sign off on acquiring someone like the Dodgers’ Matt Kemp or Colorado’s Carlos Gonzalez?
“Our payroll this year is roughly the same as last year,” Alderson said to the fans. “If we’re competing, if we’re vying for a wild-card spot or a division championship, I think we have the capacity to make moves.“Let’s focus on what we have between now and the trade deadline. At the end of the season, you can ask about the payroll.”
Alderson said repeatedly, “We’re close” to improvement, and he pointed to the Mets’ decent run differential (266 runs scored and 274 allowed after Saturday’s abomination) as a sign that they have some breaks coming their way.
They might. They need more than just breaks to blossom, though. They need the same sort of boldness that helped elevate them to where they are now — from where they hope to climb far higher.