Hang on just one second…I’m just trying to channel my inner Dr. Seuss, Roald Dahl, and Shel Silverstein for a little poetry session. OK I believe I’ve done it, here goes…Met fans one! Met fans all! Met fans great! Met fans small! The calendar reads Twenty-Ten. Resulting in sound Mets again! The boat has finally reached the Bay. Resulting in home runs each day! And with Santana as our ace, we could head for a pennant race. But as for the four starters that are sure to follow, the rest of the rotation looks real hollow.
Not a bad rhyme eh? Maybe I’ve got a future as a baseball poet, maybe not. But one thing is for certain, if the Mets don’t do something about their 2 through 5 starters – at the moment John Maine, Mike Pelfrey, Oliver Perez, and Jon Niese – it’s going to be awful tough to dethrone their National League superiors, especially now that Philadelphia has Roy Halladay in the bag for the next few years.
John Maine and Jon Niese had injury plagued 09′s, Mike Pelfrey was just flat out bad, and Oliver Perez…well let’s not go there. As it projects, 80% of our ballgames next year are going to be started by dudes who are anything but "sure things". Johan can’t do it all. And unless a trade comes from someplace out of the clear blue sky – which isn’t likely to happen if the team is really sincere about beefing up their farm system – then the only way the Mets are going to improve their rotation is through browsing what’s left of the free agent midcarder starters.
But who are the Mets going to look at? There are no sure things out there anymore. Jon Garland is average at best, Joel Pineiro is a risk away from Cardinals pitching coach Dave Duncan. Ben Sheets, Chien-Ming Wang, and Erik Bedard are nice gambles if signed to a reasonable price, but they’re nevertheless gambles. We’ve got enough gambles on our hands right now. Gambling on everyone staying healthy, gambling on two questionable set-up men, gambling on the entire rotation any day Johan Santana’s not on the mound…where are the sure things?
Jason Bay was given 66 million dollars, potentially more in the event his 5th year option vests. He may wind up making over 80 million dollars during his tenure in New York. That’s all very nice, he’ll certainly be useful in the power department. But would healthy seasons from Wright, Reyes, Beltran, and 162 games in a Met uniform from Francoeur, solve those power woes? Why not offer 80+ million to John Lackey? I do believe the Mets would have been better off at least offering a hefty 90 million dollar offer to a sure thing pitcher, something the Mets just don’t have, as opposed to a sure thing power hitter, when we have plenty of power coming back in 2010 as long as everybody sticks around. I know there was talk that Lackey simply didn’t want to play for the Mets or in New York, but I mean how do we know that’s true? Rumor websites? Come on… The Mets never even offered him a pact to reject. I just feel that the Mets money would have been better spent on Lackey than Bay.
And so, with no really prominent upgrades available for the Mets to feast upon, it’s very reasonable to believe that the Mets will be heading into 2010 with the same issue they had in 2009: After their ace, there are zero sure things in the starting rotation. And it bothers me, it really does. Couldn’t the Mets have at least offered Lackey a contract instead of spending money on Bay when they had all this power coming back strong in 2010? Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy the Mets will have a new surefire power bat in Jason Bay when Opening Day rolls around. But at the same time, I’m a little nervous because the Mets don’t have a surefire rotation to go along with it.
What do you guys think? Do you think the Mets should have spent whatever it would have taken to get John Lackey to pitch in Flushing? Do you think at the very least they should have sent him some sort of a proposal, just to see if there was any truth to the rumor regarding his trepidations about playing in New York? Comment your thoughts and beliefs in the comment section below. And as always my friends, thank you so much for reading my blog!
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