And this is the part where the Mets fall to pieces
K-Rod on the pitcher's mound. Photo by Keith Allison.
7:21 am Aug. 13, 2010
It’s not as if the Mets could have foreseen that their star relief pitcher was going to lose his mind, pummeling his father-in-law in the face Wednesday night in a hallway at Citi Field after a 6-2 loss to the Rockies. But with this team, it’s always something.
That’s the problem with assembling a club as fragile as the Mets, whose overall record hovers around .500 these days, and whose hopes of contending for championship this year have expired.
Now, Mets fans—who were frustrated with closer Francisco Rodriguez long before his arrest yesterday for third-degree assault—will get to see what happens without him, as the team has taken him off the active roster for two days, pending further developments. (He has been replaced, for now, by a pitcher named Ryota Igarashi, who is not good.)
The result will be that an ugly season will get uglier, as yet another component of this Rube Goldberg-contraption of a team (it worked for a little while!) disappears.
The good news is that Mets fans are used to this. It’s what the organization, what hands-on COO Jeff Wilpon and general manager Omar Minaya, have built over a period of years: a team that looks good on paper at the beginning of the season, and then, with remarkable, grim regularity, gets unlucky because of injuries, or inexplicable under-performances by ostensible blue-chippers, or, apparently, unexpected acts of possibly criminal violence. Again and again. It’s like an inexorable march toward calamity, particularly because the Mets aren’t so hot with the contingency scenarios: they're built to look as if such mishaps are the last thing they ever could have expected.
Whether it is the 2006 team that almost made it to the World Series, but didn’t have starting alternatives to the aging Pedro Martinez and aged Orlando Hernandez, a 2007 team with a Billy Wagner-or-bust bullpen, the 2008 squad (whose bullpen didn’t even have Wagner), these teams raised expectations and then dashed them. With one of the biggest payrolls in baseball, they are made to stall just shy (2007, 2008) or well shy (2005, 2009) of the finish line.
This season, since reaching a 43-32 mark on June 27, the Mets’ record is 14-25. Should the team be without K-Rod for any extended period of time, the remainder of the season could be spectacularly ugly.
Even with Minaya receiving a zen-like vote of confidence from owner Fred Wilpon just last week, it is still far from certain that the Mets will adhere to this plan if the team ends the 2010 season as it did, say, in 1993—with a 20-32 record over their final 52 contests.
The Rodriguez incident threatens to push this season beyond the garden-variety Mets’ failures into the league of those unmatched seasons like 1992 and 1993, chronicled in the Bob Klapisch book “The Worst Team Money Can Buy”. Those seasons included such highlights as outfielder Vince Coleman throwing a firecracker into a crowd of fans in Los Angeles, and pitcher Bret Saberhagen spraying bleach at reporters.
The Mets can’t be held responsible for failing to anticipate that their star closer would punch his father-in-law outside the team’s Family Room. But failing to have enough talent on hand to compensate for the loss, or underperformance, of any one player is inexcusable—particularly for a team with a New York budget.
Rodriguez is signed to an $11.5 million contract for 2011, with an exorbitant $17.5 million option in 2012 if he finishes 55 games in 2011, or a combined 100 games in 2010-2011. Since he’s already finished exactly 45 games this season, any further games finished will make that 2012 option even easier to reach.
But with the Mets’ attendance down significantly in 2010—about 6,000 fewer fans per game than last year—a perfect confluence between the desire to shed salary and appear to take responsibility for K-Rod’s actions may be developing. Naturally, this being the buy-high-sell-low Mets, they’ll get pennies on the dollar should they make it clear they have to trade him. And it isn’t remotely clear who else the Mets have to relieve what has been a surprisingly effective starting staff, either now or in 2011.
After Wednesday’s game, when SNY reporter Kevin Burkhardt, and later, WFAN reporter Ed Coleman asked manager Jerry Manuel who he’d be using as closer if K-Rod were not available, Manuel responded by listing several pitchers who are employed by the Mets, without defining any particular role or delivering any new information.
This kind of stream-of-consciousness strategizing reflects on a micro level the fact that the Mets simply don’t have any reliable bullpen options other than K-Rod, and on a macro level that the inability at the top of the organization to think ahead is trickling down.
In 2010, and the Mets are stuck again, in a place even more desolate than the place they were stuck before, and it may get worse. Could it be that one day soon we’ll be nostalgic for the K-Rod era?
