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Jon Heyman Can Kiss My Ass

Spring Training is underway in Port St. Lucie, FL, yet all Jon Heyman can think to write about is how the Mets "missed out" on Alex Rodriguez. Mike Piazza is in camp, is in great shape, and is actually excited about taking grounders at first base, as Jon Heyman sits in his cubicle dreaming up new ways to "stick it to the Mets". Well, Jon Heyman can kiss my ass.

You'll have to excuse my unpleasantries, but it's been a week since "the trade", not to mention three years since the Mets elected not to offer Rodriguez a contract, and certain "sportswriters" (note the quotes) continue to mercilessly beat the same dead horse. If you haven't read Mr. Heyman's latest reviling vituperation, set your reading level to "dim".

Every local paper has their own tabloid sports columnist, and it just so happens that they're all Yankee fans. They all go to great lengths to point out the Mets recent failures with glee, allthewhile sucking up to the Empire and leaving me wondering why I continue to waste my time reading their tripe.

In this particular article, Heyman reminds us why the Mets were, are, and always will be terrible.

The Mets' decision not to try for Alex Rodriguez when he was a free agent after the 2000 season has haunted them for three years and could haunt them for seven more.

Actually, most of us are all-too-happy to put the Alex Rodriguez saga behind us, and then some useless scribe makes us wonder how we talked outselves out of gouging our eyes out to avoid reading any more of their drivel. I guess I can only speak for myself, but I think the majority of Mets fans are over Rodriguez, are genuinely excited about the Mets and the direction they are going in terms of organizational philosophy and player development, and fully expect the Mets to field a playoff-contending team as soon as 2005.

He continues hemmorhaging excrement:

Mets owner Fred Wilpon said this past week that when the price "escalated to $252 million, we were out of it." But actually, the Mets pulled out way before the numbers got stratospheric. Maybe A-Rod was going to go for the money all along, but the Mets erred by not making a reasonable offer. And they're still paying for that error.

After going to the World Series in 2000, many forget that the Mets were in playoff contention until the last week of the season in 2001. If the Mets had signed Rodriguez, there's no telling where the team would have gone from there.

There was still a huge rift in ownership between Fred Wilpon and former co-owner Nelson Doubleday, and the organizational philosophy (i.e signing/trading for big-ticket players) was still in place. Even with Rodriguez, the Mets could still very well have fallen apart, and could be in a very similar position as they find themselves today, with back-to-back last place finishes, and potentially saddled with a $200 million contract.

Blah, blah, blah...

They compounded things by spending some of that money on the dreadful quartet of Mo Vaughn, Roberto Alomar, Jeromy Burnitz and Roger Cedeño. Cedeño is all that's left, and he'll probably be released this spring. Meanwhile, Rodriguez now will work eight miles to the north, in the Bronx.

Signing Rodriguez would not have precluded the Mets from acquiring any of the players Heyman mentions. They were all huge disappointments, there's no question about that. However, Mo Vaughn was acquired for Kevin Appier, who had three years and some $30 million left on his contract. He had one decent year with Anaheim, and then completely fell apart, was released by the Angels, and then signed with Kansas City for something around the league minimum.

When the Mets traded for Roberto Alomar after the 2001 season, everyone and their mother thought the Mets flat-out robbed Cleveland. He was 4th in MVP voting in 2001, had a 149 OPS+, drove in 100 runs, stole 30 bases, had a .415 OBP, won another gold glove, and so on and so forth. In exchange for arguably the best player in the American League that year, the Mets gave up Matt Lawton, top prospect Alex Escobar, a sack of bats, a bag of balls, and a jock strap. Clearly it didn't work out, but that looked like a steal.

Roger Cedeno hit .293 with 55 stolen bases before signing with the Mets, and Jeromy Burnitz had averaged 33 homers, 83 walks, and an OPS+ of 124 over the previous five seasons. Even the clairvoyance of Jon Heyman couldn't have predicted that both would completely fall off a cliff.

Not only that, but Shea Stadium is actually 9.8 miles from Yankee Stadium, not 8 miles as Heyman claims (source: Yahoo! Maps).

According to Heyman, Rodriguez might have offered the Mets a hometown discount:

Friends say Rodriguez even suggested shortly after going to Texas that he'd have come home to be a Met for "60 cents on the dollar," which translates to $151.2 million.

I don't believe for a minute that super-agent Scott Boras would have let the #1 free agent in the history of baseball (see Jon, I can pile on the hyperbole too) take a dime less than the best offer on the table. Boras, who rolled into the 2000 Winter Meetings with his 80-page A-Rod manifesto in tow, would have sooner skied the icy slopes of Hell before he let his client accept an inferior deal.

And the final turtle-head shakes loose:

We know Rodriguez was willing to sacrifice his coveted shortstop position to come home to the Yankees, so it isn't hard to believe he'd have come for less than $252 million three years ago. Exactly how much less, we'll never know. What we do know is that this was the biggest mistake in Mets history.

I find it difficult to believe that NOT signing someone to a 10-year, $200 million contract is the worst mistake any team has ever made. Even with Rodriguez, there's still a good chance the Mets would have fallen apart and ended up in last place, a-la the Texas Rangers. The Rangers DID sign Rodriguez and they DID end up in last place three straight years. It's safe to say that signing Rodriguez was a colossal mistake on their part. Is that to say that not signing him would have been an even bigger mistake?

Surely trading away Nolan Ryan, Hall-of-Famer and one of the five-or-ten best pitchers of the past forty years, for basically Jim Fregosi, who played in 146 mostly unmemorable games over two seasons for the Mets, should be considered a bigger mistake than not signing Alex Rodriguez to a ridiculous contract? I'm sure if I sat down for a few minutes I could think of a few more (feel free to post them in the comments).

So to the Jon Heyman's, Joel Sherman's, and Bob Klapisch's of the world, spare me your anti-Met pro-Yankee rhetoric, and give me a call when you write something that I might actually consider picking up my dog's sh*t with.

February 09, 2004