The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Viewpoint: Mets soap opera takes darker turn
Mets’ soap opera keeps spinning with Syndergaard news
Things happen. It’s just sometimes they happen to some people — or some teams — more than others.
Like how sometimes one of your ace pitchers gets put on the disabled list with something called Hand, Foot and Mouth Disease after attending a camp for children.
Well, that is the sort of thing that only happens to the Mets.
So after explaining away all of the other issues of the weekend as the Mets turned the Subway Series into the baseball equivalent of a beat-up train stuck underground with no air conditioning or lights for about an hour at rush hour, assistant general manager John Ricco added the news that Noah Syndergaard was being put on the DL with the illness.
“I just want to make one other announcement,” Ricco told the gathered reporters. “Noah Syndergaard is being placed on the disabled list. He contracted, I want to get this right, hand, foot and mouth disease.”
That caused even the Mets to wonder if they were snake-bit — although even joking about a snake bite seems a little cruel since you figure that’s next for the Mets.
“We did that a little like, hand, foot and mouth disease, are you serious,” Mets manager Mickey Callaway said. “It’s kinda odd. Maybe the first DL stint in Major League Baseball with hand, foot and mouth. A record or something.”
Things happen. It’s just that things seem to happen to certain more than others.
They are not openly warring like the battles the Knicks waged between Phil Jackson and Carmelo Anthony and Jeff Wilpon wasn’t overseeing Tom Seaver
being dragged out of Citi Field by security the way James Dolan casually watched Charles Oakley battling security guards at Madison Square Garden.
But the Mets seem to always be bleeding from self-inflicted wounds. This weekend the Syndergaard news was so odd and unusual that it provided a cherry on top of a kitchen sink sundae.
It hardly was the most important problem though as Ricco spent Sunday night explaining away the Yoenis Cespedes saga, or at least trying to, and then talking about another trade — this one of closer Jeurys Familia — that felt like a bankrupt organization trying to scrape every last dollar out of the deal. It’s no surprise by now that the first thought when you hear about Cespedes injury is whether the Mets will time the procedure to maximize insurance coverage of his pricy contract.
You can argue that some of this is a miscommunication or misunderstanding, but here’s the important point: The Mets need to be at their best right now.
They are at a tipping point right now, with a week ahead of the July 31 trade deadline to determine just where the franchise is headed. Since the end of last season the Mets have fired their manager, rebuilt their training staff and lost their general manager. The easy point to make of all of that is that they tried to blame the manager, Terry Collins, and the trainer, Ray Ramirez, for the struggles. The general manager, Sandy Alderson, officially took a leave of absence to battle the cancer that he has been fighting, but he said he didn’t expect a return based on the merits of his performance. In his place the Mets have put three executives together to handle the job — Ricco, Omar Minaya and J.P. Ricciardi.
Now we wonder with good reason about Mickey Callaway’s ability to handle the job in New York — although to be fair, giving him a complete team and a little time might be worth trying. We can remember back when Joe Torre was ridiculed on the tabloid back pages as “Clueless Joe.” Patience certainly paid off for the Yankees and Torre.
And the executives are left in a position that seems almost impossible to manage. Ricco is a long-time employee and a capable leader who was groomed even before Alderson arrived to take this job on. Minaya is a suitable complement to him, a longtime baseball executive with a focus on talent evaluation — remember that his time as GM in New York wasn’t just marked by the spending on bigname free agents, but also on finding bargain pieces, many of which turned into the key pieces to the 2015 World Series appearance. Ricciardi has a long resume including time as a GM himself.
Stability is a key to any franchise, but the problem for the Mets is that the stability has centered around ownership, an ownership team that has been dogged by financial binds since Bernie Madoff. The Wilpon’s have spent at times commensurate with the value of the franchise and the payroll this year isn’t exactly put together on the cheap.
But a team in the New York market with the resources available should be able to go all in with things like scouting and conditioning. The return of Minaya to the organization hopefully signals a focus again on scouting, particularly in international circles.
The question isn’t if this group could do the job of leading the franchise out of the dark ages, but if they will be allowed to do it. Rather than make a decision, the team has not even named one of them as the interim head.
That means that with the decision of whether to believe that this run of misfortune will change and that the Mets aren’t that far from contention will fall not to a GM or an interim GM, but instead a three-headed recommendation to Jeff Wilpon.
It’s no small decision. The Mets have a roster built around Cespedes, who could be facing a surgical procedure that would require eight to 10 months of recovery time. If they believe that he will be healthy, that the youth in place now in Brandon Nimmo, Michael Conforto and Amed Rosario will flourish, then they will stand pat. But if not, they can reshape the future by trading away the jewels of the franchise, Jacob deGrom or Syndergaard.
Do you believe that the Mets will get it right?
Things happen.