Leading OFF
Mets most intriguing as hot stove begins to warm
How
quickly things change in baseball. It was just a year ago that the landscape in the major leagues appeared to be centered on the Kansas City Royals. The defending champions, a year after winning the American League pennant and coming within a win of the 2014 World Series as well, had ushered in a new, high-contact method of play and silenced critics.
Now, with the offseason upon us after what might have been the greatest season yet, you’d be hardpressed to find anyone who thinks the Royals are serious contenders for 2017. This is a Chicago Cubs world and a Cleveland Indians world, a pair of young teams that are well-stocked with pre-arbitration talent, excellent managers and a time horizon for winning that appears to stretch into the next decade.
Better still, the Indians and Cubs appear to have ushered in a new paradigm themselves— the fireman has returned, replacing the highly specialized closer. Andrew Miller and Aroldis Chapman are no mere ninth-inning options.
It’s enough to make anticipation for 2017 overwhelming by itself. But let the Royals be your guide: Yesterday’s champions are just that. What happens tomorrow in this tumultuous sport is as uncertain as anything. But the next dominoes to fall will be taking place at the winter meetings, in phone calls and strategy sessions, free agent courting and trade gambits all over baseball.
Here’s what I’m most curious about as we seek warmth from the hot stove.
The most interesting team is in New York. Specifically: Are the Mets in or out? In a normal universe, the Mets would be every bit as much a part of the conversation as the Cubs or Indians. The 2015 National League champions followed that breakthrough with an echo in 2016, reaching the wildcard game despite a remarkable number of injuries, particularly to the team’s best asset, its starting pitching.
However, Matt Harvey is expected back after having surgery to fix his thoracic outlet syndrome. Zack Wheeler will be well beyond the typical Tommy John elbow surgery recovery time by spring training. And neither Noah Syndergaard nor Jacob deGrom had to take on the additional load of October innings, giving them an extra month of rest ahead of their 2017 seasons.
But the Mets still need to score runs. And their odd offseason last year made that a difficult proposition. First they spent much of the winter waiting for somebody else to come and bid on their most important offensive player, Yoenis Cespedes, while letting Daniel Murphy migrate south to the Washington Nationals. (It’s worth remembering that simply by keeping Murphy, the Mets might have avoided finishing second in the division in 2016 and seeing their postseason run limited to a single game.)
Now, Cespedes has opted out of his contract, and the Mets are again waiting and seeing who will come and take their most vital player off their hands. Whether it was internal pressure from Major League Baseball or a recognition that the optics of banking all of their 2015 revenue without spending a dime on the team were too destructive, Mets ownership finally authorized general manager Sandy Alderson to go get Cespedes.
But it was a lonely acquisition in a winter when almost nothing was done to acquire fallback plans at key positions. So when Lucas Duda went down with a back injury, the Mets were left to scramble for James Loney. When Travis d’Arnaud missed time at catcher, a similar process led to Rene Rivera. And only because the Mets were willing to take a public relations hit and try to teach him a new position did they find a suitable third baseman to fill in for David Wright in Jose Reyes.
They’ll enter 2017 without any reason to expect Wright can recover and play close to a full season. Neil Walker, the incumbent second baseman to whom the Mets extended a qualifying offer, is returning from back surgery. A back malady also cost Duda nearly the entire season, and d’Arnaud simply didn’t hit when he did play. So the Mets could get every starting pitcher back on the mound, all in pre-free agency contracts, and not have nearly enough hitting if they don’t proactively approach Cespedes and others this winter.
A team with championship aspirations doesn’t leave these things to chance. Payroll for a New York team has been embarrassingly low dating to the day Bernie Madoff went bust and took Mets ownership’s money with him. If the only reason they could afford Cespedes last year was World Series revenue they don’t have this year, the Mets, and MLB, have a big problem on their hands. And fans will not be forgiving.
There are other mysteries to be solved, too, and not just teamspecific ones. Consider that two of the top three free agents, other than Cespedes, are shutdown relievers: Chapman and Kenley Jansen, most recently of the Los Angeles Dodgers. They represent a chance to determine just how fully MLB has reconfigured its valuation of, and by extension expected use of, its best relief pitchers.
For a long time, encumbered by the save rule and the resulting feedback loop that came from it — relievers wanted only to be closers to get saves to justify paydays, teams only wanted to pay for the relievers who got saves to justify the money they were spending — there was a ceiling on what value could be extracted by a reliever and, eventually, a ceiling as more teams recognized the limited value in a single player who was getting a maximum of three outs.
But in a world in which crafty managers can ask for Rich Gossage-style usage from relievers? In postseasons where closers went two, sometimes three innings? Suddenly a Jansen, a Chapman, even other hardthrowing relievers currently under contract all look like a new Miller in the eyes of general managers around the game. What is that worth in this era of massive TV money?
We’ll learn a fair amount about the configuration of 2017 from these two factors, though there are many more questions to be answered as well:
Do the Toronto Blue Jays try to keep their offense together?
Will Ian Desmond earn the long-term contract he once rejected from Washington, now that he rebuilt his value with the Texas Rangers?
And can Carlos Beltran play forever and finally reach the World Series?
We’ll watch, we’ll debate, we’ll process it all. We’ll draw conclusions.
And then baseball will rip the rug out from under us once again.
I, for one, can’t wait.