This year’s Mets’ misery really isn’t that miserable
Oh, c’mon. You think this is bad? Are you new here?
The Mets have endured a recent run of ugliness. Before beating the Nationals on Monday night, they had lost five straight games — including three at the hands of the awful Marlins — to fall five games below .500. Mickey Callaway got the ever-dreaded vote of confidence from the front office, which often spells doom for a manager. New addition Robinson Cano twice did not run out double-play grounders, and both times pinned the blame elsewhere — first on a scoreboard operator, then on the umpire.
And so when news broke Monday that outfielder Yoenis Cespedes broke his ankle at his ranch in Florida, on came the snake-bitten woe-is-me stuff from Mets fans and media, acting like this early 2019 Mets’ misery is anywhere close to as awful as previous years’ Mets’ misery.
It just isn’t.
It’s a shame that Cespedes might now miss even more time, but his situation might represent the first time in franchise history the front office adequately prepared for a prolonged injury absence. The team is 21-25, which isn’t great, but also shouldn’t be nearly bad enough to cost Callaway his job: If you believe a manager is your guy in late March, it should take a heck of a lot more than a 21-25 start to convince you otherwise by mid-May.
There are good reasons to criticize the Mets, but they’re not Cano’s lack of hustle or Callaway’s lack of leadership or Cespedes’ lack of ranch safety protocol.
The Mets looked like they were in position to rebuild after a woeful 2018 but instead hired a new general manager — former player agent Brodie Van Wagenen, on whom the jury must remain out — and overhauled the roster in a way that suggested they were going for it. That part is admirable.
The part worth criticizing is that they’re a mega-market team that entered the season in full-blown go-for-it mode with some obvious holes, especially in the back end of the starting rotation, with Dallas Keuchel still lingering on the open market, and a middletier payroll smaller than those of the Rockies and Mariners. You can fairly beat up on the Mets for not adding more depth in free agency this offseason and for not yet locking up young core players like Michael Conforto, Brandon Nimmo, Noah Syndergaard and even newcomers like Pete Alonso and Jeff McNeil to the type of team-friendly extensions that are increasingly popular around the league.
But disappointment in the Mets’ inability or unwillingness to spend with MLB’s coastal elites is nothing new, and the 2019 team just doesn’t seem doomed by any stretch.
Amazingly, their front four starting pitchers are all currently healthy, and as far as we know they have not yet horrendously botched any decisions regarding the health of valuable players. Cano is off to a rough start and owed lots of money, and there should always be concern about 36-year-old players growing ineffective. But the second baseman has been the picture of consistency across his long MLB career, and there’s really no reason to expect he won’t perform quite a bit better moving forward than he has in his first couple of months in Flushing.
And in Alonso, Conforto, McNeil, Nimmo and shortstop Amed Rosario, they’ve quietly put together a nice core of good young position players under control for at least the next few seasons, even if they (foolishly) don’t hammer out extensions with any of them. Whether they wind up in contention this September, the Mets appear to be in a way, way better place than they were a year ago.
A lot could still go wrong, naturally — these are the Mets.
But a lot could still go right, too. It’s not even Memorial Day.
By Baseball Prospectus’ math, the team still has a 33.9% chance at postseason play.
The Mets’ reputation is such that whenever a couple of things go wrong in succession, the natural knee-jerk reaction is to assume that things will continue going wrong until the team is sitting in last place with half the roster scheduled for season-ending surgery, Mr. Met flipping off fans on video and some untold off-field embarrassment dominating the back pages of the local tabloids. And hey, maybe we’ll still get there.
But we’re nowhere near that yet. Despite their sub-.500 record, their recent run of lousy performances and the bad news on Cespedes, the 2019 Mets are, in fact, not that bad. They might even be pretty good.