METS INK De AZA FOR CF PLATOON
Fan fervor repaid with uninspired addition
T HE men who own the Mets would like to believe 3 ½ good months has earned them not only your blind faith, but also your amnesia.
They would like you to trust them, and also to forget that once upon a time, they promised all it would take for them to dust off their wallets and act like a varsity club again would be the kind of success that would bring you back to the ballpark. Because once you were there — stuffing their coffers with ticket sales, parking fees and merchandise riches — then they’d repay the favor.
Then they would start acting the part again. Just wait. On Tuesday afternoon, this is what the men who own the Mets gave you, not only for grinding through those unwatchable years from 200914, but for responding in force in 2015 when the skies brightened at Citi Field and the Mets gave you a summer and autumn out of your craziest fantasies, when you sold out seven home playoff games, and bought enough stuff that when you walk around the city these days, Mets gear is practically a parochial school uniform now.
They gave you Alejandro De Aza.
Merry Christmas. Can we interest you in a sweatshirt?
Now, look: De Aza is a per fectly legitimate Major League Baseball player who has hit as many as 17 homers in a season and stolen as many as 26 bases. Also: His WAR last year was 0.2 and his OPS+ 115, meaning he is essentially the definition of an average bigleague ballplayer. And as a spare part, he would be a fine addition to a team with the kind of ambitions we assume the Mets still harbor.
But the Mets signed him for $5.75 million to be half of a centerfield platoon with Juan Lagares, and since he’s the lefthanded half of that, he’ll be the one getting more games and more atbats, and as one talent evaluator told The Post’s Mike Puma on Tuesday: “The met rics are not pretty with him in center field.” That’s not pretty? He should have listened to Mets fans on Twitter and talk radio Tuesday. He should have taken a gander at my email inbox. It really is amazing: Monday was the twomonth anniversary of the Mets beating the Cubs in Game 4 of the NLCS, polishing off the sweep, sending the National League portion of New York into an extended tizzy that sure felt at the time like an inviolable swatch of imminent good times. And now … Well. Alejandro De Aza.
Look: It is possible there is a plan here. If there is one member of the Mets’ brain trust who has earned the benefit of the doubt, it is general manager Sandy Alderson, and regardless of his present health situation, this certainly wouldn’t have been done without his approval.
Some of Alderson’s best moves have been the players he didn’t sign (Michael Bourn, Stephen Drew), and perhaps he will turn out justified for apparently allowing Yoenis Cespedes to go elsewhere, for not signing injuryprone Denard Span, and for not wanting to go more than one year with Gerardo Parra.
It was Alderson’s plan last year — not always apparent to others — that ended the Mets’ long tour through the wilderness, so it’s only right to believe he has another in mind here.
The men he works for … well, that’s another issue.
The Mets are likely headed for another season in the lower third of payroll, and there is only one way that is remotely tolerable: if the owners plan on getting a head start on the ugly task that awaits them in years to come, when their brilliant young pitchers will become brilliant expensive pitchers. Will they push to lock two or three of them up — and with serious effort, not the window-dressed halfmeasures they have been famous for through the years? If so, perhaps they can start to earn the kind of trust that qualifying for the World Series hasn’t yet brought them. Because it really is as simple as that: Most Mets fans don’t trust the Wilpons, and believe they have neither the will nor the riches to back up their dusty old promises to act boldly once the people returned.
Well, you returned. You are likely to pack the ballpark this summer because in your heart of hearts, all you want is to love your baseball team as fervently as you can. You just want to know that the men who sign the checks feel the same passion. It would be nice to say that they do. It was hard to say that Tuesday afternoon.