New York Nine

If one is unsure of how talented a GM Minaya is all they need to do is look at their current incarnation and see how hopeless they really are. Beset with a multitude of injuries that no one would have expected is bad enough, but not having a single impact player in the system who could at least provide league average production is completely unacceptable. I mean for christ's sake their leadoff guy has been Alex Cora, a guy whos OPS hasnt even been close to league average since 2004, and that's the guy they give the most at-bats to! You're telling me there isn't one guy in their farm system who can give you something at least close to average? Indeed, as far as I'm concerned this is indicitive of piss poor management of an organization, a total lack of depth in the farm to supplement the major league team. And I don't even mean someone who's going to carry the team or anything like that, just someone who isn't an automatic out or a starter who you're confident can at least keep you competitive in the game, can you name one? No its hard to because instead this very promising season has turned into a blooper roll and Minaya only has himself to blame.



If you remember when Minaya came in several years ago, the guy was all about change, shaking things up and making them a contender right now, and he did but a very costly price. Trading for guys like Carlos Delgado, Johan Santana, investing big money into Pedro Martinez and Carlos Beltran make big headlines but they came at the cost of overall organizational health. For sure, the team won early on, coming within one curveball from being in the world series in 2006, but it came at a terrible price, the price of their long term health. Prospects like Matt Lindstrom and Mike Jacobs, or even more talented draft picks like Clay Bucholz who the sox got for Pedro, talented young players who could have provided cheap and consistent production for several years were shipped off for the quick strike for older and experienced players. And sure, most of those guys did compete for a time, but as this season has shown the bad thing about veterans is that they get hurt a lot, and its easy to see why. I mean as your body gets older it doesn't recover as quickly and more prone to injuries and these last few months for the mets have shown that to be true. Depend on older players, especially in the post-PED era and you're going to hurt. Despite this very clear trend, Omar has stubbornly continued that way and look where its gotten them.



Whats more is Omar's seeming inability to improve his ballclub throughout the year. While other contenders recognize their vunerabilities and make moves to fill their holes at the deadline, Omar has been consistently immoible come the end of July, and the results are pretty clear. Two epic late season collapses and now a team with no offense to speak of and the best he can do is trade a valuable outfielder for a guy who's career OPS+ is 90, that doesn't sound like improvement to me. Now I'm not saying Omar should make moves for the sake of making moves, but certainly there's something he could have done in the past few years that could make a difference while not killing the team, right? Nope instead Omar stood pat and got passed by.



I'm not saying everything Omar has done is bad, and in truth some of his failures were caused by problems that he can't be blamed for (injuries etc etc) but for me the mark of a good organization is having the pieces to move to be able to deal with problems. Take the Red Sox, they lose Dice-K for most of the year, are they worried? Hardly, they signed Smoltz and Penny and have a pleathora of arms who can fill that hole. Boston like many other teams are prepared for the worst case senario and smart enough to know how to make your team better like Cashman trading for Bobby Abreu a few years back. Of course they both have the financial means to do that, but so do the Mets and why not use it wisely, for something that's pretty imprortant? No he hasn't and for that if Omar's still the General Manager of the Mets next year I feel very very badly for a team that seems to get nothing going there way, and this is not helping it.