Goodbye Jose Reyes; the Mets Made a Mistake

Dec. 5, 2011 - PRLog -- So, I’ve absolutely been in denial about this whole Jose Reyes not returning to the Mets thing. But now, it’s become a reality and I have to accept it.

It was pretty obvious that this was going to happen, but I chose to ignore all the big green $igns. The Wilpons are broke, the front office doesn’t like to give out long contracts or use a significant chunk of the payroll on one guy (these two are not unrelated), and the Marlins needed to make noise with their new stadium and image makeover.

Even though this all makes sense, it’s not right. The Mets are making a huge mistake. Reyes is a great player and was the best on the team, so six years is not too long and $106 million is not too much.  It sure isn’t Carl Crawford money and Reyes is better than Crawford anyway. Reyes gets on base more and they have the same exact career slugging percentage. Plus the former Met (damn!) puts up these numbers while playing excellent shortstop, not the borderline meaningless left field. Anyway, this isn’t about Crawford, it’s about the sorry state of the Flushing franchise.

Yeah, Reyes isn’t perfect. Plenty of people would love to tell you all about his flaws. He’s got em, but who doesn’t? Of course you’ll hear how the Mets never won a ring with him, as if that’s a fair or even valid reason for not bringing him back. I guess it was a mistake signing Mike Piazza right? No championships and the last couple years of the long, expensive deal weren’t pretty. But of course Piazza’s tenure was a success, or at lease a positive one. The contract was worth it. Because just like Reyes, he brought excitement to a franchise that doesn’t have a long list of guys who can make that claim. They both created experiences-moments, and memories. Yeah, they didn’t reach the ultimate goal, but we were in it. We were close. They had us riveted. We had the privilege of the Subway Series; I got to go to Game 7 of the NLCS. A guy on our team got into Roger Clemens’ head so badly that he tried to impale him with a broken baseball bat. Endy Chavez made that freaking catch. None of these awesome things happen without Reyes or Piazza. They put us in a position to be disappointed by the Yankees, to collapse in '07 and '08, to have Beltran get buckled by the nastiest curveball ever. While I didn’t get what I truly wanted, I love the dozens of experiences I had because of them.

And I mean, Angel ******* Pagan is going to be the lead off hitter next year. Ruben Tejada is going to be expected to contribute offensively. You can’t tell me this team isn’t the worst in the division. And oh man is it going to be boring. You know it’s bad when Chris Capuano is going to be a big loss to your rotation and the most exciting player on your team has 26 career home runs and is the slowest guy in the league. Oh and Jason Bay is still on the team. As is Mike Pelfrey and his brutal 4 2/3 inning, 107 pitch, 5 walk outings.

Look, maybe Zach Wheeler and Matt Harvey end up anchoring the staff for the next decade and we forget about Reyes as he sits on the DL in last place. But I don’t think so.

For the rest of the article, visit http://www.charged.fm/blog/post/1319/goodbye-jose-reyes-t...