Looie Loss

I’m still trying to figure out if Friday was a good day or a bad day.

It’s a good day because half of “the saga” is finally over, and Luis Castillo is gone. Castillo may or may not have been better than anybody else battling for the second base job.  His distraction level may, or may not have been a problem amongst his teammates.  My guess would be no, but that’s not something I know for sure.  The bottom line was that it Castillo’s distraction level was a problem with his manager… a manager who needs to maintain institutional control right off the bat.  Combine that with his mediocre at best performance with the fact that he’s obviously not part of the future of the Mets.  That’s why Luis Castillo is gone.

It’s a bad day because this really should have worked out better. He was the last piece of the puzzle in ’07, acquired for almost nothing in what would turn out to be Omar Minaya’s final deadline deal, and the only one that wasn’t made out of weakness or panic.  Yet his biggest achievement in a Mets uniform was being a symbol of their failure.  Without having been directly or indirectly responsible for the worst collapse in baseball history along with the mini-sized version of that the next season, that’s a difficult achievement.  But Looie did it.  The drop gave him retroactive responsibility somehow.  That’s how iconic that dropped ball was, at least it will be iconic on the YES Network until the end of time.  He may not have been seen as a part of the Mets future, but he’s indelibly marked in their past for the wrong reasons.  Instead of being the final piece of the puzzle, he winds up just another in the litany of players who kills the Mets, becomes a Met, kills them some more, then probably will go on to another franchise to resume killing the Mets.  Maybe with his bat, perhaps even with his glove.  Most likely, it’ll be with a newspaper quote.

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