Waive Goodbye

March 11th: Blogger with soothsayer overtones in his handle predicts that Ruben Tejada isn’t going anywhere.

March 15th: Mets waive Ruben Tejada.

Listen, sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes the bear eats you. It’s easy to see why Tejada is probably leaving … he is only owed a half million now as opposed to the three million he would have been owed if the Mets had kept him. Your first instinct might be to say that the Mets are cheaping out again. But I’d be willing to bet that there isn’t a team in baseball … not even the Yankees, Dodgers, or Red Sox, that would pay their third string shortstop three million dollars. They certainly wouldn’t pay a shortstop with the limited skills that Ruben Tejada has juxtaposed with the limited playing time he would get. It doesn’t make sense.

I know that there are going to be a lot of people held hostage by the human interest factor. (I know a few of these people personally.) They want Tejada to be there when the Mets finally do go all the way so that things can go full circle and there can be closure. And yes, it would have been a nice little sidebar to see the guy get his leg broken play a part in the success of the following season. But this is baseball. This isn’t Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Not all cliffhangers have closure. Not all endings are happy. The sidebar, ultimately, is not the story. (You, as a Mets fan, should know this by now.) As long as his roster spot is taken up by somebody who can help the club more (a righthanded backup to Lucas Duda who could also catch, perhaps?) then this will work out for the better. And making the club better, whether it’s cleanup hitter or 25th man on the roster, has to be the only consideration here. There’s too much at stake. As long as Asdrubal Cabrera stays healthy (please stay healthy) then Tejada leaving is the right move for everyone … and that includes Tejada, who will get more time anywhere else in the league than he would have gotten here.

The one regret I have about Tejada is that he’ll never get the credit that Chase Utley got for the broken leg play in terms of “selling himself out for the team”. I’ve actually heard people laud Utley for sacrificing his body for the good of the team, while blaming Tejada for putting himself in a bad position. “Utley is trying to get a run for his team”, they say. But nobody gave Tejada any credit for putting himself in an awkward position to help the team, even though he was trying to prevent the tying run from scoring in a playoff game. According to some people, Tejada should have made the smart play and let the Dodgers tie a damn playoff game while Utley is a “gamer”. That’s the most disappointing aspect of Tejada’s Mets career, because he sold himself out to help the Mets and payed a pretty hefty price for it. For that he deserves a ton of credit, rather than a ton of scorn from baseball lifers. (Hey, I wonder what Goose Gossage thought of that play.)

But in terms of the here and now, this had to happen. Everyone will be better for it. Even you. (And hey, he could still go to the Dodgers and make things awkward. That would be terrific.)