Back To The Frozen Foods Aisle

Let’s give a warm Mets welcome to new center fielder Alejandro de Aza!

Don’t everybody throw your underwear at once.

Look, I get it. Yoenis Cespedes isn’t coming back, and he was never coming back. He was going to cost a lot of money late in his contract for a team that eventually has to sign some of their pitchers. He’s not a true center fielder and therefore not a fit on a team with Curtis Granderson and an emerging Michael Conforto. He had a bad World Series. He flips his bat. Fine. Some of those reasons are legitimate, some are sad, and some are just plain stupid.

The one legitimate reason, which is Cespedes not being a true center fielder … or a center fielder who is a much better left fielder, wasn’t addressed with this signing. de Aza has only played center field regularly for two of his eight seasons: 2012 and 2013, where he played a combined 1,800 innings give or take. His UZR and UZR/150? Numbers slightly on the negative side at -1.3/-1.8 in ’12, and -2.7/-4.1 in ’13. He spent less time at center his following two seasons, mostly because he played on the same team as Adam Jones. So is this a much better fit defensively than Cespedes? Only by default because Cespedes’ UZR/150 was through the floor with the Mets, but again, much smaller sample size.

And it doesn’t justify the difference in offense, as de Aza isn’t going to make anybody drool with his career numbers. But to be fair … his career numbers against righties are decent .274/.338/.418. Yes, he comes cheap. But again, you get what you pay for. And what the Mets are paying for, if they decide not to move Curtis Granderson from the leadoff spot, is an eighth place slap hitter. At best, de Aza is a serviceable player against righties and the Mets lineup is lengthened. This lineup at best will fall somewhere in the middle in terms of production, which is much better than how they started last season, and even a little above average if Conforto takes the next step and d’Arnaud remains healthy. At worst, de Aza is this year’s Michael Cuddyer who will force the Mets to go after the next rental player who can play center field. Ironically, the best one out there this year will be Carlos Gomez.

With Neil Walker being a wash in salary with Jon Niese and in stats with Daniel Murphy, the Mets have basically replaced Cespedes’ production and Cuddyer’s salary with Asdrubal Cabrera and Alejandro de Aza. If this excites you, great. If not, then deal with it or you’ll be blackballed as a whiner and a complainer. I’m fine with that, because I for one expected more after a World Series run which was a direct result of making shrewd trades for good players for the bench and the one big bopper this lineup desperately craves. Who is it going to be this year? Can you depend on David Wright with his spinal stenosis? Lucas Duda who compiles all of his offense in three different spans of six games each? Conforto, in his first full season? Granderson from the leadoff spot? Maybe they won’t need a Cespedes type if the lineup is lengthened. Maybe they’ll out-Royal the Royals in 2016. Maybe the collective will be better than the individuals. But I maintain until I die that the Mets go nowhere last season without Cespedes in the lineup. And I have a hard time believing that they will be comfortable, even in the N.L. East, without that one centerpiece.

The fact that de Aza’s signing comes a day or two after I had this article about the Wilpons and their “Ponzi Scheme Model” put in my Facebook timeline twice … a rarity … doesn’t look good at all for our real estate heroes. And I’m going to go off on a small tangent here so bear with me, but Casey Stern of MLB Radio had an epic rant about the de Aza signing that you should check out:

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Stern hits it right on the head. Except for, maybe, the declaration that Mets fans and Mets ownership are in two different places in terms of attitude. Because for all the Mets fans that want to see this team spend money that reflects the market that they’re in, there are plenty that I see on social media that trust this team implicitly on the strength of a World Series appearance. And don’t think the Mets don’t see that. I’ve always had a feeling that the Mets take the temperature of their fans on social media. For example: when they made the trade for Cespedes, resistance was at an all time high. They absolutely had to do something then, but that seems to be the only time the Mets get their butts in gear … when they have to. When they don’t have to, they do just enough to get by. And that’s why the Mets never capitalize on special seasons, and why it seems that every time they ascend to the top of the mountain, it’s an accident.

Andy Martino of the Daily News wrote an excellent piece which deconstructed the Winter Meetings. This paragraph struck me as much as any of them:

It is impossible to overstate the impact of Twitter on the baseball business, and not only for the fans and media. Just as execs work the reporters in the lobby, they sit in their Winter Meetings suites, monitoring Twitter. The Mets task a valued team official, Adam Fisher, the director of baseball operations, with watching social media, and relaying the news. Fisher, like Paul DePodesta, is a Harvard graduate with a dual background in scouting and analytics. He has vital responsibilities in both areas for the Mets. But social media is important, and part of Fisher’s job is to stay on top of it.

I may be making a leap here, and that’s fair if you want to complain to me about that. But if he’s looking at Twitter for baseball news, I’d be willing to bet real money that he’s also looking at Twitter to take the temperature of the fans. It was about 108 degrees right before the deadline. Now? A fever in some parts, but 98.6 in others. Not enough to change course. And that’s not to say the fans are the reason that the Mets do some things and not others, but there is never going to be any urgency unless there’s enough fans who are happy with anybody who wears a Mets uniform for the sake of it. And that’s fine if that’s your thing, because I’m a no judgement zone.

But know that Big Brother is watching.