Maybe I Owe Somebody An Apology

You young'uns might not remember all the way back to 2000 after the Mets had lost in five games to the Yankees in the Subway Series, and the Mets were looking for a splash to take the next step. Alex Rodriguez was a free agent and had secret desire to play for the Mets. For their part, the Mets were willing to go to $140 million to grab him, but then when Rodriguez came out with these funky demands of separate booths dedicated to A-Rod merchandise and salary escalators and all this stuff we thought was nonsense at the time, the Mets pulled away from the chase.

Those demands that prompted Phillips to put the "24 and 1" label on Rodriguez now seem all too believable, and tame compared to all the stuff that is going on with Rodriguez now, not the funniest of which being that A-Rod is a slumlord. It prompted me to think the previously unthinkable: Maybe I owe Steve Phillips an apology.

Then I thought about it and wondered: What would have happened if Phillips had said: "All right Alex .. you want it, you got it", and he signed on the Flushing dotted line for the $250 million he wanted? Well first off, 2001 might have been a lot better off. Now, forgive me if I completely misuse the concept of the WAR stat, but I'm going to give it a try anyway: Alex had a WAR of 8.4, and he would have replaced Rey Ordonez's -0.1 WAR. Now at its crudest form, you'd think adding 8.5 wins (though I don't quite know how you do that) to a team that finished six games out of first place, you would seemingly have a division title. A World Series? With Rodriguez's post-season history, probably not.

Now, I don't know if it's that simple to compute, but at its crudest, you'd think that Rodriguez really would have helped that team offensively without losing all that much defensively. And if the Mets were a better offensive team in '01, it most likely means that Mo Vaughn never becomes a Met, as the Vaughn for Kevin Appier trade wouldn't have been made out of desperation. You also most likely don't see the Mets go out and get Kaz Matsui, as Jose Reyes … already in the organization in 2001 … would have been moved to second base to accommodate Rodriguez to stay at SS. (C'mon, if they were dumb enough to move Reyes for Matsui, you know they would have done it for A-Rod.)

Now here's where it gets tricky: If Rodriguez has the same seasons in New York as he actually did in Texas from '02-'04, the Mets are probably more competitive than the dogmeat they actually were in those seasons. But for '02 and '03, you figure that those Texas numbers probably would have more closely resembled his 2004 season in New York for the Yankees. And also, those monster numbers didn't help get the Rangers out of last place, so while the Mets might have been more competitive, they still would have been at the very best, mediocre. Maybe Mike Piazza has more productive seasons as Bobby Valentine or Art Howe would have been less afraid to rest Piazza, so you'd figure that the Mets, while not being champions of any sort, would have been a decent improvement over what they were from '02-'04. And if that's the case, do the Mets have a need to go out and get Pedro Martinez to bring back the fan base? And if they don't get Martinez and already have a slugger in Rodriguez, does Carlos Beltran ever wear a Met uniform? And if that's the case, then my original thought of "well, maybe Rodriguez gets the '06 team to the World Series or the '07 team into the playoffs" doesn't really hold … because it's a different team.

Then there's this matter:

@Metstradamus probably, b/c if we had A-Rod, we don't sign Santana and the contract was only a difference of a few million dollars per year

— Runit Kumar (@RunitK) July 26, 2013

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This is most likely true. And if true, and the Mets decide to handle it this way, that would have meant that they would have resigned Rodriguez after Scott Boras opted out of his contract. And if the Mets had handled it just the way the Yankees did and resigned him, then yes, there's no Johan Santana, no no-hitter, and we're stuck with a performance enhancing drug using slumlord who suns himself on a rock like a lizard.

But would the Mets have really done that? Think about it, if we can conclude that the 2005-2006 Mets would have still had players like Reyes and David Wright (remember, Rodriguez is still at shortstop) but not players like Martinez and Beltran, would the Mets had even made the playoffs in 2006? And if we can agree that the one season that would have been decidedly improved was 2001, would the Mets have even bothered to re-up that contract? He most likely would have gone to the Yankees anyway after the '07 season since they would have been the only team that could afford Boras' demands at that point, making the decision to trade for Santana easy. Mets fans would have had a conniption seeing Rodriguez lead the Yankees to the '09 title after having him and losing him, and this blog would not still be active because I might have killed myself. But at least the Mets would have had some of the benefits of Rodriguez without having to deal with the later years.

But the very chance … slim as it would have been … that the Mets would have re-signed Rodriguez after that '07 opt-out and thus losing out on Santana's no-hitter is enough to inspire me to send a healthy and sincere "I'm sorry" to Steve Phillips. Without knowing it, you might have saved Met fans a huge, huge headache these days.