Irrelevanter and Irrelevanter

In the end, I can't blame the players on the team, the coaches, or the manager. Jerry's right when he not-so-subtly points the finger at Omar Minaya for giving him "the players we have."

Irrelevant is a tough word to toss around about a team that's 4.5 games out of first place, but looking at the way the team has played, you really have to start wondering whether this season is past saving.

Sure, we're going to get Reyes, Beltran, Delgado, Maine, and Ollie back; if those guys can come back at full strength that's a huge boost. But let's face it, how often does anybody come back from the DL at full strength? At best you need a couple weeks for each of those guys to find their groove, and a couple of weeks is a long time when the calendar turns to August.

And who among us would rule out the possibility of another John Maine arm issue, or Carlos Delgado old issue?

The team just isn't constructed to survive without the marquee guys. In some respects that's fair, but the challenge of assembling a good team is piecing one together that can both minimize injuries and absorb injuries to key players through a deep bench.

The Mets have neither of those qualities. Too many key players are either old or brittle, and when one of them goes down, the next best option off the bench is... Argenis Reyes?

To me, the Big Mistake this past offseason was betting the farm on Carlos Delgado's resurgence. The team should have sold high on Delgado in the offseason and made an all-out push for Mark Teixeira, an in-his-prime guy who mashes and plays gold glove defense. You could have flipped Delgado for bullpen arms, prospects, or high-grade utility players.

The team never should have bet on Delgado duplicating his 2008, not after what we saw in 2006 (when he was streaky as all get-out, essentially terrible for the three middle months of the season), 2007 when he was mostly bad, and the first couple months of 2008 when he was terrible.

But we did and for me that's where things went wrong. The question now is how to make it right, and I really don't know the answer to that one. I don't know how much value a guy like Delgado or even Beltran brings back in a trade now, given their injuries.

The only option may be to play out the string. Maybe our various injured stars come back and turn this team around. Maybe. For this team that looks more irrelevant each day, maybe's about all we have to hope for.

- A.F.O.M.G.