The Departed, Part III

Shortly after publishing Part II of our "Departed" series on Wednesday I saw a list comparing this year's Mets roster with last year's, and I realized I'd missed a few names. Before we get to the final assessment, let's quickly review these few remaining poor bastards, shall we?

Ambiorix Burgos

A complete bust who came at the cost of popular young pitcher Brian Bannister (who went on to have a really good first season in Kansas City before a really bad second season), Burgos lost any remaining trace of goodwill when he beat up his girlfriend, and then topped it all off by killing two people in the DR.

Burgos is currently locked up and the fans in Queens will likely have no chance to serenade him with boos, but put his Mets legacy this way, most fans aren't upset that he's in jail.

Damion Easley

Poor Damion, he of the 17-year playing career without a single playoff appearance. Following the Mets' playoff run in 2006, Easley would be forgiven for thinking his luck was about to change when he signed on with the team before the 2007 season. Well, I'll spare you the details but things didn't exactly work out.

As for Easley, he was always a likeable enough guy and he had a few game-winners his first season with the Mets. He's tainted by the failures of the past two years, but no one would heap responsibility on him. Expect mild applause when he returns.

Orlando Hernandez

Though he's unlikely to ever return, El Duque would probably receive more cheers than boos if his name ever blasted over the Citi Field speakers. Between replacing the horrifically unpopular Jorge Julio and his mostly unhateable tenure with the Yankees, El Duque had the fans on his side from the moment he arrived in Queens.

The trade mostly worked out; when he was healthy he was a serviceable pitcher, going 18-12 across his two seasons with the Mets.

The fact that he was injured more often than he was healthy is mostly understood by the fans, all of whom appreciate that he is 41 at the youngest and that the risk of injury came with the territory. I expect he would receive faint applause if he ever returned.

Willie Randolph

For all his talk of "being a winner all my life," Willie never managed a Mets team that fulfilled its potential.

In 2005 he didn't have a playoff team, but in 2006 he had the best team in the National League and it fell flat against a clearly inferior St. Louis club in the NLCS.

In 2007 he presided over one of the greatest collapses in Major League history, and in 2008 he saw his team play uninspired ball for 55 games before he got canned.

Simply put, Willie didn't produce, and when he returns he's going to hear boos. Lots of them. Afterward he'll say he grew up in Brooklyn, he's a New York guy and he gets it. Cool.

Duaner Sanchez

This is a tough one. On the one hand, Duaner was an extremely popular Met his first season at Shea, and most people understand that the taxi cab accident that derailed his Mets career was no fault of his own.

At the same time, if you believe what you read, Sanchez didn't do the things in the offseason to prepare himself for a return to form in 2007, and the result was a lost season. When he finally returned in 2008, he was a shadow of his former self.

You have to try; unfortunately for Duaner's legacy, it's kind of an open question as to whether he tried his hardest to come back from his injury.

I'm somebody who will always remember the good times with Duaner, and I'll clap when his name is called, but I don't think other fans will be as charitable. After two straight collapses, one of them directly attributable to failed relievers like Sanchez, 2006 feels like a long time ago.

It pains me to say it, but I expect Duaner will get booed when he comes back.

Matt Wise

Wise spent about a week in the Mets bullpen in 2008 before getting shut down for the year. In his small body of work, Wise produced a 6.43 ERA and proved generally unreliable.

Most fans won't care either way when his name is called. The ones who do will boo.

* * * * *

As I review the names across our three lists, the first thing that stands out is how few of the people we've lost that I'll miss.

Of the 16 players listed, there is exactly one that I would definitely still want to have (Joe Smith), and one who could potentially still make sense for us (Pedro Martinez).

Of the remainder, for me, three are on the bubble -- Luis Ayala, Endy Chavez, and Aaron Heilman. Ayala would probably be serviceable enough, and Endy is always good for his glove, but neither is a must-have type of talent. I still think Heilman has the talent to be a productive pitcher, but I doubt whether that would ever happen with the Mets, so that's that.

Of the 11 other names, there's not one I'd still like to have on this team. By itself that doesn't mean that the Mets are better for their absence, but more likely than not, cutting ties with these players was a step in the right direction (the same goes for that former manager of ours, too).

Next week we'll run a balance sheet analysis of the Mets, examining their assets and liabilities. After the whole Madoff thing we probably don't want to go near owners equity, so shelve that for now.

As I've said all week, if you feel I got any of the names above wrong or treated them unfairly, please, let it all out on the comment board.

- A.F.O.M.G.

The Departed, Part II

On Monday we began our retrospective look at the now-former Mets who left the team over the offseason.

After reviewing names like Aaron Heilman and Moises Alou in Part I, it's a pleasure to start off on a more positive note this time. But be warned, it's all downhill from here.

Pedro Martinez

We've devoted a lot of blog ink to Petey's Mets legacy already, but more important than how I feel about him (which teeters on adoration), what's relevant for our purposes here is how other Mets fans view him.

For a not insignificant number of Mets fans, Pedro the Met was basically a bust. To these people, for $53mm, Pedro basically gave us one good season (2005), two injury-plagued seasons (2006-2007), and one complete dog of a season (2008).

I'm not going to call those people wrong, but for me and, I think, the broader population of Mets fans, Pedro's legacy is about much more than his won-loss record, his inability to stay healthy, or his declining skills.

The last couple of years at Shea were profoundly disappointing, but the years that preceded Pedro's arrival were a virtual wasteland of despair. It's difficult, almost, to remember how bad the Mets were in 2002-2004.

The Mets' more recent success has been built to some degree on exceptional home grown talent (David Wright and Jose Reyes), but the key has been the Mets' ability to sign and trade for high impact players, and of those, Pedro was the first.

It's become cliche to say that Pedro opened the door for Carlos Beltran, who opened the door for Billy Wagner and on and on through Johan and K-Rod -- but all these years later, I still believe it's true.

Signing Pedro signaled to the rest of the league that the Mets were not a laughingstock. It signaled the Mets were back. More importantly, to Mets fans, it signaled that we weren't crazy after all; if a complete outsider like Pedro could see the potential in the Mets, maybe things really weren't so hopeless.

That first season in Queens Pedro delivered wins, but he also delivered excitement and a sense of fun. With his twin gun salutes and his running through sprinklers, Pedro was like a big kid out there, and the fans ate it up. If there's one thing fans understand, it's players who clearly love playing the game. And Pedro was just like that.

Pedro may yet return to Queens a Met. No matter what side he's on, I suspect he's earned himself a lifetime of standing ovations at Citi Field.

Ricardo Rincon

To summarize briefly, 2008 was the year of the ineffective Mets bullpen. In a desperate effort to instill a sense of order, Jerry Manual adopted a strategy that essentially consisted of throwing out relievers like they were spaghetti thrown against the wall, you just hoped something stuck. Ricardo Rincon was that spaghetti.

Unfortunately for the Mets, their fans, and any person with a sense of compassion, Ricardo Rincon did not stick. That said, he wasn't the problem either; Rincon would never be the fall guy for 2008.

Going forward, his saving grace is that most people probably won't even remember that he was ever a Met, and those who do probably won't care enough to boo a guy who threw a total of 4.0 innings for us. Life's too short.

Scott Schoeneweis

Victor Zambrano. Kaz Matsui. Scott Schoeneweis. If you're a Met, you do not want to find your name among this ignoble pantheon (I'm looking at you, Castillo).

When Omar Minaya declined to give Chad Bradford a three-year deal following his terrific 2006 season, Mets fans were angry. When Omar then turned around a short time later and gave Schoeneweis a three-year deal of his own, Mets fans found a reason to be negatively predisposed to the new reliever.

But make no mistake, Schoeneweis' unpopularity only cemented itself when he turned in a 5.03 ERA in 2007 and followed it up with a 5.40 ERA in September 2008. In the end, it was only fitting that Schoeneweis allowed the final, season-ending home run to the Marlins that doomed our playoff hopes last year.

He was a bust through and through; there was nothing to like about his performance, and fairly or unfairly (because I've heard he's actually a pretty good guy), there was nothing to like about him personally.

When Schoeneweis returns, hang on to your fucking hat. We will not have seen this kind of vitriol since, I don't know -- Bobby Bonilla? John Rocker? Hitler? Tough to say. It won't be pretty.

Joe Smith

This might be the hardest name on the whole list. On the one hand, I think most fans appreciate that Smith was one of exactly two effective relievers last year (alongside Pedro Feliciano), but woe unto he who underestimates the stigma attached to the 2008 bullpen.

Smith's in a particularly precarious position because he was included in the great bullpen purge that helped land J.J. Putz. Rightly or wrongly, because of his inclusion in that deal he's now lumped in with guys like Aaron Heilman or Schoeneweis, bullpen disasters from 2008 who were jettisoned for the good of everyone involved before the calendar turned to 2009.

That all said, I'm going to give Mets fans the benefit of the doubt on this one. Smith put up solid numbers during his time in New York, and any player gets a bounce from being home grown and cheap. He won't get standing O's or anything like that, but he can probably expect a faint smattering of applause if the Indians are ever in town.

Jorge Sosa

I have this theory that the really dislikeable thing about Jorge Sosa was his seeming incredulity about his struggles. Say what you want about Schoeneweis, but he knew he sucked.

Sosa always seemed to react to, say, backbreaking home runs, by getting this puzzled look on his face, like he was contemplating how it was that the cosmos had aligned and allowed whichever opposing player it was to hit a home run off of him. It sent the wrong message.

Sosa quickly became an extraordinarily unpopular Met, and by May 12 he had played himself off the team. He wasn't involved in the second half bullpen meltdown that doomed the Mets' season, but that look of incredulity at a 7.06 ERA in 2008 did nothing to endear him to the Shea faithful.

Expect boos when he returns. Lots of them.

Jason Vargas

As ineffective and unproductive as he was in his Mets tenure, Vargas has one really good thing going for him: Chances are most people won't even remember he was ever a Met. His anonymity will spare him the booing he probably deserves. So be it.

* * * * *

That's all for Part II. On Friday we'll bring it all home with Part III, taking a look at the names on our two lists and trying to make sense of what these departures mean for the Mets.

Like last time, if you feel I was unfair to any of the players above or if you feel I got it wrong on any of them, please, have at it on the comment board.

- A.F.O.M.G.

The Departed, Part I

In these tough economic times, we all unhappily find ourselves more accustomed to the concept of overturn. Friends lose their jobs, colleagues are let go. It's a damn depressing cycle. The bad news almost universally commands our empathy.

There is one great exception, however, and that's ballplayers who used to call Shea home. The memories of these people command an array of emotions, some positive, others negative.

Amid all the excitement of the upcoming season and the new additions to the team, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the players we've let go, and speculate as to how they will be received by the fans when they make their returns to Shea Stadium (or Citi Field I guess).

So in alphabetical order, and without further ado...

Moises Alou

Ah, Moises. We hardly knew ye. In two injury-plagued seasons in New York, Moises played in a grand total of 102 games (including 15 last year) and registered 377 at-bats. To his credit, Moises was mostly nasty when he was playing, hitting to a .342 average and generally solidifying our lineup.

On March 5, 2009, Alou announced he would retire after the conclusion of the 2009 World Baseball Classic, so Mets fans will never have the opportunity to greet or jeer him at their new digs.

If he were still playing, my guess is Alou would have inspired indifference more than anything else. I think most people supported signing him for the 2007 season. Signing him for 2008 was a bit of a calculated risk and clearly it didn't work out, but he was felled by injury, not lack of heart or anything else.

Sometimes things just don't work out. Mets fans, bless us, understand that well.

Luis Ayala

As a general proposition, any member of the 2008 Mets bullpen is liable to get the shit booed out of him, and rightly so. But amid the universe of departed relievers, Luis Ayala actually stands a chance of receiving a somewhat cordial reception.

This is largely becuase Ayala, who spent the first part of the year with Washington, did nothing to create the terrible situation, he simply inherited it and did the best he could.

Now, yes, he did little other than perpetuate the cycle of despair that had become the calling card of our relief corps, but I think we can appreciate that he was dealt a bad hand and that we had no right asking him to be a savior.

He'll probably get booed when he returns, but it's mostly guilt by association. Like Sean Maguire once said, Luis, all this, all this shit, it's not your fault.

Mike Carp

A darling of the Mets blogosphere, Mike Carp will be missed by the same crowd that used to crow that Jorge Toca was The Answer at first base.

Maybe that's overly dismissive. Either way, on those rare occasions that the Seattle Mariners make their way to New York for National League games, you can count on a very small, very vocal segment of the crowd (i.e., maybe one guy in your general vicinity) standing and applauding when Carp comes to bat, while everyone else looks at him in confusion.

Endy Chavez

It's hard to imagine a fourth outfielder / defensive replacement having a better legacy than Endy Chavez's. Endy always seemed to be in the middle of things in 2006 when the Mets were scraping together late inning wins or what have you; he was a critical role player than year.

But of course, with Endy, it all comes back to The Catch. In a season chock full of hopeful and awe-inspiring moments, Endy provided the most hopeful and awe-inspiring moment of them all when he leapt over the wall to rob a 2-run home run in Game 7 of the NLCS. As I've written, in that glorious, transcendent moment, Endy made you believe that anything was possible.

That catch, unfortunately, was about the last such hopeful, awe-inspiring moment the Mets have had in all the time from then until now, but in terms of Endy's legacy, that's no matter. When Mets fans think of Endy Chavez, they'll think of the exhilaration of that moment, and that inescapable feeling, so alien to the normal psyche of a Mets fan, that the longed-for outcome was not impossible, in fact, that it was likely.

Bless you, Endy. There's a standing ovation coming to you the next time you come to New York.

Aaron Heilman

Ooooh, doggie this one will not be pretty. The fans already loved to hate Heilman while he was with the Mets. Between that and his direct association with the failure in 2006, the collapse in 2007, and the comprehensive bullpen meltdown of 2008, Heilman occupies an uncommonly hateable space.

In a sense, Heilman deserves better. He was actually a really good reliever in 2006 and 2007, but his involvement in so many high profile failures (Game 7 of 2006, 2007 and 2008) and his constant bitching about being a reliever make him seem like an ineffective, me-first, team-second whiner.

As Julian Casablancas once said, "man, redemption, I hope it's in his future." Well, it wasn't in his future, not with the Mets anyway. To Mets fans he'll always be a symbol of the failures in 2006, 2007, and 2008; as such, I expect he'll get the shit booed out of him when he does return.

* * * * *

That's all for Part I. We'll be back with Part II later in the week, including takes on Pedro, Joe Smith, and, my god I can hardly wait, Scott Schoeneweis.

In the meantime, if I was unfair to any of the names above or if you have a different take, I invite you to sound off on the comment board.

- A.F.O.M.G.

82: Go to a Mets Road Game

(This is the latest installment in an ongoing series at Y2K focusing on topics raised in Matthew Silverman's "100 Things Mets Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die". Today's installment? Number 82: Go to a Mets Road Game.)

Why 82? The year it all began for the Glass Man

On a scale of 1-to-10, necessity of knowing or doing before you die? 1.

No use sugar-coating it, I've been to an embarrassingly low number of stadiums other than Shea in my time. What's surprising is that this didn't really dawn on me, however, until I read Chapter 82 in Matt Silverman's book.

I mean, on some level of course I knew I hadn't seen the Mets play in that many other stadiums, but the final count still seemed impossibly low. I realize I probably inflated the number in my head on account of how many times I've seen the Mets play at Fenway or Yankee Stadium, but still... four?!? Humiliating.

"I've made many road trips following the Mets and it's something that really has to be done at least once," Silverman writes (209). He then goes on to divide the 15 opposing stadiums he's seen the Mets play in into lists of Stadiums Better Than Shea (The Short List) and Stadiums Worse Than Shea.

A few lists of my own follow.

Stadiums Better Than Shea

Fenway Park: There's something about baseball in Boston, and there's something about Fenway Park. I remember my first trip to Fenway was the first interleague series between the two teams, made all the more memorable for an all-time meltdown between Carl Everett and an umpire.

If you've never been to Fenway, go. Baseball really doesn't get much better. Even amid the bitterness and the drunkeness, the game there just feels pure.

Wrigley Field: I want to say Wrigley Field was the site of the first road Mets game I ever experienced. Me and the Hound made a ritual out of going to Chicago for a weekend each summer when I was, I don't know, 14-16 or so. I remember Wrigley being the site where I watched my first game from seats in the outfield, and the change in perspective completely threw me off (it still does to this day). I really should go back one of these years; I hear the neighborhood surrounding the park is like a friendly version of the neighborhood surrounding Fenway.

Stadiums Worse Than Shea

RFK Memorial Stadium: It was one-and-done for the Glass Man at RFK. Me and some friends were in DC in August 2007, before the fall, and we took in a Mets-Nats game at the since-replaced stadium. I'd always heard it was a dump. It was.

Yankee Stadium (Old): Well, I couldn't have ranked it better than Shea in good conscience, that's for sure. Enough has been said about the old Yankee Stadium, even on this site. They should preserve the field, that was the really cool part.

Other Stadia Such That I've Seen

Bank One Ballpark / Chase Field: My high school baseball team used to have a 10-day Spring Training trip to Arizona. One year we went to go see the BOB; we saw it in the afternoon when no one was playing. I remember it was very green.

Hadlock Field: Home of the Portland Sea Dogs, I was there way back when on a field trip from my camp in Maine. It was my first exposure to Minor League baseball, but not my last...

Zephyr Field: You've never heard of Zephyr Field, you say? Well, for two glorious years in the town of Metairie, Louisiana (just a stone's throw from New Orleans), the Mets' AAA team played their home games at Zepehyr Field. Last year I saw a game with my girlfriend, a native of New Orleans, on my first trip down south. Minor League games are awesome as a general proposition, and this one was no different. Cheap tickets, cheap food and booze, and afterward a concert with a sweet brass band on the outfield grass. Perfection.

Joe Wolfe Field: SteepleCats, what! In that enchanted summer of 2004, the last summer of our youth, the Glass Man covered the North Adams SteepleCats, a team in the New England College Baseball League. Think "Summer Catch". The "stadium's" claim to fame is that Babe Ruth played there once upon a time. Did someone say mystique?

To-Do List

PNC Park, Nationals Park, Camden Yards, Coors Field, AT&T Park (San Francisco), Progressive Field (Cleveland), Citizens Bank Park, Dodger Stadium, Yankee Stadium (New), Citi Field.

A few notes on the above.

• Everyone says Camden Yards, PNC Park, and AT&T Park are three of the nicest stadiums in baseball
• Nationals Park and Citizens Bank Park are so close, there's really no excuse. I've never been much of a heckler though, and Phillies fans have some pretty good ammunition by this point
  
• Citi Field and Yankee Stadium need no explanation
• I've got family in Cleveland and a soft spot for the Indians, so that's that
• Coors Field... I don't know, something about it always seems so picturesque
• People always say Dodger Stadium is a great ballpark. To me, watching on television, it looks like a dump. Maybe it needs to be seen to believed

Did I leave anything off? Are there any stadiums I need to visit? Any I should stay away from? Curious as always for your thoughts.

- A.F.O.M.G.

Rotation Concerns

There's no hotter topic in Metsville than the status of our starting rotation.

Most people focus on the fifth starter "battle" between Freddy Garcia, Tim Redding's dead arm, Young Jon Niese, and the presumed front-runner, Livan Hernandez.

If Hernandez ends up getting the job what can we expect? On the plus side, the guy still delivers innings. He pitched 180 innings in 2008, the first time since 1999 that he did not reach the 200-inning plateau.

On the negative side, Livan's strikeout numbers have fallen precipitously and consistently since 2004. Hernandez followed that 186-K campaign with 147 strikeouts in 2005, which became 128 in 2006, then 90 in 2007, and finally 67 last year. Since his K numbers started trending south his ERA has gone fom 3.60 in 2004 to 6.05 last year (including an eye-popping 8.03 in 8 games with the New Rox).

So that, ladies and gentlemen is our fifth starter. If only that were the most of my concerns.

The really troubling thing about our rotation is that we have two guys coming back from injury (Johan and John Maine), one guy who figures to be a major injury risk in 2009 (Mike Pelfrey), and one guy who is generally unreliable (Oliver Perez).

Maybe it's naive of me, but if I'm honest I'm not altogether worried about Johan. The back-and-forth about his injury status earlier this month was troubling, but it does seem like the situation has stablized.

John Maine is a different story. The guy's getting shelled in spring training to the tune of a double-digit ERA. I'm as big a believer as anybody that spring training is basically meaningless, but for a guy like Maine who can be absurdly hard on himself, the confidence element worries me. It's easy to see him reading too much into his poor performance in March and letting it affect him come April.

As for Pelfrey... let me put it like this. He's thrown 294.2 innings in his three-year major league career. 200.2 of them came last year. Conventional wisdom in the big leagues is that young pitchers should throw only 30 more innings year-on-year; if they exceed that number, their risk of injury rises. Pelfrey threw 48 more innings in 2008 than he did in 2007, including 128 more at the Major League level. If he goes down with injury, who replaces him?

As impossible as it would have been to believed even a year ago, All-Or-Nothing Ollie is the one guy entering camp without a halo of question marks. Way to go, Ollie.

You hate to be pessimistic, and yes, I'm considering a lot of worst-case scenarios up above. But what if even one of them comes true? What if Maine needs to spend time in the minors to get his head straight? What if Pelfrey breaks down? What if Livan is Livan? Troubling questions, all.

* * * * *

On a cheerier note, me and the wife saw the Pogues in concert on Saturday. Ever been to a Pogues concert? Their fans do NOT fuck around. I've never been in a mosh pit like that.

Shane MacGowan was his terrible, terrific self. He stumbled out there 30 minutes late, a bottle of white wine in one hand. He sang his heart out for the next 30 minutes, stumbled off stage for 5 minutes, and returned clutching a new bottle of wine.

As my girlfriend kept saying, the other guys in the band (none of whom appeared to be drinking) must HATE him, but damn if they don't need him.

If mosh pits aren't your thing, head for the back of the concert hall. Or if you're in the pit, suck it up. Trust me, it's all worth it when they break out into that timeless refrain: "... And we often heard him say / I'm a free-born man of the U.S.A.!"

- A.F.O.M.G.

Honkballer Millionaire

They said it couldn't be done.

They said this hardscrabble group of unproven, untested Nederlanders could never beat the mighty juggernaut from the Dominican Republic.

I love an underdog as much as the next guy, but the truth is that I was pulling for the Dominicans. How couldn't I? Between Fernando Tatis and Moises Alou, this team had all of my favorite Mets.

But in the end it was the Netherlands that played their way into the second round. If you believe what you read, in the Dominican Republic the loss is being treated something like a mix between the Kennedy assassination and 9/11.

How did it happen? There's really no saying, but armchair analysts such as myself point to the typical psychological explanations. The Dominicans were overconfident and unprepared. The written-off Dutch lads forged a brotherhood premised on overcoming low expectations. Now if we could only find a role for a banging Dutch chick and an incredulous but nonetheless megalomaniacal WBC official, this story would easily win best picture.

There are lessons too for the Mets. Last fall I dubbed this offseason the "You Ain't Shit Offseason", the idea being that somewhere along the way (2006, most likely), this Mets team became counterproductively self-confident, and an entitlement mentality set in. So thorough was their dominance in 2006 (nevermind what happened in the playoffs, of course), that the team played the next season as if the playoffs were their birthright.

It's possible a similar affliction doomed the Dominican team in the WBC. As one distraught fan put it, the Dominicans should beat the Nederlanders 9 out of 10 times, and yet they lost two straight to them. In the first game I'll bet it was overconfidence, but in the second game I have to think it was a certain tentativeness that did in the Dominicans, particularly when they didn't score early.

Whatever it was, the Mets would do well to play like the honkballers from the Netherlands. They played without expectation, but they also played without fear. They played their game and let the other team succomb to overconfidence, tentativeness, or whatever it was.

They honkballed like warrior poets. Soon it will be the Mets' turn.

- A.F.O.M.G.

The Pedro Question

In the past week, as the struggles of Freddy Garcia, Livan Hernandez, and Tim Redding mounted, a not insignificant portion of the Mets fanerati has begun calling for the resigning of our former ace, Pedro Martinez.

No matter what's happened the past couple of years, Pedro remains a mostly beloved figure to Mets fans, so the renewed interest in him is understandable. When he's himself, Pedro brings a swagger and a light-heartedness to a team that can be very valuable, particularly in a city like New York with all the media and fan scrutiny.

As a big Pedro fan the past few years (and someone who's admired his career from afar ever since he started out 8-0 against the Mets), it pains me to say that I'm not one of the people pulling for the Mets to ink him to a 1-year deal.

Say all you want to his recent outings against the Netherlands (described by some as an A or AA quality team), we all know what we saw last year. The complete inability to prevent runs in his first inning. The general ineffectiveness. The cocky, boistrous swagger replaced by a humbled look of bemusement.

It was an injury-plagued season, yes, but Pedro is 37 years old. He made 23 starts in 2006, five in 2007, and 20 in 2008 -- injuries are part of the package now.

Pedro had a mixed run with the Mets, and you hate to see it end on a bad note (which you'd have to call his performance in 2008). Signing him to be the ace of the 2005 team was the right move, but signing him to be the fifth starter in 2009 seems based more on fondness and hope than any practical measure.

For me, Pedro will always be the jheri-curled wonder he was that first season with the Mets, the guy with the blue glove who made Cliff Floyd's light at the end of the tunnel reappear and baseball at Shea fun again. The awful truth is it was all kind of downhill from there.

* * * * *

Yesterday we said goodbye to one of the principle cogs of the 2006 season, Duaner Sanchez.

Retrospectively, Duaner's tenure with the Mets is just kind of sad. He was so good that first seasaon that it's only natural to wonder what might have been if he hadn't gotten into that taxi.

There's no saying. Would he have shut the door in Game 2 of the NLCS? Would a starter other than Oliver Perez have lost in Game 4? You never know.

RIP, Duaner. We'll pour some out for you this weekend.

- A.F.O.M.G.

The Straw That Stirs

I think the Gump Man said it best when he said it's funny what a young man recollects.

Darryl Strawberry is among the first ballplayers I can remember really following. One of my earliest, clearest Mets memories is of Strawberry hitting a home run to deep right field at Shea Stadium.

I can't remember the circumstances, nor can I articulate why this home run was so memorable for me, but I remember it was late at night (for me), and that I was in my parents' bedroom at the time, on their couch at the foot of the bed.

Other memories abound. I distinctly remember one afternoon on Randall's Island where I decided to emulate Darryl's upper-cut like swing. I was probably 8 at the time.

Every Friday a young and fiery A.F.O.M.G. and his classmates would crowd the bus bound for Randall's Island, which the after-school sports program Cavaliers used to call home. I was a bit of a natural back in the day, but trying to mimic Darryl's swing was murder on my stroke. I took an 0-fer that afternoon and decided to go back to basics.

For all my memories of Darryl (and these are just a couple), one thing I don't really recall is his relationship with the media. The closest memory I have in this area is the back page of the Post or Daily News the morning after he defected to Los Angeles, with Frank Cashen's (I think) face next to the words "We'll Be Better Off Without Him".

But as for Darryl's relationship with the press, I've got nothing there. Did he tell it like it was, always good for a quote? Was he sullen and inaccessible? Was he only willing to talk those days he hit a home run? I don't have any recollection.

Well, Darryl found himself in the middle of the press the other day when he unequivocally said he would have used steroids if the juice had been around in his day.

"Hell yeah I would have used them. Are you kidding me?" Strawberry said. "I'm not saying that was the right thing to do. But if somebody asked me... what would I have done if that was going on in the era of the '80s... I probably would have been a part of it, too."

* * * * *

I, for one, am really glad he came out and said it. For all the moral indignation mustered up by politicians, fans, the media, bloggers and whoever else, I wonder what everyone else would have done if they'd been in the same position?

As far as punishments go, the steroid era was a consequence-free environment. There was no penalty for using steroids, except that abstinence meant your performance figured to suffer, and that your career and compensation would decline relative to your peers. Essentially there was no reason whatsoever not to use steroids beside health defects that frankly, you'd probably figure you'd be rich enough to pay for.

Say you're a paralegal somewhere. If all the other paralegals started taking a substance that was not explicitly against the rules and they started to perform better and get paid a lot more, what would you do?

Some people would have kept the moral high ground, and for a lot of us it's easy to think we would have as well. But I feel certain most people would have done like Darryl and said, "Hell yeah."

We've said it before here at Y2K, but if baseball is ever going to get serious about stamping out steroids and other performance enhancing drugs, it needs to get tough in terms of the penalties for positive tests.

Fifty game suspensions aren't enough. I piss 50 games. What's needed is a penalty grievous enough to eliminate the incentive. For me it's a two-year suspension. Implement a two-year suspension and you'll see a lot of "hell yeahs" turn to "hell nos".

Better yet, implement a two-year suspension and we can all stop talking about this issue.

- A.F.O.M.G.

Well This Sucks

For months, the elated face of Johan Santana, pictured in the New York Times that penultimate day of the 2008 season, has sustained me throughout another cold and champion-less offseason.

I've written of that picture before. There's just something about that photo, equal parts joy, determination, and accomplishment. None of it foretold the gloom that was to come the next afternoon.

Retrospectively, when the news of Johan's torn meniscus came out days after the season ended, the Mets' failure to make the playoffs almost seemed like a blessing in disguise. It was still disappointing, but it would have been hard to see Team Tightrope win a World Series, so anything to protect our ace was ultimately a good thing.

Well, zoom forward six months and an otherwise exciting time of year has a major pall cast over it. Every time you read a report about the situation with Johan's elbow it tells you something different. One minute he's flying back to New York for tests, the next minute he's staying put. One minute he's definitely not pitching the opener, the next it's not so fast, maybe he will.

It's enough to make your head spin, and if you've let the recession get to you, it's enough to make you seriously pessimistic.

I mean, what could possibly be so nebulous about this situation? How could it be, more than a month before the season starts, that Johan would definitely not be ready for Opening Day, but he'd be fine to pitch the Mets' fourth game?

I don't know how they do all this stuff, I grant that, but something about it doesn't feel right. I'm worried this elbow injury is more serious than they're letting on. I'm worried Paul Krugman's been right all along about the stimulus bill, and that Orlando Hudson was the right man for the job at second, and that Bernie Madoff is the real reason we never went after Manny Ramirez, and that my worlds are crashing together.

Maybe there's nothing to it after all, but what if there is? What kind of expectations can we have for a Johan-less 2009 Mets? Recent Mets teams have flourished with mediocre starting pitching, but I fear an-Ollie, Pelf, John Maine-led rotation complemented by Tim Redding and the ghost of Freddy Garcia would be an insurmountable new low.

Feel better, Johan. Fast.

- A.F.O.M.G.