More of the same?
Murray Chass wrote an interesting blog post today about the Mets’ offseason process:
But more than one agent cited the Mets’ inability to deal with more than one free agent at a time as the primary reason they lost out on free agents. “We’re interested in your guy,” more than one agent recalled the Mets saying, “but we have to deal with this other guy first.”
In one instance, the Mets were a player’s first choice, an agent said, but he was one or two down on the Mets’ pecking order – a phrase used by another agent – and the player and the agent weren’t going to wait for the Mets to deal with them. They went elsewhere….
Another agent called the process frustrating. I have other names for it: foolish, wasteful, destructive, irresponsible, to suggest a few. Surely, a general manager is capable of talking to more than one agent simultaneously, working on parallel tracks, even if one signing depends on another.
I’ve used this space to rip Chass a bit in the past, but getting on the horn with agents to dig up dirt on the Mets is definitely the type of thing he spent a long time training to do, and everything he writes here seems to fit with everything we’ve already heard about the Mets this offseason.
But what I don’t get is why so anybody’s acting like this is an altogether new problem. Remember that last year Omar Minaya said, on the record, “we’re not in the position-player market, we’re in the starting-pitcher market.”
It’s certainly possible — and entirely likely — that the issues have been amplified by the rumored hedges on Minaya’s power that might now be in place, but it doesn’t seem like operating with a narrow and myopic focus is exclusive to the 2010 version of the Mets’ front office.
