Signing Rodriguez Would Be a Classic Mets Blunder
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Over the past 20 years, the Mets have always reliably followed on failure with stupidity, making the recent history of the franchise a sad litany of compounded error. After the teams of the late 1980s ended up in the gutter, the Mets turned to Gregg Jeffries and the family-friendly stylings of Vince Coleman and Bret Saberhagen. After that experiment ended, they decided that having no good players on the team would be a good idea. And after an old team enjoyed a brief period of success, the team fired their brilliant manager and spent several years trying to contend by replacing old players with older, lesser players. All of this culminated in the Scott Kazmir trade, the worst in franchise history.
It is clear, then, that the Mets will at least attempt to meet this year’s epic collapse with some equally epic display of idiocy. Doing something — even if that something makes no sense — is as much a team tradition as Kiner’s Korner and the heartbreaking playoff loss. Perhaps a weak free agent market and a trade market in which the Mets don’t have the young players to compete will keep them from harming themselves, but they will surely try.
This is the context within which to see the news, broken yesterday by the Daily News, that general manager Omar Minaya will be meeting with Alex Rodriguez and his agent, Scott Boras, today or tomorrow. Fans should be terrified. It should be said that there is one very good reason why the Mets should do everything in their power to sign Rodriguez, which is that they won 88 games this year. If they can replace departing players like Tom Glavine with equally good ones (which will be difficult), they’ll enter next year a good bet to win 85 to 90 games, which would make them a contender. Adding a player as good as Rodriguez would take them up a level and make them a near lock to make the playoffs. Because they play in New York and can thus charge extortionate ticket prices, this means more to them than it does to any team other than the Yankees and maybe the Red Sox. Rodriguez would be worth the same number of wins to any team, but a win is worth more to a New York team on the playoff bubble than it is to any other team in the sport.
This is a very, very good reason to throw a lot of money at Rodriguez, as one can be sure Boras will point out. However, while on the one hand Rodriguez would be remarkably valuable to the Mets, he would also be a remarkably bad fit. He would, in fact, probably be a worse fit for the Mets than he would be for any other team in the sport.
Rodriguez is a great player, probably one of the 10 best of all time—but he isn’t a uniquely great hitter. Over the last four years, remember, he’s had two MVP campaigns, but also two merely superb ones. Over that time, his on-base plus slugging percentage of .976 has been the seventh-best in baseball. Per at-bat, the best hitters in the sport since 2004 have been Barry Bonds (1.163 OPS), Albert Pujols (1.052), and David Ortiz (1.024); despite his gaudy home run and RBI totals, Rodriguez isn’t quite as good a hitter as they are. He’s a half-notch down, in a group with hitters like Lance Berkman (.973), Travis Hafner (.977), and Chipper Jones (.961).
This is not a knock on him—these are the elite hitters in baseball, and Rodriguez’s achievements at the plate place him among them. What sets Rodriguez apart from someone like Berkman, though, is his ability to hit like this while playing every single day at a relatively demanding defensive position and providing value on the basepaths. That’s what makes him special. At 32 and with a tremendous amount of wear on his treads, though, his durability and base-running going forward are at the very least a concern, and if he were to play a demanding defensive position on the Mets, that would involve moving either Jose Reyes or David Wright to a new defensive position, which would be the greatest disaster in the history of the franchise.
Wright won a Gold Glove yesterday. He may not have deserved it, but he’s a fine defender, and only Eddie Mathews among all third basemen in history has been a better hitter through age 24. The mere idea of moving a 24-year-old who already has a semi-reasonable claim to being the greatest everyday player in franchise history to another position is utterly insane. For his part, Reyes, also 24, may yet end up even better than Wright.
If the Mets sign Rodriguez, they’ll either risk destroying the career of a homegrown potential Hall of Famer, or they’ll have to move Rodriguez to first base or the outfield. This would make no sense. As great as Rodriguez is, his value is, again, not strictly in his hitting, but in his combined hitting and fielding. Would you sign Lance Berkman to a 10-year, $300 million contract? Because that’s essentially what the Mets would be doing if they signed Rodriguez and played him at first or in the outfield.
Maybe even more important, the Mets would be crippling their ability to improve in the future by doing so. Signing Rodriguez would increase their payroll enough that even one more significant signing would subject them to baseball’s luxury tax, a penalty of up to 40% on payroll above $155 million. Thus, if they wanted to sign Johan Santana next year, they could be looking at a real cost for the ace pitcher of as much as $40 million a year.
All told, if the Mets signed Rodriguez, they would be committing a fifth of their payroll to a player who, if he ages historically well, will at best be one of the dozen or so best hitters in the league through the lifetime of the deal. He will either have minimal defensive value because he’ll have to play out of position, or will force the Mets to move one of two young franchise players, both very good defenders, out of position. He will prevent them from improving the team in the future even as he’s declining on the field. And, for what it’s worth, he’ll prove to be a huge, sucking void of negative publicity, fan ire, irritating preening, and, quite possibly, playoff choking.
It would be the perfect Mets move, a 10-year calamity. I expect contracts to be signed by the end of the month.
tmarchman@nysun.com