This weekend presented an ultimatum to write a Mets column. After finally showering off my Knicks hangover with some help from the draft, I was staring at the prospect of the Mets pulling me into baseball season Godfather-style. If the Mets had taken two of three from the Phillies, I would have reserved my judgment on the season and continued coasting through the season with a faint hope of the team briefly catching lightning in a bottle and making the season interesting. Instead, they dropped two of three including one where Roy Halladay pitching like he had a plane to catch, so it's time to face the music.
Realistically, it’s time to deconstruct these Mets. I've held off on this idea for the past few years, but the Mets do not resemble a contender this year, and their minor league system makes it look like they won't for a while. However, the Mets do have plenty of chips to play to change this situation around. To trade away David Wright would invite a fan mutiny. For better or for worse he has the dubious honor of being the face of a franchise that has had a big hand in torpedoing his market value over the past few seasons. Due to injuries, poor investments in multiple arenas, and the comically colossal dimensions of Citi Field, Wright’s once lofty ceiling is now something that is well within the vision of Mets fans. Carlos Beltran is off to a decent start, but even in a contract year, would net only marginal prospects in return due to his advanced age and well noted expiration date on his knees. There’s only one player that can turn the franchise around.
It’s time to trade Jose Reyes. Even when he has finally found the instruction booklet on how to put it all together, and is one of the two answers Alek Trebek will accept for “Best Shortstop in Baseball”. In the short term, it’s going to be miserable not seeing the one guy who’s still somehow smiling through the shit storm and whipping lasers to Ike Davis in warm-ups. But looking forward to the future of the franchise, it’s clear that the rebuilding process should start as soon as possible. Hopefully it’s not a fire sale, but it will be a sale of sorts, and Reyes is the out of place fixed up 2005 Lamborghini sitting in the drive way that no one wants to listen to offers for. The worst part about it, is that he BELONGS in New York, specifically in Citi Field.
One of the laws of the fans (those laws should be published), is that a team isn’t supposed to trade a player until we don’t like them anymore. Collectively, we all sit as Commodus and look on with jaded pessimism, waiting to hand down judgment on the latest failed entertainer. Especially in New York, where it’s almost never about building relationships with athletes, and more along the lines of a series of one night stands and mail order brides that are either never as good as the first one, or as attractive as they seemed in the catalog.
David Wright may be the photogenic face that the media commonly associates with this team, but go to any Mets game and there’s only one player who’s cheered by name every time he gets up. Through all of his slumps, errors, and injuries (and there have been injuries), Reyes still can detonate the stands with excitement, and most importantly, let’s us know that he’s not taking it for granted. By all accounts he’s given, he’s just a guy that loves playing a game for a living. Whether that’s true or not, that’s what all of us non-players want to see out of any person lucky enough to not be in our category.
More importantly for Jose, very few players have had the good fortune of playing a stadium that maximizes their positive assets. Jason Bay got to have two years of nirvana in Fenway Park where the green monster transformed his long fly outs in Yawkey Way souvenirs. Jose Reyes doesn’t have the power that Bay does (whatever power that may be), but Citi Field is just as uniquely tailored to him.
Where most hitters come into Citi Field and see the black walls looming endlessly off in the distance, Reyes sees the unending expanse of green leading up to them. Make no mistake in 90% of other ballparks (especially including Fenway, one of his likely landing places), Reyes would still be a spectacular player. An increasingly disciplined hitter with enough power to prevent outfielders from cheating up to snare his line drives. But in Citi Field, Reyes is another animal entirely.
The sheer amount of ground that the outfield in Citi forces its defenders to cover means that Reyes can simply hit ball into the gap and watch it roll without any threat of a wall impeding the progress of it or him. Anything that gets past the outfielders is immediately a possible triple. For the past two years, there has been nothing even remotely as exciting as seeing Reyes realizing this possibility while rounding first, and briefly tilting the field downhill running to third. That wow factor is present in almost everything Reyes does. The best fielding at short Queens has seen since Ordonez, and the ability to steal any base at any time robbing any pitcher of their concentration.
Unfortunately, it appears that the time for Mets fans to witness Reyes in his natural habitat is coming to a close. Get your tickets while you can, because the constant smile with a # 7 on his back will be whipping balls across the infield somewhere else soon, probably San Francisco. In the short term, the Mets are removing one of the last sources of joy from their team, but hopefully when fans look back in a few years, his departure will have brought a few more people in who get their own cheers.
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