Sports

Sandy Alderson is destroying the Mets and must be stopped

The Mets want you to believe they have a handle on all of this. They want you to believe they are adequate traffic cops directing all the baseball chaos that continues to befall and befuddle them, that they aren’t the abject joke of malpractice and incompetence they seem to be to the naked eye.

They want to sell you on that. So badly.

And then, on Sunday afternoon, the team reported to Citi Field having no idea who the starting pitcher was. This was not due to some outside-the-box thinking on motivating players, or going old-school, back to when a pitcher would learn he was starting that day because the manager had placed a baseball in his spikes.

No. This happened because Jason Vargas hurt himself jogging on Wednesday in Denver. The Mets knew that, though it didn’t seem bad enough at first to warrant a DL stint. That didn’t happen until Saturday. That was unfortunate timing for the Mets (and less fortunate for the Dodgers, deprived of taking aim at his 8.60 ERA).





The Mets would not be the first team in the history of baseball to warrant an emergency starter. Yes, it is a longtime failure that the Triple-A team is in Las Vegas and thus it makes for some difficulty in travel arrangements. But the Double-A team is in Binghamton. That’s a three-hour drive, tops. Someone could easily have been summoned.

Instead, they opted for a parlor game. It was Jerry Blevins, the Mets’ one bullpen lefty (even if he’s been compromised in that role this season by almost never retiring lefties), asked to make his first career start, at age 34, after 532 big-league appearances. To the surprise of exactly no one — probably not even Blevins himself — it was 2-0, Dodgers, after two hitters.





So, yes: That was an absurd enough lapse of aptitude.

Later on came the daily doozy that emanates from Mickey Callaway’s press conferences. The Mets made a fun day out of things, banging out a bunch of big hits, tying the game late on Kevin Plawecki’s improbable eighth-inning home run. In the 10th, Jose Bautista led off with a walk. Dominic Smith was next, and the Dodgers over-shifted on him, begging him to lay down a bunt.

One problem:

“Dominic Smith has never bunted before,” Callaway conceded.

The bigger problem? Callaway actually saying that Smith has never bunted before, which is just a remarkable commentary (or telling explanation) of just how horrid the Mets’ player-development plan is. And what’s worse? It’s essentially true. In 2,511 minor-league plate appearances, Smith has exactly one sacrifice bunt, at Single-A Savannah in 2014. This for a player who only hit 42 home runs in six minor-league seasons.





Beautiful.

This eventual 8-7 loss to the Dodgers was just another in a ceaseless reminder of just how poorly run the Mets really are, an indictment that lands square at the feet of Sandy Alderson. It has already been a full year of unqualified roster replacements, of criminal mishandling of injuries, of nonsensical use (or non-use) of the DL, of one offseason choice after another exposed as horrendous — and it’s only June.

How long can this go on?

Look, you can gripe about how cheap the Mets’ ownership is, and that’s 100 percent fair. But you can win with a $150 million payroll. Alderson has been the man building this product, top to bottom, for eight years and with one notable two-month exception in 2015 — highlighted, remember, by an acquisition of Yoenis Cespedes that only happened when deals for Carlos Gomez, Justin Upton and Jay Bruce couldn’t be consummated — it has been a fiasco of failure, and what will almost surely be six losing seasons.





The biggest question around the Mets shouldn’t be if they should trade cornerstone assets Jacob deGrom and Noah Syndergaard; it should be this: How can the Wilpons possibly think it is a good thing to trust Alderson to make these critical decisions? What about his track record in building eight Mets teams tells you that would be a good idea?

Having the Dodgers in town only exacerbates the problem. The Mets think they have injury woes? The Dodgers have turned their season around with Clayton Kershaw sitting most of the past few months, without Corey Seager, with just as many games lost to the DL as the Mets. Somehow the Dodgers find a way.

Why can’t Alderson ever find someone like Max Muncy, an Oakland discard who destroyed the Mets this weekend? Why are his low-risk veteran gambles the unwatchably glacial Adrian Gonzalez and Bautista instead of Matt Kemp (and his .904 OPS)? Why can’t he ever find someone like Justin Turner, who hit the game-winning homer … oh, wait. Right.

Hell: Why can’t he figure out a way to field a full team in a game that actually counts, one that 34,060 actually paid their way into? This is what it’s come to. This is who the Mets are now. Yell at the owners; they deserve it. Curse at the players; they’ve been mostly lousy. But the bulk of this is on the GM, whose lifetime scholarship has to end sometime. Preferably sometime soon.





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