Big time.

Photo from Dee Gordon’s twitter.

Mets fans have every right to be upset today with the news Giancarlo Stanton has been dealt to…I can’t even type it. I’m sure you can find out the rest of the transaction somewhere online. It would have been worse if he was dealt to the Washington Nationals, but as Giancarlo noted once, his surname alone would have voided the deal.

He’s out of the NL East, but when the Mets were in their healthy(ish) seasons of 2015 and 2016 they handled the Marlins and Giancarlo fairly well, posting a 23–15 mark. Besides, the Marlins were going to stink in 2018 no matter what. Stanton is from the impossibly named L.A. town of Panorama City, so the Dodgers were the team Stanton was heavily rumored to be heading, which would have been fine! The Dodgers and Mets are scheduled to face each other the standard six times in 2018. The Dodgers are really good and impossibly rich! We more or less accepted it.

Instead Stanton is going to the Yankees, whom the Mets are also scheduled to face six times, but are also scheduled to go to work within the same general vicinity as the Mets. Of course the Yankees outshining the Mets is not anything new. For a long time in fact, the Mets’ charm was playing “little brother” to the big brother bullies. Jimmy Breslin damned the franchise forever when he wrote about the Mets’ inaugurual year in the book Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? and theorized on why the godawful team was beloved.

Rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for U.S. Steel and so forth, you get the idea. This dynamic lasted forever since, and while it was probably mentally unhealthy, it was up until the 2009 season somewhat of a reasonable bargain as a Met fan. When the Mets make the playoffs, they make it count! And when they win it all, it means so much more! That kind of stuff.

It is a different, more disturbing acceptable inferiority permeating the Mets now. Back in the day whenever the Mets failed, it was due to poor decision making in the front office or from the dugout, or it was because the Mets are Charlie Brown, and we have to play our roles in this world.

Now the Mets are hampered due to a lack of money, even though they play in the largest media market in the known universe. The Yankees’ payroll ceiling is baseball’s Luxury Tax threshold (at last check $195 million or thereabouts). The Mets payroll is going to go down from $155 million to $145 million for 2018. Money does not guarantee championships, but having money while making smart personnel decisions always equals success. Trust me, Sandy Alderson would prefer to have an extra $50 million (which by the way each MLB team has either received or are due to receive from the lovely folks over at Disney). Before Alderson was forced to create “moneyball” and find market inefficiencies when his new bosses slashed the budget, the then Oakland A’s general manager won his only World Series championship ring in 1989, when the A’s had the fifth highest payroll in the league. The Mets began the 2017 season with the 11th highest out of 30, and ended the year even lower after they traded away their expensive veterans in August, in exchange for cash and middle to low level relief pitcher prospects. This is like if Charlie Brown couldn’t afford a glove and didn’t get a chance to get lit up at all. At least his FIP might have redeemed him, you know?

There are two possible reasons why the Mets aren’t spending as much as they should, and I’m not afraid to say it!

Fine I’m a little afraid to say it, but here it goes: either 1)the Wilpons and Saul Katz literally cannot spend as much money as the Yankees because of the Bernie Madoff scandal, or 2)They are using the Madoff scandal as an excuse to not spend more money. There is a possibility you do not believe either of those, and that is understandable. It is hard to walk around town knowing there’s a possibility all of the poor decisions made over the years might have been in part due to a lack of money. It was understandable that the Mets let Justin Turner walk when they did! Buuuuut…did they elect to not tender him a contract because of a perceived lack of talent? Or did they not tender him a contract, let him sign with the Dodgers, and watch him become a perennial All-Star because he was due to become too expensive for them as a bench player for the 2014 season? This fun little mental game can be played for every move and non-move since 2009.

Giancarlo Stanton had a no-trade clause and was not shy about using it. He had the right to and exercised said right to turn down the Giants and Cardinals (ha). The Dodgers insisted that the Marlins scarf down some of their bad contracts, so they were never truly in play. So suddenly, Stanton was okay with playing in New York, and was okay with the possibility of joining the Yankees. Not one report says anything about his feelings about the Mets, yet we all know he probably never considered them. Maybe Mets reliever AJ Ramos, Stanton’s teammate in Miami from 2012 until he was dealt to New York a few months ago, mentioned the Mets to him when they hung out this offseason. Maybe Giancarlo only became convinced about the positives of New York. Maybe he noted that even with his friend Ramos on the Mets, they still weren’t spending as much money as they could. We’ll never know, and that is the problem.

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