Mets need to revamp training staff immediately
I am not a fan of the Mets’ current front office, manager, training staff, or several other areas that shape the team. This season, I have complained more than any other season I have covered the Mets for MattTracy.com, and I can say that I have turned into one of the team’s number one critic in one of the shortest spans of time.
I dislike the manager; all you need to do is watch one of his post-game press conferences to tell that he isn’t an intelligent man, let alone be qualified to manage a Major League Baseball team. He mumbles, stumbles, and stutters his way through questions during interviews, not knowing what to say and trying to make himself look smart by filling in the blanks with off-topic, irrelevant details. Perfect example of an ignorant man trying to make himself look better than he really is.
It is amazing how far downhill general manager Omar Minaya has gone since his magical acquisitions of 2005-06 that gave fans hope that they never had before. Unfortunately, he built the team as if it was a one-year plan to win in 2006. The Mets won often in 2006 and had a great season, but when they were unable to win game 7 of the NLCS, it seemed as if Omar Minaya threw his dreams out the window. He failed to address the seriously unstable starting rotation this past off-season, and instead acquired two closers to overbuild the back-end of the rotation when he should have spread the talent evenly.
The worst part of this team that I have seen in recent months has been their repeating irresponsible decisions to gamble and lose when it comes to injuries. Nearly every single player that was injured and placed on the Disabled List became victim to preventable injuries.
Jose Reyes – Reyes missed a few days in the beginning stages of his injury, but was pushed into games and ended up injuring himself to the point where he was placed on the Disabled List. The team did such a horrible job with treating his injury that he suffered another injury on top of it.
Oliver Perez – Perez struggled through his first handful of starts of 2009, but the team later revealed that he had been playing through an injury. He soon began to recover, but was re-injured following a rehab stint.
J.J. Putz – After a dominant start to 2009, Putz fell off the face of the planet and began getting shelled. The velocity on his fastball dropped like lead and everyone knew SOMETHING was wrong. The team soon placed him on the Disabled List and revealed that he was suffering from an arm injury.
How long will this team let players risk their injuries and eventually have an ENTIRE team of AAA minor-league players? This team certainly has missed a step in conditioning these players in the off-season if there are this many injuries and definitely are not experts at preventing injuries.
It is not easy to decide where to point the finger here, though, because each player’s situation is different and the person who actually shuts them down could vary.
My stand on blogs: News is unnecessary
In the years since I began this Mets/Giants blog in 2005, I aimed to not only fill my readers in with news and opinion, but to give my readers the full detail following a game. This post-game description included a summary of the game, which, quite frankly, can be found on Mets.com or any major site that takes information off the AP wire.
I recently have been cutting back on the amount of post-game SUMMARIES for this season because I have been confused as far as what path to take. However, that confusion has been long gone. Read on.
When the Mets season began in April, it hit me that it was not necessary for blogs (not newspaper blogs, but the fan blogs that are found abundant throughout the web) to write their own post-game summary, considering you can find that in the Associated Press.
What makes anyone’s blog special or stand out as far as writing anything about a game is how well they analyze the game. If I went through to several Mets blogs right now, I will find that they spent more time writing a summary of the game than writing their opinion. READERS DO NOT WANT TO SEE THAT. There is a big difference between just summarizing a game and analyzing a game. Readers want to see what the blogger thinks about a game, not a game summary.
It is unfortunate that blogs have taken this turn for the worse. It has become so that you can basically go through every Mets blog and see that they all wrote a post-game summary of the game. Every blog is supposed to be unique in its own, but with everyone writing the same thing, it takes the whole concept of a blog out of it.
For this very reason, there have been several Mets blogs that I no longer read because they simply state the facts. We don’t want the facts, we want the opinion about the facts. While many blogs do write their opinion following their game description, it tends to be heavily weighted on a summary and happens to be the main reason for why that blogger wrote that story.
Some bloggers probably get up off their couch following a game and say, “Well, I better go write about the game.” No, you mean steal news from somewhere else and credit it to yourself while exclusively writing a summary, sans opinion?
This is a different ballgame if you are blogging for, say, a minor league team, where that team may not get much publicity. It is also perfectly fine for sites like Metsblog.com, the top Mets blog for the past several years, to write a post-game summary, because Matt Cerrone works for SNY and is obligated to maintain a consistent chain of pre and post-game summaries. Major league newspaper bloggers, as mentioned above, and any other blogger who is able to gather the information personally without the need for other sources, are also off the hook. However, when we are talking about a major league team that is covered by every main newspaper in New York, it is completely unnecessary for most blogs to give a game summary.
This change in my blogging stance also includes news. It is not appropriate for a blogger to tell the entire story of John Maine being sent to the Disabled List. The best thing for a blogger to do is take one sentence to say that John Maine was sent to the Disabled List, then spend the rest of the post explaining what they think the Mets should do as far as filling in his temporarily-vacant spot.
It is important that blogs (not including newspaper blogs) be viewed as a center of opinion narrowed down to a specific area, such as Mets or Giants. Not a center of associated press wannabes who get all of their information off other sources, who think they can match the work of someone who does this for a living, and who gathers his own information by personally interviewing players.
I hope that fans and bloggers, even the ones who do not follow my suggested path, take this piece of advice seriously and keep blogging as it was meant to be – which certainly didn’t include news over opinion.
Injuries should help the team in the long run
The injuries that the Mets have suffered lately should actually help them later in the season, and here is why.
If the Mets are be able to hold the fort through the All-Star break with limited availability and talent, they should soar through the second half and win the NL East without too much trouble considering they will have their key players back.
In other words, if the Mets can succeed without the big-name players, imagine how great they will be with them?
This Mets team is certainly running on fumes at this point. Their original plans heading into the season are completely flipped around, and their outlook to the season has changed completely. This happens.
If the Mets are unable to recover when Carlos Delgado and Jose Reyes return from injury, I fully expect that this team to empty out and rebuild. If they are unable to recover, they will have missed the playoffs for three consecutive, high-expectation seasons.
It will be interesting to see how well they can play without their best stuff.