The Mets Have Been Operating As A Small-Market Club For Almost A Decade
So where is the fan outrage? And where is the national media?
Every so often, you find yourself trying to make a difficult argument. Perhaps the subject area is complicated and hard to understand. Perhaps the true facts are unclear, or subject to speculation.
This is not one of those times.
What the Mets have been doing to their fans, to baseball, and to the city of New York for the last ten years is nothing short of shameful. The evidence is right there — in public — for everyone to see. It requires no mudslinging, and no speculation.
You don’t need to mention the Bernie Madoff Scandal, the Leigh Castergine lawsuit, the Citi Field Casino mess, the time Fred Wilpon called David Wright “a good kid, not a superstar,” or the secret loan MLB had to give the Mets to stay afloat in 2011. You don’t have to speculate about how badly leveraged the team is right now. You don’t have to mention how the Mets reneged on a promise to build a thousands of units of affordable housing on the land near Citi Field. You don’t need to recall the indignity of the Mets Loyalty Oath.
The evidence is right there. A 70–92 team. A payroll that has ranked in the bottom-half of the league five years in a row. Veteran players being traded for cash instead of prospects. And now, a promise that payroll is going down yet again.
So where is the outrage?
Far be it from us to tell anyone else how to be a fan. Sports is a necessary escape from life for many (including us). For others, the joy of baseball is so great that it doesn’t matter whether the team wins or loses. But we cannot help but see the fundamental and established bargain of fandom: Follow the team, give them my hard-earned money, attention, and unflinching loyalty. In exchange, they try.
The team doesn’t have to be good all the time. We have rooted for the Mets without question through the dark times, through rebuilds (2002-2004, 2011 -2014) and through pretty much all of our formative years.
The team does not even have to be good overall. The Mets have a franchise record of 4285-4647, a winning percentage of just .480 and just nine playoff appearances in 55 years.
For many franchises in MLB, there simply is no chance at sustained success due to the economics of their market. The Tampa Bay Rays have a franchise value of less than half of the New York Mets, and whose highest payroll ranking in the last decade was 20th in 2010. The Rays have found a way to compete anyway, compiling a record of 855–766 (.527 win pct%) since 2008.
In baseball, there is just one deadly sin. It’s not playing dirty, it’s not your personal beliefs, it’s not even cheating, so long as you are cheating to win (you even get three strikes for banned substances). The only deadly sin is an attack on the integrity of the game.
Prior to the tenure of Commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis in 1920, 14 individuals (players and owners) were given lifetime bans from the game. Of those, 12 were banned for association with gamblers or attempting to fix games. Under Commissioner Landis, 19 more bans were handed out. Wikipedia explains, “ although his office enjoyed near-limitless power, in practice Landis only meted out punishment for serious off the field transgressions he believed were a threat to the image and/or integrity of the game.” The most famous incident being the infamous Black Sox Scandal.
Since Commissioner Landis, only four people have been given lifetime bans from baseball and have not been reinstated: Jenrry Mejia (steroids, for now), Chris Correa (hacking), John Coppolella (circumventing MLB rules) and Pete Rose (gambling on baseball while managing a baseball team; being Pete Rose). Each of these offenses — like with the Black Sox scandal — reflect upon the integrity of the game.
Major League Baseball’s Constitution talks specifically about this topic, stating that “the public perception that…Clubs perform and compete at all times to the best of their abilities” is integral to “the integrity [and] public confidence” in the game.
So what happens if a team doesn’t try? What happens if a team in a big market, that goes to the World Series, decides that it would rather print money than try to win?
No matter what your position is on fandom, or how you choose to root, or what you think is happening behind the scenes, it is clear that fans of the New York Mets are being faced with a conundrum the likes of which we haven’t seen in baseball for a long time.
It almost doesn’t matter why the Mets owners aren’t trying — perhaps they can’t afford to, perhaps they can afford to but would rather rake in the profits. What matters is they are not trying. This team isn’t trying to win, but instead, engaging in some kind of weird charade, pretending to be interested, and ducking the media for years on end.
The Mets went to the World Series in 2015 on the backs of a young, dynamic pitching staff and a streaking comet named Yoenis Cespedes. The team had the 19th highest payroll in baseball and played in MLB’s largest and most vibrant market in front of MLB’s most loyal fans. It looked as if years of austerity, patience, and planning had paid off (even in the bad years, the Mets never failed to draw at least 2.1 million loyal fans to Citi Field).
But then something weird happened. Instead of supplementing that World Series roster with free agent acquisitions, the Mets merely re-signed Cespedes, added Asdrubal Cabrera, and let Daniel Murphy leave, replacing him with Neil Walker. It was substantially the same roster as the year before — the warning signs were there.
The 2016 team won 87 games, streaking heroically to a Wild Card appearance. But by then the Mets’ fate was becoming clear. That offseason, the Mets did something that was unheard of in modern baseball, returning the exact same roster as the year before. The Mets re-signed Cespedes, Walker, Jay Bruce, Jerry Blevins, and Fernando Salas and hoped for the best. The payroll inched upward, but barely, starting the 2017 season with a projected payroll ranking 14th in MLB. The end result was an unmitigated disaster, shocking to the senses. How was this team in the World Series just two years before? The Mets finished 70–92, with a clubhouse roiled by scandal, and with very little hope on the horizon.
There is another team which shared a nearly identical path to the Mets through the 2015 season: the Chicago Cubs. The Mets met the Cubs in the 2015 NLCS, two mighty big-market franchises who were coming up after years of austerity. The difference was after being swept in the NLCS, the Cubs knew that it was time to use their resources to supplement their core of stars and embark on a dynasty that would become perennial World Series contenders. The Cubs added Jason Heyward, John Lackey, Ben Zobrist and Travis Wood prior to the 2016 season. They won the World Series in 2016, made their third consecutive NLCS in 2017, and are predicted to return for a fourth time in 2018.
The Mets have had some bad luck with injuries to Noah Syndergaard, Matt Harvey, Yoenis Cespedes, and Jeurys Familia last season. But the Mets were not in a free-fall until the second half of the year. They were 47–51 on July 25th. Perhaps a wild card run would have been possible had the roster been deeper and more talented.
When the 2017 season ended, the Mets front office leaked reports that the payroll for the team was actually going to go down before the start of the 2018 season. The Mets had just traded Lucas Duda, Jay Bruce, Addison Reed, Neil Walker, and Curtis Granderson for salary relief, and Sandy Alderson had just intimated to the media that he did so because the 2017 team itself had been over budget.
So Mets fans find themselves at a crossroads.
Ya Gotta Believe? What I believe is that every fan has the right to root however they want. But what I also believe is that there is a bargain with the fans that the New York Mets are not keeping.
We share the same fundamental belief as the Major League Baseball Constitution, that the public perception clubs perform and compete at all times to the best of their abilities is integral to the integrity and public confidence in the game. How can anyone have confidence in the game of baseball if a marquee franchise — worth over $2 billion dollars — in the sport’s largest market can be run like this for a decade? Why isn’t this a national-level scandal that should be roiling the national pastime? Why isn’t the Player’s Union chirping about this every day?
Ten years after the Madoff scandal, and after four years of rebuilding (2011–2014), Mets fans deserved an ownership group that was committed to trying to win a World Series with the core that the fans had waited so patiently to build. But they didn’t try, nor are they trying this year. The Mets are a big-market team that continues to languish on the sidelines and be outbid for free agents by teams from Cleveland, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Kansas City. The Mets continue to run a payroll that is, on a good day, $70 million less than the New York Yankees. They continue to prove on a daily basis they care more about profits then they do about winning.
This is an easy case. You don’t need to guess what the Mets payroll is. You don’t need to speculate whether returning the exact same roster in consecutive years is a smart strategy or not. It is clear that a team that cared about winning would get prospects in return in trades instead of only salary relief. Everyone would agree that a team that was genuinely trying to win would try to trade for reigning MVP Giancarlo Stanton when he was available as a salary dump. The facts required to convict were not clear yet in 2015, when fans were promised that the Mets would increase payroll if the fans came to Citi Field. It was possible to believe that the 2011–2014 austerity was a phase that was worth patiently waiting through. But the facts are crystal clear today: the jury has nothing to deliberate about.
The Mets aren’t trying, and fans have every right to be upset and make their voices heard.
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