Getting Worried Yet?

The Mets are making a lot of their fans grumpy these days.

On offense, they are firing on nearly all cylinders. They have a .283 team batting average and six of the eight regulars are performing at or above expectations when it comes to their slash stats.

There remains a perception that the Mets cannot hit with runners in the clutch, but the overall stats aren't clearly bearing that out. Their slash stats with men on base, with runners in scoring position and in so-called "clutch situations" are remarkably similar. They are all about 30 points off the pace of "non-clutch situations," which is not good but also is not an unusual difference. Some individuals are struggling more than others (hello, David Wright!), but there is no evidence of the team-wide malaise that some have suggested.

Last week, Adam Rubin of the Daily News suggested that continued ineptitude on the field might lead to some signficiant changes - both on and off the field. Winning 2 out of 3 against the dreadful Nationals this weekend may have stemmed that tide somewhat, but there are two important things to consider about the 2009 New York Mets:

* We are still only 18 games into the season, and firing coaches or demoting core players would look both panicky and vaguely amateurish. It's one thing to release someone like Darren O'Day, who was never being counted on to make a huge impact on the season. It's quite another to try demoting any of your front four starters. Even Oliver Perez, as awful as he's been so far, has no business in the bullpen or in Buffalo. When you make $12 million a year, you get more than four starts before getting bumped from the rotation.

Nothing has happened in the last four weeks that has led me to believe any coach should be fired or re-assigned, because nothing can be legitimately inferred about the Mets by such a small sample size. Oh sure, I have SUSPICIONS - that the starting pitching just isn't that good and that the bullpen is overrated. But I had those suspicions going into the season. Making changes now will just make everyone involved look incompetent for not having recognized these problems in the off-season.

* It may also just be that the Mets aren't playing that badly right now; it may just be that the Mets were never that good in the first place. This entire team was built on a wing and prayer and shockingly enough, not all of these hopes and dreams are panning out.

The only change to the rotation was adding Livan Hernandez - possibly the worst starting pitcher in baseball. The Mets re-made the bullpen by adding a closer with steadily increasing peripherals and a former closer coming off an injury-plagued, ineffective season. The only change to the starting eight was a hot-shot young hitter who was an infielder for his entire minor-league career. Perhaps handing him the starting left fielder's job in the absence of any legitimate alternative wasn't such a hot idea after all.

Omar Minaya was a lazy general manager this offseason. He decided to address only one of the three core areas of his team and simply assumed the other two would be up to snuff. That's a recipe for failure - and so far that's exactly what has been happening.

Cut-Rate Ghetto Team

When you have writer's block - and I do - sometimes you have to let someone else say the words for you. Tim Marchman, as usual, says something I wish I had said first.

Andrew Beaton: Do you believe Omar Minaya and the Mets had a successful off season just because of the revamped bullpen that now features Francisco Rodriguez and JJ Putz, or do you believe that they needed to acquire another front end starter or another top of the order hitter?

Tim Marchman: All Minaya has to do is spend ownership’s money as well as he can, so he had a terrific winter because the easiest problem to fix was the bullpen and he fixed it as well as he possibly could have. The team as a whole had a really lousy winter. Given the way the last two seasons ended and that they’re moving into a new park that’s largely financed with public money it’s just embarrassing that the Wilpons didn’t give Minaya more money for another starter and an outfielder, even if it meant taking a loss. This was their big chance to get rid of the idea that the Mets are a cut-rate, ghetto team and they totally botched it up. A team with four of the top dozen or so players in baseball, the second highest franchise value in the game and a new park, and they’re too cheap to buy a pennant in the best buyer’s market in years. It’s really bizarre.