Omar Has Lost It

Here’s the quote of the year.

“Right now we do not envision [being a seller],” Minaya said. “If we’re 6 ½ [back] in the wild card with a couple of teams in front of us, we are still kind of trying to find out how we can improve this team, if we can improve it through trades.”

Jose Reyes hasn’t played a game since mid-May. Ditto Carlos Delgado. Carlos Beltran has been on the shelf for the last month. John Maine and J.J. Putz slightly longer than that. But now, with his team 10 games out of first place and 7 1/2 games out of the top spot in the wild card, having just watched his team lose back to back games to the Washington Nationals, Omar Minaya thinks it might be time to get his roster some help.

Someone buy the man a fiddle, because he needs something to do while watching the burning rubble that is his personal overpriced Rome. During one of the great buyer’s markets of all time, Minaya paid through the nose for a bad starting pitcher and bullpen help, while neglecting the fact that there was no organizational depth beyond the starting position players. If any of them got hurt, it was going to get bad in a hurry, but that apparently didn’t need to be addressed in his spending spree over the winter.

Maybe the Mets didn’t deserve to have all these injuries strike at the same time, but the resulting collapse is directly due to a lack of planning on the part of the guy in charge. Minaya has never been very good at this whole General Manager thing, but 2009 is his Little Bighorn. If he actually thinks there’s a season left to salvage, he’s crazy. The Mets have something like a two percent chance of making the playoffs. The Pittsburgh Pirates are more likely to be playing baseball in October than the Mets are, and they’re in total sell-off mode.

There’s a bit of self-preservation going on here, of course. Minaya has earned his way into a lack of job security, contract extension or not. In a world where baseball teams are getting exponentially smarter, he refuses to catch up. Perhaps he sees the writing on the wall – his days as a major league GM are numbered. If he doesn’t get fired this winter, it will just delay the inevitable. He’s not one of the 30 most qualified people to be running a baseball team, and 2009 should seal his fate.

Sorry Omar, but if you wanted to save your season, the time to improve the roster was in May, not in July. You’re too late.





Dave is the Managing Editor of FanGraphs.

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Joltin' Joe
14 years ago

If you look at all of his good moves, it’s pretty easy to see that he cast his line and landed a big one with his eyes closed each time.

If he didn’t acquire Santana I doubt he would even be a GM right now. What Santana contributed in 2008 was worth several crucial wins over whichever pathetic alternative the Mets had. 89 wins with him, barely over .500 without.

And trading Church for Francoeur is absolutely inexcusable. Better yet the Mets will have to catch the Braves to make the playoffs… plus a few more miracles.