When you're a basically solid team without a lot of job openings or questions, spring training is, ideally, all about what you're not. News? Bad. Questions? Generally bad. Particularly any that start with formulations like, “Can the Mets survive…” or “What's Plan B now that…” The absence of questions, beyond banalities such as work visas and days off to attend to personal matters and commonplaces such as working on new pitches and re-examining swings? That's good. Or, rather, it's not bad.
So far, it's been a camp of nots. Orlando Hernandez's neck pain? Not thought to be serious. Lastings Milledge's hand? Not broken. John Maine leg after that comebacker? Not injured. Not exciting, but that's not disappointing. Exciting is so overrated this time of year.
But it occurred to me today that there's something else we're not.
There's been a lot of speculation about Alex Rodriguez and that opt-out Scott Boras built into his contract all those years ago in Texas — speculation that the clause was designed to let the Mets correct their mistake of having Steve Phillips call in a pre-emptive strike on A-Rod's supposed contract demands during the winter of 2000. The Mets were the team A-Rod loved as a kid (and seems to genuinely have loved, unlike, say, the diplomatically variable childhood loyalties of Al Leiter) and had always wanted to play for. As it's a rarity for agents to be dealing with the same GMs seven years down the road, the opt-out would give both player and team a second chance to make things right.
It's a great story. Great stories always make me suspicious. It seems a lot more reasonable to think that seven-year escape clause was designed to let A-Rod catch back up to a salary curve that in 2000 sure looked destined to rise above $25 million per for the game's greatest stars by 2008. That sounds a lot more like Scott Boras than any kind of sentiment about what logos were on a client's jammies once upon a time.
But it's spooky how the Mets' lean seasons did track the opt-out pretty closely, from 2001's gallant near-miss to the travesty of Alomar and Vaughn, Art Howe lighting up rooms, Jeff Wilpon running down Jim Duquette's cellphone batteries, Kazmir for Zambrano, pitchers running the clubhouse and every other disappointment and embarrassment of that wretched era. Shaun Powell doesn't mention A-Rod, but he does a nice job [1] in Newsday today discussing how these Mets are not those Mets anymore. If Boras really was plotting a course for A-Rod around the Mets' fallow years, his only mistake was being pessimistic by a season.
This isn't a plea to put A-Rod in orange and blue for 2008. That's not going to happen. Though if there were a chance, I wouldn't be so high and mighty that I'd turn up my nose at a player who's going to wind up owning every offensive record in the book and, as no less than dedicated Yankee hater Jim Caple has pointed out [2], seems like a decent guy whose biggest fault is letting his emotional neediness guide his foot to his mouth. A-Rod would be insane to go for double or nothing on the other side of town. The Mets would be taking an awful risk letting him take that gamble with an enormous amount of their money. And that's not what got me thinking anyway.
What got me thinking was David Wright's reaction to the idea of A-Rod as a Met. Wright is an All-Star, the recipient of a six-year, $55 million contract, a marketing phenomenon and one of the faces of his franchise. So what would he do if A-Rod arrived in Flushing? That's easy, he told Bob Klapisch [3] — he'd change positions. Really? To where? “Anywhere.”
On one New York team, when you're Alex Rodriguez you pull into town, are left to read the writing on the wall and decide you're the one who's going to change positions, even though most everybody except geeks who do motion capture for videogames thinks you're far superior at the position you're vacating. On that team the guy you moved for is more interested in punishing you for something stupid you said a long time ago than in drawing down the venom of the fans, even though he could accomplish that with a sentence or two and thereby allow you to relax and just be who you are, which is only one of the best players in the history of the game.
A-Rod seem stunned by Wright's comments, and who can blame him? In the Daily News today, Wright calmly acknowledged he'd said what he said, then cracked that “I really do hate” Reyes. In Port St. Lucie, one half of the left side of the infield saying that about the other half is a laugh line. In Tampa, it'd launch half a billion headlines.
I can't wait to find out all the things the Mets are this year. In the meantime? It's nice taking stock of all the things they're not.
Reminder: This Wednesday March 7, we'll be reading at Varsity Letters, the monthly sportswriting event hosted by Gelf Magazine [4]'s Carl Bialik. The night's other readers will be True Hoop [5]'s Henry Abbott; the Dugout [6]'s Jon Bois, Nick Dallamora and Brandon Stroud; Deadspin [7]'s Will Leitch; Dan Shanoff of eponymous sitedom [8]; and With Leather [9]'s Matt Ufford. If you're in or near New York City (or have a sudden urge to visit), please come cheer us on and/or laugh after we fall on our faces. Admission is free; full details are right here [10]. Carl even interviewed us [11], the sucker.