You’ve heard the old expression “the inmates are running the asylum.” Well, that would be an improvement [1] for the 2018 Mets.
Because nobody is running this asylum. Too many of the players can’t handle the basics of major league baseball. The manager doesn’t seem equipped to juggle the bedrock strategies and in-game preparation required. The front office — now an unwieldy triumvirate — wastes roster spots on old players with no future while letting young players rot on the bench. The new people in charge of injury prevention are as bad at their jobs as the old people were. Anonymous quotes continue to be stuck in unsuspecting backs. The face of ownership is a feckless, interfering twit who’s been given a license for negligence by his industry and is likely to outlive a good chunk of the fanbase.
The Mets just completed the third-worst month in franchise history. They are the worst team in the National League. There is no particular reason to believe things won’t get worse from here, and no reason whatsoever to think that anyone connected with this franchise is doing anything to address the top-to-bottom organizational rot.
I’ve lived through some bleak, bleak times as a Mets fan: the Lorinda de Roulet years when the Mets were baseball’s North Korea; the leaderless calamity of the early 90s; the undermanned embarrassment of the mid-aughts. All those teams were embarrassing and pathetic. I hated some of them and took a perverse delight in their chronic failures; others I just wanted to go away.
But I can’t remember a more toxic brew of underperformance, incompetence and negligence than what this team serves up each and every day — or feeling less hope that anything will change.