Room for Improvement

In one of the climactic scenes of the first season of Mad Men, ad agency head Bert Cooper instructed impatient Pete Campbell, by way of exonerating a man originally named Dick Whitman for shadily assuming the identity of the late Don Draper, “The Japanese have a saying: A man is whatever room he is in, and right now, Donald Draper is in this room.” I woke up the morning after Wednesday night’s Mets 3-1 winnable yet ultimately elusive loss to the Yankees drawn to this insight because after playing 101 games, I couldn’t tell you who the 2023 Mets are, nor could I tell you I have any swell ideas to make them better.

They no longer bear any collective resemblance to the team that won 101 games in 2022, even if individually many of the players from then are the players from now. In hindsight, it was a mistake to put much stock in recent past performance, to rhetorically ask, “what’s wrong with these Mets, they won 101 games last year?” because that was last year, and last year left the room last year. Some years more or less pick up where the years that preceded them left off. This year made a mysterious clean break with last year.

The room the Mets are in currently defies easy identification. They are not a powerhouse. They are not a contender. They are not completely out of it. They’re not good. They’re not so bad that they can be completely written off for this year or, given who’s on the team, next year (instantly putting aside some of what I just concluded about one year having a limited relationship to the next). With the trade deadline fast approaching, they do not profile as a buyer. They may not be a seller in that they don’t have that much to sell that anybody is going to go out of their way to buy from them without square pegs, round holes and dollar signs being carefully applied to any transaction of substance. I’m not sure what the purpose of selling would be beyond a vague sense that something is getting done amid a season when something happens every day yet little changes and nothing improves.

Is somebody soaking up playing time and blocking somebody who deserves reps? That’s one of those situations a fan whose team’s immediate aspirations aren’t serious sees as trade deadline catnip. Move Asdrubal Cabrera, get Jeff McNeil in there every day, that sort of thing. Maybe one fewer veteran outfielder clears space for Ronny Mauricio, and I wouldn’t begrudge either Mauricio — who’s still figuring out his potential position — or us from a glimpse or two of what Ronny might do. Finding a taker for Tommy Pham or Mark Canha would accomplish a vacancy, though you never know with this organization if that would mean Mauricio gets a crack at filling it or it just results in more time for DJ Stewart. It’s quite possible you’re quite happy with Stewart or Pham or Canha as human beings representing your team several at-bats per game. You’re entitled.

Do we merely seek catharsis? I’m not putting down catharsis. Catharsis literally feels good. The best part of the cruddy 2003 season, after Jose Reyes was called up, was the dismissal in the weeks that followed of Roberto Alomar, Jeromy Burnitz, Armando Benitez, Graeme Lloyd and Rey Sanchez, each sent away by Jim Duquette, whose elevation to general manager occurred once the Mets got rid of Steve Phillips, whose offing also felt like a cause to light a postcoital cigarette (as I’ve seen done in movies). Sometimes your team is just so bad and you so don’t want to look at those characters anymore that you’ll take action that jettisons a batch of them as a spiritual victory. None among the players who returned in trades in the summer of 2003 directly swung Met fortunes upward — even Duquette didn’t last beyond 2004 — but it literally felt good.

Yet 2023 isn’t 2003. Nor is it 2017, a less toxic but no more competitive setting. At and around the deadline six years ago, the Mets sought and secured takers for Lucas Duda, Addison Reed, Jay Bruce, Neil Walker and Curtis Granderson. The season didn’t get tangibly better or worse. Youth had been served, which generally appeals to our future-leaning instincts. The housecleaning seemed necessary in the will ya look at the dust on everything? sense rather than as an echo of 2003’s geez, it stinks in here, grab the Lysol! Bringing out the vacuum doesn’t always mean everybody you’re trying to remove from the premises sucks. And vacuuming sometimes only accomplishes so much. Drew Smith was the only young player who arrived in those 2017 exchanges to establish roots in Flushing, though promising kids Amed Rosario (now a veteran who gets traded at deadlines) and Dom Smith were called up. Brandon Nimmo received more playing time as that August progressed, and Nimmo’s still here, too. Mostly, the season wound to an end, and the next season came. New problems arose. At least they weren’t the same old problems.

This team, no matter our roughly every-other-night gripes, isn’t The Worst (a distinction one didn’t think would need to be delineated this year), and its components, for the most part, aren’t people a fan can’t stand to look at one day longer. If you can stomach these guys, however flawed they’ve proven themselves as a unit, maybe you do them a favor regardless and find them a good home with a team that already knows it’s a contender. But then you read an ideal chip like David Robertson tell Newsday, nah, no thanks, I like it here. Robertson’s one of those steady veterans who’s moved plenty in his career. He signed with the Mets. He probably thought he’d signed with the playoff-bound Mets, but Mets is good enough for him for now. Barring a Zack Wheeler-type return from the Carlos Beltran expiring contract auction of 2011, do we really need to shop around a professional who’s fine where he is? Sixty-one games remain. Some will need to be saved in the ninth inning. Somebody else could try and probably succeed, sure, but I, too, am mostly fine with David Robertson and his colleagues where they are for two more months.

I’ve been a fan for 55 seasons. I can withstand two months of well-intentioned inertia.

Theoretically, you shed salary by trading veterans with big contracts, but under Steve Cohen, what does that even mean? Nobody’s taking millions and millions off Cohen’s hands, and, though I would never discount millions and millions (I’m never gonna see millions and millions, either), that doesn’t seem like a motivating factor on Seaver Way. Didn’t the Mets eat Eduardo Escobar’s salary? Didn’t they eat Chris Flexen’s salary just for the pleasure of paying Trevor Gott? The owner was once quoted, within the context of a real estate deal in which somebody offered him a million dollars to disengage from negotiations, “What am I going to do with a million dollars?” Uptown problems, as Brad Pitt as Billy Beane said in Moneyball.

So, no, I don’t believe somebody’s going to engineer a Max Scherzer trade nor a Justin Verlander trade, nor, probably, should the Mets be seeking such resolution. I mean, yeah, listen to everything and everybody, but have you seen the Mets’ pitching depth? Neither have I.

With the approximately two months remaining to this season, is there anything the Mets can do, as a very savvy buyer, to catapult themselves from fringe of the periphery of the multiberth playoff jumble to an outside shot at competing for the six seed, a goal which is not mathematically unattainable and is anecdotally enticing? The individuals from 2022, and a few who were added in advance of 2023, still appear capable of that one sustained drive that might push a ballclub 7½ games out to maybe 4½ games out with a splendid week or two, and if you’re that close, who’s to say you can’t get closer? Of course we’ve been saying something like this across the approximately four months the Mets have been playing, usually on the nights they’re not stagnating. Then stagnation kicks in again. If it were that easy, the Mets would be something more than 5-8 since their mirage of a six-game winning streak in early July.

Still, Pete Alonso, whose bat looks alive, will almost certainly be here in 2024. Jeff McNeil, who made three nice catches at a position that isn’t really his, is signed for a while. Brandon Nimmo is signed for much longer. Francisco Lindor is signed forever. Hopefully Starling Marte, also under contract for a little longer, finds relief from his migraines (those things are no joke). Francisco Alvarez and Brett Baty are being given every opportunity to speak for themselves. As much as 80% of the rotation doesn’t give me pause in a good week. Even if coming out of 2022 guaranteed nothing about 2023, I really don’t think we’re groping for scraps of hope like we might have been coming out of a 2003 or 2017 any number of years. And if we’re not satisfied come the end of the regular season, we’ve got an entire offseason to disassemble what isn’t in bolted in place and start semi-fresh.

With 61 games left, there are 549 innings of Mets baseball to be played. Maybe a few less if it rains too much, maybe a few more if there are ties after nine. I’m not expecting miracles. I’m not thrilled with what the first 101 games have yielded, but some years I root for the playoff-bound Mets, and some years, even if it’s not really good enough for me, I just root for the Mets.

At National League Town this week, the subject of Five-Tool Fandom occupies our minds.