By Gretchen Gibbs

Hey, April 1 and it’s snowing!  God’s little April Fools’ Day joke!

The real joke, though, is that it’s Opening Day for the Mets. Other teams, like the Yankees, start on March 31, but not the Bad Luck Mets. Of course, if you wanted luck, why would you pick a goofy little doofus for a mascot. Mr. Met, with his garish orange and blue costume and his retarded smiley face, tells you all you need to know about how well the team will do.

The main problem with the Mets is that they’ve spent a fortune on bad deals and thrown their money to the wind. Of all the teams in both leagues, they’ve paid the second highest total in salaries, the Yankees being first of course. Some Net blogger, ObamaWood, regressed relative team success on the amount of money spent and rates the Mets 30^th out of 30 teams in terms of bang for the buck. Over $150 million and the last two years they’ve played about .500 ball. 

Some examples. The organization recently had to get rid of Oliver Perez, a pitcher who couldn’t get the ball over the plate, and Luis Castillo, a second base player who  hit around .200. They both had  multi-million dollar, multi-year contracts, so they’re gone but the Mets are still paying them.  

Last year they paid a fortune for Jason Bay, who was a star hitter with the Red Sox. For the Mets he did nothing and now he’s injured. That money seems down the drain.

Then there are the multi-million dollar contract players who were injured last year and look like they’re never going to recover fully. Carlos Beltran can still hit but he can only hobble around the bases, and he’ll never be the fielder he was before. Johan Santana was one of the great pitchers of the current age, but last September he injured his shoulder badly, and it looks like he’ll never be able to pitch again, at least not like he did.

Not only did the organization make poor bets, some of which could not have been predicted, but now the owners are being investigated for their ties to Bernie Madoff.

There were other problems last year besides bad investments. The Mets closer, K-Rod, Francisco Rodriguez, blew a game, and then assaulted his girlfriend’s father. Great publicity for a team thought by other teams to be arrogant. Hey, you have to have a little attitude to come from New York.

Anyway, this spring, there’s poverty. No new big players. There’s a few newbies, mainly from the minors, mainly making the minimum salary for the majors. 

Yet here we are, April 1. The weather is raw, the game’s away. The team is hopeless, yet still I hope. I’m not home, but I’ve got the DVR set to record the game. I remind myself that last year the one Met hero was R.A. Dickey, a 36-year old knuckle ball pitcher who played in the minors most of his career. Maybe the team can go back to what they were back in 1973, short on money, long on heart, when Tug McGraw said “Ya gotta believe,” and everybody did. I’m setting myself up to be an April fool, and I don’t care.

P.S.  They lost that opening day game.

Tags: gibbs

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 5th, 2011 at 12:59 pm and is filed under Gretchen Gibbs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.