What people are missing about Edwin Diaz and the WBC

The reaction to Edwin Diaz tearing his patellar tendon during the World Baseball Classic when celebrating a win for Puerto Rico over the Dominican Republic rapidly split into visceral partisanship. On one side were the rabid WBC fans; on the other were the fans who were either indifferent to the spectacle or hated it outright. Diaz’s injury became fodder for rampant logical fallacies; self-justifications; and a confirmation bias about the tournament itself. This is a rare instance where there is no “right” or “wrong.” Still, there is a disconnect between what happened to Diaz and how people reacted to it.

I have never been a fan of the WBC. I think it’s a silly, manufactured product masquerading as an event designed to take on the pageantry and status of the FIFA World Cup, the Olympics and other longstanding competitions where players at the top of their professional leagues compete for their country against other countries. For me, more than any undertones of a marketing scam or meaninglessness of it, the timing was the peak of its absurdity.

It’s played during spring training. Players leave their teams and join their country’s team. Often, their “country” isn’t even their country. They’re allowed to play based on which country they have a thin shred of a connection to – think the third cousin once removed was a quarter British so they can play for Great Britain. Or they play for a team from a country that is not really their own but for that minuscule drop of blood, they can play. This while they wouldn’t make their actual home country’s team. Marcus Stroman played for the U.S. in 2017 and is playing for Puerto Rico this time. What sense does it make? 

They’re going one-hundred percent in March, playing to win, treating the games as if they’re postseason contests for a team that is not paying them. Repeatedly, we’ve heard players say that winning the WBC for their home country means more to them than winning a World Series. I’m sure owners love hearing that. 

How about this? If they love it so much, tell them that if they get injured playing in it, their contract is voided. See how much they love it then as their agents, families and everyone else who somehow benefits from their lucrative paychecks forms a human shield to stop their plane to the WBC venue from taking off.

Before Diaz, there were no major injuries stemming from the WBC since its inception. The argument many made was that his injury – a non-baseball one where he was hurt celebrating instead of pitching – could have happened anywhere. The point being ignored is that it didn’t happen “anywhere.” It happened on the field wearing a uniform that said Puerto Rico instead of Mets and he’s lost for the season. 

Players are hurt off the field or suffer fluke on-field injuries all the time. Chris Sale flew over the handlebars of his bicycle and broke his wrist; Jim Lonborg hurt his knee skiing; Vince Coleman was run over by an automatic tarpaulin and lost for the 1985 World Series; Jeff Kent broke his wrist riding a dirt bike and lied about it saying he slipped while washing his truck; Jerry Blevins fell off a curb and re-broke his arm as he was set to return from the previous break; Duaner Sanchez blew out his shoulder as a passenger in a cab accident; Aaron Boone blew out his knee playing basketball. It absolutely does happen. 

Had something similar occurred with Diaz, the team and the fans would have been as angry and disappointed, but it would not have led to the overridingly irate response that the WBC was to blame. The tournament is not to blame, but the reality that it is a sanctioned event from MLB with clubs having limited control over their players blurs the line between what MLB deems as beneficial for its product and the employer-employee relationship.

Much was made of the announcement that the Mets and owner Steve Cohen would not be on the hook for Diaz’s salary for the time he spends on the disabled list after knee surgery. That’s very nice, but do you really think Cohen cares about Diaz’s $21.25 million salary? Or does he want the pitcher who finished ninth in the National League Cy Young Award voting in 2022, was just signed to a five-year, $102 million contract and was expected to be a key component for a World Series run?

A common sentiment from those avidly defending the WBC is the quality of play, fan enthusiasm, the excitement it has engendered and the massive ratings. Again, all true. This morphed into the preposterous argument that if you dislike the WBC, you’re not a “real” baseball fan. 

There are rules to being a fan? Ok. Here’s a rule. Fans have teams they support and they prioritize their team’s success over a country winning a tournament that I defy you to name who won in any of the previous times it was held. Owners of MLB teams are paying their players a lot of money to work for them; to play and help their team win. 

Then there were the snide responses when a player was hurt in a spring training game. “Oh, so are we supposed to cancel spring training now?”

No. But a player getting injured in a spring training game when he’s trying to get his timing down and get ready for the regular season while playing for his employing team differs greatly from a player getting injured in the WBC. In spring training, Diaz was being managed and overseen by Yadier Molina whose mandate was to win for Puerto Rico. At Port St. Lucie, he was being overseen by Buck Showalter and his staff whose mandate is to get the team ready to play from April through, they hope, October. 

See the difference?

Teams were lauded for treating their operation as ruthless businesspeople with a litany of books about Billy Beane, Theo Epstein, the Rays and the Astros. Now looking at it as a business means you don’t love the game?

I do not like the WBC. I do not watch the WBC. Am I less of a fan because I was concerned that exactly what happened would happen as one of the stars for the team I support – the Mets – was injured while off and away from the Mets’ supervision? No. It makes me rational in that I view it from an employer-employee perspective and said employee became injured taking part in an irrelevant competition away from his high-paying job and it’s having a negative impact on the Mets and the game in general for no acceptable reason whatsoever.

The Astros, Jeff Luhnow and misplaced values

In reading Winning Fixes Everything by Evan Drellich, the Houston Astros’ corporate culture is exposed as a toxic time bomb. The organization’s focus on getting to its desired destination regardless of the human cost is facilitated by owner Jim Crane, implemented by general manager Jeff Luhnow, and put in action by the obsequious underlings whose primary function is to serve the needs of the master.

The players? Eh. Who cares what they think?

Luhnow comes across as a truly terrible person — the embodiment of putting results over humanity; achieving one’s objectives no matter how it is accomplished; shifting blame to others; and using gray areas to shield oneself from the negative while taking full credit for the positive.

Despite that, it’s difficult to cast all the blame on him for doing what he was hired to do. He was hired to do a job and he did that job. There are plenty of horrible people in sports. There are worse people than Luhnow could ever be in the corporate sphere, politics and society in general. Does that alter how he should be perceived when assessing his tenure with the Astros and his work in baseball in general?

Maybe it should.

Luhnow was a self-promoter who was flexible in accurately relaying what he did and didn’t do.

But is that any different from Billy Beane or Theo Epstein?

His treatment of those who were below him on the food chain took the tone of a Terminator-like machine that did not care about humanity in the quest to achieve its mission. There was no concept of baseball and people at a cellular level, exemplified with his attempts to change how relief pitchers were used and not understanding or caring that they’re human beings who might not be able to do the things he was asking them to do and outright ordering his staff to implement no matter the physical toll it exerted and careers it damaged. His views came across as someone who had never watched a baseball game without a spreadsheet in front of him as if simply watching would somehow impact his ability to analyze.

His personality was a significant problem that likely superseded how he did his job. Invariably, he is shown to be condescending, arrogant and cold-hearted. That might work in an industry where he’s running a website or consulting with fellow corporate types who couldn’t care less if a guy could tell or take a joke, but it cannot work in a people-oriented industry that is directly in the spotlight like sports.

As time passed and the club came closer and closer to its goal, the weeding out of people who had some semblance of decency put the amoral acolytes in greater positions of power. David Stearns was seen as a positive influence on the club and once he left for the Milwaukee Brewers, the likes of Brandon Taubman took on a greater role. Taking his cue from Luhnow, the ends always justified the means. It was a survival of the fittest with less honor. Most of Luhnow’s edicts took on the tone of threats. If you don’t give me what I want, I’ll fire you.

There were instances where Luhnow was unfairly castigated. The Brady Aiken draft selection where the high school pitcher’s medical reports showed him to be too great an injury risk turned out to be accurate. With former first overall pick Mark Appel, the pitcher was struggling mightily in the minor leagues and the front office brought him to Minute Maid Park so the big league staff could have a look at him to try and find solutions. Not telling manager Bo Porter about it? Irritating journeyman major leaguers who were not going to be around when the team was set to contend was somehow a problem? He was under no obligation to tell anyone anything. Could he have? Sure. Was it an issue that he didn’t? No.

Regarding his changes to how players were drafted and developed, it’s not as if there was already a successful formula in place that could not be questioned. The number of players drafted and signed as amateurs who make an impact in the majors is frighteningly low. There is nothing wrong with making fundamental changes to a system that doesn’t work all that well to begin with.

The real problems for Luhnow arose when he tried to cover up these relatively minor disputes by asking people to lie outright or commit lies by omission. Going back to Watergate and beyond, the cover-up is always worse than the crime itself.

This extended to what eventually got Luhnow fired by the Astros and blackballed by baseball: the sign-stealing program.

He claims to not have known about it. Absurd given how his thumb was on every aspect of baseball operations.

Even after they were caught, the club continued its rampant prevarications, childlike “everyone was doing it” shrugs and passing the buck.

In his initial portrayal long before he became a star GM and later pariah, he was cast as a pure outsider who entered the game as its foundation was being shaken by new methods in which to analyze players and construct teams. In truth, he used various connections through his work at McKinsey and as an entrepreneur — along with family links — to be interviewed and hired by the St. Louis Cardinals.

With the Cardinals, he was viewed as an interloper with a pipeline to the owner like he was a nepotism case. To longtime baseball people like then-Cardinals GM Walt Jocketty and manager Tony La Russa, he was the owner’s mole who was untouchable because of that connection. Unlike an owner’s son or daughter who was installed in a key position in an organization, he was just some corporate asshole who sold cat toys and was parachuting in to tell lifelong baseball people how to do their jobs.

From his perspective and holding to the McKinsey modus operandi, he was hired to accomplish what the owner wanted. The idea that McKinsey and other prominent consulting firms are giving evenhanded analysis is idiotic. They are hired to achieve what ownership, shareholders and others in an entity’s positions of power want. The end result is detailed and they need to find a way to get there while providing information that justifies it. They want to downsize by firing 25,000 people? Ok. Here’s how you do it. They want to reduce costs by sending fewer advance scouts on the road or find ways to maximize the MLB draft capital by using financial sleight of hand? Here you go.

In short, he did his job as he was asked to do it.

After joining the Astros, he rebuilt the team in the image he wanted with financial constraints, brutal fact-based decision-making and turning baseball into a microcosm of the corporate world that people watch sports to escape. A clash was inevitable.

The success bred increased ruthlessness and the refusal to be questioned. More and more, the GM isolated himself by either willful ignorance or by simply not being there. This was not solely based on the sign-stealing scandal that led to his ouster. It was the case with his strangely timed vacations to Mexico, notably when the Aiken signing deadline was upon them and Aug. 31, 2017 when the club was trying to get Justin Verlander before the waiver trade deadline. He put assistants in charge to oversee both key moments and no explanation as to why he needed vacations then has ever been presented.

I wasn’t there and didn’t know about this.

This epitomizes plausible deniability, no matter how preposterous it is on its face.

There are endless villains large and small in the Astros’ tale.

Manager AJ Hinch seems overwhelmed; reluctant to openly challenge the veteran players, especially about the sign-stealing operation; and afraid to speak out beyond a certain limit due to his past managerial failure with the Arizona Diamondbacks and that he was well aware of how the Astros operated in that the manager was largely irrelevant to the point of being a near inconvenience that Luhnow needed to hire one at all.

Bench coach Alex Cora comes across as insubordinate and a borderline alcoholic lunatic nearly getting into physical confrontations with Hinch and broadcaster Geoff Blum.

Brent Strom is caught outright lying to Cora when Hinch had been ejected and Cora was managing in his stead.

Brandon Taubman is cast as Luhnow’s Sith apprentice. At age 30 and immersed in a corporate culture that was indifferent to people behaving like douchebags if it produced the desired results, it encouraged it. He treats people horrifically and gets himself fired for his verbal attack on female media members by defending the team’s ill-advised trade for Roberto Osuna after Osuna had been charged with physically abusing the mother of his son.

Is “just doing what I was told” justified? For most, it sort of was as everyone involved — save for Luhnow and Taubman — now has a job in baseball.

Carlos Beltran is now a special assistant to the GM with the Mets, the same team (albeit under different ownership) that fired him as manager before he steered a game after the Astros scandal exploded.

Hinch is the manager of the Detroit Tigers and now has power exponential to what he had in Houston.

Cora is the manager of the Boston Red Sox, rehired by the club after being fired in light of the Red Sox own sign-stealing scandal following its 2018 World Series win.

Mike Elias, Sig Mejdal, Mike Fast, Kevin Goldstein — all assistants under Luhnow who were servile in acquiescing to his bullying wishes are in baseball in varying capacities.

The key question about the Astros is whether it was what they did under Crane and Luhnow that was the problem or the way they did it? Had they been more gentlemanly in their viciously pursuing their goals, had a system in place that prevented going so far over the lines of propriety, treated people with respect and not been so despised throughout the industry, would this have been as huge a story and would Luhnow still have a job somewhere in baseball?

Purely transactional relationships are unsustainable for the long term. In sports, people have generally known each other for decades or have mutual friends and acquaintances. There’s an unspoken bond of trying to beat the competition without trying to fuck them. Even hard core criminals have lines they won’t cross. A clear example is the scene in Casino when Nicky Santoro pushes back on Ginger Rothstein’s cavalier entreaty to kill her husband Sam “Ace” Rothstein. Stone cold gangster Santoro responds angrily, “I know the guy thirty-five years, I’m gonna fuckin’ whack ‘im for you?!?”

Would someone like Luhnow do the same?

The Astros, under Luhnow, abandoned the pretense of any honor whatsoever. If you essentially tell your underlings that they can not only behave like dicks to fulfill their mandates but will be rewarded for it, what’s going to happen?

Even Crane, whose history in business is pockmarked with outrageous behavior and allegations of wrongdoing, accepted the Astros’ previous methods were wrong by hiring high-quality people with sterling reputations within baseball like Dusty Baker.

Ironically, of all the cast members in this saga, it’s Taubman who seems to have truly changed in the aftermath by taking part in domestic violence awareness programs and personally apologizing to the reporter over coffee after meeting by happenstance.

Part of the blame certainly falls on outside influences like the fans and media who have stoked the partisanship between those who adhere to stats above all else and old-school baseball observers who trust their eyes and history. Every executive is seemingly trying to have a Moneyball-style book written about them and this affects their behaviors no matter who is run over to get to the destination.

None of that excuses the Astros and Luhnow, but it is useful to look at it from a different perspective and ask why was this able to happen in the first place.

Luhnow still denies wrongdoing. He sued the club to be paid his contract after his termination. He’s never getting a job in baseball again. He sought to radically update the game to suit his aesthetic. And he did. The result was him winning a championship, showing that reaching the logical conclusion is about as good a thing as acknowledging one’s mortality, and getting himself canonized as the change agent who exemplifies what not to do.

Like his entry into baseball, he achieved his goal. Just not the way he envisioned. It’s not like he didn’t ask for it.

On Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

Apart from Spider-Man: No Way Home, Marvel’s outings since the conclusion of Phase Three have been niche films with reviews that ranged from lukewarm to outright negative. This was inevitable. As evidenced by Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, the transition from one blockbuster storyline to another is a difficult one. Without the major characters who are easily recognizable even by non-fans — Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, the Hulk, Spider-Man — and without A-list stars as attractions for ancillary characters like Ant-Man, Marvel is essentially in a retool mode where it is simply trying to bridge one phase to the next without alienating its hard-core “I’ll watch anything Marvel produces” fan.

Those who are responding negatively to Quantumania have lamented its relentless CGI, characters brought from the back to the front, difficult to follow narratives and absence of clear-cut resolution. Bluntly, those who enjoy Marvel and know these characters will take affront at the criticism, but looking at it from a different perspective gives clarity to the negativity. 

I have never seen one episode of Game of Thrones. If you dropped me in the middle of season three, episode five (this is random; don’t look it up to nitpick), I would mock the sets, the script and that I have no clue who any of those people are, nor do I care about them. The same can be said for any long-term, interlocked project where the minutiae is a large part of the entertainment in recognizing minor characters. This is what Marvel has relied on since it started the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Iron Man in 2008. 

The films and television shows of Phase Four have been gateway films to the next phase. This is where Marvel needs to regain its footing or run the risk of hitting a wall from which it cannot recover its lost luster. In the long run, small Easter eggs that were dropped in Black Widow, Shang-Chi, Eternals, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Thor: Love and Thunder and Wakanda Forever were the entire purpose of the films. Had they not been part of the MCU with a guaranteed, built-in audience even if the film itself was objectively atrocious, they might not have been made as standalone films at all, let alone at the massive budgets allotted. 

Marvel’s current predicament can be compared to a sports dynasty that is moving on from its core group of players and integrating newly developed talent to the roster without burning it to the ground. Comparing what Marvel is doing with how erstwhile Marvel star director James Gunn is rebooting DC and making difficult decisions such as removing Henry Cavill from his role as Superman, apparently moving on from Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman and torching Zack Snyder’s beautiful cinematography and ponderous plots for the greater good. DC is tearing it down to expansion team-level status while Marvel is trying to remain competitive until it gets to the next phase of star-level characters ninety-five percent of the planet recognizes by name. 

Quantumania is entertaining. The characters and actors are likable, but they’re basically furniture — there to complete the decor. Jonathan Majors’ introduction as Kang shows a charismatic, weirdly likable and profoundly dangerous antagonist who will be a key who Fantastic Four, X-Men and the new roster of the Avengers (however it is comprised) must confront. Still, the criticism — when looked at on its own merits — is fully justified as viewers who parachute in without prior knowledge of the comic books and an intermittent interest in the prior films wonder why there are so many characters that look like rejects from the Star Wars cantina scene, the Terminator, Ed Wood and a really bad acid trip. 

As Marvel moves forward with Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, The Marvels, Captain America: New World Order (apparently without Steve Rogers/Chris Evans), Thunderbolts and Blade, it must-must-must make sure that it nails Phase Six starting with Deadpool 3 and Hugh Jackman entering the MCU as Wolverine in what one would hope is more than a brief cameo. To ensure Marvel returns to its glory, the studio cannot miss as it finally gets its hands on Fantastic Four and has the opportunity to reboot the cornerstone team that was a critical piece of Marvel Comics from its early days. Next come the Avengers taking on Kang and a highly-anticipated big screen version of Secret Wars.

Like many worthwhile destinations, getting there is the problem. 

Phase Five has not been a disaster. It does show hallmarks of Marvel fatigue predominately because the backups are being asked to carry the team and have run into the catch-22 of showing precisely why they were backups to begin with.

How Steve Cohen can lure Theo Epstein to the Mets

By now, it’s clear that Mets owner Steve Cohen has no intention of keeping the current front office structure in place. Initially, when he got control of the team, Sandy Alderson was brought back as team president to oversee the relatively young baseball operations crew led by Jared Porter and Zack Scott with the intention that he stay on for a relatively finite period before receding to the background as a consultant once Porter took over as president of baseball operations, chief baseball officer or whatever title they decided to use.

Alderson’s return was comparable to his first tenure with the Mets, albeit under radically different circumstances. As the Wilpons’ finances were in free fall after the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme came to light, Alderson’s hiring was tantamount to him serving as a bankruptcy trustee to keep the Mets from becoming untenable – like a failed state – and needing to be taken over by Major League Baseball itself as was the case with the Montreal Expos and the Frank McCourt Los Angeles Dodgers.

The current circumstance is exactly opposite with Cohen having enough money to buy every single sports franchise in the New York Metro area and other owners fearful of him burying them financially. Alderson’s presence was a calming influence since they knew about his aversion to overspending and he was in line with keeping costs reasonable. This was not an overt Quantum Leap-style reboot with Alderson getting the chance to do the things he wanted to do under the Wilpons but couldn’t because of financial constraints and meddling from Jeff Wilpon.

Now, as Cohen prepares to find a leader to steer the club, the obvious choice is Theo Epstein. Despite his flaws, there is no doubt that hiring Epstein is about as close to a guaranteed championship as an executive can get. Still, Epstein has been coy and relatively consistent in that he prefers his current role as a consultant to MLB and is, ironically, trying to undo much of what he did in turning the game into a slogging, dull endeavor where players are treated as fungible entities whose attributes are plugged into an arcane formula and spit out a desired result sans personality, nuance and strategic preference. It is largely due to Epstein that managers are no longer allowed to have “their” way of play.

There’s no Whitey Herzog who wanted speed, defense and aggression; there’s no Earl Weaver with his three-run home runs and deep starting pitching pushed to throw 275 innings; there’s no Billy Martin with his in-your-face style and tightly wound personality always seeming on the verge of punching whoever got in his path; there’s no Tommy Lasorda sitting at the corner of the dugout cursing up a storm, singing the faux narrative of bleeding Dodger Blue and treating his team like a fiefdom in which he was the Emperor.

The only holdout is Tony La Russa and he’s only managing the White Sox because owner Jerry Reinsdorf hired him personally.

These are all factors in the allure Cohen can sell to get Epstein to take charge of the Mets.

The selling points are as follows:

HE CAN FIX WHAT HE THINKS HE BROKE

Epstein seemed surprised and chagrined that the “children” he sired took his strategies and brought them to its logical conclusion and simultaneously created a rote way in which every team was run from top to bottom.

He will have the freedom to run the team as he wants and put together an organization that fits in with what he’s trying to change in his current role working for MLB.

MONEY

There’s talk that for it to be worthwhile for Epstein to take over any club, he’d need an ownership stake. Owners are generally unwilling to just give away something so valuable. Often, it’s a negotiating ploy to increase the guaranteed money in the contract. It’s doubtful that it’s a deal breaker and if it is, he’s only reluctantly taking the job to begin with if he gets it.

Cohen can offer him a limitless amount of money to take the job.

THE LONG GAME

Appealing to a sense of history would not work with Epstein. He’s already made history. He’s going to end up in the Hall of Fame. What might appeal to him is the chance to run the team the way he always envisioned. One of the challenges he faced with the Red Sox was not building a championship team – he did that in year two. The challenge was to maintain. His goal was to create a sustainable operation that provided a pipeline of talent and was backed up by money within a reasonable budget. There would be lean years, but that was an accepted part of the strategy. Unfortunately, others didn’t see it that way and greed took hold.

After one championship in 2004 and breaking the Curse of the Bambino, he received one free year in 2005. By 2006, as he sought to maintain his farm system and rejected in-season trades to go all-in for another title, ownership, the media and the city of Boston grew restless. He was then forced to go for it in 2007. Winning that second title might have done more harm than good for his extended blueprint and culminated in the collection of mismatched stars to try and match the Yankees move for move, an indifferent clubhouse, a team of mercenaries and a complete collapse that precipitated his departure to the Cubs.

With the Cubs, he had a full-blown rebuild in front of him and turned the team around within four years, winning the championship in five. It looked as if he felt he’d accomplished his mission and was already looking toward the next venture. Epstein himself stated that he knows he’s better at building than maintaining. Perhaps that’s something he’d like to fix.

THERE IS A GOOD FOUNDATION IN PLACE

The Mets do not need to be gutted. Already, there are foundational pieces in Pete Alonso, Francisco Lindor and Jacob deGrom. The farm system is not overly deep, but is top-heavy with players who are already being categorized as potential MLB All-Stars in Ronny Mauricio and Francisco Alvarez. For the 2022 draft, he will be armed with the 11th overall pick as compensation for the club failing to sign Kumar Rocker. If the 2021 season ended today, the Mets would pick 14th as well. That gives him infinite options.

With the money to spend – even if Cohen prefers to remain under the luxury tax – he can do essentially whatever he wants to build a title-contender and would have the ability to do it in a way where he does not need to mortgage the future as he did in his final years with the Red Sox and Cubs.

***

This is not to say that Cohen should simply give Epstein whatever he wants. The problem with hiring Epstein has become what NFL teams faced when they hired Bill Parcells. They could deal with the ego, the pettiness, the mind games, the desire for more money and control. What they always wondered was when he would up and leave and it was an annual waiting game. This is the same challenge the Jaguars will face – probably very quickly – with Urban Meyer. His wanderlust, greed and the self-imposed stress will limit his tenure and there might come a day sooner than anyone thinks where he up and resigns only to take a major college job three years later and start the process again.

Epstein has talked about situations growing stale and that front offices need to change to get fresh ideas. That’s fine, but if Cohen is giving Epstein the power, money and opportunity, then he needs a commitment that Epstein won’t decide one day he’s had enough and leave or, worse, do what he did with the Cubs and imply he’s going to leave a year or two before he finally does.

That aside, there is much for Cohen to offer and if Epstein wants his original vision to become reality, he’d need to consider it very seriously.

Book Review: The Dynasty by Jeff Benedict

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The term “dynasty” is thrown around so cavalierly and as a prediction rather than retrospection that it has lost much of its impact. That has also served to tarnish the New England Patriots from 2001 to 2019 and what they accomplished compared to other would-be dynasties that never met those lofty and often preposterous expectations. This is the span covered in Jeff Benedict’s The Dynasty. 

In the past, the word was used to refer to teams that won consecutive championships and had a string of titles over a decade. The last dynasty in the sense as it was truly intended was the New York Yankees from 1996 to 2000. That Derek Jeter-led team won four World Series in five years. In the NFL, the Dallas Cowboys won three Super Bowls in four seasons from 1992 to 1995. The Los Angeles Lakers, Chicago Blackhawks, Boston Red Sox and San Francisco Giants all have a reasonable claim to call themselves varying forms of dynasties in the current environment. 

Yet standing above all as the paragon others strive to be is the Patriots. With a mind-boggling eight Super Bowl appearances and six championships in those twenty years, the Patriots were known for their machine-like efficiency and utter ruthlessness in formulating a plan to achieve that one goal at the start of every season: winning the Super Bowl. The book centers on the triumvirate of owner Robert Kraft, head coach and de facto general manager Bill Belichick, and quarterback Tom Brady. 

That desperation to win extended to allegations of rampant cheating and borderline cruelty in how Belichick callously discarded players who were no longer of use to him in that stated goal. What sets the Patriots apart from their counterparts in football and other sports is how they have maintained their level of excellence. Even in years when they didn’t win the championship, they were on the cusp of doing so. There was no bottoming out; no valleys; no tear down and rebuild. Year in, year out, they were there. Benedict explores how this sets them apart. That they achieved it in the world of free agency, salary caps, multi-tiered playoffs and a system that is intricately designed to prevent one team from doing precisely what the Patriots have done is why the story is so compelling.

How did they do it?

While the easy story to tell is Brady’s and the most polarizing one is Belichick’s, the book dedicates the bulk of its narrative on Kraft. He is the sun around which Belichick and Brady revolve. Part soothing presence; part tiebreaker; part defender; part parent; part friend; and part overseer, he was the indispensable cog in keeping the egos of his coach and quarterback from forcing a breakup long before one was necessary, though it came close several times, all of which are described in detail with the most notable being due to Belichick’s belief that Brady’s age would eventually derail his productivity and Brady being tired of the lack of appreciation and warmth expressed by his coach. 

Kraft is a businessman whose hard-charging style mirrors that of captains of industry who made it to the top of their respective professions and did not care who they stomped on to facilitate their rise, Kraft is different in that he did care who he stomped on and made certain not to do it. Piety to his Jewish faith with a gentle demeanor and socially conscious with charity work, Kraft’s rise from rabid Patriots fan who had season tickets almost from the team’s inception to when he bought the team and saved it from being moved to St. Louis showed him to be a community-minded man who grew up in the area and understood the financial and sentimental value the team held while ensuring that it was a profitable business. The best way to do that was to win. And win he did. The keys to that were his business acumen and willingness to trust people like Belichick, whose history and personality were considered ill-suited to running an organization; and Brady, whose pedigree was not such that he should have been expected to be anything more than an extra guy on a roster who would bounce from team to team as a journeyman body. 

Still, it was not an easy path. Inheriting head coach Bill Parcells and his entire package of arrogance, condescension, bullying and greed that comes along with it, Parcells epitomizes what Belichick was supposed to be based on his reputation as a miserable human, but really wasn’t. 

Nailing down the X factor to their sustained run is a near-impossibility. Without Kraft, there is no Belichick; without Brady, there is no elevation of Belichick from failed head coach who Kraft was told by multiple people including Belichick’s former boss, Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell, not to hire. Even Parcells, who had a long and fruitful working relationship with Belichick, was lukewarm on the idea as evidenced by his dual-sided question to Kraft as they negotiated compensation for Parcells allowing Belichick to leave his New York Jets contract: “Bob, do you want this guy to be your head coach?” 

Yet Kraft trusted his instincts and that he could better analyze the understated strengths of Belichick and not just hire him, but give him total control of football operations.

For those who suggest that Brady is a “systems” quarterback who was in an advantageous situation after he and the team were “lucky” that they got him in the sixth round of the 2000 NFL draft and he went on a hot streak after replacing the severely injured Drew Bledsoe in the second game of the 2001 season, their misinformed analysis is blown to smithereens. His determination and work ethic are described in detail. The hard work is one thing, but that laser focus and putting every ounce of attention into his objective is what sets him apart. Many put forth the pretense of being all-in for their goals, but Brady put it into practice. 

This is not to imply there was no tension between the parties. Kraft was notably displeased with Belichick’s penchant for pushing the envelope of propriety, notably telling his coach that he was a “schmuck” for videotaping the opposing defensive coaches’ signals (Spygate) when Belichick himself said that it did not help at all. However, many of the harshest criticisms of Belichick clearly lack credibility or are based on personal animus. The allegations of the Patriots’ cheating were explained in detail and Benedict makes a convincing case that apart from Spygate, they were innocent. The report that the Patriots had videotaped the St. Louis Rams’ practices prior to their first Super Bowl win was found to be untrue and was retracted; Deflategate in which Patriots’ equipment staff were accused of removing air from footballs at Brady’s direction in the 2014 AFC Championship Game against the Indianapolis Colts becomes difficult to believe based on the available evidence.

 As astute as Belichick was in his implementation of a system that would continually replenish while dealing with free agency and a salary cap, none of it would have succeeded had he not been blessed with an owner who gave him nearly free rein and a megastar quarterback who did not ask for nor did he receive preferential treatment. Repeatedly, Benedict retreats to the reaction of newcomers to the Patriots – notably Randy Moss, a placated star if there ever was one – who were stunned that Belichick tore into Brady during team meetings like he was the last guy on the roster and was in danger not just of losing his starting spot if he kept screwing up, but might lose his job entirely. The star player hierarchy that was and is present in other organizations is simply not there in New England. And Brady silently took it. In part, that may have been due to Brady’s desire to improve; in part, it might have been his family-centric upbringing and that he wanted nothing more than to please and receive approval from his football father figure in Belichick – something he never received to a sufficient degree. 

The fundamental question that goes without an answer is who of the three was the critical and indispensable component of the Patriots dynasty. 

Was it the owner who leveraged himself to the nth degree and navigated the complex terrain of running the organization as both an on-field sports franchise and a business?

Was it the coach whose reputation as a malcontent with the personality of a corpse’s toupee whose first foray as a head coach ended in a disaster with the Browns and resigned the day he was given his second opportunity with the Jets so he could go to New England?

Or was it the afterthought quarterback who was only given the opportunity to play due to the starter’s injury?  

The answer is that they’re inextricably linked. Without Kraft, there’s no Belichick; without Belichick, there’s no Brady; without Brady, there’s no Kraft and Belichick. The Dynasty is the Patriots as an organization with background characters Julian Edelman, Tedy Bruschi, Moss, Deion Branch, Rob Gronkowski and myriad others integral to the story, but it’s foundation is the three men whose methods were different, but who mapped out a strategy to reach the pinnacle of their profession together with one unable to do it without the other two. That these three markedly different personalities could mesh so effectively and coexist for two decades with unparalleled success supersedes any individual. That Benedict does not give an answer may be the answer as to how their legendary twenty-year run came to be.

Why was the 2019 MLB Trade Deadline so different from the past?

The 2019 MLB Trade Deadline was radically different from how it was in the past.

There are several factors that factored in with this peculiar turn of events. Certain teams illustrated this more than others.

Yankees

General manager Brian Cashman is getting scorched for his failure to act. At his press conference, he made reasonable sense as to why he didn’t trade for a prominent starter or reliever. Still, “reasonable sense” is not what made the Yankees so alluring to fans around the world. They won a lot and that will certainly draw attention; but there was always action going on. Now, instead of getting the biggest available names who fit their blatant needs and surrendering the prospects necessary to do so, Cashman again cuddled his prospects, many of whom are quietly being described as overrated.

Ignoring whether this is a wise course of action or not, the fundamental reality is that the Yankees of the Steinbrenner offspring are not the same as the Yankees of the Steinbrenner patriarch. George Steinbrenner would not have wanted to hear about Deivi Garcia if he was all that was standing in the way of getting the caliber of starting pitcher that would have made his team the favorites to win the World Series. This, more than any baseball operations philosophy, is why the Yankees have become so passive to the point of appearing impotent.

Arguing that their injured list with Luis Severino and Dellin Betances rehabbing provides them with two “acquisitions” is theoretically sensible, but it’s also Met-like – one that rarely yields the result the team expects. By now, it is wise not to expect anything from either and the Yankees know that.

The current Steinbrenner ownership does not have the unquenchable thirst to win and dominate that George Steinbrenner did. It wants to win, sure. But it’s not fanatical and desperate. Their desire to win is folded in with advancing the brand. Instead of a World Series-or-bust attitude, they’re content to be contenders, have a chanceto win a championship while understanding the vagaries that go into that result, and do not overreact when it is unsuccessful.

The Boss might have understood all this in a rational sense (or he might not have), but his rage inevitably took over and he reacted by firing people, signing free agents, trading for stars and doing something. That is not to imply that capricious brutality is preferable to wise conservatism, but there needs to be nuance. There wasn’t and these Yankees did nothing.

Having cost control with a respectable farm system and flexibility is great, but it is not the Yankee way. It’s the way of the game itself in 2019 and the Yankees in their years of dominance never adhered to what everyone else was doing. They were trendsetters and everyone wanted to play for them. If other teams couldn’t keep up? Too bad.

While shunning Bryce Harper and Manny Machado made financial sense, it might have had a hidden cost in that players are no longer looking toward the Yankees as their ideal destination. If they’re going to treat it as a cruel business, so are we. In retrospect, the Yankees were right to avoid both on the field, but it could have had a radical aftereffect in the greater context.

Hal Steinbrenner has been conscious of payroll and Cashman was a willing cohort as both got what they wanted. Steinbrenner has the immediately recognizable and financially lucrative brand; Cashman gets to show the baseball bona fides that eluded him when he inherited the late 1990s dynasty and bought his way to maintaining contending status. He rebuilt the team and is now perceived in a category with Theo Epstein, Billy Beane, Andrew Friedman and Jeff Lunhow as an architect. Yet the last championship in 2009 came after a half-billion-dollar spending spree.

Every team ownership in New York has been hammered for its faults. The Yankees have largely been shielded from that. However, Steinbrenner expressed his willingness to go beyond the luxury tax and in trading prospects to get what the Yankees needed.

And they didn’t do it.

Was this Cashman? Did Steinbrenner leave it to the baseball people to decide on cost effectiveness? Or was there a wink and nod with Steinbrenner knowing Cashman would “do the right thing” while they made statements to quell rising fan apprehension?

Put it this way: George Steinbrenner would have told Cashman to get pitching and he didn’t care what it cost. Hal Steinbrenner didn’t.

Padres

General manager AJ Preller has been there for five years and they have achieved absolutely nothing concrete. It’s all about ephemeral prospect rankings and lusty gazes regarding his “outside the box” thinking, aggressiveness, lack of interest in making friends and, in some cases, indifference for adhering to moral and ethical standards.

The latest was acquiring another top prospect, Taylor Trammell in a three-team trade with the Indians and Reds.

Most prognosticators love Trammell and he adds to the Padres’ already strong farm system. But when does the transition from rebuild to trying to win take place? There’s a difference between being happy to win and trying to win. There’s no middle ground with Preller. It’s one end of the spectrum with a ridiculous buying spree like in 2014-2015 or the rebuild where he burned the organization to the ground not with a controlled demolition, but arson. There’s the signing of Eric Hosmer; there’s the trading of Brad Hand; there’s the signing of Manny Machado; there’s the trading of Franmil Reyes; there’s the pursuit of Noah Syndergaard.

Which is it? When does this reach its conclusion? Or is this the conclusion?

Maybe “What is he doing?” is the strategy. Always maintain a plausible deniability that he’s failing. This is year five of the rebuild and they’re 20 games behind the Dodgers in the NL West and in “if we have a hot streak” contention for the Wild Card.

The spin from Preller’s first offseason as Padres GM in which he gutted the system he inherited and traded for and signed name players and then pivoted to an ongoing full-blown rebuild happened within his first year on the job. While his system has received laudatory and even beatific praise since then, he is still doing the zigzag of willingness to trade anyone and everyone while simultaneously adding the likes of Hosmer and Machado on big money contracts.

There seems to be a total disregard for actual results, replaced by a reliance on prospect rankings that, one must remember, are completely exterior from baseball front offices!If that obnoxious, arrogant buffoon Keith Law ranks a prospect number 10 in baseball, that does not mean he’s judged the same way by those who are making the actual decisions. It’s a moneymaker. It’s clickbait. Just as there is no award for winning the winter championship, there’s no tangible award for having the best farm system as ranked by some guy.

There is a benefit, though. If and when Preller’s bosses say enough’s enough and ask when the team will start show success on the field, he can point to the praise and prospect rankings and promote it as progress when it is contextually meaningless. When does the plan come to fruition? Year seven? Year nine?

It’s beginning to take the tone of a flimflam man with a modicum of competence who has tricked a wide swath of people and inspired a Manson-like loyalty sans criticism for fear of inundation from his indoctrinated loyalists.

Astros

GM Jeff Luhnow spots vulnerability and compounds that with a willingness to act. Comparing owner Jim Crane to George Steinbrenner is unfair in terms of temperament and overreaction, but not in terms of the hunger to win.

The Astros had several irons in the fire to acquire starting pitching, but would not surrender what the Mets were asking for to get either Zack Wheeler or Syndergaard – namely Kyle Tucker. Then they spun around, gave up a big haul of prospects to the Diamondbacks to get Zack Greinke (not including Tucker or Forrest Whitley) and suddenly the Yankees were KO’d with a shot they did not see coming.

Contrary to the immediate overreaction, this does not mean the Astros are guaranteed a World Series win. In a short series, anything can and usually does happen. But Luhnow’s willingness to deal while still retaining his untouchable prospects is unique. Other teams – like the Padres with Preller – are not simply looking to improve, they’re looking to screw you while they do it. Luhnow will give up value for value. And if it doesn’t make sense, he doesn’t do it.

Once this window of contention begins to close, he won’t patch it with duct tape. He’ll clean house before anyone expects or advocates it and start all over again. That’s why the Astros are where they are.

Mets

Finally, the Mets were caught in the middle of “what are they doing?” with “why are they doing it?”

It’s unlikely that GM Brodie Van Wagenen thinks the Mets are legitimate contenders in 2019. But they’re not at the point where it makes sense to clean out the entire house either. Edwin Diaz and Syndergaard were bandied about in trade talks. Wheeler, a pending free agent, was all but guaranteed to go. Yet they stayed.

With Syndergaard, there was zero point in trading him unless the Mets got exactly what they wanted. For Wheeler, the cost-benefit hinged on comparing the acquisition of prospects to what they will get with the draft pick compensation after making the qualifying offer following this season, re-signing Wheeler or in the unlikely event he accepts the QO.

It’s important to remember that Van Wagenen manipulated the entire MLB Draft to get Matthew Allan – a consensus top-20 talent who fell because he was expected to attend college – at the approximate spot where they’ll get the compensatory pick if Wheeler rejects the QO.

With their recent hot streak that has gotten them within striking distance of a Wild Card and that they added Marcus Stroman to the rotation giving them a devastating starting five of Jacob deGrom, Syndergaard, Stroman, Wheeler and Steven Matz, and there was no urgency to trade anyone. This rotation is tantamount to the “big five” the Mets had long touted as their future with Matt Harvey replacing Stroman, but the Mets only cycled that group once and it was for sentimental “what might have been?” reasons as Harvey was immediately jettisoned after it happened.

As for adding to the bullpen, trading Diaz and adding a few names would have been shuffling the same cards. There’s no guarantee the relievers they acquired would handle New York any better than Diaz; would adjust to the set-up role as Jeurys Familia has not. Rather than change for its own sake, it was better to get Stroman, retain what they had and hope the mediocrity of the National League and improved performances from their own players worked for the rest of 2019 and they could retool for 2020.

***

Teams are no longer passively letting Trevor Bauer and Stroman get traded to obvious contenders, deferring to those whose need is more pronounced and holding their chips – and the good will with their peers – for when they need the help.

The new rule that prevents trades after July 31 had a greater impact than expected. Teams were aware they could not wait out the likes of Justin Verlander and other star players whose contracts likely precluded an August waiver claim meaning they would be eligible to be traded after the “deadline” that was not a hard deadline. Now, it is a hard deadline. Now, the decision as to whether a team was a legitimate contender, a nominal contender, a non-contender or “wait ‘til next year (or, in the case of the Padres, the next-next year; or the next-next-next year), or a team that has surrendered and is adhering to a “plan” is harder to make with any certainty.

There was still a flurry of activity, but much of it was surprising in that the usual suspects who are aggressive in filling holes – the Yankees, Dodgers, Cardinals and Red Sox – were quiet. Teams that are not close enough to first place to warrant a buying spree to go for it still made moves that were in part for 2019, but were largely done for 2020. “Sellers” were few and far between as most clubs have shunned the gutting rebuild and tanking, preferring to lean toward a moderate attempt at respectability and maybe even a lightning strike playoff run. Even teams that were willing to sell big pieces added similarly big pieces before deciding to stand pat. This is better for the game, not worse.

The Giants’ rebuild hits a snag: They’re winning

When the Giants hired Farhan Zaidi away from the Dodgers to replace Brian Sabean as the head of baseball operations, they did not do it to maintain the status quo. The Giants were long one of the main holdouts for the old-school way of running an organization, eschewing a deep dive into statistics as the final determinative factor in procuring and retaining players. It certainly worked for them with three World Series titles in five years starting in 2010.

However, the Giants are an organization that knows which way the wind is blowing – perhaps a lingering aftereffect of Candlestick Park – and moved away from the Sabean/Bruce Bochy line of thought and into the same environment which has built and maintained the Bay Area cohabitants the Athletics as well as the Dodgers, which were the two organizations Zaidi worked for before heading to San Francisco.

While the Giants did not go the route of the full teardown as the Cubs and Astros did under Theo Epstein and Jeff Luhnow respectively (and successfully), Zaidi has not concealed his intentions. Over the winter, the most recognizable names the Giants acquired were Pat Venditte (the switch-pitcher), Drew Pomeranz and Gerardo Parra. These were not moves to radically improve a 90-loss team and they definitely were not designed to close the gap with the Dodgers. They were done for veteran competence and players who might yield a prospect or two at the deadline.

If this were the defending champion Giants or the “we’re going for it” Giants, these are reasonable, role players to add to a championship mix. For a club that finished 64-98 in 2017 and 73-89 in 2018, the latter with a payroll of $200 million, sticking to the admittedly successful blueprint from the past was cannibalizing and foolish. Had the Giants wanted that, they would not have gone so far in the opposite direction from Sabean’s methods to Zaidi’s.

There’s a fine line between trying to lose and not caring about losing. The Cubs and Astros, during their rebuilds, “tanked.” They were not “throwing” games, but the teams were so terrible that losing was a natural byproduct of the terribleness of those rosters. This relatively new phenomenon is not all that new. Upon informing Ralph Kiner that he had been traded to the Cubs, Pirates GM Branch Rickey famously told him that they finished last with him and could finish last without him. The idea gained prominence with the Devil Rays/Rays under current Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman by ostensibly saying, “We’re gonna lose anyway, so what’s the difference between losing 90 and 100?”

The Astros and Cubs took it to its logical conclusion and were positioned to do so with the new heads of baseball ops inheriting bloated contracts, dead farm systems, a history of failure and owners willing to hand the keys to them because there was no history to protect and nothing to lose.

The Giants had played poorly; the players who comprised the foundation for those championships were getting old and underperforming; and the template had run its course. Add in that the National League West housed Zaidi’s old team, the Dodgers, and they had exacted a dominance over the division that the Giants could not come near without radical changes to the structure. That radical change was, in short, copying the Dodgers.

In its actions, the Giants tacitly admitted they were moving on from the Bochy/Madison Bumgarner/Buster Posey/Brandon Belt/Brandon Crawford/Pablo Sandoval years – the last remaining residue of the championships.

Manager Bochy’s spring announcement that he planned to retire after the 2019 season put an exclamation point on the organization’s direction. The question as to whether Bochy is really retiring or is being granted the respect to leave on his own terms so Zaidi and his staff can hire a manager whose thinking corresponds with theirs will be answered if Bochy takes some time off and then leaks that he’s bored and will listen to offers to manage.

Posey, Belt and Crawford are under contract for the foreseeable future, but if they are not traded, they will be ancillary players who fit in with the scheme rather than the foundation around which the scheme is crafted. With no contract extension forthcoming for Bumgarner, they had essentially said he was going to be traded by the deadline. The only question was where.

Then, from the nadir of their season so far on June 29 when they were 12 games below .500, eight games from a Wild Card spot and ahead of only the Marlins in the overall National League standings, the Giants started winning. In the subsequent three weeks and after Thursday night’s/Friday morning’s 16-inning win over the Mets, the Giants were 13-2 and gained 5.5 games in the Wild Card standings.

This is where it gets complicated. Having this happen so close to the July 31 trade deadline in the season after August trades were eliminated by MLB, the Giants and every other team must decide on what they are and what they want to be. The second Wild Card has opened so many scenarios to make an argument to stand pat that the fans and media will not accept a club punting on a season when there is the remotest possibility of making a run. It takes an experienced and entrenched baseball operations boss plus a willing ownership to do that.

Some teams will take a wait-and-see approach to their midseason status before acting. The Mets fall into that category, but they are not in the same circumstance as the Giants in that they have enough young talent and starting pitching under contract that they can say they’re going to retool and try and win in 2020. Some will disagree with the philosophy and its ambiguity, preferring the resoluteness of “this is what we’re doing, like it or not.”

The Twins were faced with a comparable conundrum in 2017. Having abandoned their longtime method of running things with the “Twins Way,” they fired veteran GM Terry Ryan and manager Ron Gardenhire, mitigated background architect Tom Kelly and moved on with former Cleveland Indians director of baseball operations Derek Falvey as the Twins new chief baseball officer They had lost 103 games the previous year and were not expected to be anything more than, at most, a 90-loss team. Instead, they hovered around contention for the second Wild Card and a likely one-game dismissal by the Yankees or Red Sox if they made the playoffs.

Instead of having the freedom to do what they wanted with a 100-loss team, Falvey and GM Thad Levine were suddenly saddled with trying to make a playoff run when it was inconvenient to their plans; was a waste of time, energy and assets; and hindered rather than helped. So, they vacillated. They made trades to “improve” as the second Wild Card spot played down to them instead of vice versa. They acquired Jaime Garcia for show, and traded Garcia and Brandon Kintzler a week later as a concession…and then still won the second Wild Card that no one in the front office wanted. They got hammered by the Yankees in the playoff game and were then free to continue their rebuild. Still, loitering around contention might have prevented them from maximizing their best tradeable assets Brian Dozier and Ervin Santana and stagnated what they set out to accomplish. It didn’t hurt them significantly as they are currently in first place, but it didn’t help either.

It might be a bit much to say that Zaidi is displeased that the Giants are playing so well, but it does put a wrench in the machine he’s constructing. Certainly, his life would be much easier if they continued that late-June spiral and freed him to gut the place because, what was the difference?

Now, it makes a difference. Could ownership step in and say it’s worth the shot to get into the Wild Card game with Bumgarner pitching it and see what happens? Absolutely.

Would the fans accept trading a team legend when the club is suddenly in the mix to make the playoffs in a weak Wild Card scrum and vulnerable teams – even the Dodgers – leading the respective divisions? They wouldn’t be happy about it even if the Giants and Zaidi extract a ransom for Bumgarner, Will Smith and Crawford and salary relief for Jeff Samardzija.

Given Zaidi’s background, he will still trade Bumgarner at the deadline and ignore this quixotic leap into the playoff conversation. But the Giants’ hot streak has put that decision from the definite category to the maybe category. Retaining Bumgarner and even adding at the deadline is precisely what Sabean would have done, and that is not what Zaidi or the Giants intended when he took the job.

A note about the Mets bullpen and revisionist history

As catastrophic as the Mets bullpen has been, there is a significant amount of second-guessing, “look how smart I am/give me credit,” and agenda-laden statements masking itself as analysis that is secondary to objective assessment.

This is not a statistical gauging of the Mets’ relievers. It’s a look back at the moves the club made to bolster what they already had and what could reasonably have been expected in terms of performance.

In the offseason, the Mets acquired Jeurys Familia, Edwin Diaz, Justin Wilson and Luis Avilan.

Are these bad acquisitions? Could anyone have predicted that all would be disastrous? And what were the alternatives?

When attacking Brodie Van Wagenen and the Wilpons, there are legitimate criticisms to the hire. However, had Van Wagenen come marching in with a blueprint that so radically deviated from established norms and sought not just to reinvent the wheel, but reinvent one that would turn on Neptune, then it’s justifiable to go over the top in issuing blame. He did not do that.

He signed Familia for three years and $30 million. Had the Mets not done it, someone else would have. He is a historically good – even excellent, if not elite – reliever.

He signed Wilson who in his first six full seasons in the majors appeared in a minimum of 58 games and generally appeared in about 70. He was not solely a lefty specialist and was generally effective as a second-tier relief pitcher.

The Diaz trade was a risky gambit. In its favor, Diaz was dominant in 2018 and had the type of stuff that left hitters inert. To get him, they were forced to surrender two prospects including the sixth overall pick from 2018, Jarred Kelenic. The deal was expanded to include Robinson Cano who has looked every bit of his 36 years after a PED suspension and is combining his trademark lackadaisical act with indifference and defiance. The trade for Cano, however, was to clear the dead contacts of Jay Bruce and Anthony Swarzak. For those who lament the way Bruce and Swarzak have performed in 2019, if they had been this good in 2018, we’re not discussing any of this; it’s likely that Sandy Alderson would have kept his job.

It was a major roll of the dice that looks atrocious now, but cannot be accurately judged for at least five years when Kelenic’s fate will be determined and Diaz will either have gotten acclimated to New York and performed up to his capabilities or he will not.

Avilan was the identical type of signing that every team makes of a longtime MLB veteran who is seeking work and will sign a minor-league contract to earn a spot.

These arms were joining a bullpen that had Robert Gsellman and Seth Lugo.

In a preseason assessment, is the following a bad bullpen: Diaz, Familia, Wilson, Lugo, Gsellman and Avilan plus whichever young arms the Mets needed to recall from the minors?

If you say yes, you’re a liar or suffering from confirmation bias.

When discussing potential options in lieu or in addition to the relievers the Mets acquired, big money names like Craig Kimbrel are frequently mentioned.

Signing Kimbrel is in the same ballpark – not identical, but in the same ballpark – of trading Kelenic and Justin Dunn for Diaz. Kimbrel wanted $100 million and he did not back off from that even as his market collapsed and he sat out, waiting. The Mets were not paying him $100 million and no one else was either based on the fundamental fact that he didn’t get it.

Add in the draft pick that would have been Competitive Balance B which was exactly where Van Wagenen and his staff used a clever sleight of hand to get Matthew Allan who Baseball America ranked 16th overall and scared off many teams because he had committed to the University of Florida.

So, pick one. Do you want to hammer the Mets for trading Kelenic and not signing Kimbrel as well, or do you want to hammer them for gutting the system and ignoring any semblance of future planning? You can have one or the other, but not both.

As for the other available “name” relievers? Who’s been good? One pitcher – Adam Ottavino – has been worth the money and he was going to the Yankees, period. Other teams didn’t even really bother pursuing him with any intensity because this reality was known throughout the industry.

Zack Britton? It’s unlikely he was signing with the Mets and they weren’t overpaying for him. His walks are a major worry.

Andrew Miller? His knee injury was a factor and he’s got a 4.15 ERA, a 5.22 FIP and has surrendered 6 home runs.

Joe Kelly? He’s been effective in June, but started horribly and cannot be trusted in a big spot.

Who did you want instead of what the Mets got? Who was better and was moved? Who was available?

Facts hurt, but they’re still facts. No one with any objectivity could have foreseen the bullpen being this rancid.

Some critics, like Buster Olney of ESPN, torched the hire of Van Wagenen from the start. Most others either took a wait and see attitude, lauded many of the moves Van Wagenen made, then sat quietly to see how they turned out before parachuting in with the “I knew it” template. Repeatedly screaming “rebuild” is not a strategy. Yet the moles are popping out of their holes with criticisms and no solutions. And that is not how anything is fixed. Acknowledging the truth is the first step. Then comes fixing it. The factions are incapable – or unwilling – to do that as they wallow in their own egomania and delusions of grandeur.

A lesson for the Mets on the manager from none other than Billy Beane

As the Mets are resistant to do the obvious and relieve manager Mickey Callaway of his duties, it is difficult to know the justification of retaining him.

His salary is minuscule compared to name managers.

General manager Brodie Van Wagenen is under siege himself for roster deficiencies and did not hire Callaway.

The pitching coach and bullpen coach have already been fired with the relievers pitching at least as badly as they did before, if not worse.

Jeff Wilpon is a target of ridicule for his perceived role in this burgeoning debacle.

And even if they do make a change, there’s no guarantee that they will make the obvious and right move in hiring Joe Girardi.

It’s a trendy shield for teams to assert that managers are largely irrelevant to the overall results of a team and most subscribe to it. This protects them from firing people, paying them not to work and avoids caving to public pressure to hire the decreasing number of “proven” managers who are going to demand a big salary and expect autonomy on the field.

With front offices becoming so immersed in every aspect of how a team is run from top to bottom, the line that general managers never crossed no longer exists. Owners regularly crossed that line with calls to the manager’s office with various orders, but they were the owners. Today’s GMs are younger, hungry for attention, convinced that they know better than the emotional and reactive field staff, and do not want anything to sabotage their algorithms of optimal moves.

The days of Whitey Herzog, Billy Martin, Tommy Lasorda, Earl Weaver, Davey Johnson, Dick Williams and Joe Torre – managers in the truest sense of the word with their own belief systems, preferred style of play and personalities – are gone. The preference is to have a disposable, replaceable and faceless automaton who will carry out the orders of the front office, be the public face of the franchise, not deviate from the plan and play the part of manager rather than be the manager. None of those mentioned would even get a managing job today, except in cases where the owner ordered the hiring over protestations of the front office. They would have problems relating to players who expect to be coddled and know they have the power and could not stand the dissection of every single decision they made with public criticisms from an exponential number of outlets who would never be forced to face them in person.

The altered landscape is aptly described at the end of Casino when Robert De Niro as Sam Rothstein laments how times changed with the corporations taking over Las Vegas:

In the old days, dealers knew your name, what you drank, what you played. Today, it’s checking into an airport. And if you order room service, you’re lucky if you get it by Thursday. Today, it’s all gone. You get a whale show up with four million in a suitcase, and some twenty-five-year-old school kid is gonna want his Social Security Number.

There’s a clear parallel between this perspective and how baseball teams are run.

Billy Beane is cast as the first GM who was publicly portrayed as running the team from the front office. It was Beane who wanted a manager to follow orders. It was Beane who allowed this desire to be out there for all to see. And it was Beane who repeatedly downplayed the importance of managers by discarding them to be replaced by “another guy.” It didn’t matter who.

When he elevated his close friend Bob Geren to the manager’s chair, the Athletics were embarking on another retooling. Geren was the epitome of mediocrity. A vanilla personality who maintained the same blank look on his face regardless of what was happening around him, he certainly fit the role of “some guy” standing at the corner of the dugout and epitomizing the factotum. The results on the field were just as bland as Geren. Never better than .500; never worse than 12 games below .500. They were blah. He was blah.

Eventually, with players complaining about Geren’s communication failures, the team floundering and – perhaps most importantly – Beane’s image reaching fluke status, Geren was dismissed.

Beane steadfastly refused “name” managers in his previous hires with Ken Macha and Geren. This time, however, he did bring in a known entity in Bob Melvin. This was a tacit admission that the model from which he had been working was not a good one. Still, he clung to the tenets when explaining why he dismissed Geren by ignoring player complaints as though they were irrelevant and blaming the media and the speculation infecting the franchise.

Beane’s actions and the aftermath of those actions do not match the rhetoric and that was clearly intentional. He clung to the narrative while deviating from it making it obvious that he knew the other way was not working and was not going to work with a team that did not have the spending power to put a self-sustaining product on the field.

Whereas Geren did not have the resume to protest Beane’s orders and was known to be one of his closest friends, with whom could the players confide if there were issues with the front office? Who had their backs?

Melvin had two previous jobs as manager. In the first, he inherited Lou Piniella’s Mariners as they were just beginning their downward slide. He won 93 games in his first season and the entire club came apart in his second, losing 99 games. He was fired. The next year, he came in second to Wally Backman for the job to manage the Diamondbacks. When Backman was found to have lied on his job application, he was fired and Melvin took over. After four full seasons including one division title and an NLDS win, he was fired 29 games in to the 2009 season as he resisted front office interference and GM Josh Byrnes famously said he wanted someone who provided “organizational advocacy.” Ironically, the person tabbed to replace Melvin and for whom any chance of success was detonated with those two words as he was viewed as a spy, was AJ Hinch – currently considered one of baseball’s best managers with the Astros.

There is no doubt that Hinch’s experience in Arizona is a reason he is now successful in Houston.

The A’s played better under Melvin after he replaced Geren. Then, the next year, they won the first of back-to-back division titles and made the playoffs in the third year as a Wild Card.

Was it the players? Was it the manager? Was it the front office realizing that maybe it was time to give the manager a bit more freedom and respect than they did before? Was it a combination?

Experience. History. Knowing when to push back against the front office. All are key parts of managing that will never change, especially if the team is not the Yankees or Dodgers and does not have the money and personnel to gloss over a nameless, faceless manager who does what he’s told. For most teams, the season hinges on 15 or 20 games where the manager makes the difference. If he’s losing games due to his ineptitude, then it’s time to make that move to hire a person who has a clue.

It benefits the players to have a manager they respect; one who has a salary large enough that he won’t be dumped just to hire the same guy with a different name and face; one who can speak to the media without sounding as if he’s a hostage reading from a script; and one who will make the decisions he feels are in the team’s best interests in the short and long-term rather than because he was ordered to by guys in suits and polos in the front office suite. Even if the players disagree with the manager, a track record gives a certain amount of leeway. “At least he knows what he’s doing” is as good a reason as any to hire a manager who has done it before.

To continually present the manager’s job as meaningless while maintaining the veneer of an all-powerful and all-knowing front office is cannibalistic and destructive.

So many front offices either don’t understand this or are too paranoid and egomaniacal to admit to any level of weakness. But the players know. It would help if front offices did too. Maybe the Mets will learn this before someone else hires Girardi and they take the first step toward fixing what ails them with the simple act of hiring a manager who knows what the hell he’s doing.

The Mets and ending their definition of mediocrity

Earlier in the week, New York Mets manager Mickey Callaway elicited eye-rolls when he discussed the Mets’ struggle to reach .500 and get on a roll to get beyond the record that is the objective definition of mediocrity. After Tuesday’s doubleheader split with the injury-riddled crosstown Yankees and Thursday’s rain suspended tie against the equally mediocre St. Louis Cardinals, there are certain fundamental realities that the club and the fans must accept and act upon to maintain a glimmer of hope that this team can make the postseason.

Forget Jarred Kelenic

That means stop mentioning Jarred Kelenic.

Stop obsessively tracking the progress of Jarred Kelenic.

And come to the acceptance stage of the grieving process that the Mets no longer have Jarred Kelenic.

They have Edwin Diaz who, despite his struggles, is still a top-three closer in baseball when he’s performing up to his capabilities. He’s in a slump. His advanced statistics have been relatively consistent with his 2018 numbers with the Seattle Mariners. He’s given up more home runs, but that could be a byproduct of his home games being a park where it’s easier to hit home runs at Citi Field compared to what they were in then-Safeco Field, that the ball is clearly juiced, and hitters are going to the plate trying to hit home runs in every at-bat.

The mental aspect cannot be ignored. He knows who he was traded for and what the fans and large factions of the media said when the trade was made. He’s hearing the whispers and seeing the laments. Demoting him, trading him in a housecleaning, rebuilding – none of this is going to happen. Rather than repeat the same pattern that achieves nothing but validate an entrenched confirmation bias, live with what the Mets have and ignore what they traded away.

Dom Smith must play

Certainly, no one is expecting Smith to maintain his basic statistical split of .354/.442/.573. Nor can anyone believe that his advanced statistics of wRC+ of 174 is sustainable. His BAbip is an absurd .417. He’s only had 95 plate appearances, so he’s going to fall back to earth. The only question is whether the landing will be soft and he’ll settle into his minor league splits of .295/.360/.425 or it will be a crash landing of his previous non-production in the majors.

The Mets have openly said they’re not writing lineups based on contracts or veteran status. Smith has played left field adequately. Once Brandon Nimmo and Robinson Cano return, that should not impact whether Smith is in the semi-regular lineup. If that means putting into practice the recent suggestion of Jeff McNeil seeing some time in center field, so be it. If Cano and Nimmo are unhappy about it, it’s simple: When you play, hit. If you don’t hit, you don’t play. If that means Cano will sit if he’s not hitting, he’ll need to sit without complaint.

They must buy – within reason – at the trade deadline.

As mentioned earlier, the idea of a gutting and rebuild is a fantasy from those who have:

A) never run a business

B) are harboring dreams – as inexplicable as they are – that losing 100 games for three years automatically results in a dynasty

The Mets either need to be bold at the trade deadline and add or essentially stand pat and wait for the offseason to make radical changes (that will not include a gutting rebuild).

The Atlanta Braves have been playing excellently and were aggressive in signing Dallas Keuchel.

The Philadelphia Phillies are ravaged by injuries and, with a flurry of trades and roster shuffling, are repeating the same failed blueprint from 2018 when they made panicky maneuvers to fix a flat tire by buying a new car.

The entire National League is flawed. With the Mets’ moves in the winter designed to win right now, they can’t do an about face and sell the likes of Zack Wheeler and Todd Frazier to look toward 2020 and beyond unless they completely collapse and fall double-digits out of the division lead and Wild Card spots.

What is buying “within reason?”

It doesn’t mean gutting the farm system for a rental. It does mean looking for upgrades at positions of need with relievers Brad Hand of the Cleveland Indians, Will Smith of the San Francisco Giants and Cam Bedrosian of the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. They cannot sit on the sidelines and expect different results from similar strategies used in the past of waiting out injured players and expecting them to be comparable to deadline acquisitions as they did with Wheeler in 2016, Yoenis Cespedes and Jed Lowrie.