Locker Room -- Those Who Forget the Past...

As a longtime Mets fan, I have seen a number of approaches to the offseason task of reshaping the roster for the next year. In the early 70s, when I first became aware, it was often a case of picking up one guy who was supposedly going to be the answer – often a third baseman (Joe Foy, Bob Aspromonte, Jim Fregosi, Joe Torre). He usually wasn’t much good, and/or over-the-hill. Didn’t usually work (with the probable exception of Le Grand Orange, Rusty Staub).

In the late 70s, the team in the largest city in the US decided to go on the cheap. They rounded up whoever didn’t have a job somewhere else (Elliott Maddox, Tom Hausman, Kevin Kobel, Dock Ellis), with the hope of having enough guys to fill out a roster. Didn’t ever work (sorry, Lenny Randle: one good year doesn’t create an exception).

In the 80s, they began targeting value deals, cashing in their assets for guys with “upside” or to fill a specific role (still no free agents, by the way). I guess you could say it worked (Ron Darling, Sid Fernandez, Gary Carter, Howard Johnson); see also, 1986, 108 wins, World Champions. Or better yet, ask the ’86 Red Sox.

In the 90s, there was a seismic shift. Suddenly the club started handing out free-agent dough like it was one of those AOL CDs. Really, really didn’t work – not only were the players lousy AND jerks (Bobby Bonilla, Vince Coleman, Eddie Murray, Bret Saberhagen) but the contracts made them difficult to unload and the budget was already spent.

In recent years, we’ve seen some high-profile trades and a couple of free-agent splashes (Mike Piazza, Cliff Floyd, Roberto Alomar, Carlos Beltran), with the net result of one playoff loss, one World Series loss, and a slow drift through mediocrity to less exclusive neighborhoods.

Throughout, the conventional wisdom on the guys in orange and blue has been: not enough offense. Get us at least one more big bat. So many of the trades have been in search of some real thumper. It always seemed to me, subjectively, that the new guys never quite measured up. I wasn’t sure, so I decided to measure them.

I used OPS, a popular stat that combines on-base percentage and slugging percentage for a quick but descriptive shorthand of a hitter’s production, and found the top 20 OPSs for players the year before they became Mets. Then I compared their production in their first Met season. I excluded anyone who came over in midyear, with the exception of Mike Piazza (since he arrived pretty early in the season). The players in OPS order, with their first Met year: Piazza (98), Roberto Alomar (02), Cliff Floyd (03), Carlos Beltran (05), Duke Snider (63), George Foster (82), Bobby Bonilla (92), Rusty Staub (72), Mo Vaughn (02), Kevin McReynolds (87), John Olerud (97), Gary Carter (85), Dave Kingman (81 – the 2nd time), Jeromy Burnitz (02), Bernard Gilkey (96), Todd Zeile (00), Richie Hebner (79), Frank Thomas (62), Willie Montanez (78), and Robin Ventura (99).

Any Met fan of a certain age knows where this is headed; several of these guys were the most expensive and high-profile flops in Mets history. And indeed, 16 of the 20 declined in OPS, ranging from 0.4% (Thomas) to 26% (Alomar). The two big successes were Gilkey (up 12.6%) and Ventura (up 15.7%); note that both of those guys lost considerable altitude the year after that. The weirdest case was Gary Carter, who had exactly the same OPS as the previous year.

Averaging the percent changes, which isn’t really mathematically accurate since it’s not weighted by at-bats, the group as a whole declined by 7.6%. I also figured change in home runs (-10.1%) and RBIs (-7.6%).

This info is of national-security importance because of the arrival of Carlos Delgado, the latest slugger/savior. He had healthy numbers to start with (his year-before OPS ranked 2nd to Piazza), so a decline is not necessarily catastrophic. If he follows the trend, he ought to end up with an OPS of .909, and a line of .281-30-106, which any Met fan would sign off on today. I guarantee you, if he hits 30, no one will care where he stands for (or on) “God Bless America”, even if he stands on his head.