Mets May Soon Regret the Players They Let Go

To a Mets fan, the word disaster, if it brings to mind anything less recent than last September, will probably summon images of Scott Kazmir striking someone out or Tom Seaver crying on the day he was traded.

If not as wrenching or enraging, the last two months of 2006 deserve their place on the list of smaller Mets catastrophes. In those days, just weeks removed from Endy Chavez's famous catch in a truly dispiriting loss to St. Louis in the National League Championship Series, nothing at all seemed wrong for a team that was heavily favored to win the 2007 pennant. While everyone was waiting for next year, though, the team was frittering away an enormous amount of talent. Omar Minaya gave gifts that keep giving.

Wednesday, the day after Pedro Martinez tore his hamstring, a day when Nelson Figueroa, Jeff Weaver, and Claudio Vargas became surprisingly relevant to the Mets' pennant chase, Brian Bannister of the Kansas City Royals pitched seven innings and allowed two hits and no walks. As Bannister himself well knows and (charmingly) publicly acknowledges, giving up fewer hits than you've pitched innings has almost nothing to do with your skill. His performance last year, when he ran up a 3.87 ERA while striking out just 77 in 165 innings, is unsustainable, no matter what he did this week. Still, the Mets have a lot more use for him than they do for Ambiorix Burgos, for whom they traded him.

Bannister was just one among many players shipped abroad from New York for no discernible reason in around that time. Relievers Heath Bell, Matt Lindstrom, Royce Ring, and Henry Owens were all cast off that November in deals that brought in four fringe minor leaguers who have since pitched a combined 11.3 innings and taken 27 at-bats in New York, and show little promise of doing much more any time in the future. Casting backward a few months, second baseman Jeff Keppinger was sent off in July, in exchange for recently released second baseman Ruben Gotay; going forward, the streak was capped in December, when catcher Jesus Flores, then 21, was left exposed to the Rule 5 draft, and snatched up by Washington. In retrospect, even given Bannister's strong 2006 and Bell's emergence as a top setup man (last year he pitched 93.7 innings with a 2.02 ERA and 102 strikeouts), the last two of these losses were the most consequential.

Keppinger, a career .321 minor league hitter, hit .332 in 67 games for Cincinnati last year, and will see plenty of time at short for the Reds this year. He's 28, no future star, but a better player than Mets second baseman Luis Castillo right now, and he'll likely make less over the next four years than Castillo will over the next two.

Flores's loss is the most damaging. He was left off the 40-man roster despite having slugged .487 as a 21-year-old catcher in the Florida State League, which is hardly nothing. He did little with Washington last year — he had to spend the whole year on the major league roster because he was taken in the Rule 5 draft — but despite a sketchy defensive reputation, he has to rate as one of the more promising young catchers in the sport.

The Mets are an excellent team right now, but what they need more than anything is exactly the depth these players would have provided. All of them were flawed in their way at the end of their Mets tenures — Bannister has fringe stuff, Keppinger is unathletic and dependent on batting average, Bell did little in several major league auditions — but all were given away for, at best, players with different but equally grave flaws or, at worst, nothing.

Because he stole Oliver Perez and John Maine for nothing, made a good call in trading Jae Seo for Duaner Sanchez, made solid if unspectacular trades for first baseman Carlos Delgado and catcher Paul Lo Duca when the Mets needed reliable veterans to fill gaping holes on the roster, and took advantage of circumstances to deliver Johan Santana, Minaya deserves his reputation as an estimable operator. As shown, though, by the slow motion disaster of two years ago and the Lastings Milledge trade, which could very well prove worst of all, he's nearly equally inclined to make his own problems.

The moves that went wrong were all, in their way, defensible, but in the aggregate they betray a worrying carelessness and a lack of that knack for picking which young players with long odds of real success will actually succeed that separate good from excellent general managers. The costs are paid in wins, money paid to uninspiring veterans, and perhaps worst of all in cohesiveness. The Mets are, far more than they need be, a collection of bland players in their baseball middle age, who came up elsewhere and will retire elsewhere having made no real impression and done nothing unique. This isn't the worst of all possible situations; but things didn't need to be this way.

tmarchman@nysun.com