A few people have alerted to Bob Klapisch’s piece for Fox Sports last week, weighing in on confident statements from David Wright and Johan Santana suggesting that the Mets expect to win the World Series in 2010.
I appreciate the tips; I’m certainly not above taking writers to the mat when I feel the need arises and I reserve the right to call out members of the media for fallacious things they write in the future, but I’m having trouble mustering up enough to get too upset over this one.
There are plenty of fundamental arguments in the column I disagree with — most notably that no team in the league has “the guts” to take down the Phillies in 2010 and that Carlos Beltran is “hardly Winston Churchill” — but outside of the headline, there’s not much in Klapisch’s piece that’s too incendiary.
Wright and Santana said exactly what anyone should expect them to say. They’re professional athletes and they set their goals high. Sure, it might sound a little crazy given the way things went for the Mets in 2009, but “we expect to win the World Series” is a much more reasonable thing for a ballplayer to say than, “yeah, we suck. We’ll be lucky to win 80 games.”
Klapisch must realize that, and it actually comes out in his piece. He concludes by writing, “So Wright and Santana can be forgiven for the over-heated imagery. Call it the audacity of hope.”
Besides, it’s hard to kill the guy for killing the Mets because, frankly, who isn’t killing the Mets right now? Whether the front office could not or simply stubbornly chose not to overhaul the 2009 roster, they did not. The Mets return much the same team they trotted out last year, with all the same warts and without an additional starting pitcher.
Do I think there’s a chance they’ll be a whole lot better than they were last season? Of course. I have to be optimistic because I’m a Mets fan. And half the team was injured in 2009, anyway.
But for better or worse, the Mets did nothing to change the dialogue around their club this offseason and so, for the time being, they’re stuck with it. Rex Ryan has not walked through that door. This is the bed that they’ve made. They’ll lie in it until the season starts. If they win some games, the talk will change. If they lose some, it will grow louder.
The truth is, I imagine Klapisch was writing on deadline — from Tampa, no less, as per his dateline — and there wasn’t much else to write about. Until the games start up and the positional battles become a bit more clear, the only storylines to go on are these nebulous ones: leadership, confidence, delusion.
Players express confidence, columnists express doubt, and the wheels keep turning. Until the things that matter start happening, all we’ve got is talk: idle words and speculation and bandwidth.
It’s gray in New York today, cold and rainy and gloomy, and the best we’ve got to get us through our workdays are hazy columns about cloudy concepts. But things will clear up soon. We’ll have a sharper picture of what’s happening in Port St. Lucie and, in short time, a better sense of where to direct the thunder of our rage.
Tedquarters 
I thought his assertion that the Mets made no bullpen upgrades was completely false, and just bad reporting. Which makes the rest of the piece to be the normal lazy cliched reporting on the Mets because no one wants to bother to look closer. He hasn’t even been to PSL, he’s hanging with the Yankees writing bash pieces on the Mets. He and Rosenthal clearly have a dislike for the Mets.
I hope the Mets play well mostly to make many of the writers eat their words.
I agree with you, and I think the Mets actually took the right approach to building a bullpen this season by stockpiling arms, rather than putting too much stock in any one guy (ie Putz). But at the same time, it’s impossible to point to the bullpen as a certain area of strength for the 2010 Mets, and since Klapisch’s line was one throwaway sentence in a piece that was mostly about Wright and Santana’s supposed delusions of grandeur, I didn’t get too upset by it. Maybe I’m jaded because I’ve read so much worse.
You’re not alone, Dave. Safe to assume he has not read Baseball Prospectus’s positive take on the Igarashi signing.
And no mention of Escobar either. And, of course, Parnell could not possibly improve upon his rookie year. Only young Yankee players get the benefit of the doubt from the NY media.